Gideon Smith and the Mask of the Ripper Read Online Free PDF Page A

as hard as the cobbles coated with the dirty snow beneath the heels of his boots.
    He was very far from home, but the shrill cries and guttural shouts gave him some comfort; the swell of the filthy bodies of the damned toward a narrow alleyway and the faint but unmistakable smell of blood on the cold, damp air went some way toward alleviating the homesickness that crouched like a black toad in his soul. He fell in with the masses, hanging back at the corner of the alley as they surged forward to get a better look. He had already seen it, and more like it besides, but still he came, and craned his neck to look.
    To look at the scene of the crime.
    He felt his black, stone-hard heart quicken as he caught a glimpse of the victim, her face darkened by a dried curtain of blood, before the police officers began to push the crowd back as more uniformed coppers brought out barricades to preserve the scene for the detectives. He would be coming, ferret-eyed Lestrade, rubbing his thin mustache and pondering the body laid against the wall, knowing with a sinking stomach what was already passing through the crowd like the pox.
    Jack the Ripper. Jack the Ripper had struck again.
    He allowed himself a smile and turned away, walking against the ghoulish Londoners who flocked to the mouth of the alley still, walking away from the tumult. The true work had been done; there was nothing to see but the aftermath. Art had been committed, black art, the truest and only kind of art there was. Besides, he had seen enough, and more than the great unwashed masses who jostled for a glimpse of torn flesh and rusted blood.
    He had seen the ghost of the girl, pale and diffuse, almost invisible against the snow. She didn’t exist, of course, because although he knew there were more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than were dreamed of in all but the philosophy of a select few, he could distinguish phantoms of the mind from more outré occurrences. The ghost was a product of his mind, a stain on his soul, a message from deep within himself.
    The ghost was encouragement that he was on the right path, as dark as the woods that the trail crept through. She was blood and blackness, set free from inside him. For when he killed, he was not merely spilling the blood of his victims. He was bloodletting his own conscience, easing his own soul lest it consume him completely, trepanning the pressure that built up inside his skull not through self-mutilation, but by the vicious injuries he dealt to others.
    The ghost was also a warning.
    Not enough, she had mouthed at him. Not enough .

 
    3
    J ACK THE B LOODY R IPPER
    George Lestrade was resigned: The day was only going to get worse. Three immediate pieces of evidence in support of his hypothesis were present in the snowdrifts that had gathered in the narrow alley off Commercial Street, where the constables had set up a cordon of police bunting to keep the gathering crowd of onlookers back from the crime scene.
    One, it was definitely a Ripper. Slumped against the soot-blackened brick wall, a smear of red painting the brickwork behind her, was the victim, her eyes glassily, shockingly open, curtains of dried blood down her face, bisected by her nose. The top of her head had been severed, the cap of her skull peeled back as though it were nothing more than the lid of a jam jar. Lestrade knew that tests in the morgue would reveal that an initial cut across the forehead by an incredibly sharp, thin blade had been supplemented with a rough, jagged incision by something more powerful and crude, in the manner of an implement that might be used to remove the top of a tin can. That was the modus operandi of the man the gutter press insisted on referring to as Jack the Ripper. Beneath the pried-apart skull, the brains of the victim glistened like gray jelly.
    Two, despite his stern words of less than an hour ago, that prancing fool who Dr. Watson was supposed to be keeping as far from Lestrade as possible was here, his