When the Demons Ride from Hell

In Whitechapel, no one questioned if walls could talk. It was only a matter of what stories they would tell. Where some walls held secrets, the walls in this pocket of the city held revelations. Dark truths. Memories of sights that could shake the foundation of a world that was still trying to take shape.

I hold those truths tight, locked up in brick red as blood. Marked by fire and famine, I am the steward of a nightmare. These truths are mine to hold for an eternity, till the bells of St. Paul's come ringing my dirge and render my stalwart structure the rubble in a fallen empire.

I noticed his first footfall long before the rest; a gentleman dressed all in black. Not quite what he seemed, he moved through the world like something not quite a part of it. They didn’t see him, but I did. The madness in him was like a heat, and the stink of death was remarkable.

He stalked those alleys for a long time, moving in and out of the crushing throngs and dirty orphans like a ghost ship. Other shores had born him, but London was home, fostering him in ways that the open streets of the North could not.

The grim filth of Whitechapel suited him, though he carried himself from another plane.

I would watch him, breathing deep the stink of the chimneys and the waste. It was a heaven to him, filled with potential and reward.

Women moved with rags on their faces, desperate to protect themselves from the air, which was thick with the smell of death from the abattoirs and the sewage that flowed in the gutters...but not him. He moved openly, his long face kissed by the fumes.

Flickering street lamps and long-legged shadows may have hid his revelry from the vermin, but not from me. Even now, his smirk is seared inside of me. Twisted, tight. The smirk of a man in the throes of madness.

There was no way to warn her of the monsters that lurked when Dark Annie came stumbling along the street.

It was late, and the crowds had thinned, but not enough to conceal the poor woman’s drunkenness from the last onlookers of the night. They heckled her, a well-known face in these parts, as she disappeared into the ramshackle building where she took often took her bed for the night.

She re-emerged in the early hours, just before sunrise, and the monster was waiting for her.

Out of her senses, he pulled her off the street and into a darkened lane.

“Will you?“ asked the monster. “Yes,” whispered Dark Annie.

It was not long until the tall leather boots of police came thundering down the street, cutting between the throngs of citizens who were already standing around. The murder had not happened before my walls, but I could feel it - shuddering through the homes and shops on Hanbury Street, creeping right into my soot-stained bricks.

The shopkeepers at the heart of my beating street threw open their doors, and with opened me to the surge of pain that was passing through morning fog. Grimly, my little vermin whispered to one another and their whisper became my mantra, a secret I whispered in my nightmares of time.

“Her throat was slashed. All the way to the bone. Her belly was opened to the sky, too.“

Coppers crept by, some faces solemn and some of them panicked. Of all the horrors in Whitechapel, this was another beast, and it was not one the twisted justice keeper had expected. A few swore it was the devil come to London, but most just looked over their shoulders at the broken men who walked behind them in the hopeless lanes and alleys of London’s darkest borough.

The monster crept by too, taking on new shades and faces but always moving in his terrifying glee. He loved to watch the chaos that unfolded from his murders and never missed a chance to return to the scene, where he was nothing more than a ghost, a shade. No one else could see him but the soot-stained walls who harbored him.

All walls talk in London and we had seen his ilk before, dark phantoms with no root in this world.

We, the walls, called out to the souls of Whitechapel, but they could not hear us for their pain. No bleeding could rouse them to our truths. A place of hopelessness, those living within our twist of walls numbed themselves in the filth and the chaos, which covered us so thickly in a haze that no one could make sense of our silent screams.

The monster took more tributes. He littered the eastern edge of the city with their bodies. When the monster took his last tribute, I thought they might listen, that they may look at us - the silent witnesses...but they did not.

For the monster’s last great horror, I was present, standing still and silent as he dispatched the helpless soul in a rented room tucked into the slanted, scummy walls of Miller’s Court. She showed no fear as she led him confidently up the back stair and into the rundown space with barely enough room to turn around.

This one was called Black Mary, but to me she was Fair Emma.

Like everyone else in Whitechapel, she had landed there by the cruel hand of fate. That same fate had dispatched her in a similarly cruel way, throwing her beneath the hands of a ghoul which time will allow none of us to forget.

Once he had dispatched her, the monster took his time with Fair Emma, giving her neither room to scream nor escape. He opened a crimson smile across her throat, before playing with her in ways he had never touched the others. When he was done, he slithered into the night never to re-emerge, though reverberations of his evil remained.

By the time they found her, poor Emma was rotting in pools of thick black blood.

Crowds gathered at the edge of Dorset Street. They lined Commercial Street too, pressing in close against to my bricks. Pressing their backs so close that I felt I was among them, a part of them. I offered them the only protection they could muster from their low place in the world.

“The Ripper runs these streets...no one is safe at night...“

It became the grizzly mantra that moved them. It was the last thought they had when they cast the bolts and chains across their doors at night. The last thing they whispered to their daughters before they went to sleep at night.

Try as they might, nothing could keep the fear of the monster out. Nothing could protect the citizens of the East End from the gooseflesh and the shiver of death that held all of them captive. Whitechapel was gripped with terror. Its people were defenseless.

For them, there was nothing to do but carry on. Life could not stop in this part of the world where the brutal wheel of fate was always grinding its victims to dust.

The swell of vermin returned in the gutters, the throb of hopeless churning life stirred again as it once had. In time, the memory of the monster became little more than an ever-present shadow, a parade of horror that could never quite be claimed. He was a cautionary ghost tale to be whispered in the darkness, nothing more.

Gas lamps flickered on and off, eventually giving way to electric lights. The filth gave way to cleaner air, bus routes, and hard pavements under the feet. They washed the scum of murder off the East End, but the shades remained.

I held fast to my secrets, even as they came for me. I could not stop the press of time, or the city’s desperate attempt to pull the pain of the horrors from its spirit.

Holding tight and silent through it all, I withstood their barrage as they came for me with machines, fumes, and paints. I gave up nothing as they reshaped me, twisting the land around me and changing all the names that braced and gave me form.

My memory did not diminish. Though they changed my city, I could see the monster still. I knew his secrets and saw his ghost lurking in places that could no longer be reached. And so I remain now, even as time continues her barrage against me, soaking me in the rage of her never-ending siege.

Foundations may crumble. The war may be lost. One day, they will rip me down to remove that ever-present threat of the ripper, but my truths will remain.

Because they are locked in your memory and your heart. You will carry them into the future. You are now the steward of that memory, the pain of the women and the hopes they carried with them to their grizzly and mangled ends.

When nothing remains but a plaque, you will know. So the legend will live on. A vague reverberation of a terror which will ripple through the seas of space and time. Even when I am erased, the horrors of that demon will remain and the dead will dance from hell in all the merry glory of murders that gripped a century.

© E.B. Johnson 2023