Miller's Court

©2002 Michael Leary
All rights reserved.

"Sure you're ready for this?" the old professor had asked. "I've been twice before, and it's never what you think."

If the question had come from anyone but Dr. Armin Cawzinski, I may have been offended. It wasn't, after all, like I hadn't been through the portal before. I knew what the side effects were and was well prepared.

"I'm sure I can handle it, Doc," I replied. "The disorientation only lasts a few seconds, and it seems like every time I go through it gets shorter and shorter."

The old man looked both puzzled and amused, as if he had heard my perfectly reasonable response, but it was said in a language only children understood. He shook his head and said, "I didn't mean the portal effects, Georgie. It's the blood. No one's ever prepared for the blood."

As the molecules that make up my body reformed themselves and I staggered from the now invisible portal—whose one end stood in a vast and highly secret laboratory in Texas while the opposite side opened the door to an older and very foreign London—I thought little of the professor's comment. I was leaning against a dank brick wall, feeling the heavy moisture of a damp and foggy English night and trying to get my wits about me when I mumbled, "Hope the blood isn't as bad as the stench."

Dr. Cawzinski was generally a very serious man, Oxford-educated, formal and all business in his study of history, much the English gentleman of legend—but he couldn't suppress a laugh as he ran his hands over his coat, willing away any wrinkles that may have resulted from the rapid trek across 150-years. "London of the 1880s wasn't exactly the cleanest place on Earth," he said. "And we are in the sinkhole of the old city, so I wouldn't expect any rosy odors to be wafting through the air."

My head had finally cleared enough to take in my surroundings. It was dark and very quiet. We stood in one of the most populated cities in the world and I heard nothing but the distant rumbling of what had to be carriages, perhaps a few footsteps a block or so away, and an odd snake-like sound. The only illumination was a gas lantern hanging outside of what seemed to be a rundown boarding house. The hissing noise emanated from the lamp.

I had gone through the portal three times before, thanks in large part to the professor. If I hadn't been one of his favorite students, I doubt I would have been made privy to one of the world's best-kept secrets. The exact technology has always been somewhat of a mystery to me, except that it has something to do with molecular dissection and reintegration and a system similar to a linear accelerator, shooting those molecules at such a high rate of speed that a warp is created in the fabric of time. Dr. Armin Edward Cawzinski was one of the pioneers, and he discovered the formula that allowed the time traveller to go to a specific place at a specific time.

The only flaw to the system was time itself. You had three hours in the past. After that the pattern of your brain cells reverted back to a "modern configuration," in the professor's words, and your mind was scrambled. In short, if you stay too long, you go insane, and even re-entering the portal and coming home won't help.

I heard a beep, and for a moment I forgot where and when I was. "I've set the clock," Cawzinski said. "We're only here for two hours. Don't want to take any chances."

"Is that long enough?" I asked. "He hits two tonight. Will we have time to witness both?"

Cawzinski stared at me, and I thought I saw a small shudder go through his body. "So impatient to see such a horrible sight. I have the feeling you'll be cured of that quite soon."

The professor grabbed my shoulder and pulled me down an alleyway that was even darker than where we entered this smelly and dirty section of London on September 30, 1888. The sliver of illumination from the gas lamp behind quickly disappeared, and I found that I could barely see my guide. Our footsteps echoed off the walls, which seemed to be shrinking inward, as if some unseen force was trying to crush us between them. I wanted to say something, anything, just to hear the sound of a human voice, but when I cleared my throat the professor stopped suddenly, pulled me into a doorway, and shoved me against a cold and very hard wooden surface—the door I presumed— then turned and put his gloved hand over my mouth. I could barely see his head as he shook it back and forth, silently telling me to hold my tongue. I shook my head in assent and he led me back into the alley. It was only then that I fully realized we were walking into something far darker than the alleyway leading to Dutfield's Yard.

We finally exited the cramped alley and a rush of fresh air hit my face. I sighed as relief rolled across my body. I had never been claustrophobic before, but the dense fog funnelling through the narrow and pitch-black alley had convinced me that there are some places man should never tread.

We had walked into an open courtyard surrounded by two- and three-story brick buildings, some windows casting a very dim light into the yard from the low-lit lanterns used by their tenants. Murmurs of conversation floated into the courtyard. A man with a thick English accent was yelling at a woman on the second floor of the nearest building. The woman, equally unintelligible, gave it right back. A child laughed somewhere. Someone was whistling.

The professor pulled me close and whispered in my ear, "We should separate. You go through the gate and hide yourself in the shadows outside of that school building across the street."

Not relishing the idea of being left alone, I replied, "Where will you be? Why can't we stay together?"

I couldn't see his face clearly, but I could feel his smirk. "I was here for the first two, alone, and while I've heard him and have seen him as a shadow on the wall, I chose wrong both times on his entry point. There's only two ways in here, my boy. That alley, where I'm going—I'll hide in the doorway near the edge—and through that main gate, where you'll be."

I was about to protest further when he pushed me toward the gate and said quietly, "Hurry. They'll be here any minute." I nodded and started to walk away when he grabbed me from behind again. "And don't do anything stupid, Georgie. We witness history. We don't change it."

"What's your name, child?" the kind-faced man had asked her as he stroked her back lightly and directed her to Commercial Road and then onto Berner Street, where they could transact their business more privately.

