⁕JACK⁕
JACK THE REAPER
CHAPTER FIRST:
A NEW WORLD, RIPE FOR THE REAPING
Whitechapel, England, 4th day of March, 1891 AD,
Time had run out for Jacque Merridin. After a long and brutal spree of murders, the noose of justice had at last tightened round his neck. He wore a lopsided smile as his sentence was read to him by London’s foremost arbiter and judge.
“For the crime of multiple counts of breaking and entering, you are sentenced to a year in prison, and a fine of one-thousand Great British Pounds.”
The crowd jeered and booed angrily. The arbiter raised a hand to silence them.
“For the crime of fraud and assault with lethal intent, you are sentenced to five years in prison with a single chance at parole.”
The crowd spat their furious uproar, and the arbiter had to wait a long minute before they had calmed down enough for him to speak again.
“For the crime of terror, murder, and the utterly depraved maltreatment of a corpse, you are hereby sentenced to life in prison with no chance for parole.”
The crowd revolted, pushing against the makeshift barriers put in place by the City Watch. “Hand him over!” they screamed through rasping throats. “Hand. Him. Over!” they chanted.
The arbiter was a man who had lived to see a fair amount of public justice. He knew what would happen if a man like Jacque was left to the crowds. The man would not survive past the minute. Jacque Merridin had made orphans out of children, had made widowers out of men, and he had made cadavers out of women. He had killed scores of them. When asked, he had said, “The women I killed were dirty and vile, and God did thank me for each one slain!”
“You are a pathetic and feeble man,” one of the constables had loathingly responded during his interrogation. “And you went after women for no other reason than your inability to overpower a man.” He pulled the restrained Jacque by the hair and shoved his head against the wall, splitting the skin on his brow. Jacque was already covered in bruises and lashes he had received in police custody. His own pain had meant little now. He knew what fate awaited him. Every throb, every prickle, and every sting of his wounds was to be relished, for he would soon not be capable of feeling anything at all.
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“I am not a perfect man!” the arbiter boomed from his podium. When the crowd was silent, he continued. “But I believe in the wisdom of the masses! I believe that if a wrongdoer is thrown to the wolves and lives, then he deserved to live!”
He pointed sideways at the haggard Jacque Merridin, who sat beside the podium as a beggar in rags.
“This man has done wrong against London, and now London has decided! The man known as Jack the Ripper is to be hanged from the neck until dead!”
Finally, the crowd had been thrown a bone. Cheers erupted and roared through Whitechapel that day, but for Jacque, it sounded like a tuneless song of Death. The last song he would ever hear. He grinned wide. They had brought back the death penalty just for him.
Barbaric swine. He regretted nothing. He pitied no one.
A small entourage of guards surrounded him and roughly hoisted him up.
The crowd went silent as the arbiter began to speak once more.
“People!” he shouted. “People! Before the man face his Creator, we shall hear his final words!”
“Off with him!!!” they shouted back, but the arbiter motioned, and the entourage of guards around Jacque grew.
“He is a despicable man, yes!” the arbiter yelled hoarsely. “But a man nonetheless! And this is London, not some savage tribe! His final words will be heard so that God should not say that we judged His child unjustly!”
His words satiated the majority of the crowd, though some did not think of Jacque as a man, but a devil sent from Hell to take as many back with him on his way out.
He was marched to the hangman’s terrace amidst the harshest insults and lunges from the peasants which the fortified entourage expertly held off. Jacque could not stop grinning, and one guard struck him violently across the head with a baton before pulling him in by the hair and growling into his ear, “Hide those ugly teeth you fucking shite, you’re making our job harder.”
Jacque found those words terribly amusing, but his laughter was caught somewhere between his cracked ribs, and he coughed painfully instead. He turned to the guard that had struck him and spat on his face, quickly facing forwards and closing his eyes as they marched, waiting for the next blow. When it did not come, he smiled and chanced a look back, but the guard had disappeared amongst the throng of bodies around him.
The noise from the crowd was fierce, as if all the people of the world had turned into starved and baying stray mutts. The guards made way, and up Jacque went onto the hangman’s platform. He saw below the angry faces of London, each one ugly and monstrous as they called for his blood.
Perfect contempt sprang in his heart, and a single regret along with it.
“Jacque Merridin!” the arbiter announced from his podium. His voice carried through the air loudly enough and the crowd gradually became still. “Speak your last!”
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The whole of London held its breath, and Jacque looked to the morning sky for the last time. It was beautiful. There was a furnace of burning red clouds on the horizon and the sun peeked through a tiny gap in that molten cover, winking at Jacque its goodbye.
Stomping boots on the stairs sent vibrations across the platform and Jacque saw the guard whom he had spat on rising into view. The man was blank faced and joined him at the side, grunting something and replacing one of the three men who had escorted him up. There was no barrier on the platform, and Jacque could have jumped to his death if it weren’t for the two guards standing at either side of him, and the other at his back. He took a shaky step forward and two pairs of hands latched onto his arms.
“Speak!” the arbiter repeated, and Jacque glared at London with a heart full of hatred.
