Part 2 of 7
Zeta's eyelids slip open. Everyone gasps. Her eyes are rolled back to show just the whites. "Rejjak," she moans low, "Rejjak… his name is Rejjak… he's here… he's here an' he's laughin'."
Richard blinks and looks to his officers but they only have eyes for Zeta. OK, I know I promised not to be too rudely skeptical but this is a step too far! As the tension ratchets up and the darkness deepens in the room, he waits for someone to say something, to admit to the joke, but no one does. Finally he can't contain himself any longer and scoffs, "Oh, come off it, it's not Rejjak… it's Red Jack! Nice try, Ms. Akande, but I'm not buying it."
At his team's blank looks, he frowns. "Don't pretend you don't know, everyone knows who Red Jack is." Now the team gives him puzzled looks. Something about their stillness says they're waiting for clarification so he mutters, "You know, Red Jack… as in Jack? THE Jack?"
Zeta moans again as if in pain. "He wants… he wants t' palaver with the head copper."
Richard snorts, sure now his leg is being pulled. "I just bet he does but, as I said, I'm not falling for it. Red Jack is one of the deepest mysteries in London's past along with the fate of the two princes in the Tower. How you discovered my interest in this particular case is beyond me but I will not be played for a fool. This joke isn't funny, it's offensive and in very poor taste."
Zeta just sways as the candles dance shadows on the walls and the incense smoke swirls into fantastic shapes as she whispers over and over… "Rejjak… Rejjak… he wants you…"
Camille has had enough. If this keeps up, any romantic notions she had for the evening will be ruined! She tries to ease up Richard's grip on her hand. "OK, I give up, who's Red Jack?"
Richard snorts, "Why, Jack the Ripper, who else?" He sees the surprise on her face; it seems she hasn't done her homework. Well, he's had enough. He sits up and barks to the dark that now seems to hover above their heads, "Alright, if you're Jack the Ripper, the serial murderer of Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly then what's your name, hmm? Come on, answer me! It's time to confess, Jack!"
Camille shudders. Those names… those NAMES! Why do I feel like water trapped in a deep well where ripples run out and rush back in to crash and override each other? Why is the air suddenly full of whispers? She tightens her grip on Dwayne and Richard, suddenly afraid. Dwayne looks to her in silent question but Richard is oblivious in his righteous indignation.
Zeta shudders and murmurs, "He sez… he sez he'll strike you a bargain. He never got t' face his hunters so he'll tell you his name if you're man enough t' meet him face t' face."
Richard chuffs rudely, playing along with the game. "Fine with me! Let's get this charade over with and…" his words choke off in a guttural gasp. He jerks as if shocked then rears up out of his chair; head thrown back, mouth open in a soundless shout. He twists in Camille and Dwayne's grasp, freezes, then his eyes roll up and he crashes down onto the tabletop with only his team members' grip keeping him from breaking his nose.
The team start to their feet but Zeta rasps out, "Don' break the circle!" She shakes her head as if to clear it then leans forward and whispers, "Inspector? Inspector? Can you hear me?" Receiving no answer, she stares upwards and tries again, "Jack? Jack? Can YOU hear me?" The team is frozen at a half crouch, waiting and beginning to sweat.
Finally, Camille sinks back into her chair and gasps, "Zeta? His hand… his hand is cold as ice." She shakes Richard's hand, no response, then harder, making his upper body jostle the table top. Still nothing. The officers try calling. There's no answer. Richard Poole is gone.
The team look up in worried fright to Zeta for assurance but she has none. "He's with Jack now," she intones in a low voice as silence falls down around them like fog, like a thick sulphurous 19th century London pea-souper fog.
Over There
He's been yanked forward from wherever he had been, and he now lies face down in a gutter, and not a clean one, either. Nice.
After a moment of realizing he's not hurt, and not even muddy despite the rain dribbling down, he gets his feet under him and stands up. Not that that does much good as it's dark, and the only lights are the glints of yellow reflected on wet stone from upper windows. Off in the distance a lone streetlamp stands clear and shining almost brightly, until a surge of fog from somewhere begins swallowing it, piece by piece, from the ground up. He casts about quickly and just manages to discover he's in a street scene right out of an old photograph before the fog catches hold of his ankles and then his calves, and he's engulfed in its cold, odorific clutches.
