Ripping Time
A Short Story
By
Russ Flinn
© Russell Flinn 2005
"I don't approve."
"So why did you bring me here?"
The Doctor chewed his lip, his eyes dark as his mood. It was a good question, but sometimes even his own motives were just a hair's breadth out of his reach. He struck the tine of his umbrella on the cold marble floor, a very conscious tic to illustrate his disquiet.
"I don't know," he said quietly, barely more than a sigh of resignation.
Ace gave up on him, electing to stroll the aisles of the exhibition, pausing here and there to press the simula-switches and seeing history come alive in coldly-rendered pixellated reality. Occasionally, she would glance about her to make sure no one was looking, before delving a hand into the three-dimensional images, making them stutter and warp around her questing fingers. Striving to assert itself, the real-history projectors buzzed like abstract metal wasps-nests, angrily battling the intrusion of her flesh into the immaculate and authentic historical environments.
"Please do not touch the exhibits," came the voice from behind her.
Ace whirled round, almost losing her holdall from her shoulder in the process.
"Sorry, I was just -"
"Touching the exhibits, yes," the museum guide smiled. "We prefer it if you don't."
She gave him a guilty smile of contrition. He was a native Carrion, tall, elegant, and utterly composed. The Doctor had compared them to a race of funeral attendants, but the comparison went beyond their affection for the colour black, or their pallid faces that seemed all the whiter for their bleak, functional dress sense. There was a calm and restive air, which seemed at once to both soothe and jangle the nerves. It was the presence of one who knew more than you, had seen more than you could ever know, and imbued a sense of superior benevolence, a sympathy for others that bordered on the patronising.
It was a wonder the Doctor found them so distasteful.
"Your friend seems not to find the exhibition so compelling," the guide observed, looking over at the seated, silent, brooding little figure.
"He's just sulking," she replied, trying to avoid the unsettling transparency of the guide's eyes through which she could see the crenellations and thread-veins of his brain. Like others of his race, his breath was mustard-yellow.
"Sulking?" The guide seemed unsure of the word. He looked long and hard at the Doctor's fretful form. "I feel that it is boredom."
Eager to appease the offence the Carrion might take at the idea that their famous exhibition was anything less than absolutely absorbing, Ace broke in quickly: "I don't think so. He's just tired." She scrambled for excuses. "It's been a long day."
The guide pursed his lips, considering her words, weighing them for meaning and value before finally dismissing them for the placatory gabble that they were.
"I think not," he replied sagely. "It is boredom. What some call ennui or cosmic angst. The weariness of a soul that has seen and done everything with no more experiences to conquer. It is not uncommon." He held her gaze. "Unless, of course, he is merely bored with our exhibition?"
Ace was quick to respond, speaking from her own personal feelings about The Atrocity Exhibition.
"Don't think so, not at all. I mean, this stuff is really fascinating, don't you reckon? Well, of course you would or you wouldn't have put it all together really, would you?"
The Carrion seemed intrigued by her enthusiasm.
"You do not find it at all morbid?"
"Of course, she does," came the Doctor's voice.
He was at their side, silent as the night and as dark. He examined a speck of lint from the dark tweed of his jacket, propping himself upon his umbrella.
The guide seemed unsurprised by the Time Lord's sudden appearance, swivelling slowly to face him. Sensing a lecture, one of those dreaded third-party critiques of her self, Ace turned her attention back to the bloody chaos of some projected reconstruction labelled 'Millers Court'.
The Carrion exhaled a satisfied ochre cloud.
"I'm gratified you have joined your friend in appreciation of the exhibits, mister…?"
"Doctor," the Time Lord corrected tersely. "And I'm not as appreciative at all, believe me. Ace here simply has the benefit of being human." He employed the word 'benefit' with a heavy ironic tone.
Ace, sensing he was spoiling for a fight, slung her bag further up her shoulder and went on to the next re-enactment. It was entitled 'Buck's Row'.
