The Best of Lucius Shepard

Jack’s Decline

At first they strapped him to the bed and let him howl, let him try to vomit out the red, raw thing inside his hate. He would scream until his voice became a hoarse, scratchy chord, and then he would lapse into a fugue, his mind gone as blank as the gray stone walls. Often during these quiet times, the man who washed and fed him would bring strangers into the room, charging them a fee to have a peek at the greatest villain of the age, and they would stand beside the bed, shadows in the half light, and say, “That’s the Ripper? Why, that poor sod couldn’t butter his own toast, let alone do murder. I want me money back!” And their disbelief would rankle the demon within him, and he would scream louder than ever, shaking the bed and delighting in his visitors’ fearful attitudes.

Later, after dozens of therapies—torments, really—and doctors whose manner was unanimously neutral, years and years later when he began to suffer guilt and wanted to atone, he realized there was no possibility of atonement, that his demon was not accessible to moral remedies. For a while he tried to deny the horrors of his past, to steep himself in the genteel associations of his childhood, in memories of gracious estates and garden parties. But he found that more vivid memories possessed him. Those five slatternly faces going slack when they saw the blade, their scent of sweat and cheap perfume, and the hot true perfume of their blood bubbling over his fingers. He yearned to engage once again in those terrible amours; yet he was also repelled by that yearning, and these contrary pressures drove him to consider suicide. But it did not seem a sufficient punishment: death for him would be surcease, and he could think of no means of extinction vile enough to earn him absolution. And so, despairing, dulled by despair, he wandered the corridors of his family’s keep, becoming—as the years passed and the century turned—a numb meat of a man with graying hair and a gray pallor, whose fingers would sometimes clench spasmodically, and whose eyes would sometimes appear to grow dark and lose their animation, like pools in which the fish had long since ceased to spawn.

In 1903 there was a reawakening of interest in the murders, new clues and rumors that struck close to the bone, and his family—none of whom he had seen since the beginning of his confinement—gave orders that he be moved from England, fearing that their awful secret would be brought to light. He was issued a German passport under the name of Gerhard Steigler, and one night in the autumn of that year, along with his warders, his doctor of the moment, and a trunkful of the drugs that kept his demon tame, he crossed the English Channel to Calais, and there entrained for Krakow in Poland. From Krakow he was transported by coach to a hunting lodge in the northeast of the country, a rambling structure of whitewashed walls and pitch-coated beams, set among rumpled hills thicketed with chokecherry, forested with chestnuts and stunted water oaks. Travel had rekindled his spirits somewhat, and during his first year at the lodge, he came again to derive a mild pleasure from life. He liked the isolation of the place, and he would walk for hours through the woods, often winding up atop a hill from which he could look westward over a checkerboard of cultivated fields, of wheat and barley and sorghum. Here he would sit and watch cloud shadows rushing across the land, great shafts of light piercing down and fading, the golden fields dappling with an alternation of bright and dark, and it seemed to him that this constant shifting display was an airy machinery, immaterial clockwork that registered the inner processes of time. He realized that but for a brief, bloody season, his life had evinced this same insubstantiality, this same lack of true configuration, and as the years slipped away, he returned each afternoon to commune with that vast, complicated emblem of light and shade, believing that therein he could perceive the winnowing of his days.

If he were to look eastward from the hilltop—something he rarely permitted himself to do—his eye would encounter a smallish town of thatch and whitewash and curling chimney smokes, its church steeple poking up like a rifle sight. There, he knew, would be women of the sort he fancied. The thought of their bellies gleaming pale, the neatly packaged meats of their sex awaited a knife to reveal their mysteries, that would start him trembling, and for days thereafter he would be overborne by his demon’s urges and have to be restrained.

During that first winter, in order to perfect his role as a member of the German aristocracy, he immersed himself in the study of the language. He had always been adept at learning, and by the time the spring thaw had arrived, he had become fluent in the spoken tongue and was capable of reading even the most difficult of texts. He enjoyed the works of Schiller and Nietzsche, but when he came to Faustus and its humanistic depiction of evil, he was so nettled by the author’s dearth of understanding that he hurled the book out the window. Demons were not nearly as personable as Goethe had described them. They were parasites, less creatures unto themselves than the seepage of a dark force that underlay all creation, that—presented with an opening—would pour inside you, seducing not your soul but your blood, your cells, feeding upon you and growing to assume hideous shapes. He had seen the nesting places of such demons in the bodies of the women he had slain, had caught brief glimpses of them as they scurried for cover deeper into their bloody caves.

