Текст книги "Riptide"

Автор книги: Michael Prescott

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

eleven

It was after ten PM when Jennifer e-mailed Draper her report on the Diaz case. She knew she ought to rest and take a fresh look at the diary in the morning. But she couldn’t leave the rest of it unread.

Carefully she turned to the last page she’d seen, marked with a dried splotch of blood “fresh out of whitechapel,” the word rendered in lowercase.

The blood, noted the diarist in a subsequent entry, had belonged to Annie Chapman.

A timeline of events was included in one of the books she’d purchased. The Ripper’s second victim was Annie Chapman, killed in the backyard of an East End home.

And the first victim was Mary Ann Nichols, known as Polly to her friends.

The names matched. Whoever wrote the diary either was Jack the Ripper—or thought he was.

She continued reading. Some of the lines were struck through—an increasing number as time went on. The handwriting grew more frenzied and illegible, the forward thrust of the cursive becoming almost savage. The man’s self-control was breaking down.

There were frequent references to the Met. It seemed to stand for the Metropolitan Police, who investigated some of the Ripper murders.

In other passages the word costermonger cropped up, straight out of Dickens. Street names were hyphenated—Hanbury-street, Aden-yard, Mile-end-road. Presumably this was good Victorian usage.

Throughout, the diarist’s rage became more palpable, his grandiosity more exaggerated.

Brainless blue bottles have no more chance of buckling me than of nabbing their own shadows.

They call me wicked, fiend, ruffian. Hypocrites, double-faced asses! I do what they desire to do. They would follow in my footsteps if they had the will.

Next one I do I’ll be up her arse and shoot sponk up her then tickle up her ovaries with my fine sharp knife.

By the time he reported the next victory in his war against the “unfortunates” of the streets, his mood was giddy.

To-night a triumph—two of them dead—Berner-street and Mitre-square—two of the filthy creatures permanently suppressed—two less of the deuced vermin to fill the cots of the padding kens—

Couldn’t finish the first as I’d hoped—she was a fighter, had a knife of her own—I snatched it away, used it on her ha ha turnabout is fair play—short knife, not like mine—didn’t cut deep—no good for draining blood—would have done her properly but some Yid carman interrupted—him and his pony and cart—

Damnable shame not finishing the first but it turned all right—

My blood still hot I found another—did her good—she had no more blood in her than a stone when I was through—I took away a piece of her in my tobacco pouch—

She had eyes like Kitty's—wide staring eyes—

According to the timeline, two prostitutes—Elizabeth Stride and Catharine Eddowes—were killed on the same night. Eddowes’ kidney had been taken.

Fried up part of the kidney. Was greasy. Needed salt.

Jennifer felt her stomach recoil.

Now they say I hate Jews. All because of some nonsense scribbled on a doorway. Donkeys!! I left no message. The bit of bloody apron they found by the door—I must have dropped it—carelessness, no more.

Anti-Semitic graffiti was discovered near a scrap of Eddowes’ apron.

The woman on Berner-street is said to have been accosted by some ruffian while another lurked in the shadows—ha ha– another false trail for the bloodhounds. It must have happened before I met her. No wonder she had her short knife ready.

The diarist no longer bothered to record his victims’ names. They were not people to him.

They make it all so complicated—conspiracies—slanders on the Jews—lookouts in the shadows—political motives, religious mania. They can not conceive of how simple it is.

Betrayed by a whore, I seek satisfaction from all their kind. And from Kitty herself, one day.

But not yet. Not whilst she still may be linked to me. I am clever, superlatively crafty. I bide my time and outwit them all.

His megalomania was escalating. She expected further signs of overstimulation and personality disintegration.

Drinking too much. Can’t sleep. Out at all hours. Come home late. Pace floor.

Passed woman on street. She shrank from me. Saw something in my eyes. Must beware of giving myself away.

Wisp and the others regard me strangely. Students whisper. They don’t suspect. They only know I’m not myself.

Kidney is gone. What happened to it? I remember nothing.

Mystery solved. Lusk, head of the vigilance committee, got the kidney in the post. Wrapped in a note. I have no memory of writing it. Damned lucky I didn’t give myself away.

Half a kidney in a brown pasteboard parcel was mailed anonymously to George Lusk, who had started a kind of neighborhood watch organization to combat the Ripper. It was accompanied by a semicoherent note datelined “from hell.”

The note gave her an idea. She opened a book that reproduced letters purportedly from the Ripper. Thumbing through the pages, she found a large photo of the most famous one, known as the “Dear Boss letter,” in which the name Jack the Ripper first appeared. She compared the handwriting with that of the diarist.

