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 B

before Jack and admiring him.
    Her father works for the museum. He spends his days in a cramped, windowless office. Julia brings him his dinner on Mondays and Thursdays. Sometimes she also visits on Fridays, if mother is too preoccupied with the twins. Julia suspects Father does not take his meals at home in an effort to avoid his six children, not because he is too busy to depart from his post.
    Julia sets down the tin containers filled with food and goes behind the ropes, standing on her tiptoes to look at Jack. It’s Monday and the museum is closed but Father still goes to the office. It’s Monday and it means there is no one to interrupt her. She removes Jack’s hat. She sets it on her head.
    She tilts her head and stares at him. She brushes the knot of his necktie.
    Finally, she sets the hat back on his head, jumps down and continues on to Father’s office.
     
    The teacher speaks of the Aztecs. Speaks of sacrifice. Of the tonacayotl , the spiritual flesh-hood. We only exist thanks to the sacrifice of the gods. There is a constant cycle of death and rebirth. The Aztecs pierced their body with maguey thorns, drawing blood from their tongues, their ear lobes, their feet, their genitals. Offerings written in blood.
    Julia draws a snake. It curls on the page of her notebook, growing in size. She adds details: tiny little crosshatches for the skin, a forked tongue.
    The teacher assigns partners for a project. Julia will work with David.
    David lives four blocks from Julia’s house. His father owns a small convenience store. Julia has seen the boy there, with a green apron tied around his waist, assembling pyramids made out of soup cans.
    David proposes that they consult his leather-bound encyclopedia for the project and Julia agrees. Julia sits on the floor of his living room while he turns the pages. An image of a sacrifice taken from a codex catches her attention and she places her palm upon the page, staring at it.
    David turns on the radio. He pours her a glass of soda.
    He has no siblings. The music echoes through his apartment without the wailing of a baby punctuating it in the background. She finds that odd.
    While she looks at the picture, David’s hand falls upon her knee, brushing the hem of her skirt.
    He should not touch her and she should remind him of this. She makes no effort to move the hand away. The touch irritates her, but she is also curious. She wonders whether he will attempt to move his hand higher. The hand remains at her knee and eventually she stands up, tossing the remains of her soda in the kitchen sink.
     
    David walks Julia home a few times. She does nothing to encourage him or to refuse him. They walk together but she feels as though he was at a great distance. Curiosity and indifference mix together.
    Twice a week David’s father has him come in to the store to work the cash register. One afternoon, David gives her a grand tour of the premises. He takes her to the storage room and they sit behind a pile of cardboard boxes. He runs a sweaty palm across her knees, touches her. Julia stares at a box filled with tuna cans. She leaves half an hour later, after purchasing milk and coffee for her mother.
    In her bed that night she thinks about the tonacayotl. Everything is but one flesh. The world is but an illusion. Omeyocan. The dual space, the dual time. Everything is immaterial, innate, eternal, without beginning or end. We are but the manifestation of the gods, a fleck in the double pupil of Ometeötl. Everything dies, everything is abandoned, everything exists again and remains.
    If time and flesh are an illusion…well, then…
    Julia lays still upon the bed and relaxes her limbs. She breaths slowly, until her body feels very light. Until her body seems to drip onto the bed, through the bed, down. It sinks. The sounds of the city morph into sounds of carriages and horses. An unusual cold drifts into the room. She hears the patter of the rain upon cobblestones. Her bedroom window seems