Riptide

1911

Hare was dying.

He had known it for some time. The pain in his belly had become progressively worse, stealing his breath and his heart’s blood. Over the past several months he had been stricken intermittently with spells of weakness. The movements of his bowels were bloody and agonizing. He had trouble keeping food down. Of late he had subsisted on corn mush and warm beer.

He was fifty-one years old. His great work was at an end. Never again would he prowl the streets, purging them of the female element. The whores…and they were all whores, every last one. Toward the end he no longer singled out streetwalkers. Any woman would do, if she was young and had life in her.

His thinking in this regard had changed after the consummation of his marriage on the kitchen floor. He brooded long over the significance of the act. He had never meant to defile himself. It was her blood that overmastered him, robbed him of sense and self-control. It was her blood that made her a harlot.

And all women bled.

Even knowing this, he could not resist her wiles. He continued to take her from time to time, and not always when she was bleeding. He hated himself for it but could not stop. Thankfully, his illness had accomplished what his willpower could not-cleansed him of carnal desire.

He carried on with his work as late as possible. Only last month he claimed the sixth of his victims to be interred in his cellar. The sixth and last. He would not hunt again.

But his work would continue. He would see to that.

“Are you ready, Papa?” a small voice called from the top of the stairs.

Hare smiled. The lad was eager for his promised birthday present. It would be a grand surprise, his father had assured him.

No one was ever permitted in the cellar. In the three and a half years since his family took up residence in the house he’d commissioned in Venice, both his wife and his son had been absolutely barred from entry. The cellar’s trapdoor was ordinarily secured with a padlock to which Hare alone possessed the key, and when he was in the cellar, he secured the door from below with a dead bolt.

But today, on the occasion of his boy’s seventh birthday, Hare had left the trapdoor unbolted. He had lit the room with a kerosene lamp. And he was indeed ready.

“You may come,” he summoned.

The boy raced down the stairs so precipitously Hare feared he might break his neck. He reached the bottom, flushed with joy.

Hare knelt by him, fighting the pulse of agony that throbbed continually in his midsection. As yet he had not let the boy see what was under the stairs. It was necessary to prepare him for the sight.

“You’re a man now,” he said, laying a hand on the child’s shoulder. “You deserve to see my secret room, and to learn its mysteries.”

The boy was awed. “Yes, Papa.”

Hare picked up a metal box and held it in outstretched hands. “This is for you.”

His son fumbled open the clasp and peered inside, registering disappointment when he saw the contents. “A book?”

“Not just any book,” Hare said. “It is my diary from my years in London when I was a younger man. A record of the things I did there. Secret things. Famous things.”

“How can they be secret and famous?” the boy asked, sensibly enough.

“The deeds were famous, but my role in them has never been known. You are the first and only one to learn of my past.”

The boy ran his fingers over the diary’s black calfskin cover. “Were you…a pirate?”

“Not a pirate, lad. Something much better. I was old Red Jack.”

“Your name’s not Jack.”

“No, that was only a nickname I bestowed upon myself. Have you heard of Jack the Ripper, boy?”

The solemn eyes widened with startlement and something like fear. “The one who killed ladies and…cut them into bits?”

“You know of him, then. You know his legend.”

“Yes.”

“I am he.”

The boy stood speechless. “But he was wicked,” he said finally.

“That’s only what some people say. The truth of the matter is altogether different. It was a public good, ridding the world of fallen women. Of all women. They are harlots and temptresses, all of them.”

“Not Mother.”

“Yes, even she.”

He shook his head. “No.”

Hare felt a stab of frustration. But he reminded himself that the boy was young, the teaching difficult. “Even your mother,” he said slowly. “She cannot help it. Vice is inborn in her.”

“I don’t believe you.” Sudden tears stood in the boy’s eyes. “You’re telling tales to frighten me.”

The sight of tears maddened Hare. To cry was unmanly. The boy had been coddled excessively.

“These are no tales.” He snatched the child’s hand. “I’ll show you.”

He pulled his son under the staircase, where the crypt in the cellar wall lay exposed in the lamp’s flickering glow.

His six beauties were piled inside, their limbs severed from their trunks. Those on the bottom had rotted, their delicate skin shrinking into mummified folds. Those near the top were more fresh. The latest one showed almost no signs of decay. She might have been a wax figure, disassembled for storage. The pink was still in her cheeks.

“See?” Hare said, the word echoing in the cellar’s confines, a shout of triumph.

The boy screamed and would have run, had Hare not clutched his hand in a firm grip.

It was the scream that dismayed Hare most of all. Tears could be dried, doubts could be answered, but such spontaneous revulsion and terror might prove impervious to persuasion.

“They can’t hurt you,” Hare snapped. “They’re dead and gone.”

Another scream, this one trailing into infantile sobs.

“You’re a damn coward.” Hare pronounced the words like a verdict. “You’re a weakling. You’re no better than a woman.” It was the final insult.

“Let me go.” The boy tugged at his father’s hand. “Let me go!”

“This is your legacy. Your destiny. You cannot escape it. You must embrace it.”

“Let me go, Papa, please!”

“I offer you greatness. I offer you a chance to change the world.”

The boy hung his head and wept.

Hare spoke to him for a long time. He told him of his London adventures and of his travels. He told him that he had once been Edward Hare, though now he bore another name, a made-up name of his own choosing. He told him that someday he would understand the awful responsibility he had inherited, the opportunities it afforded, and the price it would exact.

The boy listened, but he did not understand. Terror remained stamped on his face, the threat of more tears looming in his eyes.

“I have been an agent of purification,” Hare concluded. “And when you are old enough, you will recommence my work.”

The boy looked away in stubborn denial. “I’ll never be mad like you.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that. Blood will tell. You are more like me than you know.”

“Never,” the boy repeated.

Finally Hare extracted a promise from him to tell no one, not even Mother. And he let him go. The boy scampered up the stairs, leaving the diary behind.

Hare sighed. He had done his best. But the boy was too young. Had the illness not come on so fast…had he been granted another five years…

Perhaps on his twelfth birthday the boy would have understood. Or perhaps the case was forever hopeless. There might be too much of his mother in him. Too much of her thin and tainted blood.

He passed some little time thumbing through his diary, remembering the first days of his calling, days he commemorated in his last six kills. Although his role in these most recent murders must remain hidden, someday the clues might be deciphered and proper credit given. A hundred years from now, or more. He would not be forgotten. And possibly his son would come around. He himself had been twenty-eight before he felt the stirrings of his missionary impulses. Given time, the lad might follow in his footsteps, and his son after him.

At last he shut the tin, securing the clasp, and planted it in the loose earth of the crypt. It would be here for his son to find, should the desire seize him. If not, it might yet come to light by another’s efforts.

Someday.

He closed up the wall, stacking the bricks and troweling the mortar. He worked for a long time, sealing away the bodies and the book.

Finished, he mounted the stairs. He was weary. He needed rest. Rest from all his labors. Rest forevermore.

In the backyard the lad was playing with his little red wagon. Hare stood at the window, watching, until the child felt his stare and looked at him.

Fear flickered in the young face, but only for a moment. Tentatively, tremulously, the boy smiled.

Then Hare knew that it would be all right, and that his work would go on.