"Lizzie," she replied, a slur in her voice that had been effected by the pint of fine ale her consort had provided her, pulling it from inside his bag as if he were a salesman in such potables. The liquor must have been very strong, she thought, because it had hit far faster than any ale she'd ever sunk her liver into before. It was chilled, unusual for anything you could get at a Whitechapel pub, and she had let it glide down her throat in three large gulps, some of the foam spilling out of her lips and onto her dress.

"Such a pretty thing, you are," he said, and started to slow as they approached an alleyway near Dutfield's Yard and the Working Men's Educational Club, where muffled laughter could be heard along with the distant sound of music and singing. His hand opened and something flashed in the dim light near the club's entrance.

"Are we gettin' married, love?" Lizzie asked as she stared at his handful of gold coins.

"No, my darling," he said. "I only want what every man wants from you—your soft and tender flesh against my skin."

"Christ, you sound like a fuckin' poet. Never no mind. For that price you can put it wherever you want. Won't be anythin' I've never had in me before."

"You couldn't be more wrong, my dear," he said quietly as they entered the alley and the gold coins in his left hand were replaced by another gleaming object.

I had nearly fallen asleep, my head resting against one of the side walls to the school building, when I heard the light echo of footsteps entering the yard from the alley. I quickly checked my timer, since it seemed like our two hours had to be nearly up, but we had only been on the streets of old London for fifteen minutes.

Walking across the street, I was careful to keep my head down and not allow my shoes to slap against the damp stone ground. My heart was racing. I crouched against one of the two large wooden gates, my face so close that I could clearly read, even in the darkness, "W. Hindley, sack manufacturer, and A. Dutfield, van and cart builder" in white lettering.

A woman's voice came across the yard. "Let me lift up me skirts for you, Governor." I peered through the gap in the gate's slats and saw two forms. One was clearly the woman, thin and rather tall. The other was a man, and contrary to all of the eyewitness testimony of the time, he wore neither a cape nor a deerstalker hat. He was, however, from what I could make out, fairly well dressed, which would have made him stand out in this part of London. How was it possible, I wondered, that a man dressed like that went unnoticed in the worst area of town at a time like this, when the constables were questioning anyone suspicious?

The man watched as the woman pulled her skirt up, revealing her legs and moving up to her most private of all areas. In her profession, undergarments were more an obstacle than a convenience. The man said something, but I couldn't hear his words, which had been spoken barely above a whisper. He touched her shoulders and then moved one hand to the middle of her fully exposed legs, and she shuddered.

"You do know your way around a lady, don't you, love?" she asked as the man moved around her, his hand still cupped on her crotch. She raised her head, looking either at the black sky or the second floor of the Men's Club, and began to moan. I kept wondering if the professor, in his hiding spot in the alley, had as clear a view, when the tone in the woman's voice changed from a humming sound that had risen to near ecstasy to a raspy noise and finally a gurgling sound, as if she wanted to cough but couldn't. Her body stiffened and her legs started to kick out, the dress falling back to its normal place and covering her naked flesh. As the woman began to slump, the man, still holding her from behind, gently lowered her to the ground.

I wanted to yell, throw a stone into the courtyard, anything to get the killer's attention. His face was drowned in the blackness of the yard and the little noise the two had made had been concealed by the steady, cordial laughter coming from the Men's Club. A carriage turned the corner from Commercial onto Berner, and I knew I had better move quickly, or I'd be seen by the man who eventually found Elizabeth Stride's body. As the sound of the carriage grew louder, the killer looked up, nearly staring right at me through the fence, but his features were masked by the nearly lightless courtyard. I could have sworn he smiled at me before he crept back into the alley and disappeared.

I heard the carriage getting even closer, but the driver hadn't seen me. There was nowhere else to go but inside the yard, following the same path the killer had taken, down the alleyway. Maybe it was just my imagination, but I thought I could still hear the sound of his footsteps, not even running, just walking casually through the dank, dark, narrow path of escape, so confident that no one would see him that he could take his time.

The carriage was so close I could hear the horse that was pulling it blowing air out of its huge nostrils. In a near panic, I opened the gate just enough to allow my slender form through and dashed into the yard and down the alley, not even thinking what would happen if I ran right into the killer. There was no other way out.

It all happened in slow motion. I ran through the courtyard, hunched down to keep the driver from seeing me, and my right foot slid on something very wet and thick, nearly causing me to fall. I reached for anything that might stop my descent and caught a metal railing attached to a stone stairway leading to the Men's Club back door. As I steadied myself, I heard what sounded like someone gargling mouthwash.

I gasped as Elizabeth Stride clasped my leg and tried to speak, but the gaping hole in her throat, which had been slashed from ear to ear, allowed only that raspy and watery noise to reach my ears. Her lips were swollen and foaming blood oozed from her mouth. Her eyes were open, staring right at me, but there was nothing behind them, her life-force already so far gone that I doubt she even knew I was there, her hand clamping onto me by reflex alone. Her grip weakened, and finally her hand opened as it rode my pants leg back down to the ground. Her last breath came in the form of a small cough, just as the gate started to swing open wide. I threw myself into the alley and started to run when a hand grabbed me from behind and yanked me to the side.

"Quietly," the professor said in a whisper. "I don't want to read in the history books when we get back that Jack the Ripper looked like a college schoolboy." We walked quickly but quietly down the alley and came out on Berner just in time to hear a man yelling for help.

"We must be quick," the professor said, pulling me through the streets of Whitechapel. It was loud now, with the people of the night rushing past us on all sides and a cacophony of police whistles as the authorities converged on Dutfield's Yard. All I could think about was that her body would still be warm when they got there, and that also meant he was very close.

