Part 3 of 7

He knows the place like the back of his own hand. He had built a scale model of it out of the bricks his mum had given him on a birthday long ago, to her horror and his dad's delight. He emerges from under the fetid brick barrel arch into the open air to see, as he expected, that the Court is a crevasse only a meter wider than the passage, and lit only with the dim candle glow from a few of the not-boarded-up windows. It runs some fifteen meters ahead to a blank wall and is hemmed in by two-storey houses; decrepit, foul and propped up with discarded rags, decaying food and who knows what other filth.

The singing had seemed to be getting louder but has stopped abruptly. To Poole's immediate right is the door to No. 13 Miller's Court, the one-room dwelling place, and the slaughterhouse, of Mary Jane Kelly, the last certain victim of Jack the Ripper.

Poole takes a moment to orient himself, recalling the details of the model he had built, imposing his knowledge on this foreign space. Across the Court from No. 13 is No. 1, the residence of Julia Vanturney, charwoman, and her partner Harry Owen, according to her testimony at the Coroner's Inquest on the death of Mary Jane Kelly. Next to them in No. 2 would be the Keylers and their pro tem guest, laundress Sarah Lewis, with Mary Ann Cox, self-described 'unfortunate' who liked wandering about at night in the rain, at No. 5 on the left at the end of the Court...

Poole steps squarely into a puddle as he moves forward to verify all this, pauses to shake away excess water – strangely non-existent, now he thinks about it – and jumps in the next moment at a sudden noiseless flare to his left. There WAS a lamp in Miller's Court, he remembers now as he glances up at it, on the house wall between Nos. 1 and 2. He has just verified this when something else shoves it out of his mind.

Once, when he was a child staying with his grandparents in their centuries-old farmhouse on the Welsh Border, he had wakened in his allotted room in the middle of the night to know, without a doubt, that something very, very evil was standing in the room between him and the door. His back was to it and he had not had the nerve to roll over and look upon whatever it was, something he had never really regretted not doing.

That ordeal had only lasted for a few soul-searing minutes, though it had seemed like forever. Now, as a grown man, Poole is having the same experience, and he knows he has no choice but to turn around and look.

It's not a smudge, or a shadow, or a solid shape. It writhes; that is the only way Poole can describe it, as it fills up the entrance to the passage where he had seen the shape of a woman moments before. If there is a colour tinting its darkness, he can't name it. At some seconds it might be a man, at others it's like nothing he can recognize or even imagine. Only one thing about it is constant; it's advancing, in a circuitous, shifting way, like a predator attempting to cut off all avenues of escape.

Words ooze out of the air. "So yawr the head rozzer?" The silky wet voice may be coming from it, or from somewhere near it, or from nowhere, or from Poole's own imagination. No, strike that; he can't possibly imagine anything as dead as this sounds. "Pretty 'un fawr a bloke, aren't yawr?"

This isn't real, Poole tells himself, even as he shifts his weight to try and avoid it getting any nearer. Things like this don't exist. It's not real; it's some sick prank that Zeta woman is playing on me. How did she know I had a professional interest in Jack the Ripper? Who could have told her? If I thought for a moment Camille knew... if she's been digging through my things... if she's seen my private files, my notes, my thoughts… oh, glory in heaven, I'm going to be sick!

He isn't sick, though, he hasn't got time. His whole focus now is in keeping distance between this thing and himself, despite it not being...

"Oh, I'm real, I am, ducks. Real enough t' hold me darlin'." The gleam of a knife blade, some 15cm long slips into view, perhaps held in a hand, or a claw, or a tentacle, or not held at all. Is the shape holding the knife… or is the knife holding the shape? Poole can't tell. "We never done a bloke before," the whispery, wet voice goes on. "We wonders, are yawr insides as artful as the slatterns'?"

It's not a Liston knife, not quite; perhaps it's a prototype, but it's double-edged and surgically clean. Poole notices suddenly that the thing is angling to his right, trying to back him into the pump yard behind No. 13. There's no exit from it. He twists back, sloshing through another puddle. Water splashes everywhere, except up his trouser leg. "You can't be real!" he objects, finding his voice at last. "This place isn't real, or I'd be soaking wet by now. So, if you're in it, you're not real too. Stands to reason."

"My place, this is," the thing replies proudly, adjusting itself to back him further into the Court. It has no exit either, except the brick passageway the thing bars Poole from as it edges closer. "Obeys me wishes, it does. Save there's no huntin' these ghosties; they're no good fawr that. We've got t' hunt, see, and fawr that we needs live meat. Never figured on that, did yawr, yaou peelers? Never a thought we might need it? Yawr lot didn't know us at all."

Poole's breath shudders out of him as he tries to remember if there's any other way out, perhaps through any of the houses. There's no other lamp in the Court and its light is creeping further and further away as he retreats, leaving him in the gloom. "Well then, we know you're not a woman," he gasps out, keeping the tremble out of his voice by sheer will. "Female serial killers use poison; less messy. They don't seem to need to see blood, like –"

The slip of light that is the knife blade suddenly lashes out, missing Poole by inches. "Aye, they need t' see it – need seein' their own!" the thing hisses. "Me darlin' needs it, me little, sharp darlin' likes drinkin' it! Nowww..." the voice loses its whine, becomes once again caressing and wet, "we're set fawr somethin' different. I wonder how long we can keep yawr alive while we pleases us both?"

END – part 3

Note:

The Liston knife's association with Jack the Ripper is somewhat doubtful, but it was a two-edged instrument like it he used on his victims. The version we know today was perfected by surgeon Robert Liston (1794-1847) "the fastest knife in the West End" of London, who in a time before general anesthetics, was able to amputate a leg in 2 ½ minutes.