"You do not approve of our work, Doctor?" the Carrion queried, genuinely affronted by the contempt implicit in the little man's disparaging glances at the scene of slaughter before them.
"It's perhaps a little too forensic for my tastes," came the reply. There was a curl to his lip and a flare to his nostrils that the Carrion read accurately as disgust. "I don't share my companion's zeal for the macabre."
"We simply aim to provide an accurate catalogue of barbarity, as a warning for the future," the guide countered. "You're familiar with the philosophical standpoint, surely? That our future is damned without recognition of the wrongs of the past? Our Genocide and Warfare suites rarely leave people unaffected, and the Abortion room has been known to have powers almost akin to religious conversion on some."
The Doctor shook his head sadly. "I admire your attempts to justify this sideshow. It's very…" He hesitated, searching for a tact he wasn't entirely sure was warranted. "It's very loyal of you."
"Yet still you came," was the Carrion's pointed response. "You paid the price of admission, even bringing a friend with you."
"I'm amazed that Ace isn't due a discount. It's thanks to her race that this place has so much to choose from." He indicated the rusty walls and shattered body on the glistening bed sheets of the 'Millers Court' display. "This, for example, marked a particular low-point on the individual level. The wanton plunder of another being, total destruction of all that made her what she was."
The Carrion regarded the scene with his empty eyes. He had seen it so many times now that it left him unmoved, just a mass of form and colour that marked the last crime of yet another historical figure of disrepute - albeit a major, if anonymous, artist in their gallery of horrors.
"Some of our visitors find this scene of particular interest," he stated with the stentorian intonation peculiar to his profession.
The Doctor waved a dismissive hand. "You can spare me the oration. I'm well aware of the appeal of Earth's shameful moments. I'm more concerned with a tour that is designed to titillate and mesmerise it's visitors with bloodshed and mayhem." He cast an airy look about the aisles, grim-faced. "I see nothing positive at all."
"You believe that, do you, Doctor?"
"Perhaps you'd like to point me in the direction of the moral of these tales? Maybe I've missed something all these years. Too wrapped up in preventing loss and cruelty to see the folly of my deeds…" The Time Lord's words, loaded with sarcasm, did not go unnoticed by the Carrion.
"And yet, educated minds wrote in praise of the particular criminal whose work stands before us now. Their social commentator, George Bernard Shaw, spoke of his being 'a singular genius'. His deeds brought the plight of the lower orders into the public forum. Politics was changed by the turn of a blade. Women's rights became an issue, streetlighting became more prevalent, policing and their methods of investigation were forced to advance because of their notable failure to apprehend the villain concerned."
The Doctor looked on, incredulous. "At the price of five lives?"
"Perhaps," the guide suggested, mischief in his playful pause, "Perhaps, this case especially stings your professional pride. It is hard for a medical man to conscience the notion that these actions were, indeed, most likely those of a fellow?"
"He's not that kind of a Doctor," Ace called across from the pirouetting electronic facsimile of someone called 'Elizabeth Stride'. It hung in the air, rotating like a limp puppet on a string, the drab, grey fabric of her dressed peeling apart to expose her body. Hesitantly, Ace pressed the simula-switch. The body bloomed, bursting open into bright, glossy plumes of crimson, intestines rising as if at a charmer's melody, coiling about the grinning throat.
"Bloody hell!"
The Doctor closed his eyes for a moment, his frame seeming to shrink under the weight of all the carefully crafted misery around him. When they opened, his eyes were set upon those of the guide, looking past them at the brain beyond. They blazed with indignation.
"Quite," he hissed.
"But I assumed you were a physician?"
"I make things better." The Time Lord seemed wrong-footed, defensive. "If that's your definition of a doctor, then a doctor I am."
"Don't worry about the Professor," Ace explained, running up to join the two of them again. "He doesn't like having his qualifications challenged."
"Ace, that's un-called for!"
