The woman turned down an alley, and Jack followed. His movements were beyond his control, propelled by a hunger that had grown ever since he dissected that woman in her room a few nights before.
The caramel glow cast by gas lights on the street did not reach into the alley. Darkness wrapped around him, shrouded him as he pressed against the brick wall. In these moments, he did not even remember the name he was born with. In these moments, he was what the newspapers had christened him. He was Jack. He was the Ripper.
The woman walked ahead, heels clacking at an unhurried pace. Behind her, in Jack’s hand, the blade glinted hungrily. A carriage clattered past the mouth of the lane, hooves sparking on cobblestone. The woman turned, just as Jack brought the blade up at her throat. He sliced. He felt the blade push into skin and muscle and grinned his crooked grin in anticipation of … bubbles?
Large, soapy bubbles floated out from the gash in her throat. He gawped at them as they bobbed in front of him, two bubbles colliding and collapsing into a single larger one right between Jack and the woman. The woman who was smiling. Jack tried to swing his blade at her smile, wanted to widen it from one end of her face to another, but his hand was frozen, as was the rest of him. Meanwhile, the single large translucent sphere grew in size as it absorbed more bubbles into its being; so big now that Jack could see a wobbling, distorted reflection of his features on the filmy surface. It wasn’t until his feet lifted off the ground that he realised he was inside it, suspended within as it began to slowly rise.
There was a moment when his brain almost understood what was happening. When Jack had fled into the corners of his mind where he spent most days building an appetite, while the man whose name wasn’t Jack and who walked and laughed and lived in the world just like everyone else came back to the fore. That man understood that the woman wasn’t a woman, but something so much more powerful. And then she pulled a pin from her hat, winked at him, and pierced the skin of the bubble.
It popped and disappeared. And the man who was sometimes Jack, and most times someone else, disappeared with it.
The woman placed the pin back in her hat, and smoothened the red bow around her neck, and opened an umbrella that hadn’t been there just a moment before.
“Pish posh,” she said, ascending into the sky.