Richard Poole automatically brings his jacket around him and buttons it, even as he peers about and hacks some of the stink of offal, decay and human waste out of his throat. I've been drugged, he thinks. As soon as I wake up, there's going to be hell to pay! I'll get Forensics to check the candles and the incense and then I'll throw the book at Ms. Akande! With that voodoo woman going on about Jack the Ripper, well, what else would my violated mind call up but Victorian London?
In the meantime, he's curious. He walks to the streetlamp, since that is the only landmark he can make out. Once there, Poole finds himself at the junction of two more-or-less major roads, crossing at a not-quite-square angle. His knowledge of London makes him scan the building to his left, just below the level of the lamp, for the sign. Aldgate Street.
He's got it now. He's standing with his back to the Thames and the distant Tower of London, looking north up Commercial Street into the very heart of Whitechapel. Well, he's damned if – wait, make that 'seriously inconvenienced' – if he's going to let this hocus-pocus rattle him. Right now he's the closest he'll ever get to being 'on-scene' to one of the biggest cold cases he'd ever obsessed over, and he may as well see for himself how well his own suppositions fit the facts.
Aldgate had seemed empty. Commercial Street is slightly better-lit, and Poole knows that, according to Booth's 1889 London Poverty Map, this had been a somewhat prosperous thoroughfare and should now be crowded with promenaders, even in this drizzly fog. But he sees no one; at least, he sees nothing he can identify as a person.
Although there are eyes watching – pinned to him actually, as he proceeds north. His policeman's instinct feels them pricking him like so many tiny thorns. He knows he's being shadowed… but by whom? Or what?
There are also patches of low-level vibration, clustering around the taverns, restaurants, meeting places. He steps through them as he passes the darkened shop fronts. Eventually he realizes they would be sound, if they were loud enough, or unmuffled enough, for him to make them out; the sound of merrymaking, of many voices. Closer to the cobbles the vibe is a periodic distant ticking, which would be the hooves and wheels of passing horse-drawn cabs, had he really been back in Victoria's day.
On Wentworth Street he pauses, blinking. A shadow passes him – no, it's not substantial enough to be a shadow, more like a trail of smoke... no, a stain on the glow of light from a lamp post. Once he sees that he sees others, many more; vague smudges on the foul air, eddying around him or occasionally through him. This copy of London is populated after all, only they're in their plane of reality, and he's in quite another.
Finally, at White's Row, he knows he's approaching one of the black holes of Whitechapel, the infamous "worst street in London" according to the Poverty Map makers: Dorset Street, the bottom of the mire of misery that destitution produces.
With that thought in his head it's odd that, as he makes the turn into Dorset, he can hear the distant sound of someone singing a thin, high tune; plaintive, but attempting to be jaunty. Possibly very much like those who had had no choice but to exist in this place.
He pauses a moment, looking for the drifting smudges he suspects are people, but the lamps here are practically useless and the fog obscures what might be seen. The brightest glare comes from Crispin Street at the opposite end of Dorset, where a sullen streetlamp seems as far off as a hostile planet, very low in the sky.
Poole steps carefully off the pavement and picks his way over the cobbles half-submerged in a mixture of rain and sludge. A hundred paces along and on the north side of Dorset, the first archway into the wall of shabby buildings will be...
Somehow he makes out the sign above the dim arch past No. 26's barred doors: Miller's Court. The passageway beyond it is roofed and therefore is pitch black, and as far as his recollections of the case go there are no lamps in the Court itself.
But if that's so then why, as he sets foot in the echoing brick tunnel, does he see for just a moment at the far end, something more solid than any shape he had encountered so far – the silhouette of a woman, in the correct costume, about his height, a cocky bonnet atop her head.
It gives him pause for a moment or two, but as the thing winks out as quickly as it appeared, Poole tells himself it was a mirage brought on by the miasma in this place – whatever this place is – and sloshes forward as firmly as he can into Miller's Court, the scene of the last bloody act of the drama that was the Ripper Murders.
END – part 2
Note:
Philanthropist Charles Booth's (1840-1916) Descriptive Map of London Poverty was created in 1888-89 and updated in 1898-99, the result of a door-to-door survey which used local knowledge of police, social workers and School Board Visitors (truant officers) in an attempt to define not only where the poor lived but why they were poor. The result was a series of finely graded overlays of built-up London, differentiating street blocks and even sides of a street by occupation, work status, ethnicity and regularity of income. Richard has studied these maps as part of his inquiries into the Ripper murders.