The Ripper Returns

by Dr. Sivana1

Carl meets two FBI agents you always knew he would encounter sooner or later. They wind up having to trust someone. Note: this story takes place in an alternate universe from my earlier story, Truths and Consequences. Some elements are the same, not al

The Ripper Returns
by Chuck Miller
this work is not for profit
all copyrighted characters are the property of the holders of said copyrights, duh!

I did not create ANY of these people, nor do I own them. Sometime I think it's the other way around.

(NOTE: The opening sequence of this story is of course the final ten minutes of "The Ripper," the first broadcast episode of the ABC series "Kolchak: The Night Stalker," 1974-75.)

CHICAGO ILLINOIS

WILTON PARK

JUNE 2, 1974

POV 1:

The little girl wasn't bored any longer. She was
scared, a bit, but not too much. She was eight years
old and she was braver than she used to be. She was
also a detective, so she had hung around outside the
creepy old house after she'd seen the man in the black
suit carry the woman up the porch steps and through
the door. He was probably a criminal. He was going to
tie the woman up in there and hold her prisoner. For
kidnapping ransom, maybe. If Sherlock Holmes were
here, he would sneak up and get into the house
somehow. But she wasn't Sherlock Holmes, she was just
a kid detective, and she didn't have a Doctor Watson
to go in with her and protect her with his revolver.
Sometimes she thought maybe it would be better to be a
doctor than a detective. Watson did both, didn't he?
She acknowledged how scary police work could be, and
then settled in to do her job properly.

She stood and looked and looked at the house and strained
her ears, picking at all the little sounds she could
hear and trying to find one that could have been
coming from the house. But it was so quiet and so
still, nothing but crickets chirping, and that wasn't
really a noise, it was part of the scenery and you
didn't even notice it unless you were thinking about
it.

She had awakened in the dark time past
midnight, which she loved because the world was
different then. Quietly, she had pulled on her dirty
clothes and crept downstairs to her aunt's kitchen,
because she had been forbidden to do so. Everyone else
was asleep, her brother, her parents, her aunt. She
was the only person awake, maybe in the whole world,
and she was not afraid of the dark and she was doing
something she wasn't supposed to. Her breathing was
quick and shallow and the inside of her chest tingled
with the thrill of it. There were cookies in a jar on
top of the refrigerator.

Once down the stairs, she began to look at and think about the kitchen
door. Her
chest tingled harder, and so did her arms. If she
wasn't even allowed downstairs at this hour, going
outside would be the ultimate in heroics.

The idea had taken hold, and for the girl to decide a
thing was to do it. It seemed like it took her hours
to move silently across the kitchen door and put her
hand on the knob and undo the lock and twist ever so
slowly.

And then, all of a sudden, there she is,
and the night world is not the same as it is during
the day. When her legs quit trembling and her
breathing got slower, she issued herself another
challenge. I have to walk all the way around the
block, she informed herself. I have to do it. Just one
time and then come back in.

She had made it halfway, to the street, maybe the very house
behind her aunt's, when she saw the dark man and his burden.

Once he and the woman had disappeared inside, the
little girl dashed across the street and got behind
some bushes. There she calmed herself and began a
vigil. She wished she had got a bottle of Coke from
the refrigerator to bring with her, but of course she
had been so intent upon her escape she hadn't thought
of it. She wondered how long she would be obliged to
stand here, and what she would do if anything
happened, and what kind of things might happen anyhow,
and then the man came back out. Alone. He locked the
front door, moved across the porch and down the steps
with no noise at all. She could not see his face, he
had a black hat pulled low, and he was wearing a cape,
like Dracula. A cape! Nobody wore a cape in real life.
This marked him as a suspicious character that was
worth investigating. He also carried a cane, which was
not as weird as a cape, but still out of the ordinary.
He was up to something. She would have to learn
everything she could, at least enough to write a
report for the Captain. And it would have to be an
excellent report, because she was already in trouble
on the force for taking too many chances and shooting
too many people. This assignment might be the only
thing that would save her job. The girl lived a rich
and exciting life inside her head. On one level she
knew these things were only make-believe, but on
another she knew they were just a different kind of
real.

Now that she had a task, she felt
professional and authorized. She was a secret
detective and she knew all kinds of things that
regular people didn't know, and she went on important
jobs that only she could do. She began to sidle ever
so slowly around the tall bush so she could approach
the house, when the other man appeared.

He too was quiet, just like everyone else abroad on this
night in this place. He was nothing like the first
man. For one thing, he wore a white suit rather than a
black one. And she could see his face in the glow of
the streetlight. He wasn't scary. Under one arm he
carried a thick black cable of some sort, and a funny
pair of giant yellow gloves. For just a second she wondered if all this apparatus meant the guy was a spaceman. She had certainly never seen any earthly gloves like those. But of course there was no such thing as spacemen, she knew that much.

