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. Read Free Book Online Page A

makeup there’s nothing. No wonder the Ripper sought them out. You don’t need compassion in a slaughterhouse. You try to control your raw tongue, but only the throbbing beneath it moves.
    “I’m sorry, I’m only upsetting you. Never mind, love,” she says. “Nerves are terrible, I know. You sit down and I’ll get you a drink.”
    And that’s when you have to act, because your mouth is filling with saliva as if a dam had burst, and your tongue’s still straining to raise itself, and the turgid colours have insinuated themselves into your head like migraine, and tendrils of uneasiness are streaming up from your clogged mouth and matting your brain, and at the core of all this there’s a writhing disgust and fury that this woman should presume to patronize you. You don’t care if you never understand the Ripper so long as you can smash your way out of this trap. You move towards the door, but at the same time your hand is beckoning her, it seems quite independent of you. You haven’t reached the door when she’s in front of you, her mouth open and saying “What?” And you do the only thing that seems, in your blind violent frustration, available to you.
    You spit into her open mouth.
    For a moment you feel free: Your mouth is clean and your tongue can move as you want it to. The colours have retreated, and she’s just a well-meaning rather sad woman using her talents as best she can. Then you realise what you’ve done. Now your tongue’s free you don’t know what to say. You think perhaps you could explain that you sneezed. Perhaps she’ll accept that, if you apologize. But by this time she’s already begun to scream.
    You were so nearly right most of the time. You realised that the stolen portions of Mary Kelly might have been placed in the box as a lure. If only you’d appreciated the implications of this: that the other mutilations were by no means the act of a maniac, but the attempts of a gradually less sane man to conceal the atrocities of what possessed him. Who knows, perhaps it had come from Egypt. He couldn’t have been sure of its existence even when he lured it into the box. Perhaps you’ll be luckier, if that’s luck, although now you can only stand paralysed as the woman screams and screams and falls inertly to the floor, and blood begins to seep from her abdomen. Perhaps you’ll be able to catch it as it emerges, or at least to see your little friend.
     
     
     

Abandon All Flesh
    Silvia Moreno-Garcia
     
     
    The chamber of horrors. The cobwebs and the torture instruments and the lights. And Jack. She loves Jack most of all. He stands in a corner, past the mummies and the witches, in his cape and stylish top hat. Black satin. Gloves. Right hand raised, knife gleaming. He sports a wicked smile.
    If you stand in front of Jack all you can see is the smile. The angle of the hat wraps the rest of his face in rich shadows. However, if you move to the side and step a bit forward, against the velvet ropes, you can look at him up close.
    The quality of the wax sculptures varies. The older ones are good and the newer ones are less detailed. But Jack. Jack is not good, he is great . The one who crafted him did so with exquisite detail, labouring over the eyes and the skin, striving to approximate life as much as one can within the confines of a wax mold. The result is a face that seems alert, capable of speech, of drawing a breath. The fingers curl around the knife with true strength, the body tenses, ready to leap down from its dais.
    Even the background of this exhibit is flawless. Behind Jack there is a bed, unmade, the sheets splattered with blood. The subdued lighting reveals a brick wall and a shuttered window.
    Julia stands in front of Jack and touches the sleeve of his jacket. She is fourteen. During class she draws skulls and dragons in the margins of her notebooks. In the afternoons, she does her homework with more haste than effort. Twice a week she walks the wax museum, pausing