TIME RIPPER

THE FIRST SURPRISE WHEN I awoke was that I was still alive. The way my stomach felt, I might’ve wished otherwise, but there it was.

    The second surprise came as I opened my eyes. I lay upon a rough bed of cobblestones. Brick walls enclosed me and a garish orange light bled shadows across my field of vision. I tried to stand, but my legs weren’t ready for that yet, so I pushed myself onto my elbows and spent a few quiet minutes just staring at my surroundings.

    Third surprise: this wasn’t the alley where we were sup-posed to meet; this wasn’t the place where I had collapsed. In fact, I didn’t know where the hell this was. I couldn’t even hear the usual sound of passing carts.

    You’re in hell, my friend.

    Doubtful. I didn’t really believe in hell, other than what vestiges were left in my psyche thanks to a Catholic school education. Besides, I was feeling a little better: the sweat had cooled my body and my stomach merely growled in­stead of cutting away at me— 

    Cutting. Jesus. I grabbed at my watch, missed it, thought maybe I’d been mugged and dragged into this alleyway by my attacker, but no, there it was, pulled it up to my face, blinked several times to focus, focus...

    Three in the morning. I’d been out for nearly two hours.

    The urge to stand overcame my inner ear’s shortcomings and I used the brick walls both for balance and as a guide out of the alley. As I emerged, a hansom cab rattled by, miss­ing me by only a few feet, enough to cause the horse to shy. The driver steadied the beast and cursed me for a drunken devil. Old Man Chronos might have swatted me back home right then—

Don’t make waves in the past!—but apparently, he wanted to find out what the hell was going on as much as I did.

    I spent some fruitless moments looking for a street sign. The closest I came were some doors with numbers painted on them—useless if I didn’t have a name to go with them. The next logical step—or as close to logic as my poor addled brain could get right now—would be to ask a passerby for directions. I shied from that idea, though; the Old Man was only so tolerant.

    Then I saw it: some enterprising merchant had written the entire address in one corner of his window. Lamb Street. I searched my memory, still fuzzy after my collapse, and re­alized that if I traveled east, past Commercial Street, Lamb Street would widen and become Hanbury. I was less than a block or two from the meeting place—and perhaps, by now, Annie Chapman’s dead body.

    The huge lane of warehouses and clamor of traffic along Commercial Street lured me in the right direction. I crossed with great caution—street lights hadn’t been invented yet—and willed myself into a trot. The temperature had dropped in the last few hours, creating a clinging mist, haunting in the shadows and orange oil-lamps, not yet thick enough to be called fog. Still, my progress was slowed. Most of the car­riages and pedestrians coming the other way were disguised in dark colors and seemed to appear out of nowhere, threat­ening to bump me back to the future if I didn’t get out of their way first.

    The meeting place was not more than fifty yards ahead of me when a tall, well-dressed man suddenly materialized, the mist flowing around him like spirits escorting their cor­poreal charge. I dodged past him, a fleeting moment of ter­ror seizing my heart as I realized this could be him, I could be passing Bloody Jack! Let him pass. I never wanted to get this near to the devil anyway. Doing just that, I stepped into the middle of the street, so only my peripheral vision caught sight of the stranger stumbling, bent over as if in pain, as he reached out to grab my arm in a hard, cold grip. I froze, grinding my teeth, waiting for the Old Man to draw back his leg and punt. Another surprise for the night: I remained.

    The man, who stood at least half a foot taller than me, sounded as if he were gasping for breath, and I immediately smelled sweat on him breaking through the slight aroma of perfume and...deodorant?

    When the stranger’s face finally lifted to meet mine, I be­gan to gasp for air myself.

    “You must...you must come with me,” Gordon Renault said.

    Instinctively, I grabbed him around the chest. His ribs heaved with the lungs’ exertions, and I thought I felt his heart pounding against my touch. My head was clear enough to do some fast thinking, so before I answered him, I took a whiff of his breath. There was a hint of alcohol wo­ven in with the minty odor, but not enough, I thought, to confirm he was drunk. Still, his gray eyes were shot through with bloated veins and his words slurred as he spoke. Only his pallor, nearly as white as his mussed hair, made me be­lieve he might truly be afraid.

    “Where’s Alvarez?” I demanded.

    He shook his head, gulped and coughed. “Don’t know,” he whispered between hacks, “doesn’t matter. Please, Mar­cus...you have to come with me.”

    “Where?”

    He stared at the ground; I couldn’t tell if he was thinking or still recovering. Then fingers gripped me with renewed strength—or panic. Renault’s face was suddenly inches from my own, his breath overpowering now, making me feel ill again.

    “To Number Twenty-nine, Marcus.” 

    Several seconds passed before I understood. The num­ber of the lodging house where Annie Chapman had been killed by the Ripper. “We can’t go there, Gordon...” 

    “We must, we have to!” 

