Chapter Twenty Eight
Anne screamed as James went limp, watching in horror as a pair of strong hands reached down and grabbed him, dragging him up through the hole. Anne floated up as quickly as she could, coming through the floor to freeze as she stared into the bright blue eyes of her killer. Anne forgot that he couldn’t see her as she screamed once more, this time in very personal terror.
The man grunted, not hearing the ghost, and walked through her with only a slight shiver as he hauled James against the rough stone of the cellar floor. Dusty bottles of wine covered the walls. He pulled a small gaslight fixture and one of the walls swung open, revealing a large laboratory.
The room, filled with glass vials and a long, heavy table was bathed in a reddish light which emanated from eleven glass tanks, bubbling with viscous fluids. Anne felt her gore rise as she realized that, in four of the tubes, hung the uteruses that had been stolen from all of Jack’s victims. How many bloody pieces am I in? Anne though half hysterically to herself as Jack propped James up against a support pillar, using a thick rope to bind the unconscious man. Anne shoved her hands through Jacks, chilling his fingers trying to make it harder for him to tie the knots to bind her love.
Lord Jack stood, flexing his icy cold hands. “I must remember to have the servants stoke the boiler, it is freezing in here.” The man muttered, patting James’s shoulder with a chuckle. “Not that you care, hmm?”
Anne knelt next to the unconscious man, glaring at her killer. “James! Come on James. Wake up! You must wake up!” She waved her hands back and forth through the young professor’s face, trying to rouse him. Unaware of this, Jack began going through James’s pockets, removing the compass and screwdriver. He pulled the monocle out and noticing the odd color held it to his eye. Anne, spotting the motion barely in time, dove through the floor to keep him from spotting her.
She peeked out of the floor after counting to a hundred, in time to see him find the dart gun. Jack inspected it with an appreciative eye, then aimed it at an empty cask and pulled the trigger, releasing a tiny spray of needles. His eyebrows arched up as he nodded his approval. “Not so much of a Nancy boy as I had thought, eh Professor St. Cloud?”
Jack stood and piled the items on the thick table and began inspecting them, curious. He picked the black compass up, caressing it with his long fingers allowing a puzzled look to grace his face as he tried to figure out why the needle kept spinning so relentlessly. He dropped it back onto the table with a shrug, tossing the screwdriver in a box of tools. He picked the gun back up and began inspecting it closer. Fortunately, she noticed, the monocle had been discarded already, next to the compass.
Once again Anne raced through the floor to James. “Please wake up please.” She glanced over to see Jack honing his knife, shuddering as it glinted hellishly. She panted in terror, as she tried to grab James to shake him. “James.” She wailed. His eyes began to flutter as for the second time that day he rose out of unconsciousness.
The coppery smell of blood and astringent smell of chemicals quickly brought James from his groggy, half conscious state to full awareness. He muttered “Anne?” As his eyes settled on the woman, struggling with his bonds.
“Anne?” The voice of Lord Thompson caused James to tear his gaze from the ghost, to stare in shock at the killer himself. “Who are you… oh wait… do you mean Anne Campbell? Did you know her too?” The lord chuckled, shaking his head. “Is all this about revenge?”
“On my end? I’d be more wont to call it Justice.” James growled. “As for you, I have no idea what madness has struck you!”
“No madness.” The lord assured James, walking closer. “Of course, I doubt you’d believe me. Would it help if I said I was sorry? Ms. Campbell was truly an accident. I was overly enthusiastic and so I didn’t assure myself that she was a prostitute before I slew her. A shame really, since she was missed unlike some nameless whore.”
“And Emily?”
“Oh, she was punishment, pure and simple.” The man who would be Jack the Ripper admitted with a chuckle. “It wasn’t hard to sort out who you were, after I paid young Alice to reveal your name. Oh, don’t look at me so. I paid her fair and let her be. I may be a murderer, but her daughter was there!”
“Why is it that I find your fear of emotionally harming a child is not entirely genuine.”
The doctor turned murderer shrugged. “Well, there were other witnesses about.” He admitted. “But when I saw the little red head slip out of your shop and head into Whitechapel, of all places, I just knew I could teach you a lesson about interfering with your betters. It would appear, sadly, that you are a poor student.”
“Well, you know how it is. If it isn’t science, it goes right through my ears.” James admitted. “Everything else is like trying to pull knots with gloves on. Speaking of which, what are you doing?”
The killer brought his knife up, teasing the side of James’s throat with it. “Curious, are you?”
“Wouldn’t you be?” James admitted. “After all, it is the last thing I’m going to see before I die. We both know you intend to kill me.”
“True enough.” The mad man said with a bark of laughter. “I suppose I can indulge you.”
The man stepped away, walking the several paces required to reach the large glass containers. He tapped one that already contained a bulging organ. “I take it you know what these are?”
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
“Where I to guess, I’d say they were Uteruses. The paper did mention that the once consistency between the killings seemed to be the lack of one in the butchered bodies.”
“Quite so! And they are my soul motivation.” Lord Thompson said with a smile. “Not, like the news men suggest, some deep-seated hatred of women or whores. Just a simple need for a biological system.”
“But why kill for them?” James asked. “I’m sure you could have found any number of such women who would have allowed you to remove them surgically! You’re skills are unparalleled in all of Great Britain!”
“You’ve heard of me. How lovely.” The nobleman chuckled. “As a matter of fact, I did use willing, and well paid, volunteers as I was developing the technology. Tell me, do you know how identical twins are formed?”
“Not a clue.”
The doctor nodded. “The most common theory is that the fetus at some point splits into two parts, probably early on.”
