ONDON is a giant upon the face of the earth, a gotham of teeming, caught in paralysis, cast into a dream state. Within this stuttering machine is a type of man whose being evades the idea of existence. He lives as if already delivered away, for he is not noticed by many and spoken to by few. He leers unnoticed from the edifice like a gargoyle, though he himself notices, oh surely he does. Night is not alien enough to envelop him. A surgeon of darkness he calls himself, for he creates a science of it, slipping into carbon black and melting to a massy shadow in the streets.

The university is the playground of old stylings. A band of drunken youths spill out of a tram, tripping with laughter. After the youths two plainclothes policemen cross the commons. They peer up at the edifice that is the entrance of the university library, a grand gothic old thing, a mezzanined palazzo on plain English ground.

“Nam in opere ipso argumentum creatoris eius est. Sixteen-ninety-one.” Montrose read the inscription above the entrance arch.

“For in the work itself is the evidence of its creator,” Graves translated.

“Surely it’s the work of an English masterbuilder,” said Montrose.

They climb the spiraling marbled echoing steps for an eternity. But the walk is good exercise for the mind, as well as the constitution.

The first floor of the university library was modern, lit and up-to-date, with no rare corners. As they ascend the world becomes dimmer. Here and there they crane their heads to avoid the jutting frames of portraits of university luminaries. One such personage looked down on them, one of those stern-nosed theological mages of Protestant practice. Avid-eyed and stiffly dressed, his voice once surely shook vast tabernacles, holding congregations in thrall.

“A gaze acid enough to melt the oil from the canvas,” said Graves.

“He looks,” said Montrose, “like an antibody in the organism. Ready to overturn the temple and smash its idols.”

Carefully testing locked doors on the twenty-third floor they  finally entered, a broad windowed room filled with more bookshelves, littered with freestanding props which were either essential or inconsequential to their owner. In the corner by the window, the living space of the man they had come to call upon.

Bed and desk they inspected uninvited, and the open books, littered pages, and other oddities which make up an intelligent man’s belongings.

“A questing, active mind. You expect this sort of place to be a mausoleum. Dilapidated and musty,” said Graves.

“Like the archives,” said Montrose. He took a book from the desk and was startled to hear it commented upon.

“There’s a quaintness to the novels of Mrs. Radcliffe, now, wouldn’t you say? She still holds an appeal for me. Especially that one. The Romance of the Forest. I find I can shut her books with a smile at the end of an evening. Did you know she never stepped foot outside England? All the descriptions of Italy and France were her own invention. Now there’s not a lot of people know that.”

 A tweed-suited, wheelchair bound man greeted them. The questing, active mind was alive and present.

“Professor Micklethwaite?”

“The same.”

“We’re from Scotland Yard. Inspector Graves.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

“Inspector Montrose.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

“So you are the astrolator.”

“I am.”

“We were recommended to you by Mrs. Margaret Dooley.”

“She’s my sister. How can I be of use?”

Scotland Yard detectives did not often employ parlor tricks such as mediums and ghosts. Monotone intonations, satin curtains tendriled in the wind, smelled of upper-class playacting. They knew the varieties, of course, especially the five-guineas-per-tap kind involving missing pocketbooks and an open window. However, even imaginary spirits, once invited, are not so easily dismissed. The breeze behind the curtain enters and fevers the brain. Professor Micklethwaite did not appear to be delusional, but this was a strange and desperate road they traveled.

“We have the name of a man who lives on Burridge Street,” said Montrose.

“A murderer?” Micklethwaite asked with urgency.

“Many times over.”

“You’ve interviewed him, but you can’t connect him— you need to be certain.”

“No. Yes. Precisely.”

“What’s his name?”

“Do you need to know?”

“If I’m to condemn him.”

They presented him with a diary. Montrose brought it out of a leather bag. It was old enough, surely, but written inside it was absolutely nothing at all. Except yes, they pointed out to him an edgemost smattering of ink which once upon a time formed the name of its owner.

They spoke the name.

An ordinary enough name. The professor wasn’t startled. How they came into possession of this name through a faded inkblot was a question he asked but they would not answer. They were an odd pair, these policemen, with their blank little tome and insinuations.

