I, Ripper

I cut her guts out. I had done so before, but in the dark alleys, in the out-of-doors, worried terribly about the arrival of the odd Peeler or stroller to give the shout, but that fear removed, I emptied her, pulling out sacks of glistening coils and flinging them about the room, where they struck the wall with the sound of a wet sock slapping hard.

I got in among the sweetbreads and cut out various shapeless dark objects, pulling them when they stuck, amusing myself by placing them in odd spots by sheer whimsy, and thus built an altar of the sundered, kidney under her head, liver between her feet, spleen by the left side of the body. The flesh I sliced off her thighs and abdomen went to the table, where it lay like long shreds of cheese drying in the sun. Her thighs, whose embrace would have meant the arrival to paradise of any who found himself so enmeshed, I cut to bare bone. The same to the curve of abdomen, the well of life, removing three giant slabs to lay upon the table. I turned her a bit to breach her right buttock, and my knife savaged it as if it were the family porker on Easter Sunday, with God above looking down and smiling. I went to the neck and jabbed, using the point of my knife, since for some reason the neck’s wholeness offended me, and I hacked and chopped at it, scoring it of flesh, reaching spine. I laid bare her upper chest and took her heart. It did not struggle but came readily to my hands after a cut here and there, a gross lump of muscle gray in the light, heavier than one would have thought, still bathed in the slipperiness of the blood it sent crashing through the body. I took it to my frock coat and dumped it in the right pocket, knowing that it would be well hidden by my outer coat.

My gloves were heavy with blood and smeared with near-liquid fat, my wrists and forearm speckled, and I knew spatter had arrived to my face and shirtfront; if seen, I would be the Jack all feared, Jack the Demon, unfazed by his entry into the world of viscera and carnage where so few men are comfortable. Iron Age soldiers who fought intimately with sword and spear would know what I knew, as would today a few doctors and perhaps morticians, but for most the body’s integrity was a philosophical given in their perception of the world. To breach it was to turn things upside down, and that was part of the magic of my oversize impact upon the tidier world.

At last, only the beautiful face lay unmutilated. It was even composed, untouched by the horror of the body to which it belonged. That could not stand, and what followed was the lowest depravity to which I had sunk, as even I, a connoisseur of depravities, understood. Like a drunken butcher attacking a carcass, I attacked the face. I had no system, no thought, no plan, only an objective, which was to inflict as much cruelty on the beauty as possible, to offend all the poets in heaven and all the painters in hell, and all of humanity that worshipped beauty, which is to say, all of humanity. I hacked. I twisted and pulled. I sawed. I jabbed. I cut off her nose, cheeks, eyebrows, and ears. I cut her lips down to chin. I gashed her whimsically, to no design, simply looking for a new patch of skin to desecrate. Each foray left its own record of gore, and cumulatively they became a thing no longer human, so ripped and torn and shredded that to look upon was to know that there were some among us who knew no limits. It was, I thought, a good message for the coming modern age. No atrocity is beyond man, as I have proved here tonight.

At last I was done. I left her eyes intact, because I wanted all to know she had at one recent point been human. That moored the abstraction of my work in reality. It happened, furthermore, that my last burst of energy left her face tilted left, so that her stare from beyond greeted any copper or reporter who entered her queendom. It was an artistic touch, I thought, if inadvertent.

My handiwork, in the dim light, was a landscape of ruin, as grotesque as Carthage after the Romans or Troy after the Greeks, but all worked in the compass of a single woman’s body. I stood back, breathing hard, bathed in sweat, perhaps awobble in my knees and aflutter in my stomach. It was time to leave reverie behind and reenter the quotidian. I knew I had to move swiftly, for soon the world would be up and about. I went to the window and peeked out, seeing that a full third of the sky was blurred by light, as the sun was beating itself upward, though behind a shelter of cloud. I could see spatters where the rain still fell, and the strong wind pushed it like gunsmoke across the narrow little court that bore the name Miller’s and was soon to become famous.