Author's note: This one is a bit grisly, so fair warning. I almost considered not putting it up because it's sort of jarring when considered with some of the comedy pieces.
Jack
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November 9, 1888
Merlin, once of the fabled Camelot - or William Greyson (close as he could get to Gaius's son) as he was known in this time - had a fashionable home in Belgravia, several summer houses throughout the country, and spent his time in a glittering world of operas and theatre where titled gentlemen chased after wealthy American heiresses. It was a life of pageantry and privilege, the Gilded Age, and yet at this moment, close to 4:00 in the morning, here he was to be found stalking through the sordid streets of Spitalfields, the worst criminal rookery in the city of London.
It was a terrifying, hellish place, this mean and bleak parish in the Whitechapel district. A place forgotten by the Gods. A surreal, nightmarish world of swirling lantern light or brazier fires casting spectral flickers against the fog and pollution in the air, where a great seething mass of humanity was crammed one on top of another in dark, huddled low houses. An benighted place where dark streets led off into a thousand darker, twisting alleyways, where all the arches were damp and dripping and the air was pervaded by an ever-present stench from the sewage and rubbish that people simply threw in the street. A world of furtive shadows and crumbling walls and the constant racket of people crying, screaming and brawling in the streets.
If Merlin was known to any in this area, it was as the kindly doctor who sated his upper class guilt by volunteering in a clinic once a week to treat the broken arms and split lips of women whose men folk liked to discipline with their hands, none guessing for a moment how familiar he himself was with poverty. Others - strangers - might have pegged him as some toff slumming by looking to get his leg over with one of the cheap slatternly whores the district was known for, but neither was true.
He'd been on a mission. Spitalfields, along with crime and degradation, possessed a high number of pawn shops, mostly run by immigrants from Eastern Europe, where oftentimes books came in which were of frank interest to an ancient warlock.
Magic books.
Some of these he read, but others he searched out in order to put them in a place of safety, for some of these books could be highly dangerous. This particular one he wasn't sure about; he definitely felt the magic radiating off of it as it lay snug in its hiding place beneath his greatcoat, but was it malevolent in and of itself or was it merely powerful, the evil coming more from the nature of those who used it?
Whatever it was, it was certainly having an affect on his own magic. His sensitivity as a seer - never as strong as the legends suggested in comparison to his other powers - was pulsing through him tonight, racing to break free. There were no actual visions, but…
There, for instance, by that public house he just passed - The Ten Bells! Something had happened. Coming to a stop, he focused his power on the spot.
A woman. He did not see her exactly, but what happened came to him all the same, the knowledge suddenly just there in his head as though through intuition. She'd stood there, waiting for a customer. A man had come forward and they'd gone off together.
Such a thing was hardly a rare occurrence - even now there was a heavily made up woman, reeking of gin and staggering her way towards him with a calculating leer - so why was this different? Why did this instance send such a chill through him? Merlin dashed away, not noticing the angry look on the present woman who'd been counting on him as a customer, nor her sneering dismissal of him as a "lily-livered pup, likely a pouf n' all."
A mindless compulsion drove Merlin urgently, his quick stride nearly breaking into a run as he followed the psychic trail. Down Commercial Street he rushed, heedless of where he was going. Past Brushfield, then down Dorset Street, faster and faster, an oily, slick feeling roiling in his stomach as the foulness of what he was sensing grew.
He came to a halt at Miller's Court, at the back of 26 Dorset.
Merlin could feel the man's insanity. It buzzed and undulated like a massive swarm of feeding insects in his mind. Crossing the street swiftly, he ducked into a shadow. All senses open now, he probed outwards mentally as he crept towards the source of the evil.
The monster was busy, fully concentrating on his grotesque work, unaware someone was closing in.
Merlin reached his mind out further. There was an overlay of extreme terror still resonating, but it was like a fading stain on the cobblestones and decaying walls, not bursting with energy like something alive anymore. She's dead, then, he realized.
Bile churned in his gullet as he followed the intangible path to number 13. A window was broken by the entrance, so he stuck his hand through the hole to unlatch the door from the inside. As he did, he was struck by another intuitive picture of the woman herself doing the same thing many times before because she'd lost her key. It was a small, human glimpse into the woman's life and it made him feel a connection to her for a moment.
It was a single, furnished room, maybe twelve-foot square, with a bed, three tables and a chair, and a painting above the fireplace. Poor though it was, in an area where hundreds shoved together in common lodging houses, paying tuppence for the right to sleep standing up between two ropes, it could probably have been counted as half-decent. But this was not the first thing Merlin saw.
The fire was raging brightly in the grate (later he would read that it'd been fueled by the victim's own clothes and would wonder why such an irrelevant fact stuck so stubbornly in his mind forevermore). Silhouetted against the light it cast was a blood-soaked creature in a leather apron, holding a knife more than half a foot long and goggling dumbly at the apparition of Merlin in the doorway.
Without even a conscious thought or the tiniest spike in his power, Merlin stopped time.
