The Ripper Lives: Jack the Ripper Series I - Into the Black (410) by Kevin Morris

Author:Kevin Morris [Morris, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Trilogies of Terror
Published: 2024-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

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The nightmare tour continued eastward, from Spitalfields to Whitechapel. There was hardly a difference between the two regions, such that only a trained eye could tell them apart. They both had a colourful history, the good kind. They both dated back to the Romans, long and storied. They had once been hotspots of warmth and creativity, home to weavers, galleries, concerts and the like. Music was played in the streets, children played, and gentlemen bought silks for their wives to sew into gowns they would wear to the theatre.

Or so my elders told me. All my life, I had only ever known the two regions as places of the direst poverty, of starving cobblers, carpenters, Jewish anarchists and Christian revivals, of the unemployed, the maimed and desperate, of the dead and dying. It could not be called a home to anyone, merely a residence, for nothing was homely about it. Once abandoned by industry, the conditions became unsustainable, and people flocked to the streets, the focus of beggars and thieves, and later cholera, all under a blind eye. It became a collective rookery beyond all decency. Together, Whitechapel and Spitalfields were the end of a rope. It was almost expected that no one would be there for long.

34 Hope Street was the perfect example. A single crossbeam remained, half-buried in rubble, supported by only a chunk of masonry. The foundation held a tragic mess of dust and debris, and the curbside was accented with still visible scorch marks from the flames. Unlike St. Christopher’s Church, however, this was not recent. Any belongings had been long picked clean of the lot, bleached by the sun or stolen by the floods. There didn’t seem to be a single intact brick or board. There was no path or trail; the pavement ended where the brick dust had been swept into a line. There was nothing.

Except one thing. A canvas tent, erected in some approximation of where a living room might have been. It was closer to the street than the back alley we could see through, and I was sure someone could call it humble or modest, but in unvarnished truth, it was none of those things. Something catastrophic happened here, and someone’s life or livelihood ended, worth more than the materials needed to rebuild. More than that, staring at the makeshift camp, I had a creeping feeling that the same something had endured far beyond a simple fire. Some attempt had been made to clear a space, though it wasn’t enough and, with the broken broom propping up a flap for an excuse of a door, it wasn’t likely to get finished anytime soon. As such, half mounted on top of splinters and shards, the whole structure, if it could be called that, billowed like an open curtain in the breeze and stood out like an open wound, accompanied by sobbing.

It was impossible to move closer without making a noise, and as Macnaghten took the first step, all sound stopped within the tent, replaced by deathly silence.

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