She stayed behind the bush, poking out just
the part of her head from the top down to just below
her eyes, and watched the man—she thought of him as
a good guy because he wore white, while the first man
had automatically been classified as a bad guy—mount
the wooden stairs, which creaked under his feet, as
they had not done for the dark man. Silently, so that
no one could hear, she shooshed the good guy, trying
to make him be quieter. She gritted her teeth when she
heard the sound of a breaking board on the porch. She
looked wildly up and down the street to make sure the
dark man was not coming back, and he wasn't. Not yet.
The good guy came back down from the porch and walked
around the house peeking and poking at windows and
doors. After he had gone on around to the back of the
house, the part she could not see, it was very quiet
again for a minute, and then CRASSSH! She jumped and
almost peed, looking frantically around, and then she
whispered, "Duh! You dumbass," insulting herself for
her failure to immediately recognize the sound of a window breaking. The good guy was going to get in the
house that way, and she hoped he would find the girl
that had been carried in earlier, and set her free. By
now, she had appointed herself the good guy's
assistant. He, too, was a great detective. The Captain
had sent him along to take point. She was just keeping an
eye on things out here while he went inside to break
the case, and of course she would have his back if anything happened. That was
her specialty.

And then her heart sank down below her stomach. Oh no! Up the street
there... It was the dark man! He was coming back!

Her little heart, back in her chest again, hammered away as the
man got closer. She stood
and fretted as he went up the walk and up the steps.
This was happening so fast! How could she signal to
the good guy that danger was on its way? She wished
absurdly that she had a tiny telephone she could carry
around in her pocket, to call for help in situations
like this one. But there was no such thing. She heard
the door open and close.

Dizzy with fear, she
came from behind the bush, marching woodenly across
the grass, one step and then another step and then
another step. Her legs were trembling, but she made
them keep going until she was on the walk and up the
stairs and had her hand on the doorknob. It wasn't
locked. Nothing at all went through her mind as she
turned the knob very slowly and carefully, holding her
breath.

She found herself in a large, dark room
that contained exactly one big couch covered in a
dusty gray sheet. Something smelled funny. Like bad
meat or an electrical fire. Just opposite the door
she was now carefully closing was a flight of
stairs leading to a landing on the second floor. It
was so dark and gloomy up there. She couldn't see
anything. "Oh Lord, Oh Lord, Oh Lord," she whispered.
She could barely feel her legs at all, and even at
that they seemed to be two or three feet away from
her. Her hands just wouldn't behave at all. They
jerked this way and that. She crept almost on tiptoe
toward the couch, alive to any sound that might come
her way. As she drew near, she saw that the couch had
a big lump in it, underneath the sheet. A REALLY big
lump. She chewed on her lower lip as she got closer.
She didn't want to do this, but it was like walking
around the block—she had to do it. She gripped a
corner of the sheet. It felt coarse, not like the
sheets she slept on. And she yanked, flinging it back.
And what is this lying here? Her mind can't make sense
of it for a moment, and she sees nothing but colors
and lines and shapes that don't make sense, and when
they finally do she bites down hard, turning a scream
into a faint squeak. "Oh, oh, oh." She wanted to take
back that moment, go just a little ways into the past
and not see this.

At that moment, from upstairs,
comes a much less inhibited yell. "YAAAAH!" She stands
straight, backing slowly into the gloom and listens to
the sound of someone scrambling around on the wooden
floor. And then footsteps of a person running. The
good guy comes tearing around a corner and slams into
the wooden railing running along the landing. Slams it
and keeps going—the wood cracks and splinters and
gives way, and the good guy sails down and hits the
couch (don't look at the couch) and the couch turns
over with him, and the object there rolls over on top
of him. He yells again, clambers to his feet, dashes
across the room and dives head on through a window!

Just a moment later, the dark man charges down the
stairs as well, glancing at her without slowing, but
he SAW her, she knew he did. And she saw him, his full
face. His eyes were very dark. He, too, was through
the window before she fully processed what had
happened. She was scared, but she knew it was a kind
of scared that meant you were really very brave, even
if you didn't feel brave and you were too chicken to
look at the couch and what had been on it.

She could not get herself to run, so she walked
stiffly to the door. She emerged from the house into
the black cold air outside, and shambled around a
corner. As she did so, she saw a bright flash of light
and all the air whooshed out of her lungs and she fell
right on her butt in the grass. "Mom," she cried
feebly. "Oh, Mom!"

There was a pond and the dark
man was standing in it and bright white sparks were
everywhere and steam was coming up out of the water.
The good guy was over by the side of the house,
standing by a black metal box on the wall, and sparks
were coming from this box too.

In the pond, the dark man was shrinking. He sort
of pitched forward into the water. There was a loud
roaring sound in the girl's ears and her thinking
began to slow down, and all she could do was walk even
though she no longer knew where she was or what was
going on or anything. The thoughts in her head got
thinner and thinner as she walked and there were great
holes in them where nothing could be seen and she
walked like this for a period of time until a
policeman found her and took her to the hospital and
she remembered her name and the names of her parents
and they were called to come get her. She was treated
for shock and could not answer any questions because
she did not remember anything. Shortly, she was
released to the care of her parents. For the next few
days her parents and even some policemen asked her
questions, but she simply could not remember what had
happened to her that night. She overheard some talk
about a killer, about women being murdered, about a
house burning down. She lay in bed all day, even
though her aunt had offered her the couch in the
living room so she could watch television. She could
not get on the couch, though she did not know why. The
idea of lying on the sofa made the skin on the back of
head turn cold and sandpapery. When she started feeling a little better, the
vacation was over.

And it would be a long,
long time before little Dana Katherine Scully and her
family made another trip to Chicago.

POV 2:

Damn it. The water was up to his knees and the current
was shooting through him, up and down his body in
great waves. Electricity, the one thing he had to be
afraid of. When the Deal was originally struck, there
hadn't been such a lot of it about in the world. But
that had been a century ago, and things had changed.
That was the catch, then, he supposed. There was
always a catch when you made a deal with the Devil.