"For the record, though, mate," she added, her words intended for the Carrion but her frosty gaze set upon the Doctor's troubled expression, "He's a much better doctor than whoever did this lot. He can dissect a woman in seconds and never leave a mark. Makes that bloke look like an amateur."
She knew she would regret those words, and more likely still, be made to. Yet, wasn't it he who had taught her strength, the will and determination to fight back. He had opened her up alright, but it was only at times like this that she knew he was sometimes afraid of what he had found.
"Come on, Ace, we're leaving," he barked ungraciously, turning on his heel and lunging forward with his umbrella, stamping it in time with his hasty steps, the swing decisive and controlled.
Two words that the guide found quite unsuitable for the man he had just met.
"Is it true then?" Ace said at last. "That stuff the guide was saying about the street lights and police?"
There had been scarcely a word passed between them since they had boarded the TARDIS; the Doctor striding ahead, positively stabbing the key into the lock, and Ace, laggardly, throwing her shoulder bag in ahead of her as if she feared her companion might pounce upon the first thing to broach the heavy, roundelled doors. Even the omnipresent hum that permeated the console room walls seemed to take on a new significance, a manifestation of the heavy atmosphere of tension, thick and inhospitable, threatening to stifle any attempt at conversation.
The Doctor had spent the better part of an hour busying himself with housekeeping, dragging out an array of cleansing tools and launching into an aggressive and single-minded assault upon every nook and cranny he could find, mopping the floor, dusting switches and levers, polishing monitors until he could see his own face, stern and resolute, in their gleaming surfaces.
Ace felt as if she had never left home, except maybe to exchange one dysfunctional family environment for another. Her mother had used to do the same thing, throwing herself into cleaning, perking up pillows and cushions and scouring the cooker until her knuckles were raw. Whenever there was trouble underneath, people always obsessed about the surface.
She applied the self-same tactics with the Doctor as she had used to with her mother, simply sitting there, refusing to move, as if waiting her turn to be scrubbed back into acceptability again.
That was until he hesitated, pausing to wipe the dew of perspiration from his heavy eyebrows with his handkerchief, and looking about at the pristine sum of his efforts in surprise, as if unaware that it was his own handiwork. It was then, in the abrupt lull in his labours, that she spoke her first words since leaving The Atrocity Exhibition.
The Doctor looked across at her, the exhibition pamphlet still open in her hands, somewhat dazed and taken aback by the question.
He frowned, seemingly taking great care with his answer.
"Theoretically, it could be said to have had certain progressive effects upon society, but it's impossible to say that those advances would not have taken place sooner or later. I don't think you can justify manslaughter in its potential capacity as a catalyst for change."
Ace grinned, enjoying his evident caution. The great arbiter hated moral minefields, knowing it was safest to stand his ground than to advance the argument any further.
"So that's a yes, then," she urged. "I mean, based upon the evidence of history, that's got to be a yes, hasn't it?"
He frowned, taking a deep breath. "Ace," he growled, hastily, "Adolf Hitler was a tee-total dog-lover who espoused the virtues of vegetarianism. Are you suggesting we should go back and let him win the war in case he advanced the causes of clean-living and pet care?"
"He was short, too," she mumbled, wickedly.
"What's that supposed to mean?" the Time Lord snapped, shoving the handkerchief into his trouser pocket, and piercing her with a look.
Ace shoved herself upright and threw the pamphlet onto the console, only to pick it up again more thoughtfully.
"Oh, I don't know," she groaned. "I'm just curious." She looked over at him, watching his disquiet. "That's a good thing, right?"
"Ask the allegorical cat," came his retort. He picked up the mop and began to squeeze it dry into the steel bucket at his feet. Ace recognised the signs of resignation, the slouch of his shoulders, the dimness in his eyes. It was now or never, she supposed.
"Wouldn't you like to know who he was?"
"Not particularly," he whispered, turning away from her to open the cupboard in which he set about stowing the cleaning tools.
"Come on, Doctor," Ace cajoled. "What happened to the inquiring mind and the thirst for knowledge?"
