BECOMING THE RIPPER
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF PROFESSOR JAMES MORIARTY:
J
ohn Harder lay dying on the parlor floor, but above him, the demon soul of Jack the Ripper boiled and seethed, very much alive. It seemed a red mist, rising in tendrils from his blood and gathering above his body. There was intelligence in that cloud. It watched me … and it lunged.
I staggered back and gasped, and the mist rushed into my nose and throat. It burned like whisky. I snorted to blow the red stuff out, but then I had to breathe again, and more came in. I collapsed on the bed. The red cloud engulfed me. Thrashing, I rolled to my feet and ran for the door, unable to shake the stuff. It clung to me like oil, and my lungs screamed for air.
I breathed.
The red mist filled me, suffused me. It stung, but it also intoxicated.
Ah, what sweet relief, to surrender, to fight no longer, to give myself in to the possession of my enemy.
Another breath. I understood all that I had once despised. Let him in. Let him take over.
Another breath.
I became him.
For years I had feared death. Now, I was death.
I had killed twice now, without consequence—killed
Susanna’s killer and killed Jack the Ripper, and the only consequence was this new, fearless life: this power.
At last I knew how it felt to stand above a still-warm body, to hold absolute power over it. My knife was sharp. Why not find out what the Ripper was made of? Why not draw the blade thus across his belly and see the great sac that was his stomach? Why not slide the knife between the pink snake of gut and this great gray pudding of pancreas, to feel the ducts sever one by one—
thup! thup! thup
! And, where is that thunder coming from, that panicked rumble that runs through his viscera? Ah, of course, a heart pumping itself dry, dying all the while! And by cutting thus and twisting the knife between the ribs so and reaching my hand in and yanking. Oh! Yes! This was how it felt to stand victorious above a foe and hold high the still-flailing heart!
The human body is endlessly entertaining. So many crannies, so many glands. How long I was at it, I do not know. By the time I was finished, though, the Ripper could fit into three small trunks. I know because I put him in them and set them by the door. The blood was all out of them, so they wouldn’t seep. Then I set about to mopping. It was somehow not the chore it had been when I cleaned up the last time—almost a pleasure, as if I were waxing the wood with Jack. Bucket after red bucket, I worked, toting them two at a time to the sewer in the alley and then drawing more water at the well where the whole neighborhood drank. I worked in shirtsleeves, head held high in the biting night air. I worked with the cheerful demeanor of a man who has nothing to fear.
By morning, the work was done. The blood was up, and dawn winds sluiced through the apartments from bay window to bedroom sash, drying the floor. I changed my clothes and threw the blood-soaked ones into the fire. Meanwhile,
Jack waited by the door, packed for a picnic in the country—someplace nice and secluded. I’d have to buy a shovel.
A furtive knock came at the door. I threw back the bolt and flung the door wide, startling poor Mrs. Mulroney and Anna, who trembled on the landing outside. Mrs. Mulroney held a protective arm before my daughter and frowned. “You didn’t sleep at the boardinghouse.”
“I got restless.” I flashed her a smile. “Business to attend to.”
Anna entered the parlor and looked around. Our curtains billowed like ghosts, and the floor was still puddled in places with pinkish water. “What’ve you been up to?”
“Business.”
She cradled her hand to her mouth. “Not—Jack?”
I pointed to the three trunks by the door. “We’re taking him on holiday.”
IT WAS a whole new life for me, life on a new scale. No longer was I mired in the everyday struggles of everyman. I had transcended them. Fear, worry, dread, grief, remorse—these poisons were gone from my being. In their place, I had a new, voracious appetite for knowledge—and power.
Anna refused to accompany me and Jack on our picnic. It was just as well. She would have simply fussed the whole while—might even have had a crisis of conscience and run to the police.
The porters complained about the weight of my trunks, but a few crowns shut them up. At Ely, I rented a farmer’s wagon, complete with fork, flail, and shovel. As chance would have it, I did not need any of them, but only a peat bog and the rope I had brought and a few large stones. Jack would have liked the spot. Peat water works like formaldehyde, so Jack’s flesh, as well as his legend, would be immortalized.
I committed one other act to ensure Jack’s immortality. I brought half of one of his kidneys back to Cambridge with me, placed it in a jar filled with wine, boxed it up, and sent it to George Lusk, president of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. With it, I attached the following letter.
From hell.