She was no graphologist, but as best she could tell, the writing matched the careful copperplate of the diary’s earlier entries. There were the same oversized capitals—especially the word I, narcissistically enlarged—the same dangling descenders, the same tendency to underline key words for emphasis, the same minuscule periods and apostrophes that often nearly vanished altogether. There was minimal punctuation, notably a scarcity of commas. And there was the repeated and underlined interjection ha ha.

A postcard followed the letter. Though it had been lost, a photo of it, taken by police at the time, remained extant and was reproduced in the book. The card had been written quickly, with none of the panache of the first letter, but the writing seemed to match that of the Dear Boss letter and the less disciplined diary passages.

She kept turning pages until she found the cover note from the package with the kidney. This one was written in a frenetic scrawl. The diarist had implied he was drunk when he composed it. The ragged scribbles matched the wildest entries in the diary, the ones showing the greatest decay of self-control.

In the days after mailing his ominous parcel, his condition worsened.

Go out nightly. Roam the streets. Constables everywhere. No opportunities. My head rarely clear. Thoughts run like a millrace. Too much gin and ale. Insufficient nourishment. Wasting away. Must put myself together. Scarcely recognise myself in the cheval-glass. Even Vole remarked on it. Asked if I were ill. Smirked when he said it. They mock me. They don’t know who they are dealing with. I am more than any of them. I have thrown the city into a panic. Every policeman hunts me. Every whore imagines my fingers on her throat. Newsboys cry themselves hoarse on every footway seeking to slake the disgustful curiousity of the multitude.

His penmanship was wildly erratic now, many of the words barely legible. He was breaking down—breaking apart.

This night will bring a great new victory. I sense it. As if with psychical powers I foresee the future.

Oceans of blood.

A blank page followed, as if to mark the momentous event. On the next page there was just one line of small, neat, careful script.

Done. It is done. Can not write of it this morning. There are no words...

The Ripper’s fifth victim was Mary Kelly. Photos had been taken of the crime scene, grainy black-and-white images of appalling slaughter. The woman had been torn to pieces in her bed.

Her pretty face—now no face at all. In the dance of the fireglow from the hearth I obliterated her. She did scream once. ‘Murder’ she cried. I feared someone would come. But this was Miller’s-court. The inhabitants are animals. They cowered in their dens.

What he’d said about the victim was accurate. Her face had been eradicated.

Two days have passed.

I partake of food again. I shun the bottle.

My frenzy has passed like a summer storm and I am whole and healed. No longer do I explore the nocturnal streets.

The last one has left me sated though not forever. I am like unto a man who has downed a great feast and imagines he will never know hunger again. But the pangs will come. When they do, I will answer them.

The savage strokes of his pen, mimicking the strokes of his knife, had given way to the meticulous copperplate of the early entries. But when he wrote again, much time must have passed. Some of the old unsteadiness was back, the forward slant, the heavy underlining.

I fear the city has forgotten me. To-night they will have a reminder.

I did kill one but there was no satisfaction in it. She was a haggard thing with a tobacco stench and a raucous laugh. Foul. To kill her was a mercy but it was not the same.

Alice McKenzie, “Clay Pipe” Alice, was killed on July 17, 1889. The murder wasn’t generally attributed to the Ripper, because there was only superficial mutilation of the abdomen. But the relative absence of postmortem violence could have reflected the killer’s lack of commitment.

Possibly I have lost the taste for it. I forbear to think so. I would not want my best days to lie behind me.

The last two passages were written listlessly, the words lightly rendered, t’s left uncrossed and i’s undotted. The next entry was neat and controlled.

It has been so long. I hardly think I will prowl again. I have settled into a comfortable schedule. I am fit and self-possessed. I look back on the autumn of ’88 and that one other night and I think it was a spell of madness. Yet I regret none of it. On those nights I breathed fire. I outstared the basilisk. I lived.

Not again, perhaps. Never again.

I am thinking I shall burn this book.

It is a new year and I feel something growing in me. The old familiar urge. I had thought it was gone for good. But there may be life in me yet. Life for me, death for others.

Last night I again walked the streets of the East End. Little has changed. Little ever changes there.

I saw few policemen.

Many whores.

From the transition to shorter sentences and more jagged script, she knew what would come next.

Under the railway arch I took her—glorious—I was wrong to think I ever had lost my spirit—the knife felt so right in my hand, a part of me—the first incision like a lover’s kiss—the hot stink of her, the charnel-house reek—

But I left it uncompleted. Left her dead but mostly intact. Sheer bad luck, a constable coming by. I heard the clop of his boots and ran. He found her moments later. It was a near thing.

But glorious.

This had to be Frances Coles, dead on February 13, 1891. The day before Valentine’s Day.

Some say too much time has passed. They say this is the work of some other fiend.

Let them prattle. The next one will bear my signature.

