"Ten little monkeys jumping on the bed
One fell off and bumped his head
Momma called the doctor and the doctor said
No more monkeys jumping on the bed"
-- Traditional

1. GULL

The doctor is carried in by well-meaning hands but he doesn't want to go. There's still work he has to do.

There are people he should be listening to. Hawksmoor has come to tell him some very important things and here those ungrateful bastards are, his mongrel of a son, trying to bear him off to a closeted and closed room. He can't have that, won't.

He has questions. Questions for his father, for Hinton. He has questions that demand satisfaction and they won't be answered if he's carried away. He can walk perfectly well on his own. They won't let him walk. They insist on treating him like an invalid. Ungrateful bastard whoresons.

Where is the light?

He puts a hand out in front of him to feel his way along and ignores the voices swimming around him, like listening from under the water. They're talking English but it makes no sense. Their words make no sense. He is clearly on a higher plane.

When the change happens it snaps him in two, breathless, with the force of the revelation. They lay him down, for the first time managing something right, because his legs have been shaken too weak to stand. He has to think about this. They smile down upon him from their Olympian heights and leave him to his contemplation. They've given him so much to think about already, and he's grateful.

The lights go out and Dr. Gull is left in a darkness he cannot see.

2. ALBERT

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Albert's mind is fading. It drains away in spit and wellings of pus from spots on his face and the angry red of his throat.

Truth, the facial blemishes are the worst of it, for a little while. Inside his brain cooks in his skull and his head swells till his skin can no longer contain it. He stumbles about, unable to focus, groping for anything he knows.

Just a bad flu, they say. Give him a shot of brandy and he'll clear right up. All the brandy does, truth, is mask the symptoms for drunkenness but then a love of the grape always was a better alibi than mental disease or defect.

On good days he might only press a hand to his forehead once or twice, exclaim mercy me. Bad days he won't get out of bed and the servants treat him like a rake with a hangover. Annie teases him about his slowing skills in the bedchamber but she doesn't mind. She's been slowing down herself, these days.

He still has his mind, which is something, he tells himself. He still has all his faculties even if he's weaker than he has been. He's clear-headed and clever, ignoring his duties in favor of his pleasures and his friend, who watches him with a sadder eye than is warranted.

He doesn't see it when the world ends, mistaking it for something else when all he did was step into another room.

3. SICKERT

All the painter had to do to sign his death warrant was introduce them. A few cunning words here or there and he gave Albert the distraction of a lifetime, himself the destruction of his quality. No matter what Victoria said he was the one who had wrought this great threat to the throne, and it was his fault what had happened.

They always over-saturated the red paint. Nothing to be done but suffer the stains under your skin until it finally wore off. As much as he used the damned color he was always caught red-handed.

That year his life is a series of hideous jolts and sucker-punches to the gut, each one punctuating months or weeks of dread. He vomits rather than drink, preferring to expunge the sins from his body rather than wash them away with alcohol or absinthe.

Sickert's soul dies the day he leaves the child on Annie's mother's doorstep. Little pieces falling off, like leaves. As she tears out her hair he imagines that she is tearing out chunks of flesh, pulling skin from muscle and muscle from bone until he's not much more than a skeletal figure in a cheap suit. He turns and walks away rather than address her delirium.

Explanations fall hollow from between his teeth, no lips. He mutters them as he rattles foot bones in shoes through the streets and back to his meager home. It's no use trying to cling to his humanity, but he makes the effort.

4. NETLEY

Netley doesn't know what half the words mean but after a while he doesn't even know one in three. After a long while he's just letting the words slide through him like eels. They wriggle in his stomach and make him sick.

There's something about the old man that refuses definition or permission or sanctity. Something that Netley would call devilish were he inclined to pay more attention to God than the occasional swear. It's not something he has words for, all of the evil he sees is venal, carnal, the ordinary malice that runs along the streets with the sewage. True madness in a fancy coat is rare. After the first ride and ramble the surprises come fast.

The idioms are nothing he's ever heard of but he understands the delusion of importance. Everyone he knows wants to be special in their own way, and most of them are. Or they confine their self-puffery to positions more within reach, or they're harmless.

But Netley knows what the Queen's business is that this doctor person is about, and it doesn't bother him. Murder's an ugly business but a fact of life. Mutilation, chaos, the imposition of a crazed world view on women's bodies. That's something unwelcome. Every time he sees the doctor he's older and more afraid. His back hunches against the knowledge of what he's been made a party to. It's cold comfort that he never had a choice or a chance to get away in the first place.

5. POLLY

Pretty Polly had no idea what she was doing. But the gentleman was kind, if older than she liked, and he led her up into a warmer carriage for a ride and a rest of her aching feet.

She chattered on like there were no tomorrow, like as not to annoy the gentlemen, too. But he said nary a word and seemed quite interested in her life's story. Generous of him, that.

He gave her grapes, sweeter than any sugared piece she'd had in a handful of years, sweeter all the more because of the tartness. And some flavor underneath that she imagined was the juice they made into wine. She didn't know grapes from raisins, but she liked them.

He talked only a little. She didn't mind that, she had enough conversation to fill up all the empty spaces.

After a while she was tired, tired enough to rest her head against the side of the carriage. He thought she was asleep, but she weren't. Awake the whole time they carried her out and laid her on the ground, just too weak to move. Awake enough to know what was happening to her.

It were the worst kind of death, she decided. Bleeding and dying. She could feel the life going out of her and couldn't do nothing about it. Couldn't keep her mouth shut, couldn't keep her guts in her belly. Couldn't keep life in her body.

Sad thing, that. Couldn't even be sad anymore.