And what was astrolatry they asked?

Mickelthwaite explained it as the science of memory-travel, of which the professor was the sole expert and experimenter. With this peculiar science you traveled through memory to a scene of the past. A chart had to be made first, a direct series of connections from the traveler to the past, or else swim in a universe of memories. The past was not entirely tangible— you could not smell, hear, or touch this past reality nor, as far as the professor understood, could you change it. Only review was possible— like a spectator in the cinema without musical accompaniment.

“You can’t touch inside the picture,” said the professor. “But you will certainly feel the emotions of the person whose memory you are viewing, in addition to your own.”

“Two simultaneous emotions?”

“It may become difficult after a while to distinguish your feelings from theirs.”

“If our intended personage therefore feels the sensation of the dagger that killed her—”

“You will not feel the dagger, nor her bodily pain, but the emotional response which is recorded in her memory will affect you.”

“I take it, professor, that this experience, even sans bodily pain, may nevertheless be a traumatic one.”

“You may not be able to bear it. Is it worth the attempt, do you think?”

“We are not fanatics of the law, sir, nor would we presume to innovate in our field using your specialty as our jumping point. But there are some crimes which go beyond the regular bound of the law…”

“You believe you have Jack the Ripper. You are both sons of his victims.”

They were not simply policemen suddenly, but young men desperate for justice.

“We don’t pursue simple revenge.”

“If ever there were such a thing as acceptable revenge this is your chance, but there’s nothing simple in this. As much pain may be inflicted on yourselves as this murderer inflicted on your mothers.”

“Can you help us to do this, professor? Rip the veil, so we may see the face behind it?”

“Given enough, I may.”

“This ‘astrolatry’, a science of your invention—”

“A discovery.”

“You do not profess any kind of magic, no supernatural pact, so to speak.”

“If I did, I would not be living in an institution of rational illumination.”

“I hope I don’t seem impertinent.”

“Policemen need to be impertinent, I imagine. Anyways, I don’t pretend my science appears anything but hocus pocus. You have brought items, it appears.”

“Yes. A victim’s dress…her shoes…a sample of hair. Blood…”

He placed the evidence box with the effects next to the study lamp.

“Not your mother’s?”

“No.”

“Alright, lads. We shall see what we shall see. I trust you because you are young and sincere, not because you are policemen. If you only wanted more evidence I’d have told you there was nothing in it after all. You’ve convinced me or I’ve convinced myself. We shall all be astrolators now.”

What proceeded in that library attic touching the roof of the night clouds was something less than science, something more of a rare kind of necromancy— not the raising of the undead, but bringing the living into the memory of the dead. Micklethwaite had told them much; how they must lay out the evidence, and write out the connections on paper, so that their minds were set and mapped for arrival at the correct moment. One might have less information than needed but still arrive near enough. It was soon clear the policemen would never memory-travel without the professor. He kept a final element, the critical point, in his vest; the memento that triggered the mental catapult into the cold exposure under the canvas of the stars.

As through a camera, they saw through the victim’s eyes. She lived under a canopy of brunette hair. The apportionment of her plump face surrounded the camera lens. The intake of her breath, cough, exhalation of her enclosed despair rose and ebbed with her bosom was evident even without sound. This wasn’t incorporation. They were not even listeners. They could only look on as in a picture show. But they felt her emotions. She was repulsed and needy of company; cast off once taken advantage of, she still felt as a mother whose duty is to love, a helpless desire to bring comfort to an existence of coarseness and hardship.

She spoke to herself in the frigid air.

In a narrow street she came to her front door. ‘Front door’ was a contradiction— no door could be more back than those in that slim divide of apartments. The buildings drooped with the solidity of the inebriated who inhabited them. The door’s outline was revealed with the dimmest aperture of moonlight into that cold bystreet. But she knew this darkness, the comfortable bump of the short table, the rug which covered the jagged crevasse that led into the world of upside-down crawlers that ticked noisily throughout the sleeping hours. And there was always that room. She pulled back, turning to the alley, and saw nothing. She smoked. Tobacco meant nothing to her but a trapping of her class’s reverence for little escapes. Match flame and tobacco ember added but little.