I see now that I can never return to what I was. One spark animates me. One engine moves me. I can not deny my deepest nature. I must do what I am called to do. I am a sleepwalker otherwise. I am awake only on nights like these. To desist is to die.

Never again will I be less than what I am.

And shortly it will be Kitty who feels my knife. Her time has come. I will do her as I did the one in Miller's-court.

But the timeline listed no more victims. The killer’s plans must have changed. Jennifer turned the page and saw why.

Disaster. How could they know? I made no mistakes, not one.

They don’t know. If they did I should have been arrested by now. They are only sniffing round. I am patient. I can wait them out.

And now I see. It was Vole. Dull Vole, sleepy Vole, smirking Vole. He slipped out of his bedchamber and went carousing in the city. He saw me there on the night of the whore’s death. He saw me and he talked, not to the police but to his stupid chattering friends who contacted the authorities.

And so they came by to speak with me. And they continue coming by.

Wisp has put me on leave. The noose tightens.

How much did Vole see? How much has he told?

They shadow me. Two inspectors. They dog my footsteps. But I will outmanoeuvre them. I have packed my essentials in a trunk small enough to carry by hand.

I will consign this memoir to the fire. Then slip away in the night, when my watchers have dropped their guard. Book passage on a steamer under an assumed name. America is a large country, large enough to get lost in. Once there I will cover my trail, change identities again. They’ll not find me.

And Kitty, dear Kitty, must wait. But not forever. I shall come back for her.

That was the final entry. Obviously, he had been unable to destroy the precious record of his crimes. Perhaps it was then that the name on the inside cover was blacked out, the early pages removed, to preserve some degree of anonymity. The diary would have gone into the trunk, to be carried across the Atlantic. And farther west, all the way to California, to this house. The House of Silence, which had kept the secret all these years.

She stood up. Her mind was working fast—running like a millrace, as the diarist put it. The man who filled these pages with his thoughts showed the classic symptoms of schizophrenia, the cyclical swings between lucidity and manic paranoia. In the acute phases he was hostile, violent, homicidal. He went out every night, came back late, paced the floor. Women shrank from his gaze. People feared him.

Like Richard. Richard, whose nocturnal footsteps disturbed the downstairs neighbors. Richard, who gave female tenants “the evil eye.” Richard, who was in the acute phase of his illness now.

The same pattern. If the diarist was Graham Silence, he had passed on his disease through the generations, to her father, and now to her brother.

Aldrich had killed himself. His rage had been turned inward.

And Richard? How was he channeling his violent impulses?

And what did he do when he went out at night?

twelve

She had it.

He was almost sure she did.

Someone like her would not be able to resist the temptation of such a prize.

And she would keep it to herself, the scheming bitch.

She might be reading it right now. Reading long into the night. Retracing the byways of old Jack’s thoughts. Reliving the momentous events of ’88 and later.

He himself had no need to read of such things. He already knew everything that mattered, knew by intuition, by inheritance, by blood.

He knew Jack.

Was Jack, he sometimes thought. Jack’s ghost, summoned forth from the underworld to animate a new body.

He did feel like a ghost, often enough, and more and more often these days.

Something not quite dead, not quite alive. Inhabiting the gray borderland between the quick and the dead. A dismal land.

A shadow land.

And he himself, a shadow among shadows.

No, he didn't need to read the book. But he wanted no one else to have it. For it to be scanned by unworthy eyes was sacrilege.

Her eyes. She was unworthy.

And in justice she might have to pay for her transgression.

He imagined her eyes, those undeserving eyes, wide open and unblinking, staring sightlessly. She would be a broken thing, a discarded toy, like one of old Jack’s victims, the flophouse floozies he slaughtered in back alleys.

But not cut up as they were. Not eviscerated. Unlike his predecessor, he had no need to soil his hands.

He knew the interior of the human body. He knew that it was blood and bile and shit.

We have this treasure in earthen vessels, said St. Paul. But St. Paul was wrong. There was no treasure. There was only filth and muck.

No need to disassemble them as old Jack did. Making them dead was accomplishment enough.

And now he might have to make her dead.

Possibly. He hoped it would not be necessary.

But it might be.

It just might.

thirteen

Jennifer woke shortly after sunrise, the residue of a nightmare already fading from memory. She’d been running through a maze of fogbound alleys, and a man with a knife was after her, and she slipped on the wet street and he was slashing at her, opening a long rip in her left arm, and she saw his face and it was Richard.

She needed to talk to him. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe just to convince herself that he wasn’t capable of the violence in her dream.

If she called, wouldn’t answer. She tossed on yesterday’s clothes and drove to Dogtown, parking outside the Oakwood Chateau. She took the stairs to the third story and rapped on his door.