"I know all I need to know. A madman butchered some poor unfortunates and made the best of an inefficient police force." He was muttering, almost as if to himself, his voice resounding in the confined space of the closet-space. "Putting a face to the man and a name to the face doesn't feel much like enlightenment to me."
Ace felt the pamphlet growing moist in her palm, the ink marking her fingers scarlet.
"Yeah, well, that's because you're not human," she countered. "And you're not a woman."
He slammed the cupboard door closed in frustration, whirling to face her and freezing as he saw the earnest expression upon her face. Sometimes he forgot she was an alien. In those rare moments when the realisation hit him, he wondered if this was how he often seemed to her. Unreasonable, fixated, his thoughts nebulous and beyond description.
She was right, of course. He could expound for hours upon her metabolism and anatomy, her genetic structure, her history and lineage. The evolution of her species was child's play for him. He could even poke about in the dark attic of her mind, tinker with her psyche and try to open her eyes to things that her eyes had never been meant to see.
But he could never understand her.
All he could understand was that this was somehow important to her, so important that she would fight him all the way, and if he did not relent then how could he ever hope to comprehend the reasons why this mattered. She was right. Curiosity always won the day.
His face softened, a kindly smile playing about his lips, trying to dispel his natural concern for what he might be agreeing to.
"It's what we call closure," Ace told him, looking genuinely sorry for any hurt she might have caused him. For all he had put her through, he was still her friend.
"I should never have taken you to that museum," he said, his voice sorrowful. He walked slowly towards her and took her hand, the clammy brochure between her palm and his.
"Doctor, it's not your fault. Ever since I stepped through that door, my life's been one long visit to museums. The only difference is, we see the bad stuff firsthand." She touched his face. "And look at me. I'm still standing. Stronger because of it all. I can handle this, really."
"I know," the Doctor conceded, a strange pride filling him. "I'm sorry, Ace."
She pinched his cheek playfully, watching his smile break through the dark clouds of his eyes.
"Alright then, Professor," she cheerily declared, "I'm going to find myself some Victorian togs. You set the co-ordinates and let's go and be the first to find out who he was."
"Or she," the Time Lord interrupted in mock horror. "Murder and mutilation are not the last bastions of inequality, Ace."
She laughed. "Okay, yeah, whoever it is, Jack or Jill or Jacqueline. Let's go see history in the making. Just like always."
She let go of his hand, tossing the crumpled flyer on the chair, and set off for her room, calling behind her, "And don't forget to change your jacket. You reek of Mister Sheen…"
The Doctor stood quite still for a moment, abashed for having been beaten into submission once again. He would never understand what made women tick, but he so loved a mystery.
He turned to the console and began to program their journey, using the details from exhibition's pamphlet for guidance, and absently trying to wipe the red stain from his hand.
"Now remember, Ace," the Doctor reiterated, "We are here as observers this time, not participants."
"Professor!" Ace whined, struggling to find the one comfortable posture that must surely have existed for wearers of the extravagant and torturous burden of Victorian garments. After a few moments, she surrendered to the fact that there were some things she would never know, deciding instead to limit her breathing to small, nervous gasps. No wonder they always seemed to be fainting.
"I'm just saying…" her companion retaliated.
"You've been 'just saying' that since before we left the TARDIS. I've got the message, okay? Look but don't touch, okay?"
"It's just important, that's all." He adjusted the felt cap he had felt was less incongruous than his usual straw model, and pulled the lapels of his dark tweed jacket up against the chill of the night air. "This isn't the kind of history we're under free reign to tamper with. Frankly, I find field trips such as these rather dull by comparison."
Ace giggled nervously, watching a group of beer-brave sailors haranguing a woman no older than herself, all looking for a port to dock into for the evening. She felt the urge to go over and help the poor girl, fight her corner for her in a world where she was both vassal and vessel, and in so doing, Ace knew why the Doctor was so insistent she knew her place in this world. "You just love to fiddle," she said distantly, feeling her fists clench as the tars began to speak with their bare hands and boots when money did them no good.