"He's got a good head start," the old man said, as if reading my mind but trying to contradict my conclusion. "We've got five, maybe six minutes, but we can't look as if we're running or we'll draw suspicion. Just a fast walk, Georgie, and whatever you do, keep your voice down. My accent could easily get lost in all of this, but your Yank talk will surely get us in trouble on a night like tonight. Wouldn't want to push the panic button."

I nodded and walked faster, trying to keep up with him, and as I did I put my hand in my pocket to make sure the little device the professor had mentioned was still there, and hadn't somehow fallen out as I ran out of Dutfield's Yard. My fingers fumbled around and eventually touched what felt like metal, but was in reality a composite material in the shape of a tiny disc with a little red button hidden under a thin cover. It was the panic button. An instant return ticket to the present, or future, or whatever the hell my own time really was. Pop open the top with a flick of your thumb and push the little button. A few milliseconds later you're back in the main lab. Each device was programmed to respond only to the molecular structure of the individual time traveller. If you somehow died in the past and an innocent bystander found it and clicked the button, nothing would happen. If I tried to use the professor's, concealed in plain sight as a shiny silver button sewn into the middle of his own coat, the same result. Nothing.

The panic button was for emergencies only. The professor had the main timer control secreted in a locket that hung from a necklace hidden under his shirt. It was set to return both of us at a predetermined time. But in case it failed or was lost or destroyed, those brilliant engineers who had envisioned and invented our time machine had come up with the panic button, a clever redundant system and ultimate failsafe.

Nearly ten minutes passed quickly, and the streets became very quiet again. The professor slowed as we approached a sign that read Mitre Street. The fog had become very thick and was so high it obscured my entire lower body. I wanted to ask many questions, but the professor had warned me to keep silent. Had he seen the Ripper? The killer must have walked right by him in the alley, so close the professor must have been able to reach out and touch him. Or had the alley been so dark that he merely saw what I did, a dark form shrouded in the black night air, only his horrific grin showing as he finished Elizabeth Stride off?

"There's a different feel here, isn't there?" the professor asked in a whisper. In the silence around us it was as if he had spoken aloud. "Such a perfect spot, really. Look around you, boy. If there was ever an ideal killing ground, this is it. Only a few blocks from a multitude of people, and yet so singularly isolated."

I turned and spied the buildings surrounding Mitre Square and saw nothing but darkened windows. Most of the structures were run down, many with broken windows. Of the buildings that looked like dwellings, either no one was home or they were uninhabited. Most were businesses, at this early hour shuttered and vacant. Only two dim lights on posts cast any kind of illumination onto the square.

"I'm going over there," the professor said, pointing to a spot between two buildings, shrouded in darkness. "A good vantage point, I'd say."

"I want to come with you this time," I blurted, too loudly. The old man glared at me and turned his head first right and then left, out of fear that the Ripper, who was surely approaching the square as we spoke, had heard me.

He put his hands on my shoulders. "No, my boy. Opposite sides of the square for us. I caught only a slight glimpse of him as he ran past me in the alley. He takes more time with this one, remember. 'Does her good,' you might say, and that will give us a much better chance to see him, but we're better off viewing it from two angles than one." I heard a woman laughing in the distance. The professor pointed to a brick building with a series of shattered windows on the ground floor. An abandoned warehouse. Its wooden door, or what was left of it, was partially opened. I ran for the opening as the professor hurried to the other side of Mitre Square and disappeared in the mist.

"You're such a lovely little child," the man said, his voice deep and so much more sophisticated than her usual clientele. She did have to laugh, however, at this debonair old man who took such pains to impress her, when all he really had to do was produce the quid and she'd give him a ride he'd never forget. "What's your name, my dear?"

"Kate," she replied as they approached Mitre Square from Church Passage, a dimly lit and narrow path that would soon dump them into a wide open but very private space. "The ground's rather cold tonight, doncha think, love? I'd rather we fucked against one of those old buildings in the square, if you don't mind?"

"Of course, my dear," he said with a broad smile on his face, though it was rather difficult to see his features with the brim of his hat concealing his eyes. All Catherine Eddowes knew was he'd showed her some gold coins. She didn't care if she had to rub, suck, or jump up and down on him all night, as long as there was a golden payday at the end. She was desperately low on cash and didn't want to sleep in the street or the parish poorhouse again tonight. Even a grimy and crowded boarding room would be better, and the rest of her hard-earned money could go to flushing out her system at the nearest pub.

"Over there," he whispered as they entered the square. He pointed to a closed business and a row of houses, all appearing to be empty and dark, not a light in any window or a sound issuing forth. He walked behind her, gently stroking the back of her long and quite dirty hair. As they approached the rowhouses she slowed. A strange noise came from behind her, something tinny or metallic being rubbed against leather or some coarse cloth, she thought. The last thing she felt was his hand tightening on her hair and her head being yanked backward, exposing her throat to a flash of silver.

I stared in horror. The fog was thick and covered me well, but I could see everything I needed to, and it was much more than I wanted. The shrouded figure lurking behind the woman had pulled back her head with such force I was surprised it hadn't broken her neck, and the bright blade came across her throat so quickly that she had no time to emit a sound, not even the gurgle that I had heard coming from Lizzie Stride. The blade dug in so deeply that I had to turn away for a moment as I saw her head starting to peel away from her body, only thin strands of bone and tissue keeping it from coming off altogether. The violence of that first cut contained so much anger, as if it had been pent up from his being disturbed in the midst of his first kill of the night. The inconvenient interruption in Dutfield's Yard had only allowed him to scratch the surface of his demented cravings, and now he had more time, much more, to finish his appointed task.