“Like a cell, under a microscope.”
“Just as.” The man nodded, his tone excited as if James was a well beloved student who had proven to be as clever as hoped. “I took the theory one step further and asked myself, could you do that with a living, adult human being!”
“At first the experiments were all failures. After all, while a cell culture was easily gathered, propagating that culture outside of a womb proved impossible. Then the idea struck me, why not use a womb! There are, after all, a great many of them walking around.”
“Inside women!” James growled.
“Yes, well… unfortunate, but true.” The madman waved that off as though it wasn’t a concern. “As a first test, once I was certain it worked with laboratory animals, I paid a dried up prostitute to allow me to insert a prepared mass into her. At the time, I had no real goals in mind… I was just trying a new theory. I used my own cells as the culture.”
“And let me guess. It worked.”
“Actually, it killed the woman. Some sort of blood illness set in.” The other scientist commented, for all the world as if the woman dying was merely inconvenient. “So I tried again with a younger woman, and luckily I found success!”
“I had not heard you had a son.”
“Oh, that. I dissected the babe right after birth. I needed to know if it was perfect or not.” Lord Thompson, Jack, said calmly. “And it was. However, I couldn’t think of any real use for the technique. At least, not until I found this.”
He crossed the room and pulled a book from a small case set against the wall. “The research journals of one Johann Conrad Dippel. Have you ever heard of him?”
“No.”
“Not many now days have.” The murderous lord admitted. “He is strongly believed, by me at least, to be the model Mary Shelly used for her own Victor Frankenstein… at least in profession. Personality wise I understand she used her husband. Either way, Dipple was quite famous in his day, and well into the early part of our own century, for being a skilled alchemist. His most infamous creation was a substance called Dipple's Oil. Essentially an elixir of youth.”
“How would that make your little project valuable.” James demanded.
“Simple, when you use one of the failed experiments he mentions.” He replied, tapping the first of the four filled vats. “This is your friend, Ms. Campbell’s, uterus. As you can see, it is quite pregnant… though all reports suggest she died a virgin. I implanted a culture in it, and with a mixture of some of her blood, stolen as she died, and some nutrients to keep it vital. Then I added Dipple’s so called “Oil of Aging”, which sped up its development nicely.”
James frowned, and looked at the womb. While no expert, he could easily tell the child within was more advanced then it should have been. “That can’t be safe for the babe.”
“Oh, it’s not.” Thompson agreed. “The poor thing will have a lifespan of only a few years, so I’ll have to replace it. But cheer up! Your friend can take pride in the fact that she’s going to give birth to a queen… The queen, actually.”
“What?”
“Didn’t you know?” The lord mocked the professor. “The Queen's personal physician has grown… Ill recently. I’m the favored replacement. Once that is so, and the babe is fully grown and educated using techniques I won’t bore you with, I’ll replace her Majesty with my own pawn.”
“But the other vials!”
“Victoria’s extended family. Within a year I shall control the whole of the Royal Family. And who knows…” The man grinned darkly. “With the way visitors come and go to Britain, perhaps I’ll replace more then just our royalty. In a few years perhaps the British Empire will be replaced by my own!”
“You’re a madman!”
“I know!” The other man said with a laugh. “And trust me, it’s quite liberating!”
Anne was shivering with terror and rage as she dove behind James; his hands were writhing against his bonds. “Keep him talking love, I’ll untie you. Anne placed her hands on the rope, she couldn’t feel it, but then other than her cat, she really hadn’t felt anything since her death, unless she was dreaming. She took a deep breath
Focus Anne, you can do this. It’s just like the ball. She inspected the knot to find the best place to tug at it, doing her best to ignore the vileness that was spewing from her killer’s mouth. The knots were secured very tight to James’s wrist, however they were simple knots. She picked a spot then concentrated, letting her energy flow into her hands so that she could interact, for a half a heartbeat, with the living world.
She felt the rope on her fingers and yanked down to pull the knot loose. James jerked against the rope at the feel of her pull. Unfortunately her delicate touch hadn’t loosened enough. However she smiled “I’ve almost got it James. Just one or two more tugs.”
Anne hoped she had enough energy for those two tugs. She was regretting her display of temper at Scotland Yard, realizing she could really use the energy she had wasted throwing that nameplate. Again she focused and pulled.
It was almost enough. She was shaking with exhaustion though. “One more and I should have you free.” her voice was almost inaudible. For a third time she yanked at the knot. There was not a lot of strength in the pull, and for a second her heart quailed in terror for she didn’t have enough energy to try again. She nearly wept as James wiggled one hand out of a loop that was now just loose enough for him to slip free. Sluggishly she floated to the other side of the pillar, ready to jump through her killer and give James what little distraction she could, if it proved necessary.
James, for his part, had lost track of what the madman was saying as he felt Anne’s pulls. When the man paused, smiling in a self-congratulatory manner, he decided to distract the man with a question. “Is it worth killing so many people over? For transient power?”
“Oh, it won’t be transient, Professor St. Cloud.” The lord assured him. “You see, along with the aging formula is Dipple’s own oil… the very elixir of eternal life!”
“I must, reluctantly, salute you.” James said with a dark glare at the man. “Your plan is nearly perfect. In fact, I see only one flaw that could lead to your failure.”
“What, pray tell, is that.” The man sneered.
“You didn’t kill me when you had the chance.” James’s hand whipped to his throat, pulling out the three medallions he wore. “Spanish Armada!” He yelled at the top of his lungs, the coppery disk pointed straight at the murderous doctor.
The room exploded into a scene from the depths of hell.