Tales of Jack the Ripper (18 page)

His mind reeled with hazy images of the frail, alabaster brunette whose utter perfection brought apocalyptic judgment to those who deserved it least. For love, for grief, for terror, Blake sobbed at the night.

“Luly…Luly…Luly…”

VII.

If it had been boiling up, beneath the surface, those last twelve months, Hell broke loose on Christmas Eve.

Whilst the Good Reverent Snoot sermonized his flock at First Presbyterian on the birth of Christ and the gifted voices of unseeing children were heard to raise carols to the heavens at the Institute for the Blind, the lower sort remained in Guy Town and those lower still huddled for warmth on the periphery of the railyard. Blake Prentiss, former apprentice pharmacist, huddled amongst them, waving his red raw hands at the guttering camp fire near the tracks. The yard bulls bothered these transients little on the night before Christmas, left them to their quiet misery for once, though sharp eyes were kept upon them lest any man of their number try to jump a moving box car outward bound.

When the rye ran out someone produced a bottle of Laudanum, from which Blake took a deep belt before the next man wrestled it away from him.

“This chippie’s half-Indian,” the man barked to a round of phlegmy chuckles.

Blake grunted and pulled his coat closed around his sunken chest. The filthy, bearded men with whom he had kept company these last several nights were brutes at best, vagrants and criminals who boasted of taproom killings and bank robberies and rapes. One of them, a small and wizened man with a shock of white-blond hair, even confessed to killing President Garfield and pinning it on Guiteau. No one listened, no one apart from Blake who drank in every word the unfortunate tramps about him spoke lest the devil’s instrument be uncovered before his eyes.

But though many murderers surrounded him during his days at the railyard, none was the murderer he sought. The devil, it seemed, was slyer than that.

Round ten o’clock the wizened man started to bellow “A Babe Was Born in Bethlehem,” inciting a tremendous bear of a man called Joshua to suppurate and announce his every sin before God.

“By Jesus it kilt my mama, the things I said and done,” Joshua burbled, tugging at his great, tear-sodden beard. The singer interrupted himself to assure Joshua that there was no God left to tally his misdeeds, and when fisticuffs ensued Blake removed himself from the assemblage to begin his stumbling trek back into town.

He made it as far as Fifth and Guadalupe, his left foot throbbing from the silver-dollar-sized hole in the sole of his shoe, when Delilah came swaying through the batwing doors of the tavern with an arched eyebrow and a canted smirk.

“May’s looking for you, you know.”

“I guess I owe her some money.”

“I guess she don’t want to forgive it, even though it’s Christmas and all.”

Blake nodded and Delilah said, “I’d ask you to come inside out of the cold, but I don’t work on no credit.”

“A girl’s got to eat,” he said, averting his attention to a pair of mongrel dogs feasting on a bloated dead pig. Everything in the First Ward was looking for something to scavenge, something to violate, but that, Blake reckoned, was just how things were here. The status quo. It was the landed gentry who had cause to worry, even if only for their servants’ well-being. The devil was not punishing the whores and gamblers and adulterers and dope addicts; he selected outrages that would be noticed but quickly forgotten. The devil played his fiddle well with Blake for a bow. And Blake was growing weary of that catgut sting.

He teetered for a moment, the opiate squeezing his brain like a gigantic hand, and he tucked his chin further down into his coat for the march up to Congress Avenue. His breath came out in uneven bursts of grey mist, the sweat on his brow felt like ice against the skin. He checked the contents of his pockets along the way, ensuring that he was flush enough to see his errand through—ten dollars to May Tobin to settle his debt, another dollar and a half for a roll with one of May’s girls, and however much it took for a man to drink until he plain gave out.