Blood sprayed against the wall of the rowhouses and dripped to the ground in tiny red streams. A torrent of crimson spilled down the front and sides of her dress as he lowered her to the ground. I lost them in the fog at that point and ventured closer, creeping from behind the door of the abandoned house that had been my sanctuary and crouching down to avoid detection as I crossed the square.

I was only thirty or forty feet away from them when the fog suddenly rushed past me and provided a clear view of the final carnage. The man straddled her legs, which were now naked, her bloodied dress having been pulled up above her breasts. He had opened her midsection with one clean but savage cut and was using his hands to spread her skin apart, revealing her intestines. He grabbed the knife again, which he had laid on her breasts, and sliced into her innards, then pulled two lengths of what looked like sausage out of her and draped them around her viciously torn throat.

Although I tried with all of my might to suppress it, I gasped, and he stopped and started to turn toward me. I expected to see Satan himself, glowing red eyes and sharpened talons for fingers, but when he faced me head on, he only smiled, and it was a familiar smile, one I had seen many times before. My throat closed up like someone had used a vise grip on it, and I became so parched I could only utter, "My God in heaven" in a guttural whisper.

Professor Armin Cawzinski laughed out loud and said, "Only one more thing to do, Georgie, and then we're done," and in one motion he turned from me, dug the knife under Catherine Eddowes' left eye, nearly popping her eyeball out of the socket, dragged the blade across her face and under her nose, ripping it from her face and placing it delicately on her cheek. His right hand then reached toward the front of his coat and a thin finger depressed the silver button—and he vanished.

I was frozen, completely immobile. Staring at the carnage at my feet, the dull and lifeless eyes of Catherine Eddowes turned up to me, accusing me of complicity in her untimely death. Reaching into my coat pocket, I scrounged desperately for my timer. A sigh of relief. While it felt like hours had past since we had departed the first crime scene—and I could only assume the professor had also done in Lizzie Stride—less than an hour had gone by.

A flash of light caught my eye. From out of the fog I could see a lantern swaying back and forth less than a block away, heading right toward me. "Shit," I said to no one but the dead prostitute. I suddenly remembered. Before any leap back in time, the travellers had to study their time period extensively, and any circumstances that could be effected by their presence. The light that was coming even closer belonged to the hand of a London constable—PC Edward Watkins to be exact—and any second he would be standing right here, where my feet felt like they had been encased in cement.

I frantically reached into my pocket for my panic button. It wasn't there. My pants pockets were empty save for a few old English coins. I said nothing aloud, but in my mind I was screaming. As the glow from the lantern moved onto Mitre Square, I could hear PC Watkins humming to himself, and with every snap his shoes on the brick walkway my heart rate rose until I was ready to bolt from the murder scene as fast as I could, a move that would surely have given me away. Even if I eluded him, the fact that he would report hearing the sound of running footsteps, and perhaps even the image of a man fleeing the square could alter history. No one had ever really seen Jack the Ripper. Some claimed they saw a man near some of the crime scenes, but all of the descriptions were different. Edward Watkins saw nothing, according to all of the texts I had read. And he was now so close I could almost make out his arm holding the lantern.

Just as I was about to turn and run, I heard one of the coins from my pocket drop to the street, and what sounded like the tinkling of a small bell as the round silver-colored form struck the pavement. Twenty or thirty yards away the constable stopped suddenly. "Who's there?" a loud, voice demanded.

I bent down to grab the coin, and to my amazement discovered it wasn't a coin at all. As PC Edward Watkins began to walk even faster in my direction, I grabbed the object off the ground, flipped open the cap, and pushed the panic button. Watkins' face was emerging from the fog. I could make out the moustache on his face. I yelled, "No!" at the top of my lungs and closed my eyes, waiting for this soon-to-be-famous police officer to grab me and go down in history as the man who caught Jack the Ripper. But when I opened my eyes I was back in the time chamber, gazing into the eyes of a startled technician.

"Jesus, George," Phil Hopkins said as I nearly collapsed into his arms. "Between you and that nutty professor, I almost had a coronary." I was kneeling on the floor, my body exhausted from the ordeal I had just escaped and the time shift my molecules had experienced. The mention of the professor brought me back to reality in a hurry.

"Where is he?" I said loudly, scrambling to my feet and using Hopkins' legs and torso as leverage. "Cawzinski. Where the hell is he?"

I had known Hopkins for only a few weeks, but I could tell he thought I had spent far too much time on the other side, maybe to the point of suffering brain damage. I was rambling incoherently—at least in his mind—and the look on my face was enough to make him push me away and step backward to free himself from my grasp.

"He's already gone," he said, sounding as if I should have already known the answer to my question. "But when he gets back, I'm sure he'll be pissed to find out he made the trip for nothing."

"The trip where?"

"Back to get you. The Doc came back using the panic button—you can always tell, because there's a dim blue light that surrounds you when you use that, not the ordinary yellow light from the regular timer—and he rushed into the control room. He was ranting something about the two of you being separated and something going wrong. Benny and I tried to stop him, but he punched in some new calculations, scanned his timer and his panic button to the new settings, and ran back into the portal."