Turning from literature, he developed an interest in gardening, and would work from dawn until dusk in his plot, exerting himself so strenuously that his sleep was free of nightmares. But in the end this, too, failed him. Things grew to obscenely feminine proportions in that rich soil. Beneath heart-shaped leaves, the snap beans dangled like a bawd’s earrings, and he would unearth strange hairy roots that with their puckered surfaces bore an uncanny resemblance to the female genitalia. Once again he despaired, considered suicide, and sank into a torpor.

In December of 1915, when he was fifty-six years old, a new doctor came to the lodge: a dapper little man in his forties, brimming with energy and good humor and talk of subconscious drives, neuroses, and the libido. The doctor treated him as if he were a man and not an aberration, and through hypnosis, several childhood traumas were revealed, notable among them a humiliating evening spent at a brothel when he was twelve, brought there by the family coachman and left alone in the common room, a target for the taunts of the whores. The doctor believed these incidents were seeds that had grown to fruition and inspired his murderous acts; but he rejected this theory.

“You claim, Doctor,” he said, “that once I accept the connection between my childhood pain and the murders, a cure will be forthcoming. But those experiences only weakened me, made me susceptible to the demon and allowed him to enter and take possession of my body. There were supernatural forces in play. Witness the arrangements I made of the viscera…like some sort of cabalistic sign. I was driven to create that arrangement by my demon. It was the mark of his triumph over the demons encysted within the women.”

The doctor sighed. “It seems to me you have invented this demon in order to shift blame to its shoulders.”

“You think I am denying guilt?”

“Not entirely, but…”

“Believe me, Doctor,” he said, “despite my inability to exorcise the demon, I am expert at guilt.”

He enjoyed these exchanges not for their intellectual content, but because he felt the doctor liked him. He had been self-absorbed for so long that he had forgotten even the concept of friendship, and the hope that he could actually have a friend caused him no end of excitement. He had become a decent chef over the years, and he would prepare the doctor special dinners accompanied by fine wines and venerable brandies. He honed his chess game so as to provide worthy opposition for the doctor, who had been a schoolboy champion; he took renewed interest in worldly affairs in order to make better conversation. Things, he believed, were going swimmingly. But one afternoon as they walked along the crest of a wooded hill, in a companionable moment he threw his arm about the doctor’s shoulder and felt the man stiffen and shrink away from his touch. He withdrew his arm, looked into the doctor’s eyes, and saw there fear and revulsion. What he had taken for friendship, he realized, had merely been a superior form of bedside manner.

“I…” The doctor came a step toward him, contempt, and pity vying for control of his expression. “I’m sorry. It’s just…”

The eviscerated flesh, the severed organs, the blood.

“I understand, Doctor,” he said. “It’s quite all right.” He spun on his heel and walked back to the lodge alone, back to despair. It was, he knew, no less than he deserved. But he could not help feeling betrayed.

His seventieth birthday passed, his seventy-fifth, and with the decline of his flesh, it seemed his menace also declined, for his family stopped sending doctors and he came to believe the men who cared for him were no longer warders but merely servants. This slackening of concern unsettled him, and like a good madman he continued to take his drugs and sleep in a bed with leather restraints. He had hoped senility would erode his memories, but he retained an uncommon clarity of mind and his body remained hale, albeit prone to aches and pains. It was, he thought, his demon that kept him strong, that refused to permit a collapse into peaceful decay. He still felt the violent urges that had destroyed his life and others, and to quell them he would spend hours each day maintaining a surgical sharpness to the edges of the kitchen knives, thinking that this pretense would convince the demon that its bloodlust would soon be sated.

Not long after his eightieth birthday, he received a visitor from the town: a doddering priest older than himself, who had come to warn him of imminent danger. The Nazis were massing on the border, and rumor had it an invasion was near. He invited the priest into the main hall, a high-ceilinged room centered by a long table and lorded over by a chandelier of iron and crystal, and he asked who these Nazis were, explaining that it had been years since he had paid any attention to politics.

