Jack The Ripper (Spoiler Chapter)

Jack The Ripper

Chapter Nine

The Ripper

No one knew what The Ripper's actual motive was. Although Roman and Abby suspected it and had theories that helped them feel as if they were making progress, they weren't even close. Just the way he liked it. In fact, this was the closest Roman had ever been to him. And he didn’t even know it, The Ripper thought as he watched him and his wife holding each other from the thick darkness just feet away. It intrigued him how in the daylight Roman could easily just look over his wife’s shoulder, out the long glass window into the neighbor's backyard and notice him, yet in the dead of the night, he was invisible. His black beanie along with his black jeans, boots and knee long trench coat, acted the same way a coat rack did in the corner of a dark room. You could stare as long as you wanted behind a series of repetitive unsettling squints, yet you'd never feel a sense of relief until you gathered the confidence to get up and flick the light on. And until you did, you would be left in constant fear of the unknown, which is exactly what he was. The unknown. The coat rack.

Kathy walked out her back door and sat within the dingy yellow glow of the light above as she lit her cigarette. Although her daughter, Emily, was at a friend's house for the night, she still smoked outside. She had quit smoking when she was younger but it wasn’t until her husband had passed nine years ago in a car accident that she started again. Usually she would sit in the garage but with the subtle yet skin biting breath of the night, she wasn’t going to be but a few drags away from going back inside anyways. As she sat there pulling her robe closer to her chin to shield herself from the breeze, the only sounds she heard next to a distant dog barking was the faint crackling of her cigarette as it lit up the front of her face with each hit. It wasn't until her fourth hit that she found herself looking into the backyard trying to tell the difference between leftover smoke and her visible breath in the crisp air, that she had mistaken it for movement just past the left side of the garage. She quickly reassured herself a few swats of smoke later that it was nothing as she scoffed to herself. She took one last slightly longer drag as if to make up for the one’s she was missing due to the chilled weather before heading back into the house. Just after she shut the back door, within the same second, she was met with a distant thump noise that came from what sounded like Emily's room just passed the kitchen and down the hallway. In the moment it bothered Kathy that if she had shut it just a half a second later she would have suppressed the noise with the door shutting and not heard anything. She gazed at the clock on the stove seeing that it was a quarter past midnight and for the first time, could have only hoped that Emily was your average sneaky teenager that liked to sneak in and out of the house from time to time. But the fact that she wasn’t, made the noise have an imaginary-like echo that spun deep throughout her ears. As she made her way to the hallway, she paused while debating to call Emily’s name, just in case it was her, but just as quickly as the thought left her racing mind, she was stricken with the fearful thought that if it wasn’t her, it was someone else.

After three failed attempts to call Julia, hoping that Roman could run over to assist her, she felt helpless. It took what felt like an hour to get herself to take a step knowing that the first step she took meant she was alone and had to look for herself. As she made her way through the kitchen and around the corner, she felt as if the basement beneath her was acting as an amplifier to the floorboards under her feet as she cringed with each step. As she made her way to Emily's door, which was just across from the bathroom, she debated which door to check first feeling as if she would surly pick the wrong door and be grabbed from behind regardless what one she turned to check first. Since the bathroom door was cracked open she decided to look there first. She took a deep breath that didn’t seem to make its way into her lungs due to her trembling knees that recoiled up through her chest and into her heart. She peered into the dark bathroom and reached her trembling hand around to the light switch. After turning on the switch, she sighed in relief that it was empty as she turned to enter Emily’s room, taking one last reassuring breath before putting her hand on the cold knob just across the hall. As quietly as she could, as if it would even matter, after scrunching her eyes together and tightening her lips, she slowly twisted the knob. After a slight push, the sound of the door being slowly swung open sounded more like a shrieking witches laugh than a creek. She checked Emily’s room to find it empty.

As she went to exit the room she heard the same noise again, only this time it made her jump and scream out loud. “Ahh!” she shouted as she turned around with her hands over her mouth. She saw movement outside Emily’s window along the front side of Julia’s house. She walked up and after sliding it open, rested her shaking hands on the window sill as she leaned against it and looked out, noticing their trash can tipped over with trash spread across the ground. It was at that moment, almost immediately, that she felt ridiculous as she watched the giant raccoon scurry away. “God damn mother fucker.” she said as she closed the window and locked it. Not even bothering to check the rest of the house due to her own embarrassment, regardless of being alone, she checked the locks on the doors before walking to the end of the hallway, cutting the lights off along the way, and entering her room. Not even bothering to turn on her TV, she climbed in bed, still laughing to herself that she had gotten so worked up over a raccoon, and got herself cozy. She was almost happy she got so worked up because of how tired she was, as if the fear had drained her.

As her eyes almost immediately started to get heavy, realizing she would probably need an extra hour of sleep, she reached over to grab her phone and changed her alarm from 7:00 am to 8:00 am, nearly blinding herself in the process due to the brightness. Through a deep sigh of relief she laid her head back on her pillow and brought the blanket up to her chest. As her eyes adjusted back to the darkness of the room she felt her entire body get hot when she noticed the silhouette of a man at the foot of her bed and before she could scream, was ripped off the sheets by her ankles hitting the ground. Before getting her last word out, the high pitched noise of the knife being pulled filled the room. ‘Shhinnkkkkk’. Directly after she felt a hand grab her forehead with a demeaning grip digging into her temple, followed by a blade being slapped across her throat. ‘Crrrrrrrr’! The pain in her throat made her neck feel twice the size. As she gargled for air behind the thick copper-taste of blood that filled her mouth, her shirt began riding up her back as she was dragged out of her room, down the hall, and into the living room where the light from the street lamp gave her just enough to see who she knew in her last moment, was Jack The Ripper. It was as if he wanted her to see him. As he circled her like a wolf would an injured animal, watching as she gasped for air through blood filled coughs, though she couldn’t help but be surprised at his strikingly handsome appearance, it wasn’t nearly enough to make up for the black holes he had where his eyes should’ve been. He was pure evil. It emitted off of him as he knelt down next to her, rubbing the back of his black leather glove across her forehead, removing the hair from her face while admiring her suffering as she reached up and grabbed at his coat in a panic. Her grip quickly began to soften along with her disoriented stare. As the breath slowly left her body, he began breathing heavier and heavier as he proceeded to viciously stab her fifty-nine times in the stomach, chest and face. After the final plunge just below her sternum, he held the knife in place. After taking a few deep breaths of sadistic relief, he moved his knee from between her legs to the side of her body, positioning himself in a full mount as he joined his opposite hand on the knife, placing it over his grip as he began to pull downward with his full weight. His arms trembled from the force he generated as he passed through her abdomen, like a hunter would a buck, eventually exiting his blade deep between her legs, merging her vagina and anal cavity into one.