I, Ripper

For the record, then, here is Professor Thomas Dare’s interpretation of the phenomenon of Jack the Ripper, as recorded with sublime accuracy by me on that date at that time, October’s third week, 1888, in his study at 26 Wimpole Street, London, England, via the Pitman method of shorthand. I have the papers before me as I translate them to English in my study, also London, England, in the year of someone else’s Lord 1912. Let me add, I did not bother to record my interruptions, which in any case were few and stupid.

“I begin with the conclusion and will then support it,” he began. “Here’s my somewhat radical final sum, new, I think, to the field. Our man is military. More, he is army; that is, a soldier.”

He paused, reading the look on my face, which was not stunned surprise but at least a minor bit of being taken aback, for this possibility had not been postulated previously. “Now I will track my argument through a series of subarguments, the first being attributes, the second being character, the third being physical, and the final being spiritual.”

He cleared his throat, rose, and began to pace back and forth while I sat, scribbling away in the Pitman notation.

“I say ‘soldier,’ but I mean not merely a soldier; rather, a certain kind of soldier, a type so rare that there are but few of them in London, much less the army as a whole. He is not an artilleryman, he is not a lancer, he is not an infantry lad. He is no engineer; he certainly has nothing to do with quartermastering or the medical ends of the profession of arms.

“His sort of soldiering is so rare it has no name, at least not a proper noun in the folk vocabulary common to newspapers and barroom chatter. Perhaps, as I believe this sort of thing is to become more, not less, utilized in the future, someone will christen him. But for now the closest I can come is ‘scout,’ or perhaps ‘agent,’ or perhaps ‘raider.’

“I will go with ‘raider,’ as it’s easiest off the tongue. Let’s define the attributes. The raider is used to operating alone. He is very well schooled in certain skills: He must be an officer, since he is literate, despite his dyslexia, and in these days few rankers are. Furthermore, like an officer, he plans well, scouts thoroughly, and memorizes routes in and out. He is not averse to killing, obviously, having done and seen much of that work. But for him, killing is not the point; it is part of the job. He’s always driven by task, not mere infliction of damage. He has purpose, design, agenda as his Beneath.

“This one, in particular, clearly served in Afghanistan, because the wounds he leaves on the bodies are typical of the sorts of mutilations that the Pathans commit against British troops, alive or dead, quite routinely. The women torture our wounded. They cut them open and pull their guts out while the boys are quite alive, but no one except the mountains can hear the screams. The guts are flung, the point being to attract buzzards, the further point being that relief columns will see the buzzards, find the bodies, and suffer the dislocating shock of the carnage, which must have a terrifying influence on morale. Jack has seen enough of it not to be agitated, either by seeing it or by doing it, but for him, it’s part of doing business in a certain methodology. It is restricted, I should add, to the mountains of the Hindu Kush, where so many have died so horribly. The Negroes of Africa are savages, but not so committed to dogma in their desecrations. The Pathan go more toward beheading and dismembering, as part of their primitive faith insists that by disassembling the body of the enemy, it follows that he will not bother you in the afterlife. From their point of view, it makes very good sense, if it is a little monstrous by our standards. We feel that a bundle of bullets out of Gatling, traveling faster than the speed of sound – yes, sound has a measurable speed – so that it shatters bone and shreds muscle is far more civilized.

“Then, our Jack is highly organized, as the neat setting out of Annie Chapman’s goods next to her desecrated body indicates; he seems to think tidiness counts. In fact, his sites are all notable for their concision, economy, succinctness, even. They’re very small, never orgiastic or out of control in suggestion. Contained, I suppose, would be the word. It’s like a kind of sex fetish, this need he has to do his damage in very small compass, and I can ascribe that only to years in the military trade, which demand of a man few possessions arranged by rigid convention for inspection, until such habits, which pay their premium on campaign for months if not years, are ingrained.