My jaw ached, the pressure burning outward from my clenched teeth.
My hands were fisted, fingernails digging into the palms.
I felt rage.
Rage at this world.
Rage at Alice Tanner.
Rage at being Aiden Fleischer.
It filled me and overflowed from me. I saw red. Nothing but red.
My foot bumped against something and I staggered, tried to regain balance, slipped on wetness, and fell to my hands and knees. A growl of impatience escaped me, followed by a horribly primeval and panicked whine that I only vaguely recognised as my own voice.
My fingers had sunk into the slime, refuse, and excreta of an unpaved East End alleyway—and into the rivulets of flowing blood that cut through it.
Suddenly, I was gasping for air. The world snapped back into focus. I pushed myself to my knees. A woman was lying beside me, wreathed in shadows. I’d tripped over her extended leg. Now I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her. She was sprawled on her back, the excruciated grin on her face echoed by two long lacerations in her throat, so deep they’d almost severed her head from her neck. Her skirt had been pushed up to her shoulders, exposing her abdomen. It was deeply slashed and torn wide open. Her internal organs glistened wetly.
My whine increased in volume, became a shriek, and I ran.
I don’t properly recall what happened next. Somehow I arrived at my lodgings. I think I disturbed Clarissa. I washed my hands over and over, took off my bloodied suit and threw it into the fireplace, then blacked out.
It was noon when I regained consciousness. I opened my eyes and looked into the expressionless circles of my sexton’s goggles. She was sitting at my bedside.
“You woke the household at five in the morning, Aiden. You were incoherent. Then you fell asleep as if drugged. What happened? There was blood on you.”
“I can’t remember!” I answered, truthfully. “I got lost, Clarissa. I was walking and—and—and that’s all! I don’t know where the blood came from! I don’t know how I found my way back here!”
Throughout the afternoon and evening, I struggled to recall what had occurred, but my memory didn’t return until the following day—and then only partially—when the discovery of the corpse was reported in the newspapers. According to the Daily News, the woman I’d fallen over was a drunkard and prostitute named Polly Nichols who often stayed at the boarding house on Thrawl Street where I’d been the night of her murder. A cart driver had discovered her body in the alley—Buck’s Row.
“But I think I found it first,” I told my companion, “and was so shocked that cowardice took over and I ran away.”
“Don’t judge yourself so harshly,” she advised. “You reacted instinctively, that’s all, and I’m glad you did.”
“Glad? Why?”
“Because according to the coroner, the victim wasn’t long dead when she was discovered, which means you were mere moments away from interrupting the killer at work. He may have been in the alley when you entered it. It’s possible that, by taking to your heels, you escaped being murdered yourself.”
I swayed and put a hand to my forehead. “God in Heaven, can it get any worse than this? The sooner the Society sends us overseas, the better!”
Days of darkness and death followed.
A week after Polly Nichols was killed, a woman named Annie Chapman was found dead, with almost identical wounds.
My state of mind deteriorated. I was engulfed by a black mood. My thought processes became lethargic and fragmentary. I undertook my duties, was out night after night, but returned with little memory of where I’d been or what I’d done. I’d disengaged from reality.
On the 30th of September, two more women—Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes—were slaughtered, and journalists gave the killer a name: “Jack the Ripper.”
“What drives him to commit such atrocities?” I enquired of Clarissa.
“Must there be something aside from pure evil?” she asked in response. “Would you explain away this man’s crimes as symptoms of a deprived childhood? Do you believe that Jack is crying out for love and forgiveness?”
“No,” I replied. “Nothing could possibly justify his barbarity. You were right all along—absolute evil exists, and its embodiment is stalking the streets of Whitechapel.”
A fifth killing occurred on the 9th of November, this one so ferocious that the victim, Mary Kelly, was literally gutted and her organs arranged about the room in which the murder took place. It was reported the following day. Clarissa read the details to me from the London Evening News, and while she