    He took hold of my lapel with both hands, nearly lifting me off my feet. I stared him down, waited until he eased off. “Please,” he added, almost pitifully.

    “We can’t,” I repeated, trying to sound more forceful now though my legs were wobbling like two sticks in the wind. “We don’t know when Jack’s going to strike, and we can’t be there when he—” 

    “I know. I know very well. He’s already struck, Marcus. He’s butchered the poor lass and gone.” 

    He was bent over again, one hand on his knee and the other still holding my lapel, unwilling to release his only contact with his own time and world. He was terrified I would leave him. But why?

    “What the hell’s going on, Renault? If the killing’s al­ready been done...” I had to lower my voice as a man and his purchased date for the night passed by, laughing with the loose volume of alcohol. They ignored Renault and I, but I still waited until they’d disappeared into the mist before continuing in a whisper. “If it’s already done, we’ve no rea­son to be poking around there until late tomorrow.” The In­stitute wanted to get reaction to the murders too, so cameras were routinely left up at least twenty-four hours after the event. It gave Travelers time to do a little exploring...or, in my case, to go see a young lady.

    “Now, Marcus. We have to go now.” 

    “Why?” 

    “Because I said so, you goddamn ignorant shit!” 

    I nearly hit him. He was acting erratic, spinning from one emotion to another. I’d heard of similar things happening to other Travelers, something to do with the psychological pressure of being out of touch with their “real” world and trying to interact with people they know are actually rotting corpses in Present Time. But I wanted to hit Renault mostly because he was yelling at me. A good solid punch right in his face might boot him back to Present Time where our boss, Janice Riddle, could deal with him—and it would definitely give me a great deal of satisfaction.

    But Renault didn’t look mad. He looked scared. He wasn’t yelling so much as pleading with me. If I’d had time to think about it, I might have realized that something very wrong must have happened in order to send Renault into a panic. He was usually arrogant and bullying, even insisting everyone pronounce his last name with the last two letters intact, though it was of French origin and should have been expressed as: “Renoh.” But now that pride and overconfi­dence was gone. Something had sapped it away. At the mo­ment, I just assumed he’d stumbled over Annie’s butchered body and was having trouble dealing with it. But I absolve my error: I had just been rendered unconscious and dragged into an alley.

    I let him drag me to the barber shop, the storefront look­ing so ordinary as it dutifully offered Brylcreem for the most discerning tastes. Before we entered the passageway, I paused to make sure no one would witness two men enter­ing the yard where a murdered woman would be found in about three hours. 

    “Here, damn you,” Renault growled. He wanted me to look at the body of Annie Chapman lying in a gruesome bun­dle at his feet. Steeling my nerves, I did.

    It was just as the papers and pictures and eyewitness ac­counts of the event had reported—yet entirely more real now that I stood just a few feet from her, seeing her horrible condition in the weak light of a nearby oil-lamp, studying her, smelling her. 

    The Ripper had cut her twice across the throat, nearly decapitating the poor thing. Oddly, a handkerchief had been tied around her neck, probably just an affectation of Annie’s, though the Ripper might have used it to choke her into un­consciousness. Once she’d stopped struggling, he could take his time savaging her. 

    After slashing her throat, the Ripper had made a surgical cut down her naked abdomen: Annie Chapman was a stout woman, and the impression given was that she’d been sliced open like a holiday turkey. Flaps of skin had been peeled back and cut from the body; the bloody, ragged pieces lay wet on the ground just above either side of Annie’s shoul­ders. Atop the flap over her right shoulder sat a pile that I might have mistaken for dog shit. It was too geometrical, though, coiled around itself, flaccid, shiny like a flat sausage. A cord stretched from the pile across her breast into the open abdominal cavity, and I realized then what the brown pile was: her small intestines had been removed and draped over her chest like a scarf. 

    “I saw him.” Renault, his voice distant, half-whispered. “I saw him...cut out her uterus. He wrapped it up, put it in his pocket like it was a goddamn trinket.” 

    I turned away from the horror and glared at Renault. “What do you mean, you saw him? How could you have seen him?” 

    “I was here, Marcus. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” 

    I waited, unable to speak, the miasma still assaulting my nostrils. After a few gulps and false starts, Renault contin­ued, his voice subdued, reporting to me as he would report to Riddle and all the other investigators, just the facts, ma’am, just the facts.

    “I got here after two this morning. I was...held up. I didn’t realize how late it was, but I figured it wouldn’t take me very long to check out the equipment. I was nearly fin­ished when I heard a sound outside the passageway here. It was them. Annie and the Ripper. They were discussing a price while I looked around, trying to find someplace to hide. I finally rushed around to the back of that shed over there.” He pointed to the end of the yard where a broken-down wooden shed stood at an angle.

