I, Ripper

The blade made its pilgrim’s progress through Sweetie’s abdomen toward her notch, which I had no need to observe and left for other women on other nights. For now it was enough to watch as, in the blade’s wake, a jagged, blackened crevice lay revealed to me as the two edges of the wound separated, yielding the structures below. There was no blood. She had already bled out; her heart, starved of fuel, had already ceased to beat, and so no pressure propelled internal fluids outward. It was just a raw wound, a hideous rent in the flesh that would have caused oceans of pain had anyone been home to notice them. It was a fine piece of handiwork, that. I felt some pride, for I had been curious about the yield of flesh to blade postmortem. Not neat, not a bit of it, just ripped and mangled – mutilated, one might say.

I put another one into her to pursue the strange delight it gave me and was equally pleased with the knife’s work and my own skill and attention to detail. At this point the odors of elemental reality and extinction had produced sensual epistles. It was a mad stench of the metallic, from the copper-penny musk of the blood, to ordure from food alchemized until it became shit for expulsion at the further end of the coils, and finally to piss, which somehow, some way, had slopped across everything, as if I’d nicked a tube in one of my awkward strokes. I inhaled it greedily. Delicious, almost ambrosial. A cloud of dizziness filled my head, and I had half a sensation of swoon come across me.

Then some mad infant within commanded me to further desecration. I needed to puncture her more. Why? God in heaven knows. It was the music of the kill, commanding me to make the exquisite sensation of triumph and transcendence last a bit longer. Like a playful child, I pierced her seven or eight or more times, down until the pubic bone beneath the matted fur took the pleasure out of it, across, around the navel, which was settled in soft folds of flesh, over toward the far hip bone, whose hardness again diminished the fun of it all. Again, no blood from these ragged punctures, just a puffiness of abraded red skin where the flesh recoiled against the violation as the knife’s point struck through it, then swelled into a kind of tiny little knot.

I wiped my blade on her clothes, feeling it come clean, and slipped it inside my frock coat, sliding it between my belt and my trousers, secured out of sight. I rose, rubbed my feet hard against the cobblestones, again to remove excess blood so that no hound could track me by footprint back to my lair. Then I looked upon the poor woman a last time.

She was neither beautiful nor ugly, just dead. Her pale face was serene in the snatch of moonglow, her eyes open but blank, as the pupils had disappeared. I wondered how common this might be and resolved to check for it the next time out and about. Her mouth was sloppy, her grim little teeth swaddled in a captured puddle of saliva. No dignity in the lady’s sense attended Judy that night, not that the world would ever recognize, but to me she had a kind of beauty. She would meet the world soon and it would make of her what it would make, noticing or not depending on its whimsy, but it seemed as if right now, having pleased this customer fabulously, she was resting up for the next ordeal.

CHAPTER FOUR Jeb’s Memoir