Whitechapel - Sex Stories

Whitechapel

... and now there's this killer." "Lots of people care. I'd bet that more kind words have been spent on this street the last four weeks than in the whole last year put together." What Rose didn't say as they trudged through the people, smells, the mud, and the smoke, was that she was fairly certain Mary was not going to die. Young, pretty, Irish, and always smiling or singing, Mary was the sort of woman the world liked. Mary would be all right even if a hundred murderers were on the loose. Rose was another story: no longer so young, no longer so pretty, with not a penny to her name as of that morning and few options for earning any except Whitechapel Road after sundown. She'd been working no more than a few streets from the latest murder, and only a few hours before. Rose's parents were long dead; her only brother was in prison; she’d never married (and never would be, she'd vowed). There was no one to miss her much. As a girl she'd run along these same streets and pursued bloody gossip on this new crime or that. That she would eventually end up fodder for a neighborhood tale herself only made sense. She was not glum about this; it was just the way things were. She had sense enough to be afraid, but also enough not to hope for much better. They passed a newsvendor. He was selling out faster than he could restock. Those who couldn't read clustered around those who could, and any man or woman willing to read aloud from the early morning edition soon gathered quite a fan club. A ...

... shop boy recited the front page in tremulous tones: "September 8, 1888: London lies under the spell of a great terror. A nameless reprobate, half beast, half man, is at large, gratifying his murderous instincts. Hideous malice, deadly cunning, insatiable thirst for blood: All these are the marks of the mad homicide. The ghoul-like creature who stalks the streets of London is simply drunk with blood!" The killing of women was hardly a new affair, but something was different about this one. Rumor (which always flew a little bit faster than news) said this latest victim had been chopped to pieces, the body taken apart with surgical precision, in the dark and in a hurry, no less. How could a man commit such a bloody deed and then scamper away from the scene without any witnesses, no matter how dark the night? "He's a butcher, or a slaughterhouse man, I bet," said one of the girls in the lodging house kitchen on Dean Street. Rose warmed her feet by the stove while nine or ten other women clustered around the table and held a fireside inquest on the latest killing. Mary served slices of the bread and butter they'd bought, singing under her breath as if the topic were nothing less cheerful than hop-picking (though this might have been due to the fact that she was also having her first drink of the morning. Even Mary's best friends admitted she loved her drink). "No one pays attention to a butcher with blood on his hands," the expert witness continued. "Just a man coming home late from ...