Revulsion surged in an instant and Merlin nearly screamed. In a life nearly fourteen hundred years long, he'd never seen anything like this. Battles, wars, even torture, but this gruesome exhibit was frenzied, degrading… inhuman. For the first time, he regretted ever becoming a doctor - it made the horror all that much more terrible to see when he could name the exact anatomical ravages that had been perpetrated on this poor soul.
The thing - the woman - was lying naked and exposed in the middle of the bed, her head turned on the left cheek. Blood saturated the bedclothes and soaked the floor in a large puddle. The carnage was hideous; 'eviscerated' was the only word Merlin could come up with for what had happened to her. Her breasts had been sliced off and removed, and the inter-costals between the fourth, fifth and sixth ribs cut through, leaving the contents of the thorax visible, except for the heart, which appeared to be missing. The surface of her abdomen from the costal arch to the pubes had been cut off (oh Gods, and were those flaps of tissue and muscle what was sitting on the table?), and the abdominal cavity emptied of its viscera. The poor creature's right thigh had been denuded in the front to the bone and the left thigh stripped of skin fascia and muscles to the knee. Her arms and the calves of her legs had been mutilated with jagged cuts and her neck cut through right down to the vertebrae. And her face, oh her face! he cried inwardly at the sight of it - hacked almost completely off, it was though the monster had robbed her of more than just her life - he had taken her very claim to being a human being, to being a person who lived and loved and walked the Earth like everyone else.
Merlin looked to the man, this monster. Leather Apron, he was called.
Jack the Ripper.
Rationality fled the warlock's mind and he released his hold on time. His eyes blazed gold and the fire leaped from the grate like a living thing, leaving the monster Jack to scream and writhe as he burned.
It took but a heartbeat for the magical fire to consume the monster so fully that not even ash remained.
-x-
Merlin had no memories of events afterwards until some hours later, when he came back to senses to find himself caught up in the crowds watching the spectacle of the annual Lord Mayor's Day celebrations.
As the Lord Mayor passed in his gilded equipage on his way to Westminster to be presented to the Lord Chief Justice, Merlin reflected on his unwitting role as executioner.
Sin was a nebulous concept to Merlin. He understood it as matter of right or wrong, but was less clear of how he felt towards it as an offence to a higher power. Therefore, in the midst of the cheering crowds, he found himself evaluating his actions as per his own being and judgement rather than anything else.
He knew that setting himself up as judge, jury and executioner was a dangerously slippery slope and certainly not one he was comfortable with. Not to mention a significant part of him wondered if he was truly naïve or not to believe that killing was always wrong, no matter what.
Yet he could not deny that destiny had thrown him into the role more than once. He'd been but seventeen and barely in Camelot a day the first time he'd killed someone. Yes, he'd done it to protect Arthur, and yes, he'd had no time to think of anything better, but that still didn't change the facts. He had killed Mary Collins. Could he have done something else? Perhaps. However - while he didn't want to fall on the excuse that in some situations there was no choice at all - in this hard world those choices were sometimes very small and there was no denying that hesitation could kill. Especially when protecting yourself or others.
But was that what this was? Yes, he'd stopped a monster, just as he'd often done before. But this monster was a man and it wasn't quite self-defence. Nor was it exactly saving someone in immediate danger. Undoubtedly, Merlin had saved the lives of the women the monster might have gone on to kill, but he also couldn't forget that once a man takes the law into his own hands, it is so easy to become a monster oneself. And with his magic and immortality that was already a narrow tightrope to walk.
So what was the answer? In all his many, many years, Merlin had never fully decided. Were there times when he had, if not a right to kill, then at least a pass not to avoid it? Was destroying monsters perhaps even his destiny? Why else had he been given a tremendous power and then thrown into so many situations where it was called for? What, after all, had lead him to the scene of the horror last night but this gift from the Gods? If the Gods wished him to resist the temptation, then why put him in circumstances where his killing someone protected the innocent?
The crowds began to disperse and Merlin started off to make his weary way home, mind still turning over and over. It was an old question: what was right, to kill to protect or to stay true to the values he felt important? How could he have saved Arthur - by being a better man or a harder one? In that one idea was the answer to his existence, to his very purpose in life, and yet it was still unknowable.
In the end, he settled for the bare facts. What sort of person he should be would be tomorrow's question; right now, the only regrets he felt about what he'd done the night before were practical ones. Namely, that by foolishly incinerating the body of the monster, there was now no way to tell the authorities and alleviate the fears of the city. He was also worried that someone innocent might be taken in for the Ripper's crimes and so he vowed to watch the papers for news.
But, until then, Merlin searched within and determined that he was still - mostly - the same man as before. Over the centuries, he'd become more of a supernatural being, finding it harder and harder to relate to the dying mortals around him at times, but he was essentially the same soul he'd ever been. Idealists weren't saints. "There is not a righteous man on Earth, who does what is right and never sins."* Everyone slipped, sometimes grievously, but that didn't have to change the core nature of their being. Not if they didn't let it by growing complacent or arrogant.
He reached his front door, but then paused.
"Ah, but that's the thing, isn't it?" he sighed.
He let himself in.
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* Ecclesiastes 7:20