"So did Nero. Come on, Ace, it's over this way, I think."
No museum or photograph could have prepared Ace for the visceral reality of Whitechapel in 1888. It was surprisingly busy for a crime scene, noisy with pubs, drunken songs, and dismissive obscenities filling the air. There was no fog, that was the first thing she had noticed, but a heavy industrial smog had charred the clouds, through which a sickly yellow moon cast its unhealthy light.
The cobbles were a nightmare to traverse, especially in the strictures of her period boots, laced even higher than her beloved Doc Marten's and tougher on her calves. All around them lay the debris and refuse of a city district not given to hygiene and civic pride. Vegetables from the day's street-market stalls lay rotting in the street, occasionally snatched up in humility by passers-by, heedless of the horse dung and dog dirt that lay strewn all around it. The stench made Ace sick to her stomach, and for once she was grateful that her garments only permitted her the shortest of breaths.
The Doctor cocked an ear. Even despite the riotous nocturnal activity around them, he heard Big Ben, the monolithic timepiece whose tolls pierced the air just as its ancient structure, driven like a stake through the city's heart. There was something odd about the notion that it had marked time throughout the highs and lows of London life, presiding over it all, head in the clouds, its face impassive and untouched. Just like the people who sat beneath it, passing their laws and their sherry, oblivious to the suffering of their own people. Perhaps, if the Ripper's crimes did resound throughout their world like the peals of that great bell, shaking them from their indifference and making them hear, maybe the guide had made a valid point. But then, he had the benefit of four thousand years of hindsight.
"Three o'clock," the Doctor announced. "We've got less than half an hour to find a suitable vantage point, Ace. We better get a move on."
In the distance, a woman screamed, a shrill, hysterical plea for help.
Ace started, but she felt the Doctor's hand upon her arm, restraining her.
"False alarm," he whispered, his eyes busily scanning both the street names and hostile scrutiny of the small bands of pimps and roughnecks. "It's not time yet."
Despite all the Doctor's instructions about passive observation, Ace was finding it harder and harder to put aside her feelings for these people. She had never ignored a cry for mercy in her life, and she wondered if she really did lack the peculiar kind of bravery it took to stand by and let people suffer. Maybe this had been a stupid idea, after all. Could she really watch a woman torn apart and do nothing?
"Doctor," Ace whimpered, pausing in her tracks and closing her eyes. She warred with herself not to look down as she had done as a girl, eyes avoiding his, shamed by momentary weakness.
He put an arm around her, his hand squeezing her arm in reassurance.
"You'll be fine, Ace. It takes more strength to let things take their course." She opened her eyes, taking as deep a gulp of air as she could, choking on the miasma of decaying herbage and animal waste. "If it helps," he confided, "You're doing better than I am."
Slowly, he led her along the route to Buck's Row, taking her hand and talking about the most abstract details of Victorian life he could muster, distracting her from their steady promenade towards the death of Mary Ann Nicholls.
She interrupted him, flinching away from a gang of ruffians fighting amongst themselves for a pawnbroker's shilling. "What do you know about her?" she asked.
"Mary Nicholls?" he confirmed. "Not much. Probably less than you after the exhibition."
"Come off it, Professor. You always know more than you let on." Ace implored him with a glance. "I want her to be real. To be a person. Tell me what you know."
The Doctor drew a breath, an act that often symbolised his dredging through the vast knowledge and experience at his disposal.
"Alright," he began, as they stepped into a small aperture in and emerged onto Whitechapel Road, "Her name is Mary Ann Nicholls, born Mary Ann Walker some forty-three years ago. She was known as Polly to her friends, mother to five children and wife to a philanderer called William, I recall. He took the children with him, breaking her heart and sending her deep into the gin bottles of the public house we passed back there. Of course, he gave her money from time to time, a pittance by any standards. It was the least he could do, a quantity in which he evidently specialised. She never saw her children again. Perhaps he felt some guilt that she has spent the last six years of her life trading favours for pennies. By all accounts, her life had struggled to take its toll upon her looks. High cheekbones, beautiful grey eyes, slight figure. Pretty Polly, to be sure. She's been a victim for longer than just tonight, Ace."