I realized that the truth would sound far too unbelievable. My incredulous tale could only be confirmed by the professor, and he signed Hopkins' paycheck. Who would he believe? A frightened and incoherent young student, or a respected English gentleman who owned a loft in London and two country estates in Dover and York? If I had any chance of stopping the professor, I had to get back into the portal, and quickly.

"I've got to go after him," I said. "He has no way of knowing whether I've jumped back safely, and you know how the old man is. He'll stay there until the last minute, maybe even too long."

Hopkins stepped closer to me again and gingerly grabbed my shoulders. I saw him motion with his head, and to his right the two armed guards who were standing behind a glass enclosure began to walk down the corridor that would take them from their posting and into the chamber.

"We almost lost you," Hopkins said quietly, almost soothingly. "I can't be telling the director that we lost two of you. I think you ought to stay right where you are. Cawzinski's not stupid. He'll be back." Hopkins helped me to my feet, and a confused look came across his face. "I do wonder, though, why he went back to that other date."

"What do you mean?" I said. "He didn't set the controls to return to September 30th?"

"No. He set them for...." Hopkins paused, and then reached for the small hand held computer he always had on him, the one that was tied into the brain of the time system.

"November 8th," I finished his reply, a heaviness filling my heart.

After touching the screen of his handheld a few times, Hopkins looked back at me. "Yeah. How did you know?" He looked at my feet, and as I gazed down at my shoes I noticed their tips were coated in blood, fresh from the jugular of Catherine Eddowes and transported safely over one hundred years into the future, to a time when her flesh had long ago rotted away and all that remained in her buried casket was her brittle bones. I put my hand on Hopkins' shoulder and gently tried to guide him into the main control room.

"I don't have time to explain, but something went horribly wrong, something that would likely effect the timestream, and the Professor went back to correct it at the source. The altered time event won't happen until November." The lies were coming so quickly now, I could only hope I hadn't contradicted myself somewhere along the line. We entered the control room, where rows and rows of computers like none ever seen in the public view constantly monitored the time portal.

"Check your location finder," I said. "You'll see that the Professor set the controls to take him to November 8th, 1888, very late at night, maybe even early on the morning of the 9th, and he's programmed the portal to open somewhere near a place called Miller's Court."

Hopkins didn't even need to look at the computer screen. "That's right," he said. "I remember him saying that before he punched in the data. He mumbled something about Miller's Court. What happens there?"

"Something awful," I said, my words barely audible. "But I may be able to help the professor stop it." I moved to the main control panel and pushed one final sequence into the computer, ran my panic button over a device that looked just like a supermarket scanner, and without another word to the three stunned technicians, I ran back into the chamber and leaped through the portal.

Candles and gas lamps glowed from inside the closed windows along Dorset Street. There was a distinct chill in the November air that had been absent in September. Dorset and the series of courts, or small and narrow lanes leading off the main road, were littered with row houses. Many of them served as overnight lodging for the local prostitutes, and one apartment in particular, fronting on Dorset but with only one entrance or exit—on Miller's Court—belonged to Mary Jane Kelly. I stood in the damp cold of Miller's Court for a full five minutes before daring to move.

It was just as I had pictured it. A quiet lane leading to a darkened doorway. An apartment, not exactly run down but never likely to be confused for upscale, with two shattered window panes. Through that broken glass I saw flickers of light playing against a fluttering curtain from the fireplace Mary Kelly used to keep warm on a long winter's night. There was no other movement. It was nearly midnight, and soon the murderer would enter this small dwelling, perhaps on the willing arm of Mary Kelly, to begin his most gruesome task. On this particular version of November 9th, 1888, Jack would find he was not alone.

Placing my hand on the doorknob, I shuddered involuntarily. The knob turned without resistance, the door slowly opening with a push of my hand. As I committed a felony and broke into her apartment, I could picture Mary Kelly at that moment finding her meal and rent ticket for the night, a kindly looking older gentleman with a handful of gold. I remember thinking they were probably only a few blocks away and could walk in at any moment when I realized, to my utter horror, that Mary Jane Kelly was home. In fact, she was quite literally all over the apartment.

Falling to my knees, I felt a flood of bile rise in my throat and wasted little time vomiting it out. I had only caught a glimpse of the carnage that was scattered about Mary's apartment, but it was enough to sicken the most hardened soul.

A whiff of pipe tobacco suddenly filled my nostrils, and a loud and evil laugh came from my left side, somewhere near the fireplace, which was crackling violently, as if someone had tossed an accelerant on the blaze.

"I warned you, my boy," Professor Armin Cawzinski said. "The blood and the gore—the sudden impact of seeing and smelling a human being's muscle, tissue and bone that's been ripped apart—will get you every time. I bet you've seen the black-and-white photos of this scene a dozen times, and they never fazed you a bit. Maybe you even took part in some nervous laughter with your classmates when I showed the slides of this poor woman's remains in that Serial Murder class I taught last term. Yet it's just so different in living color, isn't it? Especially when you add in that coppery smell of spilled blood and my own particular favorite, the odor that accompanies a woman's innards roasting on an open flame."

He laughed again, and when I was finally able to turn and look at him, I saw a complete stranger. The gentle, funny, inspiring, ever-nurturing old professor had been transformed into something alien. He stood by the fireplace, his body silhouetted by the bright glare of the flames that circled him like a halo. His white starched shirt was unbuttoned to the waist and stained with blood, his chest gleaming in scarlet, and his black coat lay draped on a wooden chair in front of the mantle. The main timer control still dangled from his neck, a drop of blood slowly congealing near its oval-shaped bottom. I met his gaze for a moment and then turned away from him, rising to my feet and nearly collapsing again as my eyes met what was left of Mary Kelly.

