Page 30 of If Looks Could Kill
He swallows. “But they ain’t as pretty as you. Will you take eightpence?” He waits, but she says nothing. He adds, “You will be all right for what I have told you.”
She rubs her arms against the cold and peers around his elbow once more. Whatever or whomever she sees seems to make up her mind.
“All right, my dear,” she says more audibly. “Come along. You will be comfortable.” As if he’s not really the one she hopes will hear.
She steers him toward Dorset Street, turns, and makes for the entry to Miller’s Court. She glances over her shoulder more than once.
“Who is he?” he asks her.
She shrugs, feigning indifference. “Old gentleman friend of mine.” She reaches into her coat pocket, looking for something, then stops. “I’ve lost my handkerchief.”
Every delay is a torture to him. He pulls his own handkerchief from his pocket and hands it to her. Red silk may give his ruse away, that he’s no mere working man looking for a tumble after a night at the pub. It doesn’t matter. They’re nearly there.
She opens the door to her room. Ground-level, two windows overlooking the paved court.
She sings softly to herself.“Sweet violets, sweeter than all roses.”She lights a candle, then shuts the door behind them and removes her hat. “You’ve had a busy autumn,” she says conversationally. “Quite the celebrity, you are. Did you miss me?”
He blinks. He hasn’t been the only one playing a role.
She fixes him with her gaze. His hands reach for his knives, but it’s too late. Her wet eyes burn. Her hair slithers about. And still, carelessly, she sings.
“Laden with fragrance, sparkling with dew.Did you think I would forget you?”
Her voice is different. Sibilant. A “th” sound sliding off her protruding tongue. Forked and long and fluttering. Tasting his face. Sending pinpricks of fire skittering across his skin. More and more as her hair enfolds his head, the strands so close, and his head so frozen, and his vision so rapidly dwindling to a narrow point that he cannot see what they are. And yet he knows.
He knows.
Her lilting voice sings through his darkness:“I plucked them, my darling, for you.”
Jack in the Morning(Friday, November 9, 1888)
He wakes from his stupor in the squalid little room. A few embers glow upon the grate, and the candle still burns down slowly, but it’s much shorter than before. How much time has passed?
He can’t move. He lies on the floor upon his side. It feels as if his arms and legs are trussed up with cords. He strains against what binds him, but his body won’t obey his will.
Until, at length, fingertips begin to curl. Eyelids blink. One boot scuffs along the floor. Dulled nerves awaken to the electric shock of survival. He raises leaden hands before his face.
No ropes. Only paralysis fading away.
The bells toll four. The night, still black as pitch. He rises to his feet.
There, on the bed, rumpled and peaceful, is the soft, sleeping form of the red-haired girl. Like a painting. Like an angel. Like a lie.
She did this to him. All of it.
Beside her on the bed is a small diary. He thumbs to its most recent entry. Scrawled in pencil are just three words:I killed him.
So that’s why she’s still here, asleep. She thinks she ended Jack the Ripper tonight.
He tosses the diary into the fire. It sits a quiet moment upon the embers, then lights up with newly hungry flame.
She and her kind, her whole sex, deserve disembowelment. Not merely to die, but to die with their vile and vulgar hideousness laid bare.
She is asleep. One swift stroke and his work will be done, his victory assured. Her lidded eyes will lose whatever power they had to transfix and suffocate him.
One quick slice from ear to ear.
He is an expert at it now. At speed, at stealth, at silencing his prey.