"The Devil," he knew, was simply a bit of melodrama on his part. Whatever it was he had bargained with so long ago was not so easily classified. It was, he mused, more like a personification of… what? Death? Violence? Yes and no. He met his savior in a makeshift triage hospital a mile or so from a battle so bloody and devastating that the name of the nearest town would forever after be linked in the public mind with the slaughter that took place there.

The current pounded through his flesh and blood and
bones, drawing out the moisture, burning, petrifying. He rolled his eyes to the heavens, the stars up there, the black sky, so vast, so cool and unsympathetic. . Immortal
and unchanging, like him. Shaken loose by the current, perhaps, thoughts. The gray interior of a huge tent. The heat. The holes in his body. The smell of
carbolic acid, the stink of dying flesh, urine, death,
disease. And then the face and the hands and the Deal…
The Deal.

And the pact, but that came later. He had once been a part of a
trinity, but the other two members were gone now. It
had been a family of sorts, the only one the Ripper
had ever had. He did not love them. He didn't love
anyone and never had. Even so, he missed them. Janos
and Malcolm, his "brothers." He had met Malcolm on the very day he had become what he now was. Janos came later. They had battled at first, of course. They were, after all, the ultimate alpha males, weren't they? But it hadn't taken them long to realize that there was really no need. There was no shortage of the human livestock each of them required. They might be able to kill one another, but why should they when they could provide the mutual support that might ease their journeys through endless years? They reckoned they would
go on into eternity together, indulging their
appetites again and again and again, the terrors of
the earth. Nightmare creatures, acknowledged only as
fiction and superstition by the world at large. They
would move into the technology-dependent future, and
they would wreak sheer havoc because they could not be
quantified or accounted for by any branch of science.
Science is God, and God just doesn't fucking know what
to do with this.

Death would not have
him now. He was Jack the Ripper. He brought death and
scattered the world with it, but he could not succumb
to it. The damage was already beginning to heal,
even while it was still being inflicted. But the
current was taking a grievous toll on him and it would
be a very long time before the healing would be
complete.

On
the opposite side of the pool stood the man in the
white suit. He reached out a hand, as though he had
the power to grasp the man and pull him down too. Too
far away… The man had on thick gloves, held a thick
black cable that snaked from the electrical box
attached to the house, his house, the Ripper's latest
home, into the water. Electricity… The man in the
white suit must have thought that this was killing him.

He tried to open his mouth, to cry out, but
his jaws were clamped together as though they were
wired. He wanted to tell the man what was happening.
"I can't die, you fool! I can't DIE!" He sank below
the water, into the mud, the current drying out the
last few drops of moisture in his body, mummifying
him.

And why was he here tonight? Why was the Ripper standing in this pool of water, laid low by the man in the white suit? How had he fallen into the snare of this…... mortal human worm... that had killed the Ripper's "brothers." Somehow. Somehow he had done it.
Janos first. Staked through the heart in Las Vegas, that horrible artificial city in the forsaken desert, a neon sepulcher, monument to greed and stupidity, with a soul as dead as the surrounding desert wastes. But filled with disposable people. It should have served Janos as a hunting ground for months, maybe years. But no. And then Malcolm, a year later, up in Seattle. He had been tracked to his subterranean hidey-hole and done to death. The Ripper's rage upon learning of first one death and then the other had been monumental. He would have thought that nothing could ever surpass it, until he learned the truth behind his "brothers'" respective ends. The same man had killed them both.

Carl Kolchak.

It had been easy to draw the reporter out night after night. The Ripper
knew that this Kolchak would be irresistibly drawn to
him and his crimes. Kolchak was to have been the final
ripped carcass to be left on the streets of this city.
He should not have done what he did, this Kolchak. He
should not have been able to. Aside from a few
prominent idiosyncrasies, Kolchak was an ordinary man.
Was it luck? Was there something more to this Kolchak
than there appeared to be? If he had only done it
once, it might have been a fluke. Twice was stretching
the bounds of coincidence. And now...

Now it appeared that Mr. Kolchak had achieved a
hat trick. But it only APPEARED so. Electricity could not kill him. It
disrupted the receptors in his brain even in small doses, and this much current
could damage and paralyze his body, but only for a time. And time was the one
thing he had plenty of. Of the three "brothers," the Ripper likened himself to
the little pig in the fable that built his house out of bricks. Janos had had so
many vulnerabilities. Malcolm had relied on a difficult and dangerous procedure.
But the Ripper... He could walk abroad in daylight, though he seldom did, and a
stake in his chest would accomplish nothing more than the ruining of a shirt.
There was no alchemical brew that could be withheld to halt his endless
perambulation through the ages.

And then he was gone beneath the water and the mud.
His thoughts were vague and slippery and very, very
slow. But he would not forget. He would remember who
had put him here. "Kolchak. Kolchak…"

And the child... There had been a child there in the house.
Was she burning up right now? Who had she been? She had the
look about her of one who was in the world but not of
it. What had she been doing? He had no answers, and
wouldn't for a long while.

He would be back, Jack would. It would
take a long time, but he had all the time in the world
and then some. For now he was still and cold and
silent but he was not gone and he would most certainly
return, and when he did, he would be sharpening his
knives for more than just whores... though a
journalist could certainly... be... consid...