Most of her was on the bed in the corner of the room. Her legs and arms were the only clearly identifiable parts. The legs were spread apart and near the pelvis they had been sawed to the bone. In between those legs, the part of Mary Kelly's body that had provided her with her living, so to speak, was nothing but shredded skin and tissue soaked in blood. Her entire midsection was pulled open from her hips to her neck. What had once been a very attractive face had been sliced so heavily that her skull protruded through what was left of her skin, and her hair, once long and flowing, was now a much darker shade of red.

Mary's organs were tossed about the room. Part of an intestine lay near one of my feet. Her liver was on the floor near the bed. Her feet played host to her kidneys, one on each upturned set of toes, like some sick and bizarre art exhibition commissioned from Hell. And her breasts, another key to her trade, had been cut from her chest. The two lumps of flesh were on the table next to the bed. One of Mary Kelly's outstretched arms was frozen in what appeared to be an agonizing attempt to find her missing body parts.

"You thought you were going to get here before we played our little game, didn't you, Georgie?" the professor asked, a tinge of false sympathy in his voice.

"The medical examiner said she was killed between one and two in the morning," I replied like a robot. "It's midnight. I thought I had given myself enough advance time to...."

"To stop me?" he asked, incredulously. "Funny thing about 1880s forensic medicine. It was so inexact. No DNA samples to test, no way to measure rigor or the body's temperature in a precise way. Hell, even the science of fingerprints is a ways off. Did you know, Georgie, that the chief inspectors in this case once took photos of the dead girls' eyes in the hope that the reflection of the killer would be found mirrored in them? They were reaching, like blind men without canes, for anything and everything that could give them a clue. But there were no clues to be found, because they would have had to look over a hundred years into the future to find their answer."

The Professor stood up and moved toward me. I wanted to run away. The door was close and I knew if I could just get my feet to move, I could make it home ... but he would come after me, no matter where I went, or when.

He reached for me and I awaited the flash of steel as his razor-sharpened blade sliced through my throat. But instead of a knife, he held out a blood-soaked hand cupping something moist and nearly rounded. His hand opened, and Mary Kelly's heart, torn from her chest while it was still beating, was shoved under my nose. I stumbled backward, the door preventing my fall. My back slammed against the wood and I screamed.

"Have a heart, Georgie," Cawzinski said, laughing, and then turned and flung the mass of tissue into the fire. At first there was a sizzling noise as the blood boiled, and then a horrible pop as Mary Kelly's heart exploded from the intense heat. Again I waited for the end to come, but he turned away and walked to the dead woman's bed, staring almost sadly at her remains, as if he were Hamlet about to expound on Yorrik's infinite jest. When he finally did speak, his tone was filled with remorse, but not for the poor woman he had so savagely murdered.

"I'm not going to kill you, Georgie, my boy," he said quietly, his back to me. If I had wanted to, I could have easily opened the door and run into the yard, yelling at the top of my lungs, bringing a constable to this slaughterhouse on Miller's Court. But I couldn't move. As misplaced a relief as it may have been, my fear was gone. He sighed and turned, his hands resting so leisurely on the bedsheets that were now painted a shade of human scarlet.

"Do you recall that first discussion you and I had on the nature of time?" he asked, as if we were standing in a faculty lounge.

"Yes," I managed to croak, my throat so dry I nearly coughed the word out.

"I said that time was a river—a theory that's been espoused by so many before—but somehow I knew that to be the case."

I could stand the idle chatter no more. Some saliva finally wetting my lips, I practically screamed, "What the hell does any of that have to do with this?"

He smiled, and then began to laugh. "Don't you understand, Georgie? It's not that I don't want to kill you, that I don't have the overwhelming urge to slice your throat and pull the head right off of your egotistical Yank shoulders. I can't. No matter how hard I try."

"Is it so different to kill a man?" I said, not wanting to know the answer, which could only come from the mind of a madman.

"Not at all. I dispatched the real Ripper on my first visit. No trouble at all. Hell, he didn't even struggle. Just looked at me with an incredible sense of shock, as if he knew somehow that his destiny was to murder these women and I was going to take it all away from him. And by the way, it wasn't the prince. At least I dispelled that myth."

"This is insane," I said, my hand finally trying to turn the door knob, his promise of not taking my life notwithstanding. "If you killed the Ripper, why did all of these women have to die?"

He said nothing for a moment, staring down at the floor into a pool of blood that was being fed, drop by drop, from the soaked sheets. I swear the sound of those droplets hitting the hard wood floor was the worst sound I've ever heard.

"Did you know my first trip back in time was to Dallas in 1963?" he asked, sounding for the first time since earlier in the evening like the professor I had once so admired. "I signed all of those legal documents saying I would never attempt to change history, to manipulate the timestream. But it was so vivid. Being there at Dealey Plaza, watching the motorcade make its way to its meeting with destiny. I couldn't help myself. I went into the Book Depository, ran up those floors to where Oswald lay in wait—and he was there, rifle and all—and I stopped him. I yelled as the presidential motorcade came in front of him, right into his target, and he turned, and missed his shot."

My head was swimming. I couldn't understand what this menace was trying so hard to say to me, discussing the philosophy of time only moments after he had snuffed out the lovely woman who had once lived and breathed and loved here. "I still remember that Kennedy was murdered in Dallas," I said, my voice like a robot. "You changed nothing."

