Anno Dracula (Page 26)
MUSINGS AND MUTILATIONS
Dr Seward's Diary (kept in phonograph)
2 OCTOBER
Indeed, I think the Eddowes delivery my greatest achievement to date. At its conclusion, I was calmed. To throw my pursuers off the scent, I left a message on a wall. I walked back to the Hall, changed my clothes in good time, and was ready to meet the police when they arrived. All things considered, I carried off the unpleasantness with Stride well. Beauregard's steady eye and silver bullet finished my work. I feel better in myself than in some months. The pain in my hand has abated. I wonder if this is not an effect of the bleeding. Since Kelly tapped me, the pain has been receding. I've looked Kelly up in our files, and have an address for her off Dorset Street. I must seek her out and again solicit her attentions.
There are so many fabulations about the Ripper, fuelled by silly notes to the press, that I can hide unnoticed among them, even if the occasional rumour strikes uncomfortably close. After all, my name is Jack.
'Yours truly, Jack the Ripper'? Is the letter-writer someone I know? Does he know anything about me? No, he does not understand my mission. I am not a lunatic practical joker. I am a surgeon, cutting away diseased tissue. There is no 'jolly wouldn't you' to it.
I worry about Genevieve. Other vampires have a kind of red fog in their brains, but she is different. I read a piece by Frederick Treves in The Lancet, speculating on the business of bloodline, as delicately as possible suggesting that there might be something impure about the royal strain the Prince Consort has imported. So many of Dracula's get are twisted, self-destructing creatures, torn apart by changing bodies and uncontrollable desires. Royal blood, of course, is notoriously thin. Genevieve is sharp as a scalpel. Sometimes she knows what people are thinking. With her, I try to keep my mind on my patients, on schedules and time-tables. There are traps in any train of thought: thinking of the injuries I treat in a new-born who was run down by a carriage reminds me of the injuries I have inflicted on other new-borns. No, not injuries. Cuts. Surgical cuts. There is no malice, no hate, in what I do.
I know what I do is right. I was right to save Lucy by cutting off her head and I have been right to deliver the others. Nichols, Chapman, Sch?n, Stride, Eddowes. I am right. But I shall stop. I am an alienist, and Kelly has made me turn my gaze back upon myself. Is my behaviour so different from Renfield's, amassing tiny deaths as a miser hoards pennies? The Count made a freak of him as he has made a monster of me. And I am a monster, Jack the Ripper, Saucy Jack, Red Jack, Bloody Jack. I shall be classed with Sweeney Todd, Sawney Beane, Mrs Manning, the Face at the Window, Jonathan Wild: endlessly served up in Famous Crimes: Past and Present. Already, there are penny dreadfuls; soon, there will be music hall turns, sensational melodramas, a wax likeness in Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors. I meant to destroy a monster, not become one.