Free Tales of Jack the Ripper by Ramsey Campbell, Joe R. Lansdale, Walter Greatshell, Laird Barron, E. Catherine Tobler, Ed Kurtz, Mercedes M. Yardley, Stanley C. Sargent, Joseph S. Pulver Sr. Page B

your hand. Gleaming like purest silver in the un-whole light.
    You look down on them.
    It’s August 4th.
    Two more days.
    Only two.
     
    2:00 A.M. August 6th. The Day of the First Event.
    You call this THE WILL TO KILL.
    You’re ready.
    Clothes dark and tight out of necessity. To hide staining blood. To minimize the whore’s purchase. Naughty whores will grab, you bet. Fight for their miserable whore lives. Wouldn’t you? Even if you were the filthiest of filthy animals? Even if you sucked dicks for pounds? Wouldn’t you fight for your life? For your survival?
    Even the most trusted dog will bite if you kick it hard enough, long enough.
    And there isn’t a whore in all the world as good as a good dog.
    High Street is intermittently dark. You imagine it by gaslight. The smell of the coal-gas. You imagine the stench of East London, East End, a hundred twenty-five years and however-many-tens-of-thousands of bodies less foul. You imagine what it must have been like: a Jewish ghetto in the midst of the Second Industrial Revolution; God’s chosen children, the sons of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob crowding the storefronts, the flats, the streets, forever seeking Salvation from the Oppressor; forever in Exodus. You stop on the south end of Whitechapel High Street, step back into the doorway of a Pakistani-owned grocery store. The red Perso-Arabic script against the white of the store sign stands out like blood runes in the window. You wipe sweat from your forehead with the sleeve of your shirt. The fabric’s synthetic. It doesn’t do much good. You turn your attention across the street. The White Swan isn’t the White Swan anymore. It’s a private pub, now. The Visage.
    2:08 A.M.
    She’ll be coming soon.
    Your Martha.
    A Martha Tabram for the post-millennials.
    The street is empty. Empty of eyes that care. The Rule of Law is as blind as Justice here. Both are impotent. The Metro only sees aftermath. Reports it. Catalogues it.
    The unseasonable heat is the breath of an angry God; an Old Testament God; a God of the desert.
    Your sweat doesn’t cool, it just saturates your shirt. Slides down your temples, down your neck, into your collar, beads on the fabric (but finally takes, wet on wet). The knife is on your belt, hid in its black leather sheath, handle wrapped in electrical tape. Slung round your neck by its cord is the gender-neutral plastic mask you formed yourself in your kitchen. It’s translucent. Almost pearlescent—something bad in the mix—but it’s plenty serviceable. Across the mask’s forehead you have written CRIME in Sharpie, mimicking Tenniel’s famous cartoon, The Nemesis of Neglect (There floats a phantom on the slum’s foul air).
    She’s coming. She’s here.
    Martha.
    Her name’s not Martha, of course. Which is unfortunate. But everything else…she’s so close . The similarities between this woman leaving The Visage, today, and the Victorian “unfortunate” who left The White Swan on the arm of Walter Sickert (dressed as a Grenadier; Saucy Jack did so dearly love his costume) in the August chill more than a century ago, are astounding. Delightfully perfect. As if she has been offered up by the Universe to be your victim, your sacrifice. You can feel the cosmic strings, knotted in your balls, flying up through your body, your arms, out into the Ether to this woman, and from her…to Beyond.
    Her real name (Pauline Nizza) is not important. Not yet. It won’t matter to anyone till you kill her. Death is the price of her immortality; however ironic, it’s the best offer she’s going to get out of this life.
    You put the mask on. Snug on your face; like it’s your own; it’s better than your own. You draw the knife…
    (oh, that cutting whisper of steel)
    … your knife.
    The steel in your hand is the unfeeling steel inside you.
    THE WILL TO KILL.
    You pace her. Watch the rhythmic turn of her ass in its tight vinyl skirt. Legs perfect pistons of flesh in the lift of her heels. Meat. Meat and