I blinked and found myself back in the den, in the drifting pall of red haze, watching as now and then someone drifted this way or that. I was sure my trip had lasted but a second or two. However, once reality more or less returned, I became bored. If one does not smoke opium in an opium den, what is there to do? There is otherwise no entertainment, so the answer is nothing, and I did nothing for an hour or so, pretending to draw a lungful of the gas into my system now and then. Generally, however, I was quiet, and after more than a bit of time, I felt secure enough to look about in the low light.

I could not see him, but I could not see anyone or anything except the seething red vapors. At a certain point, a fellow across from me decided he’d been voyaging through the universe enough for one evening, and rose and stumbled out. That opened a vantage, and across the room, at another grouping of four divans, I made out the silhouette of the colonel’s derby, read the shortness of his form, and by that method identified him. His face was still, somewhat blocked from view by a large bat that hung off his nose. He seemed oblivious, as oblivious as all of them, and I wondered if he were dead. But now and then I’d detect motion, see a pipe rise, its stem put to mouth, and the glow suffusing the air above the cup signifying a deep inward draw. He must have had big lungs, as his ingestions were heroic in their length and depth. He also must have had terrible dragons in his brain, if it took that much to soothe them.

More eons passed. In other words, ten minutes went by, even if those ten had no place in real time, and two of the smokers from the colonel’s little collection of four got up to stumble out. As they shambled toward the door, the Chinaman attended them, and in this brief little circus of activity, I slipped off my divan and took up one next to the colonel.

Finally I got a good look at him. His face was rather dour, as if gravity had a special grudge against him and pulled his flesh downward at twice the going rate. Morever, the large bat that dominated his lower half turned out to be a spectacularly droopy mustache. It must have weighed a stone three. His eyes were lightless, he stared at nothing, he looked at nothing, he said nothing. He was utterly still.

I lay next to him. He was in a very deep place. I did notice one hand was closed into a tight fist, suggesting it gripped something, proof of tension unusual for this place, since the point seemed to be languor as an expression of collapse and escape.

By now it must have been close to dawn. I hoped poor Ross hadn’t frozen himself stiff. It was getting to seem rather pointless, as one learns nothing from a man so far gone as the colonel. But at a certain moment, he stirred.

I turned upward to his face and saw what might be called a just-after-battle stare, the stare of a commanding officer who sees his men slain and gutted in the sun.

He sensed my attention; our eyes met. I could seen pain in his. The drug, which offered such merciful surcease, had at last worn off. He was naked to memory in that moment, perhaps not yet hunkered down behind the Spartan war shields of self-discipline and willed stoicism that kept him sane. It was a rare moment.

“The blood,” he said. “There was so much of it. Blood everywhere, the poor girl. You see, it’s on me. I was the one. Her guts, her face, all butchered up, all cut to ribbons. Me, see, I was the one who done it.”

“Sir,” I said, “are you all right?”

“I killed her, you know. No one else, me alone. God help me, it was a terrible thing, but I could not help myself.”

Though this confession should have stirred horror in me, it inspired compassion. He was so in pain.

“Sir, would you like me to get you some water? Perhaps you have a fever and need a doctor?”

He wasn’t listening. He opened his hand to examine what he gripped so hard in his fist, and I nearly fell out of my own divan. He held Annie’s rings! I had to make certain I wasn’t the one hallucinating, so I closed my eyes hard and long, then opened them and made certain I saw what I saw, which was indeed two rings in his large palm.

“She wore them both, you know,” he said. “It fell to me to take them from those still, bloody fingers. I am beyond damnation. Hellfire awaits, and rightly so.”

With that he arose, turned, and walked out.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

The Diary

November 19, 1888

The funeral. It seemed that once the papers recounted the thoroughness with which I had hashed poor Mary Jane, she became London’s favorite martyr. It was not to me to point out that, alive, she was invisible to the gentry who would not so much as spit in her direction, unless of a dark night they were tupping her sweet loins for a few pennies’ worth of ejaculate deposit, after which it was back to nothingness for her. In death she became magnificent, a star, however briefly, more so than any actress or opera singer. They had not read her letters to her phantom mum, they had not wondered at her addiction to demon gin, they had not missed her brothers and sisters.

When it turned out no money was available to send her on, a churchman named Wilson, the sexton of St. Leonard’s Church in Shoreditch, put up the sum. I’m guessing he thought it would get him to heaven, and I’m guessing that it will, assuming heaven exists, which it doesn’t. According to the Times, Mary Jane was laid into polished oak and elm, a box, that is, with metal fittings. A brass plate would accompany her into the dirt: “Marie Jeanette Kelly, died 9 November 1888,” so that He above would not get her mixed up with another Marie Jeanette Kelly, unless that one, too, had died on the ninth.

Sexton Wilson’s crown and pounds and guineas went rather far: They obtained two wreaths of artificial flowers and a cross made up of heart seed, which went upon the coffin, which was put into an open two-horse hearse to be drawn all the way from the mortuary to St. Leonard’s.

The crowds—I was one of the thousands, in a dowdy bowler, lumpy dark suit, and black overcoat, looking like the clerk of a clerk who clerked for a clerk, but a really important clerk—were quite hysterical with grief. A crowd is a fearsome thing. If you are in it, you cannot fight it, and I did not. It frothed and flashed and rolled and rumbled, filling all the streets around the mortuary and the path from that grim little house of the dead to the slightly more prominent St. Leonard’s, whose steeple, though a piercing construction, was no match for the Christchurch missile that soared Godward. But it was, as the shopkeeps say, nice.

Absorbed in the bosom of the crowd, I did note something of interest and must mark it down. In this case it was the women who were the driving force of that mass of flesh and sadness called The People, and you could feel them yearning to be close with Mary in her box, to touch it somehow. What possible motive did they have? To assure themselves that they were alive and that she was not? Or to remind themselves that as long as Jack was about, their own grip on life was fragile? No, I think it was something vaster, more universal: They invested in her, poor Welsh-Irish whore given to song when drunk and knowing no way of saying no when a thruppence was offered by a cad who wanted to have a spasm of jizz with someone other than his dour old lady; they invested in Mary Jane, shredded and splayed in her box, as Woman Universal. Somehow, I don’t know how, it would link up with the suffragette movement and other uniquely feminine power dynamos who are only now finding the voice and the means to express themselves. Mary Jane was the eternal woman, I, Ripper, was the eternal man, even though sex had been quite far from my mind as I ripped.