“Richard, I know you’re in there. It’s Jennifer. Open up.”

She kept on banging until she was convinced he wasn’t home. He could be anywhere. But the manager said he often went to the cemetery in the morning. It wasn’t far.

She parked on a side street and walked through the gateway, past a sign half obscured by dripping foliage. Traffic hummed on the Santa Monica Freeway, immediately to the north. A homeless man wheeled a shopping cart past the mausoleum, his head bent low.

No one else was in sight. She spent a long moment looking in every direction, but saw no sign of Richard.

There wasn’t any reason to linger. Still, she made her way farther into the graveyard.

Woodlawn Cemetery dated to the early 1800s. Buried here was Venice’s founder, Abbot Kinney, a tobacco mogul who patterned the town after its namesake, complete with Italianate palazzos and sixteen miles of canals navigated by gondolas. “Venice-of-America” was meant to be a cultural showcase, but the public wanted carnivals, roller coasters, and sideshow attractions, and Venice became “the Coney Island of the Pacific.” In the Depression most of the canals were filled in and paved over. Only six were spared. Now they had been dredged and reclaimed, and with amazing speed Venice was being transformed into something close to what Kinney intended—a pleasure garden for a moneyed elite.

Jennifer went past rows of Gothic headstones into a section reserved for bronze plaques set in the earth. Two of the plaques marked the places where her mother and father lay.

Marjorie Ellen Silence. Aldrich Graham Silence.

She rarely came here. Now that she stood over the graves, she wasn’t sure what to do. Say a prayer? She didn’t know any. She contented herself with a whispered, “Rest in peace.” Not the most original sentiment, but she meant it. There had not been much peace for her parents. Aldrich was shattered by mental illness. His suicide left Marjorie an emotional wreck, prone to insomnia and crying jags. She could be a harsh disciplinarian. She and Richard quarreled constantly. Jennifer sometimes thought Marjorie saw too much of Aldrich in her son, and the recognition pained her. Or did it scare her?

Richard was too young to escape the House of Silence. Jennifer was not. She partied nightly. Venice in the early ’90s was still “the sewer by the sea,” as locals called it. No McMansions back then, only decaying buildings and dry canals lined with trash. Drugs were everywhere. At fifteen she was doing coke and speed. At sixteen she ran away from home—for good, she thought.

A girlfriend drove her to San Francisco. They were going to live in Haight-Ashbury in a shared apartment. Or so they assumed until they learned what the rent was like. Her friend ran out on her a few days later, taking the car. Jennifer was alone. She could call home, but she was too scared and too stubborn. She ate at a soup kitchen, cadged dollar bills in public parks. She found a place to live—the utility room in a shopping center, where she could sneak in and out without being seen by the custodial staff. Or perhaps they did see her, but let her stay out of pity. After two months of this, she was a ragged, dirty, emaciated mess.

Then she was raped.

She never knew who did it. On a rainy evening he ambushed her beneath an overpass. It was dark, and she was scared and crying as he jerked down her pants and put himself in her. His cock was flaccid, and he barely got off. He blamed her for struggling too much. He had a knife. She remembered the hot wire of pain along her left arm, then the splash of his sneakers as he ran away.

He’d opened her arm almost from elbow to wrist, a long red slit, oozing blood. She pulled up her pants and applied pressure to her arm, trying to stanch the flow. It didn’t work. She hid inside the mall till closing time, then found a pay phone. With her last few coins she called home. Richard answered. She didn’t know what to say, except that she was in bad shape and she didn’t think she’d be coming back. “I love you,” she said. “Tell Mom I’m sorry.” She hung up while he was asking where she was.

Then she found the utility room and crawled inside to die.

She bled out slowly. The wound was long but not deep. There was time to call for an ambulance, but she didn’t want an ambulance. After the E.R. patched her up, they would reunite her with her mother. She couldn’t go back. It was easier to die.

But she didn’t die, and she had Richard to thank for it.

She blinked, coming out of these memories. Slowly she turned away from the graves and headed back to her car. A folded flyer, a menu for a Thai restaurant, was wedged beneath the wiper blades. Something made her open it. Written across it in a brisk angular hand were six words, all in capitals.

I KNOW YOU HAVE MY BOOK.

She felt nothing at first, only numb unreality, as if the flyer were a figment in a dream. The numbness lasted just long enough for her to identify it as a defense mechanism against shock. With that thought, she snapped out of it.

She jerked around, looking everywhere at once, but whoever had left the note was gone. Or out of sight—hiding, watching her.

Her breath was coming hard and fast, and there was a funny weakness in her knees. She fumbled the car key out of her pocket and got the driver’s door open and slipped behind the wheel. She pulled the door shut, locking it.

The note shook in her hand. Over and over she read those same six words. They shouted at her.