Riptide

twelve

She had it.

He was almost sure she did.

Someone like her would not be able to resist the temptation of such a prize.

And she would keep it to herself, the scheming bitch.

She might be reading it right now. Reading long into the night. Retracing the byways of old Jack’s thoughts. Reliving the momentous events of ’88 and later.

He himself had no need to read of such things. He already knew everything that mattered, knew by intuition, by inheritance, by blood.

He knew Jack.

Was Jack, he sometimes thought. Jack’s ghost, summoned forth from the underworld to animate a new body.

He did feel like a ghost, often enough, and more and more often these days.

Something not quite dead, not quite alive. Inhabiting the gray borderland between the quick and the dead. A dismal land.

A shadow land.

And he himself, a shadow among shadows.

No, he didn't need to read the book. But he wanted no one else to have it. For it to be scanned by unworthy eyes was sacrilege.

Her eyes. She was unworthy.

And in justice she might have to pay for her transgression.

He imagined her eyes, those undeserving eyes, wide open and unblinking, staring sightlessly. She would be a broken thing, a discarded toy, like one of old Jack’s victims, the flophouse floozies he slaughtered in back alleys.

But not cut up as they were. Not eviscerated. Unlike his predecessor, he had no need to soil his hands.

He knew the interior of the human body. He knew that it was blood and bile and shit.

We have this treasure in earthen vessels, said St. Paul. But St. Paul was wrong. There was no treasure. There was only filth and muck.

No need to disassemble them as old Jack did. Making them dead was accomplishment enough.

And now he might have to make her dead.

Possibly. He hoped it would not be necessary.

But it might be.

It just might.