She sighed.

Died.

6. ANNIE

Annie Chapman was next. Dark Annie, as they called her. Poor old dark old weepy creepy Annie Chapman.

She'd had a secret fear that she'd been dying all along. Not so good to know that she was right, even if it weren't what she'd thought.

He'd said he was a doctor. Well, surely that weren't right, doctors were supposed to help people. He'd helped her, a little. Enough that the minutes she'd spent relieved of her strange head had almost outweighed the three seconds of terror when the hand slid around her throat. It was quick. So there was that, at least.

He'd talked of marriage like they'd be wed. She knew better than that, of course. Gentlemen, and especially doctors, didn't go off wedding girls they picked up in the streets with swollen heads and witch's hair. But it was nice to pretend. Strange to hear him talk, but nice to pretend.

She thought he'd been nice enough. Willing to give him a poke where he wanted to take it, talking a bit to his coachman, who was likewise a nice enough fellow. Bit pale around the lips, but nice. Looked as though a proper woman might scare him to death.

She weren't a proper woman anyway, but she'd been living and breathing. She had her wages to make, same as anyone else. And she'd liked the doctor who'd promised to help her, gave her sweets. Didn't deserve what happened. He were supposed to help.

Poor old Annie Chapman.

7. LIZ

Liz Stride should have known better, honestly.

Rumors about men in leather aprons, though, and who expected a gentleman to be wearing a leather apron? No man of trade rode around in a coach, not unless he'd worked his way up from trade and no longer needed to make his way by it.

Besides the being a gentleman, his coachman said he'd been watching her. Mad dog killers didn't watch people, they snuck up on them and stabbed them all crazy-like.

He'd known, though. Looking back on it, he'd known when he'd said that about her going running off. Any man who'd known who he was talking to wouldn't have said that. Her, run off from a chance to make some real money for a change? Not when she was barely scratching it out as it was.

He'd called her Elizabeth, like she was someone special. Not Long Liz, which she variably said was on account of her hair, her legs, her hands, or her scarf. Even she'd forgotten what the account of her name was.

She'd put up a good fight, little Lizzie. Never one to just give up. She'd made them work for it but she was only a woman, and only a whore to boot. Liz Stride made it hard till the end, but the end made it hard on her when it came. She'd been about to scream on account of the angle at which her neck was bent until it was almost severed clean through.

8. KATE

It was only a little lie. Just a quick one. How were she to know what it'd mean to that daft old man?

She'd just said the lie so she wouldn't get caught out being Kate Eddows who was locked up for drunkenness and vagrancy. Or something like that, at any rate. She'd been out of it, hadn't heard what the man had said to her when he'd tossed her in the clink. Hadn't listened when he'd tossed her out. She'd been awake enough to lie about her name, that was it.

They'd said something about a gentleman. It was a carriage, a place to go out of the cold and the damp. Not like a home or a pub, but it'd do for the night. Maybe he'd take her to a place afterwards. The finest, they'd said. The finest in the land.

She was dead in an instant and bloodied soon after that. Best that she were done quickly, with the blood that flew and the hands full of things never meant to pass through fingers. Apart from the neck she could have lived through at least the feeling of her guts passing through the man's hands, and wouldn't that have been a terrible thing? Vivisected and still breathing. Do you know what your own liver tastes like?

Red blood on white chalk on blackened wall. The symmetry of it would have appealed to him if he'd known. Kate Eddows neither saw nor had enough learning to appreciate it.

9. MARY

Mary, Mary, quite contrary.

It was supposed to be her twice over, and twice it wasn't. Third time might have been lucky, if he'd been in any condition to make it three. He might even have appreciated the magic.

She escaped by the skin of someone else's teeth and lived to feel her heart beating properly in her chest, instead of in a pot over the fire. He knew it, and she knew he knew, though she couldn't have said how or why.

By the time a year had passed she'd figured it out, and was relieved to have done so. Anyway, she was back in Ireland now, away from all that mess. She had the girl to look after, and more on the way besides. She saw clearer now than she ever had while deep in the bottle.

It was years before she saw him again.

Tasted him before she saw him. Blood on her tongue, bile in her mouth. And a cold wind blowing down the back of her dress like it would lift up her skirts in an indecent fashion. Like it would steal the life from her with brutal fingers.

She gave it a choice finger and told it to be gone. For a wonder, it did.

Mary Kelly smiled to herself. She'd beaten death twice, and it had one more chance at her. That, she had no plans on giving it for many years yet to come.

In the meantime, she had children to tend.

10. GULL

Druitt was the goat of course. Baa.

Abberline sacrificed what he thought of himself to a cause he never knew of, never believed in. The gesture was made after it was far too late, and he'd been ripped in pieces.

Netley died a no-count, his courage stolen away by a long-dead man.

Gull never knew what he had done, and knew a great many things that were lies. He looked at the blood on the walls and saw a pattern that didn't exist. He tugged strings with nothing on the ends but the weight of his madness and imagination. Neurons that fired when they should not have fed him visions of godhood that was never his. The drums of victory were the blood pounding in his ears.

He never knew it till the end, when he had a glimpse of his own powerlessness. When a woman he had killed told him to bugger off, and he did. Amazed, he stared at the wall until he died. An ignominious end for a great fellow, he thought.

He had gone through the world, through space and time in a few instants of madness and it was all for nothing. To die in his own shit and sweat, to the sound of two people who knew little more than how to fuck against a wall. It was pitiful. It was worthless.

But he had done great work.

But he had done nothing.

He called for light from that ungrateful bastard son of his.

Go to the top! For you have reached the bottom.