Beneath a Blood Red Moon Read online

Page 43

 

  The alley was dark, dingy, flanked by ancient structures that were nearly all condemned. There were a few shops on the street, a few poverty-level homes.

  In fact . . .

  The alley was remarkably like many a street . . .

  In old London. Whitechapel, Spitalfields.

  The Ripper’s old haunt.

  London November 9, 1888

  Megan didn’t find Peter until nearly five in the morning, in the dark shadows of an alley, fallen against the wall of a tenement. He sat, his hands bloodied in front of him, his eyes on his hands.

  She called his name, hurrying to him and enveloping him in her arms.

  “You didn‘t do it, you didn’t do it!” she assured him. “You didn’t kill her, Peter. ”

  “How do you know I’m not a monster?”

  “I know. ”

  “How can you?”

  “Because I know. I’ve seen monsters, Peter, and you’re not one. You didn’t kill her. ”

  “Her?” Peter said, and he began to laugh hoarsely, but in a way that frightened her, for he verged on hysteria. “Haven’t you heard? It’s been a double slaying tonight. Two women dead.

  Two. One at George’s Yard, the other in Mitre Square. And, ah, you should hear what they already whisper about the second. The things that were done to her, the violence! She was mutilated beyond recognition!” He started to laugh again, and then to cry. Megan shook him fiercely. “Peter, you are stronger than this!” She forced him to his feet, and then, when he continued to seem to have no will of his own, she slapped his cheek. “You have not done this!

  Understand the truth. You could not have done this!”

  “No, no, I don’t believe that I could have done such a thing, but I don’t know where I was, or what I have done. The time is gone, the past is gone, there is nothing but this blackness and the blood. Oh, God, look at the blood on my hands, look at the blood . . . ” She maneuvered him home. They slipped through the remaining darkness of night. Daylight came at last to wash away the shadows.

  But no amount of light could take away the new terror. The first victim, eventually identified as Liz Stride, or Long Liz, was a Swedish prostitute. She had been spared mutilation.

  The killer made up for it with Catherine, or Kate, Eddowes. She had been even more cruelly ripped and torn than Polly Chapman. “Butchered like a pig,” one witness to the finding of the body reported. Stomach slashed open, organs removed . . . organs gone. Though killed within a mile of each other, Liz had died in the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police; Kate had been killed in that of the City Police. Massive manhunts by both forces were instantly underway. A piece of bloodied apron was found, and written in white chalk on the fascia of black bricks at the edge of the nearby doorway were the words, “The Juwes are The men That Will not be Blamed for nothing. ”

  What was written came to the people through word of mouth, for Sir Charles Warren, afraid that the words might cause anti-Semitic riots, immediately ordered them erased. And so began the pondering on exactly what the words meant— and if they had even been written by the killer.

  Once again, the city went berserk. Peter was at first ill with fear, then he began to believe Megan’s assurances, and he became determined that he would prove to himself that he was not guilty of the heinous crimes.

  Immediately after the killings, a major newspaper let out the information that a letter had been received— prior to the latest killings—written by a man claiming to be the murderer. It was addressed “Dear Boss,” talked about the foolish police and the sharpness of his knife, promised to send a lady’s ears in next, and was signed, “Jack the Ripper. ” Another letter had been received soon after by the same author— promising a double event.

  And more awful offerings were to arrive in the mail.

  George Lusk, chairman of the Mile End Vigilance Committee, received a small brown parcel. It contained half a kidney, and a message from the killer that he had “prasarved it” for Lusk—

  while he fried and ate the other half.

  The foremost pathologists were approached by the police and the consensus confirmed that the kidney was human, most probably female.

  London went wild with fury and panic.

  Peter spent hours staring into space.

  Megan took to the streets alone, seeking Jack the Ripper.

  October passed. Laura became ill, and Peter tried to rouse himself from his lethargy and fear. He tended to his wife, and as she seemed to recover somewhat from the influenza that plagued her along with her pregnancy, he began to notice that Megan left night after night.

  He followed her, demanding to know what she was doing. “Saving your sanity!” she told him.

  “At the cost of your own life, little fool!” he charged her. “If you’re about on this fool notion, I must be with you. ”

  “Who can I solicit if you’re with me?” she inquired

  Peter became angry, warning her that she dared not taunt such a killer. She tried to assure him she was in no danger, she was young and strong and seldom drank.

