Page 82 of If Looks Could Kill
Slowly, she opens the front door. The street seems deserted. The cold night air jolts her.
Where to now? She can’t go home. She has no home.
She closes her eyes and breathes. Feels the pull.
All right, then. Not to do anything, not to do any harm, but all the same: uptown.
Jack by Moonlight(Sunday, December 2, 1888)
Sleep keeps no appointment with Jack that night. He is wide awake, fidgety, and restive. The detective found someone to relieve him and has gone elsewhere for his own sleep. A new figure stands there, pacing back and forth against the cold, monitoring the door to Jack’s lodging house.
The hours drag on. Jack can’t relax for knowing the new man is out there. Is the rear door still guarded from the back window across the alley?
Jack’s thoughts won’t hold still. He is miserable with sickness and with the mounting fear that he will never find a cure. That it can’t be found in time. That neither his cunning nor his money are enough to solve the problem thrust upon him now: he is dying, dying, dying. His nervous energy keeps him moving frenetically, but it’s a mask, a false front for his lagging energy and languishing health. For the swelling, the thirst, the palpitations. The fevers that poison him, body and brain.
Oh, God. He sits up in bed. That’s it.
That’s it. The missing piece.
Body and brain. Perhaps it would be better put, “body and soul.”
The first four women—well, the parts of them he managed to harvest—couldn’t help him because they were sodden old heaps of disease and drink. Of course they couldn’t cure him. They hadn’t an ounce of health to give. And their souls were filthy with the reek of sin. The last woman was young, but she wasn’t a woman, was she? Not human. A monster straight out of nightmare. More reptile than human. No wonder his body had rejected her organs too.
Here in New York, he is free of those devil women. One in London and one on the boat, but New York is too modern, too enlightened, for such barbarism. It stands to reason: an ancient Greek myth might come to life in dying Europe, but not in ascendant America.
He must find a girl here to harvest. Healthy and young and only human. A pure and healthy almost-living body. A virtuous girl. A modest maiden.
Almost living.
What if almost were not almost? What if—his mouth waters at the thought—he can prepare his brew beforehand, and then take the specimens, not from a dead girl, but from a living one, so that they are less than a minute old when they touch his beaker?
What if he, Jack, world-famous for the stealth and speed with which he kills, does not kill first? Only afterward, when the elixir is drunk, will he humanely end the life of the donor. She will never feel a thing. He will do it quickly, while she is still under the sway of chloroform.
It’s so beautifully simple. A living body to bringhisalmost-living body new life.
But where, and when? Any action taken here, under the nose of detectives, is a screaming advertisement of his guilt, as small minds will undoubtedly perceive it.
The frozen detective outside looks truly miserable, jumping up anddown to warm himself and chuffing hot breath into cupped hands.
Jack smiles to observe this from the warmth of his bed, where contentment works its soothing, sedating effect. Best to get some rest while he can. Escape, find a new base, prepare his materials, and strike.
Tomorrow, his plan springs into action.
Tabitha—Never Can Tell(Sunday, December 2, 1888)
Emma and Carrie, I was grateful to learn, were still not at home. Meetings and cleanup at the base must have gone late. I didn’t dare wait for them, but I scrawled out a hasty letter explaining that they must not sleep there that night, or for the next few nights, under any circumstances, though I couldn’t say why.
Mike waited in the kitchen while I changed into a suit of traveling clothes, found my stash of saved money, and packed my essential belongings into a suitcase, and Pearl’s into hers.
I almost missed it. Tucked inside Pearl’s bureau drawer was the coral bracelet I’d brought her. The one she was going to sell for the poor.
I was glad she’d kept it.
It was nearly eleven o’clock, and the streets were quiet when we stepped out the door.
We each held a suitcase. Mike had tried to carry them both, but I wouldn’t hear of it.
The cold, it seemed, had lessened somewhat, and the air began to smelllike snow. Damp and heavy and brimming with weather. Expectant. It felt like Christmas, which fit the terrifying mood of the night about as well as Worcestershire sauce fits a sponge cake.
