WHITECHAPEL IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA
by Gerard C. Smith

It was a vile, moonless night when I found myself lost in a damp coal smoke and fog enshrouded alley, and I shudder to recall the fearful sensation that coursed through my spine and pierced my brain as I listened to bone chilling screams that rent the fog, screams that emanated from what I then took to be other souls who, like me, were lost in that pitch black shroud, and it was not until much later, months, perhaps years, that I learned that the screaming voices were those same voices that stayed with me, night in and night out, and were, in fact, the anguished cries of souls who had lost reason resultant of unholy harlotry that festered in Whitechapel tenement rooms, and it was my maker's own doing that placed me in that blind alleyway and who stoked my mind with the ungodliness of those lost and sin infected souls whose voices became the voices that told me over and over and over again to take God's desire into my own strong hands and to cleanse London of the infected harlots who would pass their foul and disgusting puissance to the populace by joining in unholy fornication with traitorous members of upper society who would seek such repulsive pleasure and who, in turn, would bring vile diseases home to their beloved families, insuring that generation upon generation of our once fair city's denizens would be successively infected until not one soul would exist in any form save as the dregs of society, save as imitations of those contaminated harlots who had begun this chain of disgust and who insured that only the offspring of their foul lives would remain to populate London, and so it was that I, who with my training as a surgeon, took up the edged tools of the sacred calling and systematically began to eliminate the font of disease that befouled our once fair habitat and it was with utter shock and disgust that as I progressed with my savior work those cleansing efforts were met with popular derision and that I then learned that the vulgar press dubbed me Jack The Ripper, a sobriquet to please the great unwashed among us and it was that foul appellation, Jack The Ripper, that began the downward spiral that in time caused the loss of my sanity and now I swear by my Creator that good men will come to rue that day of my besmirchment.

© Gerard C. Smith 2004

Jerry Smith is from beautiful Beaufort, SC where he lives on the water. When he's not fishing, reading or drinking beer, he is working on novels, short stories, flash fiction and poetry. His novel, WHITE LIGHTNING, a tale of murder in the world of Winston Cup racing, is currently with an agent.

(smithg@islc.net)

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