A Study in Red - The Secret Journal of Jack the Ripper by kindels Read Free Book Online

doesn't work straight away. Must admit, the headaches weren't so bad last night. Good old Cavendish. Got that one right. Still hurts a bit though, my forehead throbs. So tired tonight. No little trips to take. Sleep, sleep, sleep.
    Laudanum! My great-grandfather had suggested he take laudanum. Popular as a cure-all in Victorian times, laudanum was an opium derivative that could, and frequently did become highly addictive. It would certainly have had the effect of calming the writer down to some extent, but its hallucinogenic properties would probably have served to further inflame his delusions and perhaps to amplify the severity of the voices in his head. It seemed to me that my great-grandfather may have unwittingly helped to pour fuel onto the already smouldering fire that was about to explode into life from within the tortured mind of the writer of the journal. The journal moved on to the next day.
    29 th August 1888
    The laudanum is working. The more I take, the better I feel. Hearing the voices much clearer now, less clutter, less babble. Headache still there, but bearable. Another visit to the taverns, the cess-pits of iniquity, foul beer in dirty tankards. Too many whores to count. I shan't forget the whore who lay with me, and caused my suffering, the dirty, filthy, diseased bitch whore! I hope she died in agony, I haven't seen her, she must be gone by now, but the others will do, the wretched whores, they're all the same, foul pestilence upon the world.
    I was almost breathless with the task of reading the page before me. It was now like a roller-coaster ride. He was getting closer to the moment when his illness would push him over the edge, when the voices would give the word, and he'd lose his final tenuous hold on reality, and plunge into the pit of damnation from which he would never escape. His reference to his dalliance with a whore that led to 'his suffering' led me to believe without a shadow of a doubt that, this man was infected with syphilis, and that he was quite likely in the later or Tertiary stages of the disease, when the body itself can start to exhibit lesions known as gummas, which slowly eat away at the skin, bones and soft tissues. The most awful part of this phase of the disease is the progressive brain damage which takes place, once known as general paralysis of the insane. Though antibiotics and effective testing have all but eradicated the disease from the developed countries of the modern world, in my great-grandfather's time syphilis was rampant, and our unfortunate writer would have been described by the physicians of the time as being 'sexually deranged'. So, I now felt the writer of the journal was infected with syphilis, suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, either as a result of his syphilis or in tandem with it, and I now knew, deep down inside that this was indeed the journal of the man known to history as Jack the Ripper!
    30 th August 1888
    All the preparations are in place. Maps, clothes, the tools, most importantly, the tools. I've never felt so good, so calm, no pain, the headaches have gone, the voices singing quietly to me, soothing me, telling me where to go, what to do, to be invisible. I'll always be invisible. The dark streets will be my home; my heart will beat in time to the rhythm of the night. It's a warm night, so quiet outside, so calm, and I also am calm, and at rest. Yes, I must rest tonight. Tomorrow my work begins!
    I must admit that, on reading that entry in the journal, I could feel my heart rate increase. Although the writer may have been calm, I was anything but; I was physically and visibly shaking as I put the page down on the desk. Although I was reading about events that took place over a century ago, I confess I was afraid, afraid of what I was going to see in the following pages. Poor Martha Tabram had been a trial run. Now the conflagration of fear and death that went by the name of Jack the Ripper was about to be fully unleashed!

Chapter Seven
    The