"Precisely," the professor said excitedly, moving toward me. My hand turned the knob even further. "Don't you understand? My theory was correct. I had proven it. Oswald was stopped, but it was a conspiracy after all, and in any conspiracy, there's redundancy. One shooter misses, the others hit their targets. Bam! Kennedy is still dead, Oswald is still seen running down the stairs of the Book Depository, and he's still the patsy. But the point, Georgie, is even if I had taken another route, the end would be the same. If I had gone behind the fence on the grassy knoll and tackled a shooter there, Kennedy would still be dead. Another shooter, maybe even Oswald himself, would have taken him out. If I had gone back in time to just before World War II and killed Hitler, Himmler or another of his henchmen would have led Germany into war, killing millions along the way. All scenarios are the same. You can't change history."

"I still don't know what that has to do with ... with this!" I yelled, pointing to Mary Kelly's body. "How do you reconcile some time theory with the murder of all of these women? What's the fucking point?"

"They had to die," he said sadly. "If I hadn't done it, someone else would. The Oswald of this time string. The real Ripper, if I hadn't prevented him from his own destiny. The river, Georgie. If you divert it, change its course, it still flows into the sea in the end. The same is true of time."

"This proves nothing! If you had let them live, and they still died at someone else's hands, after you killed the Ripper, then you could have proven your theory and the blood wouldn't be on your hands."

He moved so quickly, I didn't have time to finish opening the door. Before I knew it, he was standing directly in front of me, his face so close to my own that I could smell the putrid odor of roasted human flesh on his breath. It had been said, I recalled, that Jack the Ripper may have cooked some of Mary Kelly's organs and dined on them. I knew now it was true.

"Don't you understand, my boy? I didn't murder these women just to prove my point. I rather enjoyed it. In fact, I loved it. For so many years I've studied these great enigmas called Bundy and Gacy, and dozens of others whose only claim to fame was their obsession with death and power over others who were too weak to defend themselves. And Jack, well, he's the DaVinci of all of them, the purest form of the serial murderer. The one who started it all and whom all the others, without even knowing it, strove so hard to emulate. I was a professor, an intellectual, and my world of resources was books. I read countless historical and psychological profiles of the most infamous men of history, trying so hard to understand why they did it, but I could never put my finger on what really made them tick. What was it about taking a human life that made the phenomenal risk they took so worthwhile? The power? The control they held over others? The thrill of it all? Pure sadism? And then I had a monumental idea. I didn't need the books anymore. I could be Jack the Ripper and know first-hand what it meant to hold the fragile lives of these women in my hands. Just using the time machine to come back and see who he really was wouldn't be enough. That would only satisfy the tiniest fraction of my curiousity. I needed to feel just as he felt, to see it all through his eyes. And it worked. I finally understood. I saw it and felt it all so clearly."

I couldn't move. The professor's stare held me as tightly as he had grasped the women he had butchered, and his words cut as deeply as the blade he had used to shred their flesh.

"When I pulled my knife across that first woman's throat and felt her stiffen and then convulse, I was in another world, a place I'd never been, a place so few of us have ever been. It was intoxicating. It was like the longest orgasm I've ever experienced. My whole body was electrified. I didn't want it to end. Who knows, Georgie? Maybe, in a real sense, I've always been Jack. I've got so much more work to do. So many other places to go. With our little machine I can be Zodiac, Green River, and any number of other killers who've plundered this world's cache of flesh." He pushed his body against mine, crushing my hand between my back and the doorknob. I cried out in pain and pulled my hand away, the door clicking completely closed behind me.

"I was just thinking, Georgie," he said, slowly backing away from me again. "Jack may have never killed a man. But if I sliced you up, nice and small, and buried you in some deep woods outside the city, no one would ever find you. And even if they found bits and pieces, you'd be written off as just another vagrant who came to a bad end."

"You said you couldn't kill me," I replied weakly, moving away from the door and closer to the fireplace, seeking something, anything, a block of wood meant for the fire, to use as a weapon. "It would ruin your timestream theory."

"Perhaps," he said, turning away from me for a moment and reaching into a black bag laying on the floor near the foot of Mary Kelly's bed. He withdrew a shiny silver knife, nearly a foot long, with a thin and very sharp blade. To my horror, I realized as I looked at it that bits of flesh still clung to the metal from his attack on the Ripper's last victim. "But for the sake of experimentation, and I am the consummate scientist, I am willing to test the hypothesis."

The professor slowly approached me as I backed away from the fireplace and tried again to reach the door. I grabbed his coat, hoping to use it as a cloth shield to stop the impending first cut of the blade, maybe to catch the knife in the material and wrest it from his hands. Cawzinski just laughed and leaned into me, his fetid breath filled with the odor of Mary Kelly's ingested internal organs. As he did, a small gleam caught my eye and a piece of metal brushed my right hand as I raised it to fend off the attack. The necklace holding the main timer. I grasped it tightly and pulled as hard as I could. It broke free from the professor's neck so easily, and he backed up—just one step—as if momentarily stunned.

"Now, Georgie, let's not make this more difficult than it has...." he stopped and stared at my hands. One held his coat and his necklace, the main timer dangling precariously from a crease in the cotton material, almost touching a tiny silver button on the lapel, the little button the professor had been so careful to see secured with needle and thread to prevent its loss to the denizens of the dank streets of London. With my other hand, I reached into my pocket and pulled out my own panic button, the one so meticulously programmed to respond to only my molecular structure. Cawzinski opened his mouth to say something and lunged at me with the knife, just as I pushed the red button with full force.