She turned to go inside but was kept. 

A fingered cloud was upon her mouth. A brushing drape of a cloak over her shoulder. A dull sliver, seen as through a glass darkly, in front of her chest.

The spectators could do nothing as they fell with the bulk of her frame and met the cold stone of the landing. The murderer was gone with nothing left behind.

“He’s a wild beast, escaped from a zoo,” said Montrose.

“Nothing that vile has ever been in a zoo— no ape, not the biggest, most virile in the world,” said Graves.

“But we have him,” said Montrose.

“We have nothing!” said Graves.

“We have a beginning,” said Montrose.

***

HE prisoner was haggard, and certainly of a rough disposition. He was certainly capable of violence but had no devil in his eyes. He was innocent of the murder being examined. The scrape of pencils at a long desk belonged to the recordists. Young men— one young lady — their heads nosed so close to their papers that you could only see a brow, each as diabolical as the next, and the tops of their heads. Brown. Brown. Sandy. Brown. Balding.

The barrister’s voice filled the echoing chamber with a drone of information. “Patrick Brinston, merchant on 222 Walpole Street…”

Nothing. Nothing left on the scene. Except the particles of iron from the blade, totally beyond the scope of investigation.

Months of starvation. Months of pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and drawing and drawing. One could not always gorge, one could not always be warm with the corpse. There had to be days of training, observing the caged animal and studying it, seeing what its nature was made of, how close it came to human intelligibility. A soldier has his orders, but often— why, you see it every day —they discard military prowess for lethargy. Wine, women, song. So too the tiger, once too often fed, is happy and content. It is the surgeon of life-light who must train the spirit to be the whole thing, the entity of entirety, the flexible inflexible, the constant…

The judge wore a sympathetic countenance as he listened to a man in a leather jerkin with a red scarf knotted at his throat.

“There she was at my feet, your honor, I’d just noticed her sleeping there curled up. My arm was reached up, lighting the lamp— then I saw how still her mouth was, and I knew she was quite dead. She seemed peaceful. Her eyes were closed as if she were asleep.”

All of life could be learned at these depositions. It was a privilege not given to many to sit and draw and scribe what the witnesses said. It was life put on pause for your benefit— they must tell, they could not return to life until they had told everything they were asked. You learned the nooks and crannies as the police mind tried to grasp that of the criminal. Methods of, and, inevitably, methods of un-detection. There were many avenues for successful evasion. Police were only willing to endure so much.

Policemen were trusty like streetlamps.

Ah, the romance of wearing a police uniform. He wanted to— he had one. It demanded a different performance. Carpenters, bricklayers, handymen wear their personality in their manner of clothing, open for reading. A gentleman, or what is termed a gentleman, a man dressed for the bank or the evening party, is effusive and jovial and tells funny stories to boys on the street; his brusqueness, terseness, meanness, baseness is tucked into sleeves and collars. Uniforms are sometimes a disguise for a ponce, the suit and hat hold down the addresses he has to visit. A silk hat worn with a lingo immediately betrays you. No no no, there must be care taken in every respect for the performance. A policeman is as passive as a streetlamp; he must not be delighted madcap livewire.

Once ready? A disappearing act to disappear all others. An eighth wonder of the world.

Starvation whetted the appetite, and the mouth to swallow the feast was enormous.

***

HEN the habits of a few are in close continuity it is not impossible that the many may dream the same dream. The student astrolators sat once more by their teacher and pressed starry phosphenes into their eyes, returning to the memories of the Ripper’s crimes over and again and over and again.

No killer was cleverer than the Ripper. Victim after victim, they saw nothing but his breath next to their faces. Once lifeforce was extinguished he did his real work. But they saw nothing of that.

“There’s nothing more for you to discover,” said Professor Micklethwaite. “We are victims of excess. I have no stomach for any more of this.”

“Policemen endure fresh tragedies every day. We’re not prepared to simply leave off,” said Graves.

“Teach us to travel without you,” said Montrose.