He stopped in his tracks, taking in the surroundings. It was quieter, practically silent but for the echoes from the bawdyhouses and domestic disharmony of the tenement buildings surrounding them. A single gas lamp strived in vain to cast any kind of glow upon the end of the street.
The Time Lord pointed to a break in the chain of dilapidated accommodations.
"Buck's Row, Ace. I think, from now on, we need to keep a very low profile indeed."
Blushing, Ace sharply realised exactly what people would have thought of them, an older man and a young woman, walking the streets of night in search of a dark alley. Worse, was the realisation that if that was what she looked to others, then what might the Ripper make of her? She knew from The Atrocity Exhibition that he had already shown his capacity for a double-event, as he had called it himself, and for once she trembled at the thought that it might not be herself that the Doctor feared might be about to change history, but the killer himself.
"He's here," she found herself saying, grasping the Time Lord's hand so tight he flinched noticeably.
The Doctor's eyes, dark and unrevealing, examined the path ahead of them.
"Very possibly," he replied.
Ace wanted to stamp her feet against the cold, but knew better than to give away their position. After a few seconds of indecision, the Doctor had settled upon a small passageway that gave them the best outlook across to the junction of Buck's Row and Whitechapel Road, whilst providing them with natural cover from the feeble attentions of the single gas lamp reaching out in vain to light the surrounding area. It was cramped, damp and stank of urine, the ground spattered with more than that. She did her best to focus on anything but their secluded corner of Buck's Row.
The Doctor, once concealed, seemed to want nothing more to do with their mission, squatting down on his haunches with his back to the wall, oblivious to the human debris at their feet, and facing the opposite direction to the point at which he believed the Ripper would strike.
Withdrawing not only from sight, but from conversation, he had not uttered a word once he had set the scene for Ace, despite her numerous attempts to engage his interest. She was rapidly growing hoarse from whispering to him, and unsettled by his strange, fugue state.
Without once checking his pocket watch, he suddenly broke his silence to proclaim, "It's three-thirty, Ace. There'll be a bulls-eye lamp pointing in your direction within a matter of seconds, so keep your head down. Constable Neil's had a long night, but his senses are still keen."
Sure enough, before Ace could respond, a lone, uniformed figure stepped into the partition between the crumbling housing and the wall that faced them, the beady searchlight beam of his lantern cutting through the darkness. The light passed swiftly over both Ace and the Time Lord, who inhaled sharply through his teeth, shrinking back against the dank wall.
Ace clung to the brickwork, hearing her nails scratch the red clay. She hadn't even been aware of holding her breath until the figure moved on, gasping in a lungful of stale, icy air just as she felt her head growing light and giddiness had threatened to send her toppling to the floor.
She heard the Doctor once more.
"He will be back in ten minutes." Ace was silent, disquieted by her companion's casual commentary. He sounded no different to the guide at The Atrocity Exhibition, informed, indifferent, inscrutable. She felt as if he was taking the lack of participation to extremes, completely removing himself from what they were here to witness, more aloof than impartial. Had he really objected so strongly to her wishes that the only course of action he could allow himself was to remain completely uninvolved?
"By that time," he went on, "Mary Ann Nicholls will be dead. Be careful, Ace."
As if cued by the Time Lord's words, Ace discerned the unsteady footsteps of a woman, heavy with fatigue despite her small frame. She sounded as though she had been walking all her life.
Dead on her feet, Ace thought, hating herself for it. What a place to find rest, her torn body unveiled for all the world to see, the inhabitants of Whitechapel able to see clearly where countless men had paid to go before.