But for now, all is darkness. For tonight, the rest is
silence. But there are so many tomorrows waiting for him...

FBI HEADQUARTERS

WASHINGTON DC

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER

Special Agent Dana Scully stood, hands on
hips, before a cork board in Fox Mulder's basement
office. Tacked to the board were a number of color
photographs and the main color in them was red. She
was a doctor and a pathologist, so the images did not
make her sick, she could look at them as a mechanic
might look at an engine or a butcher a slab of meat.
Not that she was cold or inhuman, she was nothing of
the sort, but she had learned long ago to distance
herself from the worst of the many terrible things she
was obliged to see.

She took a pair of wire-rimmed glasses from her handbag and
put them on,
leaned closer to one of the photographs. There were
nine photos in all, three sets of four, one set for
each of the victims.

She took a breath and said, "I see no evidence here of any particular
surgical skill. These women were hacked apart, not operated on.
Why, a hunter field-dressing a deer would use more
finesse." She removed the glasses and turned to face
her partner, seated behind the close and rather
squalid room's only desk.

"Anyone could have done this. Anyone sick enough
to want to, I mean."

Mulder nodded and ran a hand through his hair. "I know. I'm not buying the theory
that a doctor is responsible. I'm not sure where that came from. I don't think anyone in Illinois law enforcement generated it." Scully cocked her head.
"Do you have a theory? Should I even ask? Your aliens
haven't graduated from cattle mutilation to humans, I
hope." She was not at all serious, but not entirely
joking, either. And she held her breath while she
waited a beat or two for Mulder's reply.

He grinned a little and answered with his tongue
in his cheek. "No, Scully, the Reticulans perform
breeding experiments on humans. They don't just hack
us up for the hell of it. Of course," his voice grew
thoughtful, "we could be dealing with an alien serial
killer, which is certainly a rare phenomenon, but..."

Scully held up a hand. "Mulder, if you dare go
there, I will resign from the Bureau just as soon as I
sign the papers for your involuntary committal."

He laughed. "Scully, if you were inclined that way,
you would have done it years ago. I think you're afraid of committal. No,
seriously,
though, I do see a possible... theme here. I don't
know what it means or how we might use it to track the
killer... Tell me, do you notice the same thing I
did?" Scully frowned and moved back to the board to
study the photos. At first, her expression was blank,
her eyes flicking here and there, focusing and
unfocusing like a person studying one of those magic
eye hidden picture posters. She saw nothing...
nothing... and then BAM!

"Jack the Ripper," she
said quietly, looking up at her partner. "These
mutilations are identical to the ones performed in
1888 by Jack the Ripper. I remember the details well.
I had a class at the Academy where we studied the
post-mortem reports from the case in detail. This
first one, here... the wounds correspond with the ones
received by Mary Ann Nichols. This second one," she
tapped the photo with a fingernail, "has been made
into a—and I'm going to hate myself for saying
this—dead ringer for Annie Chapman. I'd have to
check a reference book, but it seems to me that the
bodies are even positioned in exactly the right way.
You're thinking..."

"Copycat," Mulder said." It isn't a common
phenomenon. But it isn't unheard of. There was a...
Well, I'll get to that. But most serial killers are so
egocentric they wouldn't dream of copying someone
else's 'work.' I've never seen this much attention to detail. Serial killers
often murder in a state of frenzy that would preclude their
taking pains to do it in such a precise way. Of
course, some of them are able to exert that kind of
control, but that usually goes in aid of their own
'style.' They are, after all, demonstrating their
general superiority—they're gonna want to do it
their way.

"On the other hand, have you ever noticed how
many bar bands there are that cover the same few Led
Zeppelin songs? Some of them play nothing but. The
desire to slavishly imitate is strong within our
collective breast. There's no reason that even a
sociopath should be immune."

"You're suggesting some sort of... homage?"

Mulder nodded. "A tribute band. It would
be sui generis in the annals of crime, but not
impossible by any means. Change is part of the human
condition. Everything evolves. Organisms, technology,
social structure... Why not murder methods? Retro is in now. And whoever this guy is, he has an eye for detail, as you noticed. The only discrepancy is the intervals between the murders. Those don't correspond with the original Ripper's pattern in any way that I'm able to decipher. It's only been two weeks since the first one. Ripper '88 took almost two months to work this far down the list. The timing here is either random or based on something so arcane I can't figure it out. Some people are traditionalists so long as it's convenient. He doesn't want us anticipating his next move. He's a show-off, but he's pragmatic. He taunts and terrorizes without tipping his hand."

"Like the Ripper himself," Scully offered. "Or herself. Did you know that Arthur Conan Doyle postulated that the killer might have been a midwife?"

"Conan Doyle believed in fairies," Mulder said dismissively. "He accepted a set of crudely faked photos by a pair of young girls as proof that the 'little people' existed."

Scully was silent for a beat or two, eyes narrowed at her partner. Her gaze cut over briefly to his "I Want To Believe" poster, with its elegantly faked (she believed) photo of a classic flying saucer, and she drew a breath to say something. Mulder cut her off before she could get it out.

"Never mind," he said, "I get the point. Pots and kettles." Scully just shrugged.

"Right. Well, Glen or Glenda, the ripper left quite a mark. Eighteen-eighty-eight was a
bad year, Scully. I suppose you could say it gave birth to the worst horrors of the twentieth century. There was the Ripper, the first widely publicized serial murderer. Hitler was conceived in 1888. Think of how much different things would be if those two had never existed. You ever daydream about having a time machine and going back and killing Hitler?"