Micklethwaite shook his head.

“In your travels alone surely you’ve seen the worst of humanity,” said Graves. “Or was it all peeping in on Helen of Troy and Cleopatra and that sort of thing?”

“I never let anyone travel alone,” said Micklethwaite. “I am the guide. This is my science, my living, my life’s work. I keep my guidebook. And when I die it goes with me to the grave.”

“Not before we’re finished.”

“I didn’t plan on dying just now, Inspector Graves,” said Micklethwaite. “We’ll continue the investigations. But against my better judgement.”

“Let your judgement consider the legal weight of an open investigation, Professor Micklethwaite.”

“As I said, we’ll continue,” said the professor.

Again they plunged into the stars and winced as waves of emotion washed over them.

“Wait— there is something here…” said Graves.

Briefly, too briefly, a victim’s hand came into view. A distortion of light on her hand. A thread, the smallest of thread bits. Dissembled, dissipated, it had snagged on the dead woman’s fingernail from the Ripper’s cloak.

Useless bit of evidence for the police— too fragmentary for their methods. But for the astrolators it was a discovery. Did it exist twenty-eight years later?

***

WIDE hat donned. A burgeoning cloak. Implement stowed. To the close alleyways. It was surprising how much distance one could go by silently slinking along the corners of London. You stifled a chuckle whenever someone turned to look, hearing your muffled footstep behind an eave, and then go on pretending it was nothing.  They couldn’t see you. Apprehended with the bear-hug from behind, the rondel gripped them to the heart. Nice to know people felt safe, for it was just then, that surprise that you could catch the spirit reflected in their eyes just before it was gone. Successive rippings were only meant to try to recapture that beautiful moment in the eye.

***

EST is the effect of a legend, the legend of a person alive in your own time. When a house break-in happens you are disturbed by the theft of valuables and the vulnerability of doors and windows. You are comforted, however, that the theft was logical. Something wanted, something gotten, and then they were gone. Better, much much better was the tremble of fear which, at first, came at a price of argumentation.

“We can’t always be afraid and stay indoors forever.”

“Easy enough to say, but who’s to say who’ll get ripped up next?”

Doubt evaporates with the strike. Fear and trembling and trembling and caution and the stopping of all activity. Hilarious that the victims were the ignored miserables of the street, and yet the dancing public were horrified as if it had happened to some genteel lady of noble vintage rather than a nobody.

“It’s been women so far. What if he gets my Amber?”

To be a creature of this kind of existence was to not exist at all. Husks with a frail light in an ice box. To extinguish such a light was a privilege not to be shared. There was risk, there was being brought blinkering under the full sun, there was becoming a dim light, indoors and trembling.

They’d soften. Nobody could stay indoors forever, not even at night. Feeling unwatched they get on with life. Then— mad tiger crouched, curled up, not looking on but hearing the workaday hum-and-thrum of the street-sellers, a smile bent up, halfway forced by the chill, teeth chattering, till he brought them to silence by biting into his scarf— the second strike.

This strike particularly impressed him— that is, he was impressed by his ability to achieve such an agile act by only having thought of it beforehand— he was no soldier —and able to carry it out as if given orders. Jack-in-the-box he pounced upon the concrete landing and twirled the plump lady round, and in the work of just a moment— the skilled incisions of a surgeon —turned on a spry heel and bounded down the frigid alleys, the body still hot on the inside.

Hark again my friends the illimitable legend of the alley tiger, the claw-and-ripper, the one who smiles in the face of death.

And now to slip back and perform the whole play through again.

***

HE Astrolators now led an existence of constantly interrupted reality. No sooner would they return from the past than Inspector Graves would get a fancy to go immediately again. Over and over again they fell with the victim, felt the brief ripple of her surprise when the knife was plunged into her chest. But the camera always turned off. They attempted everything. They brought mud in from the street.

That was a mistake.

Words cannot bear description enough for the memories they entered, the hot entrails of the recent past collated together. It was as if a demon had deposited a giant kidney stone in their bodies. Knowledge would not remove it, nor any blanket of sedative annul its coruscating agony. It was hardly to be endured. They fell from their delirium and scraped the floor, pounding it with their fists, cursing everything.

