Tales of Jack the Ripper by Ramsey Campbell, Joe R. Lansdale, Walter Greatshell, Laird Barron, E. Catherine Tobler, Ed Kurtz, Mercedes M. Yardley, Stanley C. Sargent, Joseph S. Pulver Sr. Page B
Authors: Ramsey Campbell, Joe R. Lansdale, Walter Greatshell, Laird Barron, E. Catherine Tobler, Ed Kurtz, Mercedes M. Yardley, Stanley C. Sargent, Joseph S. Pulver Sr.
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bastards understand, innit?”
“Bitch… what’ve you… what’ve you done to me? Ungh!”
“That’ll be the muscle spasms—very painful, so they say. Sorry about that. Good news is you won’t suffer long. Bit of a coincidence, really, us meeting like this. Truth is stranger than fiction and all that. Maybe it was inevitable, considering. Quite funny, if you think about it: Jack and Jill.”
“You… you… mmph!”
“I think that’s enough talk for one night, don’t you? Time to get down to business.”
Something About Dr. Tumblety
Patrick Tumblety
An intruder in my room called my name and lifted me out of sleep. I fumbled for the light on my nightstand and ended up knocking it onto the floor. The moonlight that punctured through the window helped me to see that the intruder was not on that side of the room, so I hopped up and put my back against the wall. The television still played, but its glow was not strong enough to penetrate the darkness at the other side of the room. Had I left that on? I usually leave it on. Keeping my eyes fixed on the angular shadows of the interior space I leaned over and opened the top drawer of the nightstand, taking out and turning on my flashlight. I threw it on the bed and the light illuminated the dark corner. The room was empty. I must have been lucidly dreaming.
That’s when the television called my name.
“Tumblety.”
A man’s deep voice narrated over old photographs of London’s streets with the History Channel’s “H” at the bottom corner of the screen. The pictures dissolved into a reenactment of a red-haired woman shielding herself from the shine of a lifted scalpel. A female interviewee replaced the reenactment, and though I wasn’t completely coherent, I could make out key words such as “murder” and “Whitechapel.” It was just another documentary about Jack the Ripper. The calling of my name, surely, was a mere byproduct from the remaining remnants of the dream.
“Tumblety,” said the woman on the screen, and I held my breath while a chill of fright crawled up my spine. A yellowed photograph replaced her, showing a man with a bulbous head and a comically enormous Snidely Whiplash-like mustache. His identifier popped up on the lower third of the screen: Dr. Francis Tumblety.
Seeing my last name scrawled on the screen was so odd that I had to physically shake away the confusion.
The deep male voice continued, “Dr. Tumblety had already fled the United States to avoid persecution from both his private and business life, and continued what some have called a ‘deviant lifestyle’ while living in London. On the next episode of ‘Ripper: Unleashed,’ we will explore the facts behind this man’s dealings in Whitechapel and why some expert investigators call him the best candidate in the search for Jack the Ripper’s true identity.”
I was never told a thing about my past. My grandfather killed himself when my father was a teenager, so there was never any knowledge passed down. If my mother knew anything about my lineage, she never told me. If she wasn’t working, she was drinking, telling me that I was just like my father, telling me that I had to pay for his mistakes. She died when I was nineteen. If I ever see my father again, I’ll tell him what I just learned, that it’s not his fault he’s an evil, abusive bastard. Evil just happens to run in the family.
Bad luck runs in the family as well. It’s almost comical. I had dropped my Prozac down the bathroom sink and had to pick up a refill from the pharmacist. Fishing out a new pill on my way to work, I slipped on ice and the refill rolled into a runoff drain in the street. I arrived at the hospital twenty minutes late with a scraped knee and a coffee stain running down the left leg of my scrubs. During one of my father’s angrier rants he had told me, “Son, every man in this family is fucking cursed.” Considering the parents I had, as well
“Bitch… what’ve you… what’ve you done to me? Ungh!”
“That’ll be the muscle spasms—very painful, so they say. Sorry about that. Good news is you won’t suffer long. Bit of a coincidence, really, us meeting like this. Truth is stranger than fiction and all that. Maybe it was inevitable, considering. Quite funny, if you think about it: Jack and Jill.”
“You… you… mmph!”
“I think that’s enough talk for one night, don’t you? Time to get down to business.”
Something About Dr. Tumblety
Patrick Tumblety
An intruder in my room called my name and lifted me out of sleep. I fumbled for the light on my nightstand and ended up knocking it onto the floor. The moonlight that punctured through the window helped me to see that the intruder was not on that side of the room, so I hopped up and put my back against the wall. The television still played, but its glow was not strong enough to penetrate the darkness at the other side of the room. Had I left that on? I usually leave it on. Keeping my eyes fixed on the angular shadows of the interior space I leaned over and opened the top drawer of the nightstand, taking out and turning on my flashlight. I threw it on the bed and the light illuminated the dark corner. The room was empty. I must have been lucidly dreaming.
That’s when the television called my name.
“Tumblety.”
A man’s deep voice narrated over old photographs of London’s streets with the History Channel’s “H” at the bottom corner of the screen. The pictures dissolved into a reenactment of a red-haired woman shielding herself from the shine of a lifted scalpel. A female interviewee replaced the reenactment, and though I wasn’t completely coherent, I could make out key words such as “murder” and “Whitechapel.” It was just another documentary about Jack the Ripper. The calling of my name, surely, was a mere byproduct from the remaining remnants of the dream.
“Tumblety,” said the woman on the screen, and I held my breath while a chill of fright crawled up my spine. A yellowed photograph replaced her, showing a man with a bulbous head and a comically enormous Snidely Whiplash-like mustache. His identifier popped up on the lower third of the screen: Dr. Francis Tumblety.
Seeing my last name scrawled on the screen was so odd that I had to physically shake away the confusion.
The deep male voice continued, “Dr. Tumblety had already fled the United States to avoid persecution from both his private and business life, and continued what some have called a ‘deviant lifestyle’ while living in London. On the next episode of ‘Ripper: Unleashed,’ we will explore the facts behind this man’s dealings in Whitechapel and why some expert investigators call him the best candidate in the search for Jack the Ripper’s true identity.”
I was never told a thing about my past. My grandfather killed himself when my father was a teenager, so there was never any knowledge passed down. If my mother knew anything about my lineage, she never told me. If she wasn’t working, she was drinking, telling me that I was just like my father, telling me that I had to pay for his mistakes. She died when I was nineteen. If I ever see my father again, I’ll tell him what I just learned, that it’s not his fault he’s an evil, abusive bastard. Evil just happens to run in the family.
Bad luck runs in the family as well. It’s almost comical. I had dropped my Prozac down the bathroom sink and had to pick up a refill from the pharmacist. Fishing out a new pill on my way to work, I slipped on ice and the refill rolled into a runoff drain in the street. I arrived at the hospital twenty minutes late with a scraped knee and a coffee stain running down the left leg of my scrubs. During one of my father’s angrier rants he had told me, “Son, every man in this family is fucking cursed.” Considering the parents I had, as well
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