"Not really," Scully answered. "I won't go so far as
to say that I think time travel is not and never will
be possible, even though it is exactly what I do
think. But if it were possible, meddling with the past
would be dangerous and foolish. What if by killing
Hitler, you opened the door for someone worse? And
don't say there was no one worse than Hitler, because
there is always someone worse. Even if you whittled it
down to the worst person on the planet, someone would
be born that could outdo him."

"Scully, that's downright nihilistic! When did you
become such a cynic?"

"I'm not a cynic. I'm realistic, not nihilistic. Not being a Pollyanna
doesn't make me abnormal. Who is it that has 'Trust No
One' for a motto?"

"It's not a motto, it's just..."

"What?"

"Nothing," Mulder muttered and turned his attention back to his cork
board gallery of atrocities.

But Scully wouldn't let up. "You were going to say it is just being
realistic! Admit it!"

Mulder's tone was indifferent, and he was pretending to be distracted by
the board. "I forget what I was going to say. It just
popped out of my head."

"That won't work. You have a photographic memory, Mulder, as you
see fit
to remind me every day or two."

He gave her a sad smile. "Maybe my photographic memory is out of
film."

Scully snorted delicately. "Now, what is
that supposed to mean? It doesn't even make any
sense."

"No, but it sounds witty."

"Does it? I hadn't noticed."

They might have gone on in this vein for a
considerable length of time. It was, for them, a form
of recreation, which their work made necessary. They
had honed their technique over the years to the point
where they could ad lib some pretty impressive
material. On days when they were particularly sharp,
their timing and delivery rivaled that of Abbot and
Costello. They had formed a sort of symbiosis with one
another, and the bon mots were a shared psychological
defense mechanism. However, Scully could tell from her
partner's body language as he squatted before the
board to study the third set of photos that his
gallows humor had dried up for the moment.

"And victim number three..." he said thoughtfully,
rubbing his chin. "Throat cut only. Just like
Elizabeth Stride in 1888. The theory is that the
original killer was interrupted before he could complete the
job back in '88. And here it is, duplicated perfectly
112 years later. And if that is our current Ripper's
game..."

Scully swallowed. "Then there is another
one." Mulder nodded. Elizabeth "Long Liz" Stride had
been the first of two women to die on the night of
September 30 - October 1, 1888. By this time, the
shadowy murderer who had claimed two, or possibly
four, victims had a name, but the public had not yet
heard it. A letter, penned in red ink, had been
received by London's Central News Agency on Sept. 27
or thereabouts. The writer claimed responsibility for
the murders, expressed an eagerness to continue, and
ended with the most notorious sign-off in the history
of crime: "Yours truly, Jack the Ripper." The letter
would be released to the public shortly after the
latest outrage, the so-called "double event."
Elizabeth Stride had had her throat cut, but the
customary mutilations had been absent. It was believed
that the killer had been frightened away by the
approach of a horse-drawn buggy. Apparently the
slasher was not one to take "no" for an answer. Within
an hour he had found a second victim, Catherine
Eddowes, upon whom he was able to lavish the attention
the unknown driver had denied Long Liz. Catherine had
been opened wide, from the pubis to just below the rib
cage. The contents of her abdomen had been lifted out
of the body cavity and dumped over her left shoulder.
Small mutilations had been effected to her face,
curious little cuts that seemed almost prim in
comparison to the savagery inflicted elsewhere on her
body.

Mulder breathed deeply. "If our killer is
true to what appears to be form, there is another
victim somewhere. He killed two that night. We have
'Long Liz,' but where is 'Catherine Eddowes?'"

"Well, as you pointed out, the sequence is correct but the dates aren't. Maybe he plans that one for later."

Mulder shook his head. "I doubt it. The 'Double Event' was the original Ripper's masterpiece. The terror he generated by taking two in a single night was the high point of his 'career.' I don't think our copycat has it in him to water it down."

Scully nodded slowly. "Yes, and that's not the worst
of it."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, Eddowes was the next-to-last victim, right? There was a lull of a
few weeks and then Mary Kelley was killed. If the 'Double Event' was the climax, Kelley was one hell of a bombastic coda. The worst mutilations yet. I'm sure you've seen the police photo. She looks as though she exploded. And after that..."

"Nothing," Mulder said. "The killer disappeared."

"Well, he never really 'appeared' to begin with. But yes, the
murders stopped. The killer was never heard from again. Our copycat, if that's what he is, has one more to go to complete the sequence. Will he stop? It is
almost unheard of for a serial killer to abruptly
'retire.' Their impulses keep driving them until they
die or get caught. But our man here is already unique.
He might be an exception to that rule. And if he is,
once he finishes with his next victim..."

Mulder's face had shaped itself into angry lines.
"Then he gets away with it. Just like the original.
That's not acceptable, Scully."

"No," she agreed. "It isn't."

Mulder breathed deeply. Girding
himself for whatever was to come, Scully figured.
There was more, she knew. He had something else to
say.

"This is not the first time this has happened, Scully."

"What? A Ripper wannabee? You just said it had never been done."

He nodded. "I meant the painstaking attention to the details of the
original series. But the general method, Scully, is a different thing. I got the
information this morning. Actually, it seems that
Ripper-style killings were pretty common all over the
world up until the 70s. Some of the killers even sent notes to the police. The
last set with enough of the standard elements to qualify was in 1974."

