I, Ripper

“Got a present for Annie, your lordship?” she asked. She had a rheumy, wet slough to her voice, as if her lungs were full of death, and seemed a little blurry, not drunk as a sailor but in that zone of vagueness that the gin confers before it hammers one into full-bang disorientation.

I pressed the coin into her hand, and she took it greedily, sliding it into some hidden pocket of her voluminous dark dress. I said, “Come, let’s move a bit, into more privacy.” I had a fear that this place was too vulnerable, that noise would rise through the house or that another Judy and her companion of the minute might enter 29, not knowing it was occupied.

And here is where what happened began to deviate from the ideal. I had imagined a hundred times since picking the site how we’d end up in the backyard, and how I’d cut her hard, and how fast she’d die, and how I’d do what must be done, and how smoothly it would all go. But no plan survives contact with the world beyond the mind.

“Sweetie, here’s fine, come on, then, let me pull up me petticoats and we can—”

As if it had a will of its own, my left hand shot out like a snake and bit hard at her throat. Recalling now, I realize that I was not prepared to be defied, I was certainly not willing to argue, and my threshold of frustration was dangerously low, though I had been unaware, thinking myself blissfully composed and utterly in control of both self and lady. It was not so. My hand clamped at her larynx and began to squeeze with the full force of my musculature and my will behind it. Even in the dark, I saw the surprise light her face as the oxygen was pressed off, and though so cinched she could not cry out, her throat’s machinery began to manufacture unintelligible noises of despair, dry clicks and hitches, half-grunts, spitless, noiseless screams, the sound of inner structures rubbing frictively against each other, words that no letters exist to approximate, a whole product line of constricted-throat expectorations, and one hand feebly came to beat against my pinioning arm. I knew this would not do, not here, not indoors, where at any moment we could be interrupted, and so with my right hand, I grabbed her fleshy biceps and put force behind, bumping her along, if you will, shoving her with my chest, guiding her with one hand to arm, one to throat, all the while strangling. It was as weird a dance as has ever been danced, an uncoordinated shuffle of bodies set against each other with the ultimate progress to the way out ten feet, then seven, then four away.

Three, two, one, and we were out the rear door. Still almost carrying her – she was not light, but the intensity of the struggle released strange fluxes of strength through my limbs – I took her down three steps, pivoted to the left, and braced her hard against the wooden fence there, well constructed, as I have said, and able to sustain the force of my thrusting her body against it.

In a flash, I let go of her arm and reached back to withdraw the Sheffield from my belt, aware the whole time that the episode had completely veered south from perfection and become a graceless, cruel thing. Whether she was dead or not – her tongue seemed to protrude from her lips, and her eyes were shut – I could not tell, but if so, just so, and if not, almost so. I struck her neck hard with the knife, blade belly sinking into the softness, and drew it strong around, letting my left hand slip off her throat at last.

That was a moment. She was propped against the fence, unsupported by me, her throat ripped but not yet producing blood, utterly still, quite vulnerable. I struck her again, again felt bite of knife’s belly, again drew down and, pivoting myself, around until my natural length of arm ran out and the blade broke free of its cutting stroke. Now came the blood. As before, a progression, first the droplet, then a few crooked tracks tracing the geography of her neck where it merged into shoulder, an area as full of subtle hollows and ridges as a landscape, then a black stream, then a torrent, then a deluge. She slid to the left as the blood continued to gush, and came to rest with her head next to the three steps down which we had come, parallel to the fence.