tell me must seem very important to you,” Dr Hodgson said.
“Important to the entire human race,” Norbrook said levelly. “That’s why I decided to surrender when I might have escaped through the brush. I didn’t want to risk the chance that a bullet would preserve their secrets.”
“Their secrets?”
“All right. I’m perfectly aware that you’re fully prepared to dismiss everything I’m about to tell you as paranoid fantasy. And I’m perfectly aware that paranoid schizophrenics have no doubt sat here in this same chair and offered this same protest. All I ask is that you listen with an open mind. If I weren’t able to furnish proof of what I’m about to tell you, I’d never have permitted myself to be captured. Agreed?”
“Suppose you begin at the beginning.”
“It began a hundred years ago. No, to be precise, it began before history—perhaps at the dawn of the human race. But my part of the story begins a century ago in London.
“My great-grandfather was Jack the Ripper.”
Norbrook paused to study the effect of his words.
Hodgson listened imperturbably. He never made notes during an interview; it was intrusive, and it was simpler just to play back the tape.
Stringer muttered, “Bullshit!” and crumpled his coffee cup.
“I suppose,” continued Norbrook, “that many people will say that madness is inherited.”
“Is that how you sometimes feel?” Hodgson asked.
“My great-grandfather wasn’t mad, you see—and that’s the crux of it all.”
Norbrook settled back in his chair, smiling with the air of an Agatha Christie detective explaining a locked-room murder.
“My great-grandfather—his identity has defied discovery all these years, although I intend to reveal it in good time—was a brilliant experimental surgeon of his day. Because of his research, some would have condemned him as a vivisectionist.”
“Can you tell me how all of this was revealed to you?”
“Not through voices no one else can hear,” Norbrook snorted. “Please, Doctor. Listen and don’t interrupt with your obvious ploys.
“My great-grandfather kept an extensive journal, made careful notes of all of his experiments.
“You see, those prostitutes—those creatures—that he killed. Their deaths were not the random murders of a deranged fiend. On the contrary, they were experimental subjects for my great-grandfather’s early researches. The mutilation of their corpses was primarily a smoke screen to disguise the real purpose for their deaths. It was better that the public know him as Jack the Ripper, a murderous sex fiend, rather than a dedicated scientist whose researches were destined to expose an unsuspected malignancy as deadly to humanity as any plague bacillus.”
Norbrook leaned forward in his chair—his face tense with the enormity of his disclosure.
“You must understand. They aren’t human.”
“Prostitutes, do you mean—or women in general?”
“Damn you! Don’t mock me!”
Stringer started to head for the door, but Norbrook remained seated.
“Not all women,” he continued. “Not all prostitutes. But some of them. And they’re more likely by far to be hookers or those one-night-stand easy lays anyone can pickup in singles bars. Liberated women! I’m certain that they engineered this so-called sexual revolution.”
“They?”
“Yes, they. The proverbial they. The legendary they. They really are in legend, you know.”
“I’m not certain if I follow entirely Could you perhaps...?”
“Who was Adam’s first wife?”
“Eve, I suppose.”
“Wrong.” Norbrook leveled a finger. “It was Lilith, so the legend goes. Lilith—a lamia, a night creature—Adam’s mate before the creation of Eve, the first woman. Lilith was the mother of Cain, who slew Abel, the first child born of two human parents. It was the offspring of Lilith that introduced the taint of murder and violence into the blood of mankind.”
“Do you consider yourself a Creationist, Mr Norbrook?”
Norbrook laughed. “Far from it. I’m afraid I’m not your textbook religious nut, Dr Hodgson. I said we were speaking of legends—but there must be a basis for any legend, a core of truth imperfectly interpreted by the minds of those who have experienced it.
“There’s a common thread that runs through legends of all cultures. What were angels really? Why are they generally portrayed as feminine? Why was mankind warned to beware of receiving angels unawares? Why are witches usually seen as women? Why was mankind told not to suffer a witch to live? Why were the saints tormented by visions of sexual lust by demonic temptresses? What is the origin of the succubus—a female demon who copulates with sleeping men?”
“Do you sometimes feel threatened by women?”
“I’ve already told you. They aren’t human.”
Norbrook leaned back in his chair and studied the psychiatrist’s face. Hodgson’s expression was impassively attentive.
“Not all women, of course,” Norbrook proceeded. “Only a certain small percentage of them.