“Evil men,” the priest told him. “An army of monsters ruled by a madman.”

Intrigued, he asked to hear more and listened intently to tales of outrage and excess, of Hitler and his bloody friends. He thought it would be interesting to meet these men, to learn if their demons were akin to his.

“I sense in you a troubled soul,” said the priest as he made to leave. “If you wish I will hear your confession.”

“Thank you, Father,” he said. “But I have spent these past fifty years in confession and it has served no good purpose.”

“Is there anything else I might do?”

He considered asking for the rite of exorcism, but the notion of this frail old man contending with the fierce horror inhabiting his flesh was ludicrous in the extreme. “No, Father,” he said. “I fear my sins are beyond your precinct. I’m more likely to receive comfort from the Nazis.”

One morning a month or so after the priest’s visit, he waked to find himself alone. He went through the house, calling the names of his servants, to no avail; then, more puzzled than alarmed, he walked to his hilltop vantage and looked east. Dozens and dozens of tanks were cutting dusty swaths across the fields, rumbling, clanking, at that distance resembling toys run wild on a golden game board. Black smoke billowed from the little town, and the church steeple was no longer in evidence. When dusk began to gather, he returned to the lodge, half expecting to find it reduced to rubble. But it was intact, and though he waited up most of the night to greet them, no soldiers came to disrupt the peace and quiet.

The next afternoon, however, a touring car pulled up to the lodge and disgorged seven young men, all wearing shiny boots and black uniforms with silver emblems on the collars shaped like twin lightning bolts. They were suspicious of him at first, but on seeing his proof of German citizenship, they treated him as if he were a fine old gentleman, addressing him as “Herr Steigler” and asking permission to billet in the lodge. “My home is yours,” he told them, and he set before them his finest wines, which they proceeded to swill down with not the least appreciation for their nose or bouquet.

They propped their feet on the table, scarring its varnish, and they told crude jokes, hooting and slapping their thighs, spilling the wines and breaking glasses, offering profane toasts to their venerable host. Watching them, he found it difficult to believe that these louts were creatures of evil; if they were possessed, it must be by demons of the lowest order, ones that would quail before his own. Still, he withheld final judgment, partly because their captain, who remained aloof from the carousing, was of a different cut. He was a thin, black-haired man with pale, pocked skin and a slit of a mouth… Indeed, all his features seemed products of a minimalist creator, being barely raised upon his face, lending it an aspect both cruel and disinterested. His behavior, too, was governed by this minimalism. He sipped his wine, conversed in a monotone, and displayed an economy of gesture that—to his host’s mind—appeared to signal a pathological measure of self-discipline.

“What do you de here, Herr Steigler?” he asked at one point. “I assume, of course, that you are retired, but I have seen no evidence of previous occupation.”

“Poor health,” said the old man, “has precluded my taking up a profession. I read, I walk in the woods and meditate.”

“And what do you meditate upon?”

“The past, mostly. That, and the nature of evil.”

The rigor of the captain’s expression was disordered by a tick of a smile. “Evil,” he said, savoring the word. “And have you arrived at any conclusions?”

The old man gave thought to bringing up the subject of demons, but instead said, “No, only that it exists.”

“Perhaps,” said the captain, with a superior smile, “you believe we are evil.”

“Are you?”

“If I were, I would hardly admit to it.”

“Why not? Even were I disposed against evil, I am old and feeble. I could do nothing to menace you.”

“True,” said the captain, running his finger around the mouth of his glass. “Then I will tell you that I may well be evil. Evil is a judgment made by history, and history may judge us as such.”

“That is a fool’s definition,” said the old man. “To think that evil is not self-aware is foolish to the point of being evil. But you are not evil. Captain. You merely wish to be.”

The captain dismissed this comment with a haughty laugh. “I am a soldier, Herr Steigler. A good one, I believe. This may call for a repression of one’s conscience at times, but I would scarcely deem that evil. And as for my wishing to be so, my only wish is to win the war. Nothing more.”

The old man made a gesture that directed the captain’s attention toward his uniform. “Black cloth and patent leather and silver arcana. These are not the lineaments of a good soldier, Captain. They are designed to inspire dread. But apart from being psychological weapons, they are ritual expressions. Invocations of evil. You had best beware. Your invocations may prove effective and allow evil to possess you. Should that occur, you will have no joy in it. Take my word.”