"Other Ripper copycats? I've never heard
of anything like that."

Mulder shrugged. "None of them got as much publicity as the original
Ripper. A thing is only unique once. And considering the historical events of the
century or so following the Ripper's heyday—revolutions, two world wars, the
Holocaust, to name a few—the bar for shock and awe was seriously raised—and
in many cases, law enforcement agencies involved in the murders were less
than forthcoming to the press or anyone else. The times and locations and
number of victims were seemingly haphazard, but the method was identical, the
Ripper's signature if you will. Strangulation, throat cutting and disembowelment. They came at irregular intervals in major cities on just about every continent. Records are spotty. Evidence, if you can call it that, is mostly anecdotal. I could not find a
single case in which the killer was actually, unequivocally, put to death, and only two who even went to trial. Some of them were tagged 'escaped.' But the
details are missing."

"How about the Yorkshire Ripper? That was, what, '79?"

"The Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, wasn't a
Ripper. He was a smasher. He incapacitated his victims
with a hammer. He never called himself the Yorkshire
Ripper, either. Someone in the press came up with
that, I think, or it might have been the work of a
hoaxer. Is 'hoaxer' a word? Well, anyhow, the only
link with the original Jack was that Sutcliffe's
victims were, for the most part, prostitutes. He
doesn't fit into the pattern at all."

"What kind of time frame are we talking about for
these other Rippers?"

"The years between 1891 and 1974. At least a dozen
cases. Usually prostitutes, but there was one, in
Italy I think, who killed flower girls. Same mutilations, though. And in all cases notes were sent to police and newspapers. Taunts, cryptic poems, that
kind of thing. Who knows, some of the earlier ones might well have been the work of the original Ripper himself. None of the killers were ever
caught or even identified, with two exceptions."

"And those would be?" Scully said carefully. She could
see now where Mulder was probably heading with this.
She would give him free rein for a bit, then bring out
whatever arguments she needed to dissuade Mulder from
whatever train of thought he was on. And it would have
absolutely zero effect. She knew that too, but that
was simply how it worked around here. They had their
respective roles and they would play them, just as
they always did.

"One was captured in Germany,
just before World War I. He was caught in the act,
more or less, and led police on a foot pursuit. This
lasted, incredibly, for some three hours. He was
finally nabbed when he fell and injured himself. By
this time a powerful thunderstorm was moving through
the area, visibility went to just about zero. The cops
were able to stay on his trail by spotting him
whenever lightning illuminated the scene. But in the
end, they practically stumbled over him, lying on the
ground, unconscious. As I said, the official story was
that he fell in the rain and knocked himself out."

"When you put it that way, it means you're about to
take issue with that official story."

"Right you are. I looked at some maps and photos of
the area and found out that the accidental fall story
had a big problem."

"Tell me."

"He was captured in a large open field. There was nothing for him to
have fallen from."

"All right. I don't know how
relevant that might be, and you'd be surprised at the
injuries people can incur in seemingly harmless
environments. It seems like a pretty trivial detail."

"Those are where the Devil lives."

"Or God. I've heard it both ways. Anyhow, they caught him. Then what
happened?"

"That's where the information trail peters out. We know he was placed in custody. We know he was tried and sentenced to hang. According to some
stories the trial was very swift. Remarkably so. This
is all speculation, though, because all records
pertaining to this man, court documents and police
files, everything, are gone."

"Gone?"

"Gone. Disappeared. Removed. All the info we have
comes from newspaper stories, which are worse than
useless. But the way he was captured is a telling anomaly, I think. Particularly when it's considered in light of what happened with the only other ripper to be captured."

"Which was whom? And how did you find all of this out if the records
don't exist and no one has ever heard of it?"

Mulder was about to reply when the phone on his desk
rang. He picked it up, identified himself and
listened.

"They did?" he said. "Where is it now? Yeah, I'll say.
Yes, right away." He hung up.

Scully looked a question at him. He nodded. "They
found 'Catherine Eddowes.' We're on a flight to
Chicago in 45 minutes. And that's not all."

"What else?" Scully wondered, already mentally
preparing for the trip.

"They got a letter."

"A letter?"

"Yeah. From the Ripper."

The letter was written on plain notebook
paper in what appeared to be red ink from a cheap
ballpoint pen. It ran in this way:

"Dear Mister Kolchak:

"I keep on hearing that the police have caught me but
they won't fix me just yet. They never shall, for I am
Boss, was the nosy reporter in the cheap straw hat.
But that was not forever, as you can see, for Saucy
Jacky has returned. Four jobs already, and I have
laughed when they look so clever and talk about being
on the right track. They will never be clever enough,
while you, Mister Kolchak, are too clever by half. I
propose this go round not to limit myself to the usual
five. The first five I shall do as a treat for my fans ha ha, I give them a
new performance of my greatest hits. The sixth is the one that will set it apart. Yes, there shall be six, something new eh Boss? Ha ha. And after that? I am down on whores and shan't quit ripping them til I do get buckled. This city will reap the harvest
from what you have sown and then I shall come after
you. For I am down on reporters named Kolchak too, and
even the grave shan't keep me out from amongst your
vitals. It is a mark of my esteem that I drop my girls
only policy to rip you up, but that is what I shall
do, serve you just as I did your fat friend That
Night, you remember her dont you, she found out that
Jack was not a love crazed moose ha ha! And then I
clip your ears off to send to police, just for jolly
wouldn't you?
"Until we meet again dear old Boss I remain always and forever
"Yours Truly
"Jack the Ripper"

Scully peered at the color printout' a
scan of the original letter e-mailed to Mulder by the
FBI field office in Chicago. Irrational as it may be,
she reflected, this scares me. And not just because of
the content. The handwriting looks... oh, Dana, don't
you dare say this out loud to Mulder, but the
handwriting looks evil.

