Take Away the Saints

Switch: Part 2 || Shaun Allan

          

I wasn't sure what to expect.  A sense of falling?  The feeling I was being torn apart and slammed back together again with my body parts not in the right places?  Suffocation?

I knew what not to expect.  Nothing.  I didn't expect nothing.  I'd heard about sensory deprivation tanks where you float in darkness and silence and can't feel, see or hear anything.  This absence of anything and everything felt like one of those taken to the extreme.  Everything was removed but without feeling as if anything had been.  There was no sensation of change.  There was just everything and then nothing.

And then everything again.  Except different.

I wasn't in Kansas anymore.

I was in London, still, but not the London I knew.  Not the one I had visited countless times.  Not the one with the Shard and the Eye.  This London was one of smog and of slum and of squalor.  And of Whitechapel.

Durward Street was once called Buck's Row.  It was the site of a horrific atrocity that began a reign of terror, taking the imagination of generations by the throat and refusing to let go.

I checked the dials.  It had worked.  If the smells and sounds hadn't been enough to tell me, the machine was.  I was in 1888.  August.  It was a Friday, the last day of the month.  In five minutes, at 3:40am, a murder would be committed.  The deceased, with a severed throat and jaggedly rent abdomen, would become the first of the Canonical Five.  Mary Ann Nichols would be Jack the Ripper's first victim.

I couldn't stop him.  Time wouldn't let me.  I could try but, somehow, I would fail.  History had to remain the same and existence itself would stand in my way to ensure its continuity.  So, I just wanted to see.  I wanted to know.  Were any of the theories correct?

Who was Jack the Ripper?

I was about to find out.  I heard voices.  A man and a woman.  They were laughing.  Coming closer.  She, a lady of the night, he a creature of the same, the references meaning entirely different things.  Pleasure and pain.  Joy and jugular.

The couple approached.  I moved back as far as I could, doing my best to meld into the shadows.  They stopped, talking, but I couldn't hear the words above the thundering in my chest - a thunder that stuttered when I saw my machine still where I'd left it.  They had walked past it without noticing.  I needed to retrieve it.  Quickly.

They were immersed in each other's company but the lack of lighting and the fact I had to remain hidden was making it difficult to see his face.  I knew hers, having seen it many times in my research.  She would be famous, but for a reason she would never wish.  Slowly, I took a step forward, crouching and reaching as I moved.

I still can't remember quite what happened in the next few seconds.  It didn't exactly happen quickly, but it did seem to happen all at once.  I know I didn't make a noise, but Mary looked over in my direction.  Jack, though that wasn't his name and I was desperate to find out who he really was, followed her gaze.  I stumbled back.  There was the flash of steel and a quickly silenced, gurgling scream.  A muffled thud and the sound of tearing.  The neck and stomach.

Then footsteps as he fled into London's decaying heart.

I had missed him.  I'd witnessed the murder, but I hadn't come for that.  I felt callous but I knew I couldn't have stopped it even if I had tried.  Mary was doomed - destined, perhaps - to die.

I followed, my time machine under my arm and the soles of my feet slapping on the stones.  I tried to be lighter footed and managed, to some small extent.  I could hear his own flight not far away.  Running had been the only sport I'd had any talent in at school.  I assumed the man I pursued had not had either the diet, cleaner air or better living conditions that I had.  I was gaining.

Then he was there.  He'd stopped, waiting for me, knife out.  He'd killed once so another death would not have marked his Gate to Hell entry pass any more than it already was.  I stumbled to a halt.  He lunged.  I felt the impact but no pain and pushed, hard.  He fell back and I heard a crack as he hit the ground.  He yelled and swore.

I needed to see him!  I needed to know!  Even if I died in the process!

I leapt on him, looking for his knife to at least give myself the chance to avoid its bite.  He cried out as I landed on him and I saw the blood oozing from his side, his life force creeping away, hoping I wouldn't notice.  Then I saw the blade, impaled between his ribs, pushed deeper between the ground and his lifeless body by my weight.

No!

NO!

I pulled the knife free.  I shook him.  Slapped his face.  Pushed, rhythmically, against his chest, ignoring the way the blood squirted in ridicule at my feeble attempts to resuscitate him.

The knife was in my hand.  I stared at it.  This was the weapon that had killed those woman.  It had, also, killed the killer.  The Ripper.

The realisation was a tsunami of horror.  I was swept away by the torrent, drowning in the black waters of despair.  He had died before he could continue his campaign of death.  But he couldn't!  It was Time.  History!  They could not be changed!  There was no such thing as a paradox.

There wasn't.  There couldn't be.  There was only the absolutely defined line that everything must follow.

Yet I had killed him.  Before Time could take his legacy and make it immortal, I had taken his life and made it very mortal.  He had only murdered Mary.  What about Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly?  They would now live.  They'd have children.  Leave a stain on the unblemished perfection of that which I thought unstainable.  They would have a life they should not have had.  Should not have been entitled to, with them being extinguished over the next month.

What had I done?  What would the world - my world - be like when I went back?  What if the children of one of the Ripper's intended victims became a serial killer themselves?  Or...  Or a boy who read a book and invented a time machine to go back and...

I vomited.  My puke, covering the dead man and mixing with his bodily secretions like water and wine, had traces of blood in it.  I wondered, knowing I was healthy, if the time travel had, indeed, had a detrimental effect on me.

The knife was still in my hand.  Jack the Ripper still beneath me.  I bent over and turned his head so I could see his face.  Finally, I knew.  Finally, I could see the truth of who he was.  But it was for naught.  This man would not, now, be known as Jack the Ripper, one of the most terrifying legends London had ever offered.  He would just be a murderer in a long line of murderers.  No mystery.  No wonder or theories or films or books or late night city tours for sightseers.

Which meant, I wouldn't feel the need to come back to 1888 and find out his identity.  I'd visit Ancient Egypt or the Jurassic.  And, if I did that, then he wouldn't die and the Ripper would be real and then I would come back and kill him but then I wouldn't and...

I was dizzy.  I could feel my stomach twisting.  I could feel the vomit rising again and swallowed it down.

There was only one thing I could do.

I stood and looked at my machine.  I could go back to my own time and prepare, hoping the world hadn't collapsed after recent events.  The gouge in the surface, caused by the Ripper's first thrust at me - I had felt the knife hit something but it hadn't been me - told me I would not be travelling through time at all.  The blue pulse that had emanated previously was gone.  My machine was as dark as my mood.

I held the knife up and took a deep breath.  I had eight days to try and make sure the next century remained as it was meant to be.  Eight days and just a couple of hours to be at Hanbury Street where, at number 29, I would have to take both Annie Chapman's life and her uterus.

And I was a man who was unable to even cut through a raw chicken breast.

I shuddered.  The night joined me with a shiver of shadows that blurred my vision momentarily.  I could feel its anticipation.

Dear boss, it was saying.  We have some grand work to do.