Michel Parry - Jack The Knife

[dem]

Michel Parry (ed) - Jack The Knife:: Tales of Jack the Ripper (Mayflower, 1975)

Introduction - Michel Parry

Joseph F. Pumilia - Forever Stand the Stones
Hume Nisbet - The Demon Spell
Marie Belloc Lowndes - The Lodger
Anonymous - In the Slaughteryard
Anthony Boucher - A Kind of Madness
R. Chetwynd-Hayes - The Gatecrasher
Philip Jose Farmer - My Father the Ripper
Robert Bloch - Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper
Ramsey Campbell - Jack's Little Friend
Harlan Ellison - The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World

Mrs. Marie Belloc Lowdnes - The Lodger:

"I can't think why he wants to go out in such weather. He did it in last week's fog, too ... 'twould be a very bad thing for us if anything happened to him. The lodger's the first bit of luck we've had for a very long time."

That's Mr. Bunting talking, and the stroke of good fortune he's discussing with second wife Ellen is the self-styled "man of science", Mr. Sleuth who moved into their Marylebone home on December 29th at a time when they were too broke to carry on. An easy date to remember as that was also when the first of the "'Orrible murders in Whitechapel" made the headlines.

Mr. Sleuth has eccentric ways. He turns around the pictures and photo's in the sitting room so that they face the wall because "those women's eyes follow me about.": he fanatically scrutinises the Bible for the worst of the anti-women references: he conducts experiments in his room at ungodly hours, experiments that require extreme heat.

Another of the murders, this time in Marylebone. Mrs. Bunting is far from sympathetic - "it serves that sort of hussy right" - but the killing disturbs her deeply because she already has her suspicions. To make matters worse, Bunting's daughter, Daisy, is coming to spend her eighteenth birthday with them. She arrives in London just as two more mutilated corpses are discovered in Kings Cross ...

The murders take place off the page, but this is among the more effective Ripper stories for the sheer suspense of the thing as Sleuth invites Daisy along with him to Madame Tussauds for a birthday treat. By now the Buntings are certain that he is the Ripper but do nothing to prevent her leaving with him. Greed has much to do with it, but Ellen Bunting doesn't seem in the least unsympathetic to the madman's cause and has she developed some kind of hideous crush on him?

If only the Chamber of Horrors was half as frightening these days.

Anonymous - In The Slaughteryard: Mr. Horace Jeafferson, fearless member of the Adventurers Club, relates his exploits of the previous evening when he found himself at the Melmouth Brothers' slaughteryard in Whitechapel. This being 1888, you'll possibly have guessed which famous murderer he encounters, though you may be surprised to learn that the man who evaded the massive police presence was a slobbering leper. Fantastic mockerney dialogue, notably from the old night-watchchman, and the heroic young bobby's dying speech is another bonus.

R. Chetwynd-Hayes - The Gatecrasher: Edward Charlton and his trendy friends hold an impromptu seance - and summon forth the spirit of Jack the Ripper. Saucy Jack soon has total dominion over Edward and together they prowl Soho, picking up working girls to butcher back at the flat off Edgware Road. When the downstairs neighbour grows suspicious that those stains on his ceiling are maybe not the result of spilt red wine after all, its time for the pair to part company.

One of the four RCH stories filmed for the Amicus anthology From Beyond The Grave

Hume Nisbet - The Demon Spell: ... a mangled corpse lying on the muddy pavement, and a demoniacal, dark, pock-marked face bending over it, with the lean claws outspread, and the dense fog instead of a body, like the half-formed incarnation of muscles."

A pretty medium materialises the ghost of Ripper victim Polly who warns Nisbet who he's earmarked as his next victim (you've guessed). Our hero bursts in on him just as he's about to get down to business.

Anthony Boucher - A Kind Of Madness: We've already met with conflicting accounts as to why the Ripper murders ceased as abruptly as they began. Unlike Nisbet and dear old Anon, Boucher doesn't go in for the macho chest beating "it was me who killed him!" approach. According to him, the couple who put an end to his capers - true life murderers Gabrielle Bompart and Michel Eyraud - were entirely oblivious as to just who they were lynching and the danger Gabri was in during the hours leading up to their crime.

[sean]

The Harlan Ellison story (which I encountered in the 'Essential Ellison') is, if memory serves, decidedly strange...

[dem]

Joseph F. Pumilia - Forever Stand the Stones: A few of us had a good time recently with his Instrument Of Darkness in Michel Parry's 3rd Mayflower Book of Black Magic Stories but this cosmic classic is something else again! Pumilia crams so much into this century and dimension spanning twenty pager, i'm amazed i managed to take it in, though writing it up coherently might prove tricky.

We begin 2000 years ago at Stonehenge as the Celts prepare for battle with the Roman invaders by performing the usual human sacrifice. The Arch Druid has chosen Elwyn of the golden hair as their offering to the God, and her lover, the young Priest, Wygiff, is to perform the ritual. What, he wonders, would happen should he kill himself while the others feast upon her flesh? Surely that would mean they ascend to Tir-Na-Nog together?

The deed is done. The God is evidently satisfied as, with the sunrise, a portal opens in the sky allowing the worshippers a glimpse of what they take to be "the world beyond death" but which is, in fact, the London of the 1880's. Wygiff hurls himself through the rent in time .... and is quickly apprehended as a lunatic and committed to Broadmoor. After three years, the doctor's decide he's relatively harmless and release him onto the streets of London. Of course, "William", as he now calls himself, doesn't much care for the city which, he suspects, is not, after all, the realm of the honoured dead, and longs to get back from whence he came. But how? Another sacrifice! He takes to prowling the slums of Whitechapel, tearing up prostitutes with his knife, but his disappointment at a lack of reunion with Elwyn has lead to a crisis of faith. It's not until he performs his savage butchery on Mary Kelly that he finally meets with success.

Meanwhile, Walter Deacon, a tourist on Salisbury Plain, is snatched out of 1883 before the disbelieving eyes of his wife Gertrude as they visit the ancient Stones - this recorded in the "lost notebooks of Sigmund Freud"! We also get to visit Romania to catch Vlad the Impaler at his peak, spectate grisly murders in Ancient Rome, Nineveh ....

The immortal who makes it all possible, the architect of Stonehenge, is essentially, a psychic sponge who endured down the centuries by invoking and feeding off the greatest emotion man is capable of - fear.