Aloud, she said, "This handwriting is very odd, Mulder. Look at this penmanship. It's very archaic. No one writes like this nowadays. They stopped teaching this sort of thing...I don't know, a hundred years ago. "

"Mmm," Mulder grunted absently, gazing out the airplane window at the frothy carpet of clouds below. "It also looks remarkably like the handwriting in the first letter the original Ripper sent the Central News Agency in 1888."

"Yeah, you're right. In fact, most of this is plagiarized from that letter."

Mulder gave her a tiny smile, one of the red flags Scully had learned to be on the alert for. "A person can't plagiarize his own work."

Scully sighed. At last, the other shoe has dropped. No, Scully said firmly to herself. We won't be going there just now.

She shifted gears quickly. "And who is Kolchak? Is he with the Chicago PD? Or is this
Ripper so deranged that he sends hate mail to dead Russian admirals?"

Mulder snorted a little laugh. "Hardly. Kolchak
is evidently one Carl Kolchak. He is, or was, a
reporter for a small wire service in Chicago.
Independent News Service. Kolchak was a crime reporter
and a damn good one. He worked all over the country,
several major cities, like Vegas, Seattle, New York."
Mulder turned from the window and looked at Scully.
"Good as he was, he never lasted long in one place. He
had a reputation as a troublemaker, always in hot
water with management and local law enforcement. He
was a maverick and he made a lot of enemies. Kolchak
was in Chicago in '74, when the last—until now--
series of Ripper murders was taking place. May 28 to
June 2, just five days. He started in Milwaukee. The
Ripper I mean."

Out of the blue, Scully felt a chill go all the way through her, from
her feet up into her scalp, where it tingled and faded away. She
felt cold and feverish at the same time, and she
couldn't figure why. She wrestled for a moment with a
set of symptoms she recognized from her reading to be
the onset of a panic attack. She took four deep breaths to charge her blood and brain with fresh
oxygen.

Mulder, peering into her face, said, "You alright?" She nodded. "I may be a bit airsick," she offered distractedly.

Mulder's frown deepened. "You never get airsick.
You've never been airsick."

She nodded. "I'm
branching out. You're always telling me I should
develop new interests."

Mulder nodded back, not quite
mollified. "I had something like stamp collecting in
mind."

"Stamps are a bore. Strictly for geeks." She could feel her system
righting itself. The eerie
feeling of dread passed by and she found herself back
in the sunshine of rationality.

"I collected stamps, Scully."

"Well, there you go. Now please
finish telling me about this Kolchak. I assume we're
going to interview him?"

Mulder shook his head. "Carl
Kolchak seems to have dropped off the face of the
earth. Believe me, if he could be found, I would have
found him. He hasn't worked for INS or anything else
since 1975. I found plenty of documentation from '75 on back, though. Some of it is VERY interesting.

"Why the current Ripper should seek
him out, I have no idea. This letter was sent to
the INS office in much the same way the original
Ripper sent mail to the Central News Agency. Either
the Ripper doesn't know Kolchak has been absent from
work for 20 years, or he does know and he's
broadcasting a threat. I would say by the tone of the
letter that the Ripper had some unsatisfactory
encounter with Kolchak. This is the stuff of
vengeance. Whatever it was, it happened on the second
of June in the Wilton Park district."

Scully felt that frisson again, coupled with a feeling of deep
depression, as intense as it was short-lived. It
lasted a few seconds then moved along, leaving her
with a bit of a stomachache. This time she didn't
flinch. She did not want to alarm Mulder.

"The thing is," her partner was saying, "the '74
Ripper case was covered by a Ron Updike. Now, him we ARE going to talk with.
He's the bureau chief now. Kolchak was there in '74, but his byline doesn't
appear on anything the
INS put out on the killings. Like I say, he didn't
make many friends. I gather he had zero ability to
suck up to anyone, cops or editors or whatever. I did
find out that he was pulled from the Ripper story as a
punitive measure for his... creative professional
conduct. He couldn't be controlled and no one could
shut him up."

"Sounds like someone I know," Scully said wryly. "But
tell me. How do you come to know so much about this
guy?"

Mulder smiled a bit sheepishly. "I guess you
could say I'm a fan. I first became aware of him when
I found an unpublished manuscript making the rounds on
the internet a few years ago. It was called 'The Night
Stalker.' Quite a piece of work, Scully. I thought it
would make a good movie, even though the premise is maybe a little too far out
even for Hollywood. And it would be damn near impossible to cast Carl Kolchak."

"The same could be said of you," Scully remarked playfully. "Kevin Bacon maybe. Or what's-his-name from the Red Shoe Diaries."

"Please. Anyhow, back to 'The Night Stalker,' it's an account
of a series of killings in Las Vegas in 1970. This Carl Kolchak claimed to have
tracked the killer down and done away with him."

"Done away?" Scully said, her eyebrows going up. "You mean this... reporter... took it upon himself to… to kill the killer? Self defense?"