The final count came to twelve dollars and a nickel. He sighed and halted, sat down on the ground beside the road and counted again. The count was the same—enough for the first two tasks, but with nothing left for the end. Blake sighed heavily and stared down the length of the street. A pair of policemen was pounding on a woman on the corner of Lavaca; plenty of people were watching, but no one moved to help her. Blake made a thin line of his mouth and hoisted himself back up again. His head seemed to keep going up, even after he reached his full height.
Christmas, Christmas
, he thought.

“And where’s my pudding?”

He chortled and missed a step, stumbling over the paving stones until he regained his balance, and then continued on to May Tobin’s bordello. The front room was in full swing when he arrived, let in by a half-dressed mulatto girl no older than fourteen.

“My debt,” Blake mumbled, stabbing a fist stuffed with paper notes at the madam of the house.

May accepted the payment with a thin smile and an ironic curtsy.

“And a merry Christmas to you, Mr. Prentiss.”

The girl from Blake’s last appearance at the house of assignation appeared at his elbow, winding herself around his middle like a snake, and May scrutinized what little money was left in his hand. Blake shrugged, and May said, “Oh, what the hell—it’s a special night, isn’t it?”

“And a bottle of—anything,” he added to the bill on his way to the back rooms, veritably dragged by the girl.

Together they sat and drank, he ten times as much as she, from the jug of cheap rotgut May had sent back to them. The girl made several attempts at idle conversation, each rebuked by Blake in turn, as were her clumsy overtures that they get to the business at hand. At times he feared that he would begin to weep again, but he was successful in maintaining composure apart from a violent shiver that rocked his bones. The girl politely pretended not to notice.

When the liquor was gone and the clock struck ten, Blake left the room without a word, leaving the bored and frustrated prostitute to breathe a sigh of relief. His heart slammed unevenly against his ribs, his hairline spilled sweat in rivulets that slicked his unshaven face. He found himself facing the hallway window through which he had peeped a year before, and right beside the door to the room in which he spied Luly Phillips and her startling escort.

Was she in there now? With the same cadaverous man, or another, or whom?

For a moment, Blake considered the dubious wisdom of kicking the door down to see for himself. Instead, he lurched toward the window, hefted it open, and climbed out into the cold black night. A pervading sense of déjà vu overwhelmed him, a mirror to the past wherein he crept alongside the dark hotel as would a thief and rose only high enough to peek through the window into the lamplit boudoir. And his heart stopped.

For on the narrow bed beside the fluttering flame of the sconce, a sallow-skinned man Blake had never seen before was grunting like a rooting hog while he rutted with Blake’s beloved Luly. The man—his eyes small and black, his nose upturned to an almost comical degree—wore a battered slouch hat and black stockings on his feet that were riddled with holes. As for Luly, she was stark naked, her chocolate hair undone and spread out over the pillows like tentacles. Her small breasts, so white that the skin was webbed with translucent blue veins, shook violently as the man rammed into her, baring his teeth and gripping the bedposts tight.

Blake whimpered like a beaten pup. He dropped back down to the cold, damp ground and pulled his knees up to his chin. The night seemed to shatter all around him like obsidian glass and fall away, with nothing left but him and sweet, frail Luly who was neither sweet nor frail but filthy—degenerate and dripping with sin.

And Blake hissed aloud, “You whores will be next.”

VIII.

A scant few carolers were to be seen on the streets of Austin this Christmas Eve; most of the capital’s women remained at home behind locked doors while their husbands eyeballed strangers passing by or joined up with armed militias to prowl the shadows in hope of putting down the “servant girl annihilator.”

To a one they all felt certain that the killer lurked somewhere among them. They traveled only in pairs and groups, firing suspicious glances at one another and whispering
sotto voce
whenever Blake passed near. He paid no mind.

He floated up Congress, a man possessed, his eyes streaming tears and lips gibbering madly after the loss of love and life, the betrayal of Luly and his own heart and everything that made the slightest bit of sense to him. Pure and chaste she was, belonging by right and fate to that violin player, that
rake.
All lies: the devil did not walk in Texas. Just a murderer, whose madness and motivations were his own and had nothing at all to do with the hell through which Blake had walked, burned, loved, hated, wanted desperately to die. He had given up his livelihood, his standing and his sanity, and for what? A dream? That his love for the girl who needed his father’s potions to flush the life from her womb was so wretched the whole world needed to be punished for it?