Mr. Lusk,
Sor
I send you half the Kidne I took from one woman and prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise. I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only watse a whil longer
signed
Catch me when you can Mishtr Lusk
Sending that letter was my final act on behalf of Jack. I did not need to do more. The police and the press and the public together kept him alive. So did other killers—men who needed a scapegoat for their crimes. For example, on the ninth of November, five weeks after Jack’s own death, a Mary Jane Kelly was found slain in her small apartment in Spitalfields. The murder was entirely different from the others, though. The victim was about twenty years younger than Jack’s targets, she was far more mutilated than the others, and she was killed indoors. Despite these discrepancies, all of London credited the killing to Jack the Ripper.
But I knew who Mary Jane’s real killer was. I’d already incorporated him into my grand algorithm of crime in London. He was Joseph Barnett—an extortionist and opium addict, and also the victim’s lover. He would get his. My algorithm would make sure of it.
And so, I returned to the mathematics of crime. After a few weeks, I’d filled in the last of the modern personalities that ruled London’s criminal underworld. Then, a handful of calculations revealed the lynchpin—a pet cat owned by a gang lord named Jacob Ferny, a cat he was convinced was the reincarnation of his beloved mother. Skin the cat, and the whole organization would self-destruct.
But in my calculations, I couldn’t help noticing other possibilities. There was Susan Graham, the aspiring opera star who was also the pampered mistress of another mob boss. If I got at her, I could get at him. I arranged the untimely illness of a diva in
Aïda,
and Susan stepped up from understudy to star. Then I made sure the mob boss understood that this had been no accidental illness. By careful and anonymous insinuation, I gained influence over a third of the East End rackets.
There was also Harold Jenkins, a drug lord who used opium to allay his own natural paranoia. Simply by adding a few other choice compounds to his daily hit, I put strings on the man. I controlled his every move and slowly took over his whole enterprise.
Then there was Bill Stewart, a minor but promising blackmailer who had a weekly appointment at a brothel. I sent him an anonymous tip that he should delay his weekly visit by half an hour—and thus he witnessed a Member of the House of Lords in flagrante delicto. Bill had struck gold. In the course of a month, he became king of the extortion racket—a king who religiously read every note that came to him from his anonymous benefactor.
A hit man named Emil Sykes received a similar note—indicating that his boss had taken out a contract on him. At first unbelieving, the hit man soon discovered the truth of the message—for I myself had taken out the contract in the boss’s
name. Sykes was desperate for a plan, and I provided him one, note by note. He followed my advice and soon chewed his way through the boss’s other killers until at last he slew the boss himself. A new lord of murder was crowned, one completely loyal to me.
And so it went. With the right note sent to the right eyes at the right time, I could destroy a whole branch of crime and build it up again in my own image, under my own control. In six months, I had gained influence over every major branch of crime in London. By the end of a year, I controlled every operation. In two years’ time, I had become the unchallenged and unchallengeable emperor of crime throughout southeastern England.
Susanna would have been proud.
But Anna wasn’t. She had turned on me the very morning after I’d killed the Ripper. She wanted to involve the police, argued about what was “right,” told me that I hadn’t killed the Ripper—that he had killed me.
I laughed it off. It was just the sort of nonsense a young woman would say. Anna hadn’t ever done an honest day’s work. She was a china doll who did not cook or clean or raise children but only sat and stewed about “injustice.” A whole generation of Victorian women did the same. They protested that they couldn’t vote, they protested that their men ran out to prostitutes, they protested that their men got drunk, they protested that their men were opium addicts. And why were these men driven from their homes to the streets and the sins there? Because of the insufferable protests of the insufferable women in their lives. Anna’s “concern” had the same effect on me. The more she complained, the more time I devoted to my criminal empire.
What a grave disappointment she had become.
And then even Jesus turned against me—Jesus College, that is. Here is the letter I received from the president.
Dear Dean Moriarty:
Your genius is needed, now more than ever, at the head of the Department of Physics. However, your activities beyond the campus have been stealing you away with increasing regularity. Some of your students have reported that you attended only two of the twelve physics tutorials you were assigned to provide. This sort of disregard for your duties, if left unchecked, will result in your eventual dismissal.
President MacWilliams
Absurdity. Jesus College had the greatest mathematical mind of a generation, and they would let him go because of tardiness?
