I, Ripper

I looked about. The room was like so many of the professorial class I had seen behind London’s brick and ivy, all booky and leathery, with brass gas outlets for nighttime illumination so necessary to the soirees that drove their society and furniture heavy enough to crush an elephant’s skull and carpets from the Orient that would tell pornographic stories of Scheherazade’s actual relations with the Caliph if one but understood the code. What distinguished it from all the other Bloomsbury iterations was a contrapuntal melody that might be called “Throat.” It was quite extravagantly decorated in Throat. Was he a Sherlock Holmes of the voice?

That is, it was dedicated to matters pertaining to the vocal cords and their substructures, from charts of that particular organ in profile half-section complete to Latin labels for all the tiny flowerlike leaves and tendrils, charts on the wall that I took to be for eye but revealed themselves to be of the letters we call vowels; then strange devices on a large laboratory table that could be for torture but seemed for measuring breath, both intensity and consistency, including a tiny torchlike thing against whose flame one would speak, I’m guessing, and by that method give visual evidence of the absence or presence of the letter H, whose existence bewildered half the population of our city.

“I say, you take this phonetics business rather seriously, don’t you?”

“Voice is communication, communication is civilization,” he said. “Without the one, we lose the other, as those festivals of slaughter called wars attest.”

“May I write that down? It’ll do for an aphorism.”

“Go ahead. Claim authorship, if you prefer. As I say, I am beyond glory. I merely want to stop this nasty chap from gutting our tarts. That’s enough for me.” He bade me sit.

“I have to tell you,” I said, “I have not accomplished much. I go forward and back, upward and downward, I enter randomly or by system, and I cannot seem to get beyond what the police know, that a skilled, dedicated individual is, as has been said, ‘down on whores,’ and butchers them with such grace that he has yet to be caught or even seen.”

He drew reflectively on his pipe, the atmosphere he was pulling past the burning tobacco intensifying its burn so that more great roils of vapor tumbled forth. It was like the skyline of Birmingham.

He proceeded to ask questions that showed intimate familiarity with the material. How wide was the passageway Jack had taken Annie down on Hanbury Street? What were the dimensions of the pony wagon at the Anarchists’ Club, versus the dimensions of the gate, and how low to ground was that wagon? How many stone was Mr. Diemschutz, the pony-cart man? Over which shoulder were Kate Eddowes’s intestines flung? How quickly had the various teams of coppers arrived at Buck’s Row? Why did he only cut Polly but not eviscerate her like the others, assuming interruption in the matter of Liz Stride? Why was there no moon her night but quarter-moon the others? What explained the odd irregularity of rhythm between the murders? What was my opinion of the quality of mind of both Sir Charles and the number one detective, Abberline? Did I get a bonus for writing the Dear Boss letter?

“Now, see here,” I said, all fuddled up, “that is uncalled for.” Particularly since it was true.

“It is quite called for. As I have said, I have a gift for the Beneath of a piece of writing. Beneath ‘Dear Boss’, not entirely but mostly, lies our friend Jeb, for I recognize the boldness and clearness of his sentences united with his vividness of image. Those are separate talents, by the way, not a single general one for ‘writing.’ You are lucky to have them both. Anyhow, ‘Jack the Ripper’ is indeed vivid, if not quite accurate. It certainly echoes and deploys a genius for the exact and the resonant. It may indeed become immortal. I love the melody of ‘reaper’ in its own Beneath, and I like the ‘Jack’ for its onomatopoetic evocation of brisk, decisive action, as the snap cutting of a throat. I mention your clear authorship not to embarrass you or flatter you but to point out that the reason so many have tested their brains against the riddles Jack poses and failed is because they now see him as you created him – Jack, demon of mythology, folklore, mischief, a god of mayhem and slaughter – and that will occlude their thinking, cause them to miss what I would consider obvious. So even as I twit you, I do so because I want you to exile this Jack-demon idea from mind and concentrate instead on a human being who is knowable, trackable, and findable. Will you do me that honor, sir?”

“I will,” I said.

“Then let us turn this hellhound.”

“May I record in Pitman’s? This may be historic.”

“I doubt that. I hope only that it’s coherent.”