Jack the Ripper

Chapter one- Mary Ann Nichols

         I spent the summer of 1888 in London as I had for many years since leaving my childhood home.

         I hadn’t changed much since then either, I’d grown taller and I’d become an accomplished and well respected doctor but I was still the lonely boy of my childhood at heart.

         Although I was well-liked trusted in the surgery where I worked, not many people would approach me on the street but I didn’t mind at all about that, I was meant for solitude.

         Then as August drew to a close something changed in me, I became intolerant of the wrongdoing in London.

         The metropolitan police had been formed in 1829 but it was still in its childhood, pickpockets and prostitutes and petty criminals were common sight like rats in the streets of London

         My assistant Scruff (an orphaned boy that I can’t seem to get rid of because he has been in my company since the age of about seven) followed me like a puppy and kept me from such criminality like a guard dog.

         On the twenty-seventh of august a young woman came into the hospital, she was so very malnourished and weak. She’d clearly been homeless or going from doss house to doss house for a long while without proper care.

         She was heavily pregnant. She wasn’t able to produce a name for the father, my prejudices effected my judgement. Other doctors may have considered rape or maybe the father had died and she was too grief-stricken to say but I assumed that she was just another prostitute.

         Very quickly after she had arrived she delivered the child but she was too frail to survive the ordeal.

         At first the baby was completely still but miraculously the baby filled its lungs and began to shriek with life just as I was about to call its time of death.

         I saw it for what it was a criminal in the making with no real future.

There were no other patients or staff around so I suffocated the thing. It was the very first time that I’d killed.

         Naturally I’d lost patients before but this was the first time the death was intentional.

Scruff wrote out the death certificates without question.

         Once the work day was through I returned to my home, it was a pretty modest place but a grander abode wouldn’t suit me at all.

         A Carrion crow was walking on the fence posts of the front of my house as he always does; I named him Drakul after he began waiting for me everyday for a year.

         What attracted him to me I do not know but unlike his name and his appearance suggests he was a kind companion and far more intelligent than Scruff.

         I gave him some flesh from a dissection I’d done that day.

         Once Scruff had prepared the fire, I settled in my armchair and read the day’s news.

         There was little news interesting enough to catch my attention so eventually I went out for a lonesome stroll around the ill-lit streets.

    “Mister, how’s about Tuppence for my services?” a middle aged women called to me.

         She was not a pretty sight at all, her clothes were ragged and her face was heavily wrinkled and aged from years of streetwalking and bad health.

         I found some change in my pocket and offered her sixpence; she then walked me to a nearby alley where we wouldn’t be seen.

    “I won’t be using your ‘services’, I don’t want to share your venereal diseases. I’m only looking to rectify your criminality.” I said after deciding this was the final straw.