I, Ripper

Again, there was no death rattle; no sound marked her passing from this world to the next. I controlled my breathing – exertions so intense always stir the heart, it is a natural rule of the body, found universally in biology among all mammalian creatures – and reacquired the focus I needed. First the rings. I pulled her dead hand up, laid the knife upon her chest, and yanked the two brass circles off her pudgy digit. I may have done some harm, not that she noticed, for the finger fought me and I had to yank and twist quite aggressively. I deposited them in my pocket. Next up was her pitiful estate, as looted from her pocketbook. I took some care in arranging its meager contents neatly next to her feet: two small hair combs, one in a paper sheath of some sort, and a piece of coarse muslin whose function was utter mystery to me. An envelope didn’t fit into the line by her feet, so I placed it daintily next to her head. That neatness stood in contrast to what came next, and I was not unaware of the effect.

I reacquired the knife, pulled her petticoats up, saw – oh, comic detail, too pretty to be true but true nonetheless – striped bloomers. I pulled them down until I’d exposed her slack gut, a large dish of pudding, creased and gelid and wrinkly, with a kind of substrata that looked, even in the quarter-moon, like curdled milk.

I cut a deep stroke, left to right, across her lower belly, but unlike with Polly, did not stop there. More work was to be done. My cut was longer, deeper, more workmanlike. I opened a flap into her bowels, pulling it back as one would pull back a canvas, and they lay before me, almost an abstraction. In the moon’s faint blush, they were like a sausage stew, all interconnected in twisty, labyrinthine ways. Perhaps I hesitated, perhaps I didn’t. There was blood, but, the heart that drove it being quieted, no pressure, and so it simply ran downhill to disappear in her swaddles of clothing.

I had seen beasts gutted and felt no remorse, for I was applying myself merely to a sack that now had no spiritual dimension, no sentience, memory, individuality, hope, or fear. I slipped the knife behind the tubes to find the way out – that is, the large one leading to the anus – and cut through it, finding it slippery to penetrate but yielding once the knife edge had found purchase and made its argument persuasively. The whole bloody pile was open for play. I grabbed, my gloves turning black in the moonlight where they would have been scarlet in the sun, and extracted one slippery clottage and tossed it over her shoulder, where it did not quite fly away but rather unraveled, as the flight through air took out its kinks.

That foray into the cavity took most of her from her stomach, but at least a quarter of the tubing remained, and so I repeated the act, removing all but remnants of what remained, and flung them over the same shoulder. Again the phenomenon of unraveling, as the yards of curled loop became, under the process of being flung, a long and stringy ribbon.

Thus was she excavated. Now, pièce de résistance. Dr. Gray was my guide, Sheffield’s legendary sharpness my facilitator, but will to complete the task was the true coal that made my furnace rage. I dipped into the crater I had created, searched downward through wreckage and liquifaction, and even though my gloves cut off the subtle sensations to my fingers, found what I desired. I thought of them as the woman’s biscuits. Once found, I quickly removed, by suppleness of hand, the two trophies I will leave to the reporters to identify, if they dare.

I stood, after cleaning my blade on her dress, and restored it to its place. I deposited my trophies in an inner pocket, where, after wiping and wringing them, I was certain they would not be moist enough to stain through the heavy wool. I peeled the gloves from my hand and put each in a different pocket, gave my suit a quick examination so that I was confident its darkness and the darkness of the quarter-moon night would camouflage it well. I clutched the two rings in my pocket to make sure I had them both, and departed through the same door by which I had come.

On Hanbury I took a right but didn’t bother with either Brick Lane or Commercial Street, as both, I feared, would be too well lit to conceal the moisture from the dear lady’s insides if it sneaked through the wool. Instead I turned down Wilkes Street and continued to more or less track my way helter-skelter through the dark warren of Whitechapel. I saw only the occasional ghost and once or twice heard a gentle call – “Sir, is the gentleman seeking something?” – but shook my head firmly and continued on my way at a medium, somewhat relaxed pace. I looked at my watch in the farthest light of a gaslamp I encountered, and saw that it was not yet four-thirty A.M.

CHAPTER EIGHT Jeb’s Memoir