Page 7 of If Looks Could Kill
Didn’t it?
Was he, somehow, immune?
Maybe it was her fault. Her weakness. Maybe some part of her had held back. Some squeamish, childish, be-a-good-girl part that couldn’t quite commit. Even if she’d long ago left “good girl” behind.
And now he still lived to prowl the streets and strike again.
So she’s taken a bad business and made it worse.
Is it true? Having survived her attempt, he will become a maker of others like her? To spread the contagion of her curse?
That’s part of what makes her mysterious and lonely existence so hard: the not knowing. No rule book exists. No ancient text of sanctioned wisdom. Only nightmare whispers.
And yet, she does know. She feels it as she feels her own being. How darkly fitting. Justice of a brutal sort, wielding a check to her power. What she cannot kill, she strengthens.
Instead of ridding the world of a threat to womankind, she has unleashed another. Armed it. Added a new weapon to his arsenal. One he won’t even know he carries. At first.
But what else in her life has she not bungled and ruined with her touch?
She folds into bed. Thick red hair spreads across her pillow as her eyelids flutter shut.
“Forgive me, sisters,” she tells the room, “for what I’ve done to you.”
Jack at His Lodgings(Saturday, September 8, 1888)
That morning, back at his lodgings—one of his lodgings; they’re cheap, and it suits his purposes to move about between several, to hide any pattern to his comings and goings—his hands shake. They won’t stop shaking. He struggles to apply a match to the wick of the oil lamp.
That girl. What had she done to him? Put him under some sort of witch’s spell?
There was something fey about her. Something serpentine. Those gruesome images she’d somehow planted in his mind. He can’t quite conjure them. But they leave him cold.
She saw him. She knows. He must find her again and finish what he’d meant to start.
He opens his kit of surgeon’s knives. Civil War issue, very fine. He cleans them carefully and tries not to think about her. But his trembling hands are clumsy, and he slits a deep slice into the side of his own pointer finger. The blood wells in the gash and runs down into the washbasin.
He takes from his bag the items he’d prepared for his experiments.Wine. Potash. Mineral spirits. Specially mixed herbs. From his pocket, he draws forth the paper parcel and opens it. There lie two limp, moist, dark red objects. As unremarkable as any cut in a butcher’s window. A bit of uterus. A piece he hopes is part of the kidney. It was dark, after all.
Less than half an hour ago, this bit of kidney had purified the blood, if such blood could ever be pure, of that pathetic vagabond woman of the streets. Less than half an hour ago, it had been alive.The almost-living body. If his theories are correct, and his researches complete, this tissue, still soft and pliant, will restore him to health and life. If his own kidneys trouble him, this kidney will heal him. The generative powers of the uterus will beget new life within him.
He slices the organs into paper-thin strips, then minces them, but still his shaking hands are clumsy. He mixes his strange brew in a beaker and hovers it over the globe of his oil lamp, watching closely as the glass blackens and bubbles break upon the liquid’s thick red surface.
Again, after this second kill, he drinks down the disgusting brew with every ounce of hope aflame in his breast. This must be the cure.
Again, in under a minute, he is retching himself sore, heaving wave after wave into a bucket. There it all comes back up again. Every drop, until all that dribbles out is yellow bile.
What a marvelous thing, the body, he muses bitterly. So skilled at ejecting what it deems poisonous that it rejects the one thing that might effect its salvation.
He flops back upon a chair. His arms droop to the floor. He passes into a delirium of tormented half-sleeping, half-waking terror, pursued by a she-monster at whom he dares not look.
When at last he wakes to the dirty sky of late morning, his tongue salty and dry, his skin clammy, his chest fluttering, he knows. He has failed. There was no cure. He is as ill as ever. This killing has brought him no closer to his aim.
The wretched hag. The odious old bag of woman, sloppy and misshapen, sodden with dirt and drink. With her age, her illness, her ugliness, she has thwarted him. The investigative noose draws tighter, and he is no closer to his reward.
How many times dare he try his luck?
The Bowery, Lower East Side, ManhattanTabitha—September Windows(Saturday, September 15, 1888)
September grew more damp. The street gutters, more clogged with fallen leaves. The windowpanes, more fogged with condensation. The sky, more choked with coal smoke. Pearl and I failed to find much to love in each other. The upstanding citizens of the Bowery failed to find much to love in our copies ofThe War Cry.