***

OMETIMES truth is stranger than fiction, but only sometimes; life is slow and minute-to-minute, lacking the abbreviated quality of dreams. This, his put-on dream, a masquerade outmatching all others, was the happy, liveable in-between.

No man lives without another in his head; the jury sits and says much in deliberation. All men but he. He might conjure others to mind, but they are pushed outside the skull and cannot perceive inner actions.

“Please sir. I see the devil’s in your eyes, sir,” said she, body trembling. “Let it pass.”

The tiger had sprung.

“Can’t you see I’m as wretched as can be? I couldn’t do you any harm. Not a nice gentleman like you.”

Something was all wrong. A miscalculation in the jump. She had turned round. Met his eyes. Focused and recognized the manner of his face and expression. The lines of his face. The commonness of his being.

Was that it?

“...couldn’t do you any harm.”

He was holding her now as if she’d slipped on a patch of ice and he’d caught her in a cradle. His other arm poised a dagger above her.

Silence as the lady tried to put a friendly look on her face, as though she were being held in some impromptu vaudeville act.

Confidence came in the knowledge that nobody could look in on his thoughts. Men have consciences, other little men inside them who pull strings this and thataway. They reported tingling in the back of their neck, as though aware of being watched.

Silence as the dagger trembled in midair.

Now a sort of ration of watchfulness entered into his memory, back back back inside the courtroom, many eyes glimpsing his thoughts.

Silence.

Silence.

“Please. I don’t want to die.”

The dagger came down. 

Her expression was not peaceful, nor grateful, nor solemn.

He should have run at the first bark, for now a hound was at his heels. He twirled round before it caught his cape and in a motion slit it across the eyes. Mid-twirl, dervish-like, he saw the figure of man at the end of the alley, his torch flooding the alley with yellow light.

Suddenly his coiled spring, his tiger ferocity— gone. Drums in the head. Speed of foot. Tumbling crates and crashing blindly into the open street. Leaping up stairs. Stairs and a leap. On and on, far past the safety of his den, further and further until his inner voice became silent in the edges of the night.

A lesser performance tonight.

***

N the top room of the library the sun shines through the perforations in Professor Micklethewaite’s curtains. The pain from the night’s journey remains, gotten over only with force of will and restrained emotion. Exhaustion alone has allowed them to sleep a little.

Graves and Montrose picked the frail man from the floor and placed him on his bed. His breath came in short stutters. They gave him brandy and waited for the conscious recognition of their faces.

“You knew it would happen!” said Montrose.

“Too callous. You had to know…”

“That level of pain could have killed us,” said Graves.

“I told you. At the beginning.”

“You weren’t afraid for yourself?” said Montrose.

Silence.

“Were you trying to kill us?”

The professor finally drew in a large breath and his voice became regular.

“I was trying to warn you off,” said Micklethwaite.

“Why now, so late?”

“Because I told myself a lie. You’re not really sons of the Ripper’s victims.”

“We never lied,” said Montrose.

“But you didn’t correct me— that means you’re dishonest. You’re not here for justice.”

“Why do you think we’re here?”

“To steal my secret.”

“I’ve figured you out, professor. I have your trump card,” said Graves.

“Then you don’t need me.”

“Indeed we don’t.”

***

HERE sat the judge, noticing for the first time this scribe in his courtroom and, jealousy raging inside him, condemning the scribe for taking on a role without credentials. There is nothing so hostile as professional jealousy.

“You, clever? You?”

I was the ultimate shadow…

“Why, you’re a common murderer.”

…my disappearing act is unparallelled…

“Many criminals disappear. What’s that he called himself earlier?”

“‘Surgeon of darkness.’ We don’t really know if he did it, sir, he may be trying to lay claim the fame.”

You know very well I did.

“Did Miss X and Miss Y know very well you did?”

Who?

“Nevermind then. We can’t really enter a proper name. It might have been done by any regular old tom-the-terror or jack-the-ripper.”

It’s the act that’ll live forever. There’s no need for anybody to know my name.