I often lay awake at night and replay the final moments of that fateful confrontation in Miller's Court, where I both lived and made history. I don't know what the Professor saw as I disappeared—that flash of blue light that our technicians say they've witnessed or just a body one second and thin air the next. What I remember most of all was the look on his face. Jack the Ripper and the man who would be Zodiac had lost the one thing he had ever really, and yet so briefly owned—control of time. In that face I saw a mix of fear and resignation.

When I awoke on the floor of the time chamber, back in my own time, if there truly exists such a thing, I was holding my panic button in my left hand and—very tightly, so tightly they had to pry my fingers apart—the Professor's only means of return in my right hand. Hopkins rushed to my side, checked to see if I was conscious, and said, "Dr. Cawzinski? Where's Dr. Cawzinski?"

Looking at my right hand, I could only reply, "He didn't make it."

In the weeks and months that followed, there were official and unofficial inquiries, computerized checks of the timestream to be certain that the river was still flowing to the sea. I was cleared of any wrongdoing. As far as anyone knew, the professor was a casualty of time travel. I painted a heroic picture of him sacrificing his life to save the integrity of time, which in a way was the truth.

The professor's time controller and panic button sat on the shelf in my library until I celebrated the second anniversary of that ill-fated day by throwing them both into the trash compactor.

On that same day I took my final voyage through time. I returned to old London, this time to 1892. I visited the Colney Hatch Asylum, as majestic on the outside as any English estate, but more like a medieval dungeon on the inside.

I inquired about a man I said was my old Polish uncle. An orderly led me down a hallway crowded with inmates, some yelling for help, others staring helplessly and trying to see beyond their own fogged minds. We came to a row of cells that looked more like homes for prisoners than lunatics, though I doubt there was much difference in the opinion of the people of the time. My "uncle's" was the first on the right.

"He don't talk much," the orderly said in a thick English accent. "Mainly mumbles to hisself. He's peaceful enough, though. Not much trouble since his first couple of weeks here. He tried to smash a chair over me head once back then, and he got hold of a kitchen knife and nearly slit one of me mate's throats."

"I don't doubt it," I said, doing my best to hide my American accent with a barely passable English one.

"He got very quiet after that. One of those blokes that seems to have just gone deeper inside hisself as time's gone on."

"Can I speak with him alone?" The orderly looked skeptical. "You can stay right outside the cell if you want. I only need a minute. The family wants to know how bad off he really is."

The orderly nodded and keyed the cell door, which opened with a loud creak. The silent form inside sat on a hard bed with a thin bit of padding on it. His back was to me when I entered the cell. Despite the noise of the door and my approaching footsteps on the stone floor, he didn't turn.

Hair as white as snow flowed from the back and sides of his head, nearly reaching his shoulders. His body appeared emaciated, as if he hadn't eaten in months. His hands, so familiar to me, yet so unfamiliar, were like a skeleton's, the bones nearly protruding through the skin. They were by his side, clenching the padding on the bed as if holding on for dear life. I gave the man this asylum identified as Aaron Kosminski a wide berth, walking several feet off to his left side to get a look at his face. As I came into his eyesight at last, he moved, almost imperceptibly. I walked directly in front of him.

"Hello, Armin," I said quietly, so that only he could hear. I wondered how long it had taken before he couldn't even say his own name. Three hours after he had jumped to the past and murdered Mary Kelly, his brain had started to betray him. Who knows where he was when it dawned on him that his condition was not only irreversible, but would worsen slowly and without end. It started subtly, or so the medics have told me from studying those who failed to make it back before their three hours were up. Flashes of light and images that aren't there. Bouts of forgetfulness. Bits of rage, something the professor needed no help with, but this rage would be uncontained. It's likely that rage landed him in the asylum. Finally, after several months, and for some even a few years, there is the onset of a vegetative state in which the brain has been mashed to a pulp and all cognition of past and present are gone. When he entered this place he tried to tell them he was Armin Cawzinski, respected scientist, but what came out was Aaron Kosminski, who would one day be named a potential suspect in the Jack the Ripper slayings, though he was never charged. A harmless imbecile, one investigator would say after interviewing him, hardly the kind that could kill all of those women and walk away without leaving a clue.

He receives no visitors, according to the records, so my arrival and request for an audience was quite the surprise. I knelt down in front of the old man, who, one record said, lived another 28 years. Other records claimed he died only months after my visit. From his appearance, I tend to believe the latter.

I stared into his eyes. I expected some sign of recognition, a dim light trying desperately to reach the surface, maybe even a hint of deeply buried hatred as he glared at the man who had sentenced him to this prison of the mind and body. Nothing at all. A blank and nearly blinkless stare. I almost hoped he would say or do something, scream my name, grab my hand, but this shell of a man just kept on looking straight through me. To Armin Cawzinski, I was something in the distant future, and we all know memories are made up of the past.

The orderly grunted and said something I couldn't understand. I had overstayed my welcome. The records of Colney Hatch don't tell the orderly's tale, though I'm sure he regaled his grandchildren on long winter's nights of the time he led a stranger into the cell of a dying old man who had lost his mind and when he had called out for the stranger to take his leave, a bright blue flash of light spilled from the dark opening, and the man inside vanished. Was that a tear he saw on old Kosminski's face?

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