For an instant the captain’s neutral mask dissolved, as if the old man’s words had disconcerted him, and the old man could see the symptoms of insecurity: parted lips and twitching nerves and flicking tongue. But then the mask reformed, and the captain said coldly, “I fear your long solitude has deluded you, Herr Steigler. You speak with the confidence of expertise, yet by your own admission you have little knowledge of the world beyond these hills. How can you be expert upon anything other than, say, regional wildlife?”

The old man was weary of the conversation and merely said that being widely traveled was no prerequisite to wisdom.

Later that afternoon a second touring car containing five women under guard arrived at the lodge. They were all young and lovely, with dusky complexions and doe eyes, and seeing them, the old man felt a dissolute warmth in his groin, a joyous rage in his heart.

“Jews,” said the captain by way of explanation, and the old man nodded sagely as if he understood.

That night the house echoed with the women’s screams, and the old man sat in his room ablaze with arousal, fevered with anger, his knees jittering, hands clenching and unclenching. He was barely able to restrain himself from taking a knife and hunting through the dark corridors of the lodge. Though wantonness had been imposed upon the women, it was in their nature to be wanton, alluring, and oh how he wanted to fall prey to their allure! Perhaps, he thought, he would ask the soldiers to give him one. No, no! He would demand one. As payment in lieu of rent. It was only fair.

The following morning, after the soldiers had locked the women in the basement and gone about their business, the old man crept down the stairs and peered through the barred window of the basement door. When they saw him, the women pressed themselves against the bars, pleading for his help. They were bruised, their dresses ripped, and they stank of sex. The sight of their breasts and nipples and ripely curved bellies made him faint. He would have liked to batter down the door and flash among them, drawing secret designs of blood across their soiled flesh.

“I cannot help you,” he said. “They have taken the key.”

They intensified their pleading, reaching through the bars, and he jumped back from their touch, fearing that it would further inflame him. “Perhaps there is a way,” he said, his voice thick with urgency. “I will think on it.”

He went back up the stairs and returned with wine, bread, and cheese. As they ate, he asked them about their lives; he felt a childlike curiosity about them, just as he had with the five women in Whitechapel. Three were farm wives, the fourth a butcher’s daughter. The fifth, whom he thought the most beautiful—tall, with high cheekbones and full breasts—was the local schoolteacher. Her eyes were penetrating, and it was those eyes, their look of stern accusation, as if she knew his guilty soul, that made him aware of the magical opportunity with which he had been presented.

There were five!

Just as in Whitechapel, there were five, and one would be handy with a knife.

Here was the perfect resolution, the arc that would complete his mad journey and release him from his demon’s grasp.

“I have a plan,” he said. “But should it succeed, you must do something for me.”

There was a chorus of eager assent from four of the women, but the schoolteacher stared at him with distaste and said, “If you wish to sleep with us, why not take your turn with the Germans?”

“It’s not that, not that at all,” he said, trying to inject a wealth of sincerity into his voice. “I promise you, you will not be harmed.”

Again a chorus of assent, and again the schoolteacher favored him with a disdainful stare.

“You must swear you will do as I ask,” he said to her. “No matter how repellent the task.”

“Tell me what you want,” she said.

“I will tell you afterward,” he said. “Now swear!”

“Very well,” she said, following a lengthy pause. “I swear.”

Excited beyond measure, he hurried up the stairs, went to his desk, and wrote page after page of explicit instructions. Then he busied himself in the kitchen, preparing a feast for the soldiers. There would be veal and chicken, artichokes and asparagus, home-baked bread, and a delicate soup. And wine! Oh, yes. The wine would be the soul of the meal. As he went about these preparations, he whistled and sang, gleeful to the point of hysteria. His limbs trembled with anticipation, his heart pounded. Glasses and cutlery and china seemed to shine with unnatural brilliance as if they were registering and, indeed, sharing in his joy. Once the pots had been set to simmer, he returned to his room, stripped off his clothes, and, with his best pen, traced the mystic designs upon his groin and abdomen. He set half a dozen candelabra about the bed, and—satisfied with these arrangements—he opened his medicine chest and emptied his vials of the drugs with which he would treat the wine.