Ace felt a pang of shame. She had been no better, playing out Mary's final moments in an endless, electronic loop. A woman, anonymous in life, made famous by the ministrations of an equally anonymous maniac, achieving a bitter immortality. She would be there, a million light years away and thousands of years from now, rebuilt in electrons, her death captured and replayed in whimsical cycles, a gaudy nursery mobile for the kind of child who strips a fly of its wings out of listless boredom.
"We shouldn't be here, Professor," Ace opined. "We have to go."
The Doctor, who she now saw was staring down at the spattered cobbles, arms folded and waiting, answered her softly, "You have to stay now, Ace. There's a reason we're here." His eyes drifted up to meet hers. She saw tears streaming down his face, glinting like silver. "Watch and learn."
"Cold night," she heard him say.
Mary Ann Nicholls hesitated, her eyes straining to focus. Cheap gin and scant light would have made a hazy silhouette of the man, but she might have recognised that he was something more than she was used to having chase her, a gentleman's cologne, the fine cut of his clothes, a man of education judging by his words and manner.
She was too brave from having drunk so much, her natural instincts nullified, suspicions allayed by the chance to earn enough for something more substantial for breakfast than another shot of gut rot.
Ace wept, biting hard on her knuckles not to sob, to cry out to her, to scream until the brickwork rained down upon her.
"Don't," the Doctor instructed quietly. "Remember the streetlights and the votes for women and the policemen stationed every mile." For all it could be derision, she heard the sincerity in his voice. Now that she couldn't bear to be right, he finally agreed with her.
"She's not a bad person," Ace said, her voice cracking with emotion as she watched the stranger lead Mary Ann Nicholls into the shelter of Buck's Row, gently taking her by the arm to steady her. She was giggling, flirting happily. For that one moment, she sounded happy, hopeful. Perhaps she was thinking of what the money could buy for her children.
"Neither is he, Ace," came the Doctor's voice. "Don't torture yourself. This has to happen. It's always happened."
"He's a bastard," she hissed, barely able to control her anger, her frustration. What the hell was the Doctor talking about? Not a bad person? This man was a bloody monster…
In seconds, it was over.
The shadows had saved Ace the worst of it. She heard Mary Ann's laughter turn into a series of frantic gasping gulps, horribly wet. There were quick glints of light as the knife went quickly about its work, unzipping her with unnatural dexterity. The Ripper pulled a handkerchief from his trouser pocket, placing it over his mouth against the stench of the pockets of steam he was releasing with every touch of his blade.
At last, he rose to his feet, unsteady, reaching out to the wall for support.
"It's nearly over," she heard the Doctor whisper, almost as if to the stranger rather than his companion. "Time to go back now."
The figure responded.
He was looking directly at them, breathing heavily, wiping the blade on the handkerchief, and sliding it carefully inside his jacket. Ace was close to breaking cover, desperate to see the face of the man who had just wrenched the life from this poor forgotten woman.
In the end, she didn't have to.
The Ripper averted his eyes, raising a shaking, dripping hand to shield him from her scornful glower.
The Doctor spoke once more, his words matching exactly those of the figure as it called out to her.
"Forgive me, Ace…"
And then she felt the Time Lord's hand upon her, his fingers reaching for her forehead, their touch warm and dark and closing down everything but the night that reached into her and carried her into sleep.
She woke in her room.
"You've been asleep for days," the Doctor told her, sat upon her bedside, gently applying the cold damp kiss of a soaked handkerchief to her temple.
The sensation of his fingers on her skull made her recoil, images flashing through her mind, too quick to see. There was a scarlet stain upon his hand.
She lifted herself up, propping herself against the head of her bed, realising she was moving to get away from him, nausea and panic rising to the surface of her waking world.
"How many days?"
He thought for a moment, as if contemplating the need for either lie or truth.
"Five," he said, watching for her reaction.
"Five days?" she asked, uneasily. "Or do you mean five nights, Doctor?"
He let out a sigh that seemed too big for normal lungs, his eyes closing to hold back the darkness within.