I decided to dismiss myself before MacWilliams could dismiss me. That very night, I packed up Anna and me, and we moved to London. The next morning, MacWilliams was found stabbed in his bed.
AND SO, mathematics herself delivered dominance into my hands. Other men rose through bribes and threats and murder. I rose through logarithmic functions. Like a tireless spider, I spun out my equations and sent forth my notes and wove a vast web of calculation and crime, a web that soon reached to York in the north and Cardiff in the east and Copenhagen in the west and Paris in the south.
But some men are immune to the Mother of Sciences. Mathematics has no hold on them. They are irrational figures: 3 divided by 0 or 5 divided by infinity or the square root of
negative 9. When such a figure enters an equation, he brings it crashing down.
I met my irrational figure. I met a man who, like a plague, infected the smallest tissue of my leviathan and thereby destroyed the whole organism.
With no love of mathematics, he brought me down. And I will bring him down, in turn.
HER STORY
As the Bern Express rolled toward Paris, Anna lay between Thomas Carnacki and Harold Silence and told them all she knew about her father’s life: that James Moriarty was a genius, that he once had been a good man, that her mother was also a genius but had unwittingly set into his hands the keys to control a vast criminal empire. Anna told them that after slaying Jack the Ripper, her father had ceased to be the man who had loved her and whom she had loved, and had become a monster.
“Of course, I don’t know all the details. Father’s been writing his memoirs, and maybe someday I’ll get to read them. But I do know this much: Whatever madness grips him now comes from outside. Deep within, my father is a good man.”
Silence, who had been lying with his hands templed above his face, at last spoke: “So, you knew of your father’s activities all the while that he was taking control of this … empire of crime?”
“Well, I knew what he let me know—or what I could discover on my own. At first, I pleaded with him to stop, but it only drove him into a rage. Then, I simply watched him, monitored, tried to understand his machinations. One day he caught me studying his algorithm, and he struck me across the face. From then on … I ceased trying.
“And when we moved to London, all that was bad became worse. I had no friends in the city, and Father spent no time with me anymore. His manias became terrifying—with ruined furniture and words that turned the air blue. At least he didn’t kill anyone by his own hands anymore. He had others to do that. He even found this Dr. Gottlieb—a ghoul of a man whom Father had met at Cambridge—and enlisted his talents. Whenever Father had a particularly horrible man to kill, he would take the man to Gottlieb, who performed a lobotomy. Father always assisted. It was as if he wanted to see what was happening in their minds, wanted to harvest the evil in them.”
Thomas, who lay next to the wall, took Anna’s hand. “It must have been terrifying.”
“It was. I only hoped I could somehow win him back. And then, one day, he appeared at the door with a storm cloud about his shoulders and his eyes flashing lightning. He stomped into the room and sat in his accustomed seat, and when I brought him his tea, he gently laid hold of my wrist and said, ‘You may get your wish, Anna.’
“‘What wish, Father?’ I asked.
“He laughed bleakly and squeezed my arm so that his fingernails left circular welts. ‘Your wish to destroy me.’
“I protested: ‘I don’t want to destroy you. I want to save you. I want you to give up this life of crime.’
“‘Well,’ he replied more quietly, ‘you may get your wish. There’s another man out there—another genius. He’s figured out the algorithm. He’s found the lynchpin.’
“‘Then let’s escape, Father. Let’s take the money and escape to the Continent—before the killing begins.’”
“‘There won’t be any killing. This man has set everything up through the police. My whole empire will go before the docket and go to jail. There’s nothing I can do.’
“I knelt before him and stared into his eyes. ‘Yes, there is. Let’s go to the Continent. Let’s be someone else—James and Anna Schmidt.’
“His face brightened for a moment as if he saw the hope of a new life. ‘Yes. The Continent. Why not travel there? It would be pleasant to have a diversion. I’d like to go hunting on the Continent.’
“I took his words the wrong way, of course. I took them as a sign that he would be giving up his life of crime.” She looked to Silence. “I had no idea, until too late, that he had come to the Continent to hunt you.”
The conductor’s voice came, distant and muffled, through the compartment door,
“Paris! Saint-Lazare! Une demi-heure! Paris! Saint-Lazare! Une demi-heure!”
Silence gave a sigh. “And your long story tells us everything except who I am.”
Anna shook her head. “I’m sorry, but Father never told me your name.”
“It’s no matter. I’ll know in half an hour.”