Mulder shook his head. "No, it was deliberate, premeditated and
cold-blooded."

"Then why is this Kolchak not in prison?"

"Interesting question. According to Kolchak himself,
the Vegas law-enforcement community decided to wash
their hands of him. This was not a straightforward
serial killing spree. You see, the Vegas killer turned out
to be a—well, I wouldn't call him a man, exactly--
an individual named Janos Skorzeny."

Scully thought for a moment, then snapped her fingers.
"Yes, I've heard of him. The subject came up at a forensic pathology seminar I
went to. I seem to recall that he exsanguinated his victims. The case was
interesting because there was a lot of speculation as to what sort of a device he used. Matter of fact, there were numerous
similarities to the Dark Star Coven killings in LA a couple years later. But
Skorzeny was killed in
a gunfight with the police."

Mulder snorted. "Not just a gunfight. A 'pitched gun battle.'
I've always wondered what that means exactly. According to the police, that's
what happened. But not according to Kolchak. According to Kolchak, Skorzeny
was.." He licked his lips. "Skorzeny was a, well..."

Scully scowled. "Don't dance around it, Mulder. I should have seen
this coming. Go ahead.
Say it."

"Do I really have to?"

"No, but I want you to. I just want to hear it."

"Okay. Skorzeny was a vampire."

Scully was nodding vigorously. "Okay. Okay. Good. Now
we've got that out of the way. Look, you don't really
need me to tell you why that isn't true, do you?"

"Of course not. And of course you know what I'll come back
with."

Scully nodded. "You'll totally dismiss my argument by
producing a ton of spurious 'evidence,' anecdotal tales, and folklore. No sense
wasting time. We could have had this argument in complete silence. So we'll just call it a draw, as usual. This could be a milestone in our relationship, Mulder.
Instantaneous debate."

"Not to mention premature adjudication."

Scully's response to this bon mot was to slowly closer her
eyes, pull a set of headphones over her ears and tap the "play" button on

her portable CD player.

SOMEWHERE

The old man sat at an old desk, tap-tap-tapping away at the plastic computer keyboard. He typed rapidly, but he watched his fingers, more out of habit than necessity, and he did not use all of his fingers. A self-taught typist, grown so adept at his own slapdash method that his speed and accuracy could outdistance many a professional secretary.

Even now. Even at this age.

He thought wistfully of the horrible metallic clacking sound his old portable typewriter used to make. It was, much like the man, a relic of a distant epoch in history. Most of his thoughts these days were tinged with a dull feeling of nostalgia. And the accoutrements of the present day did more to feed those feelings than to banish them. The cool plastic tapping of this shiny ergonomic keyboard reminded him of the sound of the old elevated trains, back in Chicago.

Odd, he reflected how 25 years could seem like no more than a month or two, while at the same time feeling like centuries. The gulf between then and now seemed much too wide to be accounted for by mere time and space. Not at all like the demarcation between present and past; more like the line between fact and fiction, or wakefulness and dream.

"Truth is stranger than fiction" was an aphorism he had always rejected, and still did. His own past experiences had been uncommon and unsettling, sometimes apocalyptically so, but if he were to be absolutely objective, he'd have to admit that they weren't as strange as, for example, the adventures of Harry Potter in these new novels that were so popular. A zombie here, a werewolf there—these were minor things compared to the creatures that inhabited (and often beset) Hogwarts School.

But then, he had never been a wizard, not even an apprentice one.

"You've got mail!"

The old man scowled and his fingers stopped their relentless tapping. He hated that insipid voice. He saved and closed the document he was working on ("haroldswordmanbakerdraft6.doc"), and, muttering, "It isn't mail; mail has a stamp on it and the mailman brings it," clicked the little cartoon mailbox icon (There was another word that had been twisted out of shape; when the old man thought of icons, he thought of pentagrams and crosses).

He looked at the "sender" line and frowned. "Bernie," he whispered, and the two syllables seemed to contain a lifetime of disappointment and fatigue. He let the pointer hover for a moment over the "delete" button. But he had to look, of course. He opened the message and read it. Then he read it again. There was an image file attached and he opened that. He studied it for quite some time, eyes narrowed to sharp slits. His breathing grew more rapid. A look of tentative fear started on his face, but stopped abruptly, as though he had caught himself doing something inappropriate. His face was blank for a moment. He had the air of a man weighing certain options. Then he decided on one.

The old man smiled.

"It was horrible," Ron Updike said, "just horrible."

Seated behind a large wooden desk, Mulder and Scully facing him in old and worn but comfortable office chairs, the older man stared beyond the two agents, beyond the office wall, into the abyss of a long-ago night from which he had never completely recovered.

Scully squirmed a bit in her seat, uncomfortable and feeling just a bit guilty for ripping open such an obvious wound after such a long time.

Updike, a compact man somewhere north of sixty, with silver hair and a trim moustache, swallowed a couple of times and continued. "I saw her… body. What the Ripper had… done to her. It was…"

"Horrible?" Mulder offered helpfully. Scully shot her partner a rather chilly sidelong glance, to which he was characteristically oblivious. Mulder was not an insensitive man, and certainly an investigation like this one left little room for delicacy, but still… His odd and often inappropriate sense of humor tended to manifest itself at times when his mental focus was at its tightest, giving him a curiously flippant air.

"Exactly," Updike said, nodding vigorously.