    I stepped towards him, moving carefully around Annie, breathing through my mouth now. Renault looked at the ground again and I could tell he’d need a push. “What hap­pened, Gordon? Why didn’t you just let them see you? The Old Man would’ve kicked you back to Present Time and they never would have remembered you.” 

    “I...I guess I panicked.” 

    I’d never seen him this way before: abashed, trembling, a giant who’d suddenly withered into old age. I prompted: “And then?” 

    “The Ripper strangled her, then laid her out like you see here, on her back. Then he got on top of her and...slashed her throat with a knife. Twice. Like the others.” 

    “With his right hand, but backhanded, from left to right.” I thought it might help if we kept this as technical as possi­ble—for Renault and my own grumbling stomach. 

    “Right. Then he knelt between her legs and lifted up her coat and skirt and...started cutting.” He placed a hand over his stomach and gulped something down. “Removed her in­testines, then her uterus. Just like in the reports.” 

    “And you saw it all from over there, behind the shed?” 

    He nodded. His eyes finally lifted: no longer the hard stones, but milky gray shadows, barely able to latch onto my own. “I couldn’t help it,” he said. “I threw up. Vomited all over the grass.” His lips trembled as he added, “And he saw me.” 

    I stood rigid, my voice and manner as authoritative as I could muster. “The Ripper saw you hiding behind the shed? What’d he do? What’d you do?” 

    “I thought I’d pop back to Present Time as soon as he spied me. But I didn’t. He saw me and I didn’t disappear!” He grasped at me, trying to make me understand the impli­cations. He didn’t have to bother; that last sentence echoed through my bones, leaving me feeling as much an intruder as I’ve ever felt. The little voice in my head, drummed into each one of us during training, kept repeating: Old Man Chronos doesn’t allow paradoxes. The Old Man protects the timeline at all costs. You could be booted back to the fu­ture at any time, for any reason... 

    But not this time.

    “What then?” I asked.

    “He approached me.” 

    “The Ripper saw you and approached you and you still didn’t disappear?” Stupid to repeat it; of course that’s what he meant. But it was impossible. Impossible!

    “He did more than that. I just stood frozen. I couldn’t be­lieve it. He came at me, sort of bent, peering into the dark to get a good look at me. I finally stood straight—and that’s when I noticed he still had that knife in his hand.”  

    He paused to see if I’d say anything. I couldn’t. I was completely confounded. All I could do was stand there and listen to him spin his impossible tale.

    “He attacked me. I couldn’t...I didn’t know what to do. So, I fought back.” Suddenly he grabbed me again, clawing at my coat and pushing his face into mine. “I swear, Marcus, I didn’t mean to do it. This kind of thing isn’t supposed to happen. You know that. Everyone does. The Old Man should’ve kicked me out of here. But the Ripper attacked me and I had to defend myself. My God, Marcus, he actually touched me! Hell, he hit me—and would’ve killed me if I’d let him!” 

    He backed off, exhausted, hurting for air again. I was shaken by how old he looked, at least twenty years over his forty-something, quivering and stammering like a confused old man. He leaned against the wooden fence. As he did so, there was a pop from behind the fence as one of the cameras disappeared. “Shit!” he cursed, surprising me with the strength behind it. 

    I looked about, wondering what had caused the equip­ment to go. The lodge windows that overlooked the yard were still empty and dark, the street quiet for a change. Probably some important shred of wind had to pass through the space the camera had been occupying, so the Old Man had sent it on its way.

    “Christ, Gordon, what happened next? You weren’t hurt, were you?” Fat chance of that.

“No. Just a cut across my arm.” He didn’t bother showing me it; I saw the tatters of his coat sleeve. “We struggled for the knife and I finally got hold of it.” 

    “Okay.” I took a breath, looked back at the body at the base of the steps. The various items reported later by wit­nesses looked like they were in their proper places: spilled muslin, comb and paper case lying near the body; coins at her feet; part of an envelope and some pills by her head. A glance at her hands showed the Ripper had already removed the rings from her fingers. “Okay,” I said again. “Well, I don’t understand why this happened, but it doesn’t seem to have affected the event too much. We’ll have to investigate it when we get back and view the disks. Maybe the Ripper did have a fight with a witness who never came forward, and the fact’s been lost to history. That wouldn’t be too bad, even if the witness was a guy from the future. I doubt the Ripper will let this little incident keep him from striking again. He’ll just be more careful.” 

    “I don’t think so,” said Renault.

    I turned back to him, saw he’d shuffled over to the wooden shed. He beckoned me with his injured arm. 

    “What?” I didn’t want to move, didn’t want to see what else Renault had to show me. Things were bad enough. But he just kept gesturing to me, his defeated eyes staring down at something in the dark. So, I went.  

    A well-dressed man lay there, his throat cut so deep that the ends of little veins stuck out, like worms crawling from their nest.

    “Who the hell is that?” I asked.

    Renault whispered the inevitable that I dreaded: “It’s Jack the Ripper.”