I stood over her, heard the soft murmur of her lungs as, beneath her breasts, they processed oxygen into life fuel for her, watched her occasional twitches or shudders as, unknowing, her body evinced its aliveness in its incapacity to achieve the perfection of stillness, heard a swallow, a gulp, a sniffle, perhaps some of the other ablative sounds of a body functioning properly in sleep, stretching, bending, unwinding in tiny degrees here and there. I felt the radiation of her warmth, I smelled the sweetness of her body.
I cut her throat.
I pressed her face with my right hand down deep into the mattress, and with my left—though not as strong and educated as my right, which I had so come to rely on, I found it clever enough to do the job—I began low and cut hard and high, feeling the sharpness of the blade as it bit and sliced through the layers of muscle and cartilage, the skin being nothing of an obstruction. I had grown sensitive to the feel of the blade as it engaged and vanquished tissue and felt the subtle textures of each structure of the throat as the blade intercepted them.
She struggled, and with my stronger right, I forced her facedown into the mattress and could see it distended and distorted by its friction against the yielding cotton sheets and whatever underlay to render the mattress soft. Her right hand, unregimented by her body weight, clawed a bit, grasping for life, but ever more feebly. I cut again, nearly in the same track, and her muscles fought me, she bucked and died harder by far than any of the first four, that arm whipping out in final spasm, her leg straightening, then reloading to straighten again. She was a strong girl, no doubt about it, full of life and dreams but no match for the prim efficiency of Sheffield’s best steel as it glided through the ensheathed arteries and veins. Again, curiously, more blood by far than before, and I felt her struggle against the pinioning leverage of my strength, and desperate if muted noises issued from her crushed mouth. Her heart pumped her empty before it quit.
And then she was gone. It took nearly a minute. The blood soaked the mattress, and it looked as if she lay in the midst of a strawberry pastry, melted and collapsed and turned squalid by the passage of hours since the party broke up.
Now to work. Now to give London and the world what I felt those two corrupt entities demanded in their despicable way, and who was I but their humble servant? I would give the shopgirls much to natter about for a few days.
Where there was flesh, softness, ripeness, the quiver, the undulation beneath the skin, the sense of heaviness and softness, I cut. I cannot remember much about it, only that once started, the temple once desecrated, all restraints were magically removed, and whatever darkness has wormed its way to the center of my brain had full vent and expression. I was in a delirium of destruction, as if the body were an insult to the philosophy of my life, and only in destroying it could I reclaim my sanity.
I cut her guts out. I had done so before, but in the dark alleys, in the out-of-doors, worried terribly about the arrival of the odd Peeler or stroller to give the shout, but that fear removed, I emptied her, pulling out sacks of glistening coils and flinging them about the room, where they struck the wall with the sound of a wet sock slapping hard.
I got in among the sweetbreads and cut out various shapeless dark objects, pulling them when they stuck, amusing myself by placing them in odd spots by sheer whimsy, and thus built an altar of the sundered, kidney under her head, liver between her feet, spleen by the left side of the body. The flesh I sliced off her thighs and abdomen went to the table, where it lay like long shreds of cheese drying in the sun. Her thighs, whose embrace would have meant the arrival to paradise of any who found himself so enmeshed, I cut to bare bone. The same to the curve of abdomen, the well of life, removing three giant slabs to lay upon the table. I turned her a bit to breach her right buttock, and my knife savaged it as if it were the family porker on Easter Sunday, with God above looking down and smiling. I went to the neck and jabbed, using the point of my knife, since for some reason the neck’s wholeness offended me, and I hacked and chopped at it, scoring it of flesh, reaching spine. I laid bare her upper chest and took her heart. It did not struggle but came readily to my hands after a cut here and there, a gross lump of muscle gray in the light, heavier than one would have thought, still bathed in the slipperiness of the blood it sent crashing through the body. I took it to my frock coat and dumped it in the right pocket, knowing that it would be well hidden by my outer coat.
My gloves were heavy with blood and smeared with near-liquid fat, my wrists and forearm speckled, and I knew spatter had arrived to my face and shirtfront; if seen, I would be the Jack all feared, Jack the Demon, unfazed by his entry into the world of viscera and carnage where so few men are comfortable. Iron Age soldiers who fought intimately with sword and spear would know what I knew, as would today a few doctors and perhaps morticians, but for most the body’s integrity was a philosophical given in their perception of the world. To breach it was to turn things upside down, and that was part of the magic of my oversize impact upon the tidier world.
At last, only the beautiful face lay unmutilated. It was even composed, untouched by the horror of the body to which it belonged. That could not stand, and what followed was the lowest depravity to which I had sunk, as even I, a connoisseur of depravities, understood. Like a drunken butcher attacking a carcass, I attacked the face. I had no system, no thought, no plan, only an objective, which was to inflict as much cruelty on the beauty as possible, to offend all the poets in heaven and all the painters in hell, and all of humanity that worshipped beauty, which is to say, all of humanity. I hacked. I twisted and pulled. I sawed. I jabbed. I cut off her nose, cheeks, eyebrows, and ears. I cut her lips down to chin. I gashed her whimsically, to no design, simply looking for a new patch of skin to desecrate. Each foray left its own record of gore, and cumulatively they became a thing no longer human, so ripped and torn and shredded that to look upon was to know that there were some among us who knew no limits. It was, I thought, a good message for the coming modern age. No atrocity is beyond man, as I have proved here tonight.
At last I was done. I left her eyes intact, because I wanted all to know she had at one recent point been human. That moored the abstraction of my work in reality. It happened, furthermore, that my last burst of energy left her face tilted left, so that her stare from beyond greeted any copper or reporter who entered her queendom. It was an artistic touch, I thought, if inadvertent.
My handiwork, in the dim light, was a landscape of ruin, as grotesque as Carthage after the Romans or Troy after the Greeks, but all worked in the compass of a single woman’s body. I stood back, breathing hard, bathed in sweat, perhaps awobble in my knees and aflutter in my stomach. It was time to leave reverie behind and reenter the quotidian. I knew I had to move swiftly, for soon the world would be up and about. I went to the window and peeked out, seeing that a full third of the sky was blurred by light, as the sun was beating itself upward, though behind a shelter of cloud. I could see spatters where the rain still fell, and the strong wind pushed it like gunsmoke across the narrow little court that bore the name Miller’s and was soon to become famous.
I went quickly, unrolling my sleeves, sliding into my coats, replacing my steel. Fastening my scarf, pulling the coat tight to button, restoring my hat and pulling it low over eyes that showed nothing. At that point a perversity yet beyond afflicted me. I went to, pulled up, and stuffed in my pocket the letters I had noted on the table. Now I had to read them, having shattered the vault of her body so as to shatter the vault of her privacy. It gave me a shiver of extra pleasure. I, Ripper, I, Evil, I, Tomorrow, I, Forever. Then I took my exit. When the door shut behind me, I heard Mary Jane’s efficient lock clicking obediently as it bolted itself closed and the world out.