The soldiers had told him they would return by dusk, and six of them were true to their word—the captain, they said, had been held up in town. The old man could see that they were eager to be at the women again, but he begged and cajoled, and on beholding the sumptuous table he had laid, they could not reject his hospitality. Loosening their belts, they set to with hearty appetites, washing down every mouthful with liberal drafts of wine.

Oh, the old man was happy, he was sad, he was beset by storms of emotion, knowing that peace was soon to be his. Just as had happened in the kitchen, it was as if everything were in sympathy with his poignant moods. The room was giddy with light. The glaze on the veal shimmered, the varnished wood rippled like a grainy dark river, the chandelier glittered, and the silver lightning bolts twinkled on the collars of the doomed men as if accumulating the runoff of their vital charge. Three of the men keeled over almost immediately; two others managed to stagger to their feet, groping for their sidearms as they fell. The sixth actually succeeded in drawing his weapon. He fired twice, but the bullets ricocheted off the floor and he toppled facedown at the feet of the old man, who finished him with a knife stroke across the throat, switched off the lights, and went to wait for the captain.

Waiting grew long, and several times he nearly decided to go ahead with his plan; but at last he heard a motor, followed by footsteps in the foyer. “Uwe!” called the captain. “Horst!” The old man flattened against the wall, saw a shadow moving past, and swung his knife. Some sound must have given his presence away, for the shadow turned and the knife penetrated the captain’s shoulder, not—as he had intended—the back. There was a shriek, and then the scrabbling of the captain trying to drag himself away. The old man eased along the wall, unable to locate the captain, not daring to switch on the lights for fear of posing a target. But darkness had always been his friend, and he was unconcerned. He held still and heard the captain’s whistling breath and felt a joy so rich that it seemed to tinge the darkness with a shade of crimson.

“Herr Steigler?” said the captain. “Is that you?”

Ah! The old man spotted a lump of shadow huddled by a chair.

The captain fired at random—three distinct spearpoints of flame. “Why are you doing this?” Voice atremble with desperation. “Who are you?”

I am Red Jack, the old man said to himself. I am fear made flesh.

“Who are you?” the captain repeated, and fired again.

The old man inched closer; he could make out the shape of the gun in the captain’s hand.

“For God’s sake!” said the captain.

Moving a step closer, the old man kicked the gun. Heard it skitter across the floor. He kneeled beside the captain, who had slumped onto his back, and pricked his throat with the knife.

“Please,” said the captain.

With his free hand, the old man felt for the pulse in the captain’s neck. It was strong and rapid, and he kept his finger there, liking the heady sense of potency it transmitted. “Evil, Captain,” he said. “Do you remember?”

“Herr Steigler! Please! What are you doing?”

“Killing you.”

“But why? What have we done to you?” The captain tensed, and the old man pressed harder with the knife.

“You have a stringy neck, Captain,” he said. “Necks should be soft and smooth. I may have to saw with the edge a little to do the job right.” He prolonged the moment, exulting in the quiver transmitted along the blade by the man’s straining muscles.

“Please, Herr Steigler!”

“I am not Herr Steigler,” said Red Jack. “I am mystery.” Then he nicked the carotid artery and jerked his hand away before the first jet could escape the wound. Male blood did not excite him.

The women rushed forward when he opened the basement door, but on seeing the bloody knife, they shrank back, their faces going slack in a most familiar way. He had waited upstairs for an hour after killing the captain, letting the hungers of his demon subside; but despite that, they looked so vulnerable with their rags and bruises, it took all his self-control to keep from attacking them. “I have freed you,” he said at last. “Now you must free me.”

He led them to his room, lit the candelabra, and explained what must be done. To the butcher’s daughter he handed his written instructions, detailing the depth of each incision and the precise order in which they should be made. Then he removed his clothing to display the bizarre template he had sketched on his body. The women were horror-struck, and the butcher’s daughter flung down the papers as if they were vile to the touch. “I cannot do this,” she said.

“You swore,” he said to the schoolteacher.

She said nothing, fixing him with her black stare.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked them. “I am the Ripper! Red Jack!”

The name was lost on them.

“I have killed women!” He pointed to the papers. “Killed them exactly in the manner I have described. You must give me justice.” They edged away. “You swore!” he said, hearing the petulance in his voice.

