Page 11 of Taken By the Ripper
That wasbeforethe murders.
By the time she reached the back door, she was breathless. But it wasn’t due to physical exertion as much as fear for her own safety. She tried to twist the doorknob. Locked. And then she rapped on the door, glancing over her shoulder once more only to find darkness.
Thankfully, footsteps on the other side alerted her to someone’s presence, and she quickly pulled the cap off her headto let her hair tumble freely down her back. The lock clicked followed by the rattle of a chain. And then the door swung open to reveal a thin man with a bushy mustache that contained more hairs than the top of his head.
The man held up a lantern to illuminate the dark shadows around his eyes and the permanent frown pulling on his wrinkles. “We’re closed, Miss Thompson. Come back on the morrow.”
“Please,” she begged. When the door started to close in her face, she stuck her foot in the door to stop it from closing entirely. Pain ricocheted up her leg. Tears stung her eyes. But she tried to remain calm and collected. “I need that medicine. My sister forgot to pick it up earlier today.”
Mmmhmm.Forgot. On purpose.
The man released a long sigh and rubbed a hand down his weary face. “Just because you ain’t doin’ the devil’s work like everybody else.” He disappeared but left the door slightly ajar. A minute later, he returned with a sealed crate and handed it to her across the threshold of the shop, exchanging it for five pence. She loathed to hand over the coin, but it was a necessary expense for her practice.
“Thank y—”
He slammed the door in her face.
Well, at least he’d given her the package rather than forcing her to return in the morning. It was a small blessing.
She tucked her hair back in her cap and clutched the crate close to her chest. It was no weapon, and the weight and size of it made it awkward to carry, but it still made her feel safer than carrying nothing at all.
Again, the silence of the city sent an eerie chill chasing each of her footsteps through the back alley. It was like venturing outside after a raging snowstorm and listening to the accompanying nothingness. Except this quiet was far frompeaceful. It was like the silence that alerted the critters in a forest of a nearby predator.
Or…it might all be in her head.
“Fifteen minutes until I reach home,” she quietly reassured herself. For a moment, she wasn’t sure whether to talk to herself to keep herself calm or to remain quiet to prevent discovery. In the end, she decided to travel without speaking and attempted to muffle her footsteps by walking on her tiptoes.
However, the farther she traveled, the quieter the city seemed to fall. A chill seeped up from the ground and clung onto her extremities. Frosty breaths escaped each labored exhale. Shivers took a hold of her body and shook violently.
And then the fog rolled into the streets, slowly crawling across the ground until it obscured the way ahead.
Clara’s breaths escaped as rapid, fearful huffs as she spun around to find fog enclosing her in the alleyway with not even a single lamppost to illuminate the way ahead. One street blended into another until she lost track of the path leading home.
Keep calm,her father had once said during a surgery to remove a patient’s appendix.One of the worst things for a doctor to have is shaky hands. No matter the outcome, you must control your fear.
She focused on breathing slowly through her nose instead of giving into the fear pounding its fists against the inside of her ribcage. She needed to find a way home. And quickly. Not a single moment wasted on indecision and panic.
Setting the crate of supplies on the ground, she gingerly climbed on top to give her a better view above the fog continuing to creep across the ground. Although the lamp remained out of sight, she made out the outline of the clock tower of the Co-operative Wholesale Society Building. For a moment, she swore the hands on the tower lay still and unmoving, but the distortion of the fog around her likely played into the tricks on her eyes.
She stepped off the crate and reached down to pick it up but froze when the quiet scuff of slow footsteps moved her way from behind.
Her heart leaped to her throat as she spun around to find two figures approaching through the darkness. Each wore a long, black coat with a short cape billowing around their shoulders. One wore a derby hat with his face riddled with shadows while the other wore the devilish grin of someone who had won a grand prize, his long hair tied at the back of his head.
Clara gasped and abandoned her crate entirely as she turned to run in the opposite direction. But just as she neared the end of the alley, one of the men stepped blindingly fast in her path, and she crashed into his chest.
He grinned, showing off two pearly white fangs that seemed to glow like moonlight in the darkness.
“Where you goin’, sweetheart?” he asked in a voice closer to a sultry purr than a foreboding hiss. “We only want to play.”
She should have run. She should have wrenched herself away. But all she managed to do was stare wide-eyed at the fangs impossibly long and sharp protruding from the man’s gums.
A vampire.
But it was impossible!
Before she had a chance to react, the man shoved her by the shoulders. She stumbled backward, tripped over a broken brick dislodged from the wall, and crashed into the man behind her. His chilling laughter planted a seed of dread deep within her gut, letting nothing sprout but shadows and darkness.
“Let me go!” she cried when she finally came back to her senses and elbowed her captor in the gut.