“May you know no peace!” Jacque cried and even the gulls remained silent. One guard pulled at his rags as the crowd started to jeer.
“And may God put you all to the blade!”
The crowd erupted and the guard tore at his rags, exposing his torso completely.
“You fucking pig,” the same guard he had spat on growled in his ear. “Taste your blade.”
Something sharp stabbed into Jacque’s gut and it sent a feeling of heat throughout his abdomen. It was as the feeling you get when you soil yourself in bed. He looked down and saw his blood gushing out, staining a knife he was all too familiar with. His own.
One guard barked something in alarm and let go of Jacque. The other tore sideways with the knife and Jacque shrieked when his guts spilled forth. He trembled and shook as his belly emptied itself, and the sound of the crowd was a roaring chaos in his head. Jacque fell to his knees. His eyes rolled upwards, past the English morning sky, and to the back of his head.
A heavy boot slammed him squarely in the back and the wind rushed past him as he fell to the mad, yammering crowd of Whitechapel. He landed on knuckles and fists and clawing hands that latched at his rags and ripped. That grabbed at his hair and tore. That clasped at his limbs and pulled.
Volleys of hammering blows beat at his back and his guts were yanked from his belly like slack rope. When at last the hands let him drop to the hard, cemented ground, Jacque was already blind and naked. For what seemed like the longest moment of his life, no hand touched him, and the cold ground pressed up at him with great force.
The next moment, the hands returned like a frenzied plague of rats, tearing at his skin and slicing with razors and knives. The agony was like no other, and it sent his mind into a trance-like state.
I must end them all. End them all. End them all. All them … Got to… end them… all.
Limbo, time unknown,
Jacque was floating. He was no longer in his body. He was no longer wearing pain. Voices yelled like distant echoes in the valley.
He opened his eyes and looked down, and though it took him a moment to remember, he soon did. With that realization followed an abounding joy.
“So, death is false! We carry on!”
At that very moment there was no room left for anything but relief. His life in England flowed through his mind, every event and every deed, and Jacque understood that The Almighty had begun his Judgement.
Jacque, however, did not judge himself. “I am who I am. I did what the body You gave me desired.”
The life-review continued and at the end of it, Jacque repeated, “I am who I am. I did what the body You made for me desired.”
A terrible shock struck Jacque, and red, glowing eyes flashed in his mind with all the splendour of the moon in full. Fear seized him as he was flung backwards into void space, travelling faster than he ever thought possible.
His left hand became a vortex of invisible force, pinning itself to a spot.
His right hand became a vortex, pinning itself on the opposite side.
Then his feet became vortices, pinning themselves together.
At last, his skull became a vortex, and the most sublime feeling of ecstasy burned in his being. Every star in the world danced for him, blinking and flashing and spiraling around him in the greatest show a man could see.
His mouth was opened wide, trying to scream from the sheer forces acting on him, but he could not.
When he thought he could take no more, the vortices died down and a feeling of coolness enveloped him. A feeling of heaviness weighed at him. A breathlessness began to tighten in his chest.
He tried to breathe but his mouth was full. He tried to move but only squirmed like a worm. He tried to open his eyes, but something had encased him so completely that even opening an eye lid was impossible. The tightness in his chest gripped harder, and he struggled again, groaning with effort.
A clicking noise sounded in his ears and it grew into a sound he recognized. Laughter. A gnomish sort of laughter. It cackled in his head and Jacque felt a coldness seep into him.
At once, Jacque began to struggle again, and this time his arms and legs pushed through the material encasing him with added ease. It was earth. He bore upwards through the pebbles and small shards of stone that scratched at him as he clawed his way through.
Why do I feel pain again? What has God done?
The urge to breathe was becoming unbearable, and the cackling in his head increased when another coldness entered into him.
He swam through the earth, moving upwards and working his tongue to expel all the soil that had been wedged in his mouth.
Jacque’s hand pierced through to the surface.
Pallet Town outskirts, Kanto Region, 1st Day of September, 1995
Jacque gasped the moment his face met with air. Rain poured heavily from the blackened sky, pelting at him his welcome back to life. He grasped out to the grassy surface as the two cackling voices in his head retreated and fled out of him. His body immediately lost power and he was left a man, half-in-half-out of a hole in the ground.
Jacque stopped struggling when he saw the beings in front of him. They were both large and round, with the widest grinning mouths and brightest set of red eyes that Jacque had never seen. They stared at him in the pouring rain and with a cackle, they vanished in an instant. Jacque remained there, half out of the ground like a man stranded at sea. When the beings did not return, he pulled himself out with every last drop of his strength.
Strange cries came from the dark. Cries that told him that he was either in a zoo, or in a place far away from civilization. He rose on trembling legs and clouds lit up and thundered as he stood. Despite the circumstances, Jacque hardly felt cold. These must be early summer rains.
He spread his arms and closed his eyes, letting out a big sigh as the rain washed through the layers of mud caked all over his naked body.
Where would he go?
He would have to find his way back to London. He would have to return and prove that God had seen his works and had seen them as Good. What other reason could there be for his resurrection?
It was a new life, and the world was ripe for the reaping.