  Still, that night, she shared a pint with him. And they commiserated together that rumors grew more absurd daily. Doctors were suspected, butchers, tradesmen, foreigners— even members of the Royal household, despite the fact that Queen Victoria herself was appalled and demanding answers from the police. “Since the letters have been published, the police have received more confessions than they can count!” Megan reminded Peter, and he was much better.

  They made a pact that night. Peter would work again, and believe in himself. And they would hunt the killer together.

  Throughout October, the killer lay dormant. Yet, like the police, Megan and Peter hunted the streets. It was easy enough for them to do so; Peter had legitimate business among his patients.

  Friday, the ninth of November, was to be the day of the Lord Mayor’s Show. The new Lord Mayor of London would drive in state with tremendous pageantry down the streets of the city to take his oath of office at the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand.

  Peter and Megan talked about the pageantry as they walked through Whitechapel that night.

  It was a strange night, the temperature growing chill, and yet, a fog swirling in the darkness and shadows. As they walked, they suddenly heard a soft cry.

  “Murder!”

  “My God!” Peter cried. “Stay close!”

  And he ran forward.

  Yet somehow, in the darkness and the shadows and the relentless swirling of the fog, Megan lost him. She cried his name, running through the night. She ran, and ran, and ran. When dawn came, she had still not found him. She kept walking, and realized at last that morning had come, and she had walked home.

  She was alarmed to see that Peter’s and Laura’s door stood open. With dread filling her heart, she hurried forward. She hesitated just briefly, then heard the sound of a wretched sobbing so deep it was unbearable. She rushed in then, and found Peter on his knees by the side of the sofa where Laura lay, dead still. Megan walked carefully into the room. Laura lay on the sofa, pale as snow, beautiful, frail. . .

  “Peter?”

  “She’s dead,” he sobbed.

  And she realized that Laura’s condition had worsened in the night, and that she had died while she and Peter had hunted the killer. Laura had died alone. Perhaps, if he had been with her, she might have been saved. At the very least, she would not have died alone and abandoned.

  “Oh, Peter!” she whispered, and tried to soothe him.

  But he would not forgive himself. “I am cursed! Again, I awakened with blood, and God has punished me for the lives I have taken with this most precious of lives!”

  “Peter, no! For the sake of your immortal soul, you mustn‘t believe such a thing—”

  “What do you know of the immortal soul?” he demanded brokenly.

  “Only that it is the most precious par
t of us,” she told him evenly. “Peter, Laura is with God, and you must realize that you are not at fault, and you must continue to help others. ” He shook, still clinging to his wife’s body. “Megan. . . you’ve been so good to us both. She loved you so dearly, you know,” he said, speaking as if confused, broken. “Megan, would you get me a brandy? For the love of God, I need some help now, oh, God, oh, my Laura . . . ”

  “I’ll get you brandy,” Megan said quickly.

  She hurried to do so.

  As she left the room, she heard a shot.

  She froze, and turned back.

  Peter had taken a pistol to his head. He‘d fired one clean shot into his temple.

  He died upon his wife’s breast.

  The following day, the ghastly and gruesome news of the murder of Mary Jane Kelly, a twenty-five-year-old Irish prostitute, eclipsed the news about the Lord Mayor.

  She was killed in the room she rented in Miller Square. The murderer had taken his time with her, savagely mutilating her face beyond recognition, slashing out her organs, arranging them about her, skinning parts of her body to the bone.

  Megan heard the news as she went about the business of telegraphing the families of her friends about their tragic deaths. She was furious with herself for not realizing Laura’s condition, and furious with both Peter and herself— that he had not had the strength to keep from killing himself. Deeply saddened by their deaths, she was still shaken by the death of the young woman she had never known.

  That night, broken, lost, lonelier than she had ever been, she found herself walking toward Miller’s Square.

  The streets were filled with the frightened and the curious. Yet, as she stared at the house where the terrible event had happened, she felt as if she was being watched, and she spun around.

  He was there. In a deerstalker hat and black cloak, standing in a deserted yard a few hundred feet away, in the shadows. He lifted his hat to her. She walked over to him.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Watching the results of my handiwork. ”

  She inhaled sharply, staring at him with a fury deeper than any emotion she had ever known.

  “What?”

  “Oh, come now! Surely you were aware the torsos in the river were my handiwork! And you are ever talking about innocence and the quality of human life! You are the one who is so righteous, feeding on those condemned for murder and the like. These women were pathetic, rotten, disease-carrying vermin. They were whores. Dying of alcoholism. Dying of despair. I hastened—”