They turned to leave, and he clutched at the schoolteacher’s arm. “You must help me!” he cried. Then he realized he was still holding the knife. He gripped it more tightly. In his mind’s eye he saw her belly sliced open, its red fruit spilling into his hands. But before he could strike, she reached out and took the knife. Took it! Like a mother forbidding her child a dangerous toy. His fingers uncurled from the hilt as if she had worked magic to calm him.

He fell to his knees, eyes brimming with tears. “Please don’t abandon me,” he said. “Help me, please!”

The schoolteacher regarded him soberly, then looked to the butcher’s daughter. “Can you manage it?” she said.

“No.” The butcher’s daughter lowered her eyes.

“Look at him.” The schoolteacher forced the butcher’s daughter to face the old man. “This is what he most desires. What he needs. We owe him our lives, and if you can find the strength, you must do as he asks…no matter what toll it takes.”

“I can’t!” cried the butcher’s daughter, turning away; but the schoolteacher grabbed her by the shoulders, shook her, and said, “Do you see his pain? He is an old, mad creature torn by some cancer, one you must excise. If we deny him release, we condemn him to far worse than the knife.”

The butcher’s daughter stared at him for long seconds, and her face hardened as if she had seen therein some blameful thing that would make the chore endurable. “I will try,” she said.

Babbling his thanks, he lay down upon the bed and told them to fasten the straps about his wrists and ankles. As they cinched them tight, he felt a trickle of fear, but when they had done, he knew a vast sense of relief.

“Stand at the foot of the bed,” he said to the schoolteacher. “And you”—he nodded at one of the farm wives—“stand beside her”—he nodded at the butchers daughter—“and hold the instructions in a good light.” He positioned the two remaining women on the other side of the bed.

“Do you wish to pray?” asked the schoolteacher.

“No god would hear me,” he said; then, to the butcher’s daughter, “I will scream, but you must not heed the screams. They will be merely reflex and no signal of a desire for you to stop.” He gazed up at the women ringing the bed. In the flickering light, with their widened eyes and parted lips, their secret flesh gleaming through rents in their dresses, they looked like the souls of his victims beatified by death, yet still sensual and sullied after years of phantom life. Eerie wings of shadow played across their faces. He drew a deep breath and said, “I am ready.”

He had steeled himself against the pain of the first incision, but even so he was astonished by its enormity. His body arched, his tendons corded, and hearing himself scream, he was further astonished by how shrill and feminine was the voice of his agony. Pain became a medium in which he floated, too large to understand, and he knew only that it contained him, that he had gone forever inside it. Biting her lower lip, the butcher’s daughter wielded the knife with marvelous deftness, and he could tell by the thin, hot trickles down his thighs that she was cutting neither too deeply nor too haphazardly, that he would survive the completion of the design. Once his eyes filmed over with redness and he nearly lost consciousness, but the schoolteacher’s unswerving gaze centered him and pulled him back from oblivion. Reflected in her eyes, he saw the crimson light of his dying, and—growing numb to pain, able again to conjure whole thoughts—he reckoned her stern beauty a gift, a beacon set to guide him through the act.

Finally the butcher’s daughter straightened and let fall the knife; on beholding the full extent of her work, she covered her face with her stained hands. Two of the farm wives had averted their eyes, and the other stood agape, her hand outstretched as if in a gesture of gentle restraint. Only the schoolteacher was unmoved. She engaged his stare unflinchingly, her voluptuous mouth firmed into cruel lines: the image of judgment.

“Lift my head!” he gasped as their lovely faces began to waver and recede, like angels passing ahead of him into the accumulating dark. It seemed he could feel an evacuation taking place, a lightening, a lessening of perverse cravings and violent urges, and he wanted to learn what manner of demon, what beast or wraith, was crawling from his guts. He needed sight of it to validate the fullness of his atonement, to assure himself that he would have a niche not in heaven, but in some less terrifying corner of hell, where he might from time to time secure a few moments’ grace from the process of damnation. But his demon—if it existed—must have been invisible or otherwise proof against the eye, for when he looked down into the great cavity of the wound, he felt only the sick despair with which his every attempt to seek salvation had been met, and saw there nothing more demonic than his red, wrong life pulsing quick to the last.