"I had no choice, Ace." Not risking her glare, the Doctor got up from the bed and walked to the door, not opening it, just standing there.
She wanted to get up, get out of the bed and shake him by the throat, tears running down their faces, hating him for making her hate him, but most of all for what she had seen him do. Yet she was too weak, and he knew it. Whatever mind trick he had played on her, it had left her drained, strong enough only to listen. That was how he always liked her. "You can't even look me in the eyes, can you?"
"No," he admitted faintly.
"I thought I knew you," she screamed suddenly, making him flinch. "But I don't, do I?"
"Sometimes, I surprise even myself, Ace."
"You killed them." She spat at him. "You bloody murdered those women, and you knew you did it all along, didn't you?"
He turned, his head hung low, eyes streaming with tears.
"Not at first," he replied quietly. "But gradually, as I grew closer to myself, I could tell what I had done. It was like some terrible déjà vu, only not. I only know it had to be done. That it had been done."
Ace couldn't find an emotion to fill the void he had given her, nothing to fill the loss she felt for herself, the Doctor, those five, lonely, tragic women.
"Why, Doctor?" she said at last, fighting against all her revulsion to understand, to make sense of his betrayal of everything she thought he stood for. Without him, what was there left to hope for?
Still, he stood in total silence, barely taking a breath.
"Is there even a reason good enough or is this more of your 'holier than thou', 'need to know', Gallifreyan bullshit of yours?"
"You know the reasons, Ace. If I hadn't done it, who else was there to do it? We were alone. Mary Ann Nicholls was going to walk straight back home and history would never be the same again. All those advances, all that turmoil, even as far as the Crown itself, shaken out of complacency by the need for change. Change for the better. All gone if it hadn't been me."
"But it would always have been you!" Her head was reeling, thoughts flitting about her skull like moths round the flame of her anger. "Wouldn't it?"
He bit his lip hard enough to make it bleed. He felt sick with his fresh familiarity with the taste.
"I have no idea. Time's not an easy ride sometimes. There are bumps, unexpected twists and turns. Perhaps our being there alerted whoever it should have been, made him think twice, gave him a second chance to rethink his intentions. He could be at the bottom of the Thames or doing missionary work in Africa by now. I'm his sin-eater now."
"Why take me there? Why did you put me through that? Don't you see what it's done to me? To us?"
He reflected upon the question, wiping his eyes dry. "Can you feel how cold the TARDIS is now? I've let her down."
"What about me, Doctor? I trusted you, and you took me there knowing what I was going to see. That poor woman -" Her voice was snatched from her by a wracking sob.
"You had to see, Ace. You were growing too much like me. Seeing the big picture at the expense of the individuals like Mary and Liz. You came close to justifying their deaths with talk of the benefits to history. That's not you, Ace. That's me. Without you to guide me, I'm lost. My moral compass."
"There's no compass in existence that can bring you back from where you've been, Doctor.You've got centuries of looking in the mirror and seeing him there, looking back at you. Your very own exhibition with yourself as the crowning glory."
Her hatred was palpable, like the heat from a fever coming off her in unbearable waves. The room seemed stuffed with anger, bearing down on him. He looked old.
"I did what I could to protect the timeline. I'll deal with the consequences in my own time," he sighed, running a trembling hand through his hair and looking up to the ceiling.
He left her there, walking the passages of his ship alone, trying to remember the names of all those souls he had saved in his time. But they weren't there anymore. Just five ordinary names that would never leave him.
The ones he could never have saved.
He added his name to that list, and kept on walking.
There was silence throughout the TARDIS, the corridors empty and cold, the organic hum barely a murmur. The time rotor fell still. The barren, twisting wastelands of the Time Vortex buffeted and chafed it's wooden, blue skin, as the timeship hung there, waiting and hoping and praying in it's own way. It wanted to be clean once more.
There were some secrets, and some guilt, that even infinite spaces could not hide.