But what to do? What to do?

For worship of a false idol, Blake had nearly died…

He collapsed onto the crisp, yellow grass of somebody’s sideyard and vomited up a belly full of liquor. “Luly…”

He blacked out, and the night reassembled itself, shard by jagged shard. Only it was not the same night as before, before it cracked apart and took Blake’s soul with it to Hell. This night was much blacker, and though it did not return with his soul, it came back with purpose. Seconds later, or perhaps hours, he found himself being shaken roughly and a tenor voice shouting at him to rouse himself, to go back to whatever reprobate hole in the earth from which he crawled. Blake opened his eyes to thin slits and beheld the grey-haired man looming above him. The man’s face was pinched with annoyance. He wore a dressing robe and cursed enough to bring the law down on himself for coarse language in public. Blake had seen a dozen people hauled off to jail for saying considerably less.

In time, he sat up. His skull pounded, felt much too small, and his stomach roiled again. He pressed his fingers hard against his temples and focused narrowly on the scars the night bore from its reconstruction.

He said, “I am sorry, sir.”

“Just fuck off, trash,” the man grumped and he stomped back into the house. Blake watched him go, and when the door shut and the lamp went out, the moonlight illumined the woodpile beside the house, and the broad chopping stump before it, and the well-used ax protruding from one of the stump’s many clefts.

His head stopped hurting him. So he rose up and went directly to the ax.

“Moses?” came a tinkling voice from back of the house. “Mose? What is it?”

“There is no devil,” Blake whispered, yanking the ax free. “Only me.”

He went boldly around to the backyard, where he discovered the voice’s owner: a birdlike woman clutching a heavy red cape to her throat.

“Moses?”

“Only me,” he repeated for her benefit, hefting the ax. He grinned through his tears and took three long strides to close the distance between them. “And I am from Hell.”

Though dulled from overuse, the blade cleaved through the top of the woman’s skull with relative ease. Its trajectory halted halfway down, at her nose, and she emitted a hissing noise like steam from a teapot before falling limp. Blake planted his right foot at her groin and gave the corpse a shove; the ax came free and Moses’ wife crashed to their winter-dead lawn.

Blake wiped the tears from his eyes with his free hand and squatted beside the dead woman. Her head was an impossible tangle of hair and blood, bone and brain. The selfsame moonglow that showed the ax to him now brought a sparkle to a hairpin, having come loose from the now bifurcated head. He pinched it between forefinger and thumb, examined it closely as though it were some artifact from an undiscovered civilization. Blake had never before given much thought to the accoutrements of feminine beauty, something he always took at face value, so to speak, but he thought now of Luly’s heavenly locks and how high she usually wore them on her head. The work of hairpins, he did not doubt.

A small, sad smile formed at his cold-chapped lips. He then jammed the hairpin deep into the corpse’s brains, pushing it all the way in with his thumb until it vanished completely.

“Merry Christmas,” he said.

IX.

Hell came to the Phillips’ house round about midnight.

Blake stood at the foot of the couple’s bed, breathing slowly through his nose and watching them sleep, man and wife. There was frost on the bedroom window and the faint odor of cinnamon in the air. The smell was stronger on the first floor, near the modest Christmas tree in the main room, yet somehow the reek of heart-rot overwhelmed this erstwhile pleasant sensation. Eula’s rot permeated everything.

It even poisoned her marital bed—mere hours after fucking some John of May Tobin’s custom, here she lie beside her lawfully wedded husband (worm though he was) in defiance of everything noble about the world before the night smashed to pieces. Sleeping like a milk-sated babe, her small hands pressed palm to palm beneath her snowy cheek as if in supplication to God.