Chapter 19
PASSING ON THE GIFT
HACKNEY, LONDON–9:22 PM, JANUARY 12, 1903
The crowd booed. Jonas Troy concentrated. Nothing happened. The crowd booed louder.
But the dead were silent. And that was the problem. No dead, no show.
“You’re a fraud,” someone shouted from the audience.
It had been a rotten evening. It had been a terrible fifteen years.
And Troy knew why—The Ripper.
The one they called Jack.
The audience bayed. They had come to talk to their dearly departed. But their dearly departed weren’t in the mood.
This was his first performance at the Hackney Empire.
“We’re getting big crowds,” Mr Tolland, the manager, had told him. “I’ve never had a medium here before. You’d better bring a show.”
He promised he would.
But waiting in the wings while a fourteen-year-old singer and dancer named Charlie Chaplin dazzled the crowd, Troy started to feel queasy. Voices echoed in his head—the screams of the Rippers victims, the hollering of the crowds that followed the trail of bodies, the trilling of police whistles, always too late, and the cold, cruel laugh of the one who made this madness.
Jack.
In the theatre, the crowd had cheered Chaplin. The kid skipped off the stage. As he entered the wings, he winked at Troy and said, “If you’re half as good as me, mate, you’ll be all right.”
That was asking too much.
He quaked now as the audience crowed. He’d done performances in smaller venues, front rooms. They had been successful. But the money on offer at the Empire was much better. It would put food on Hannah’s plate for months and pay for their lodgings for weeks.
After the Ripper plunged into the well, bringing the murders to an end, Troy had stayed in London. It was a grim, dirty city crammed with grim, dirty people. The East End, in particular, was a cesspit of immortality and disease. But he remained. He found lodging and soon he began to advertise his gifts so he could pay the rent.
Your future foretold. Your dearly departed contacted. Medium and fortune teller Jonas Troy will bring the spirits alive for you. Let him guide you to your fate.
The ad appeared in the newspaper. Soon he had customers knocking at his door.
He would only charge what people could pay. Sometimes that was nothing. Sometimes it was: “I’ll sew on those buttons for you, sir,” “I’ve got some apples here, guvnor,” “I could keep you company this afternoon, love.”
The third offer, he’d refuse. He was courting by then. Magda, the daughter of a Polish butcher. She was golden-haired and green-eyed. At eighteen, she was thirteen years younger than Troy. He’d met her when he read for her mother. The woman had been grief-stricken after losing her brother the year before.
Troy made contact. The woman cried. She thanked him in Polish. Magda translated. Troy said, “And can you ask your mother if I might be able to take her daughter out to tea?”
Magda said, “You should ask the daughter yourself.”
He did. They went.
On April 7, 1891, six months after they met, Troy and Magda were married.
Ten months later, Hannah was born. Two months later while she was walking home late, after visiting her ailing father, Magda was murdered.
Throat cut. Face mutilated. Gut opened.
Her intestines were spooled on the ground beside her. Her liver and kidney had been removed. The words “A gift from him” had been written in blood on the wall.
Troy wailed. He raged. He cut himself. He tore out his hair. He smashed up the room where he now lived with his motherless daughter.
And then a voice in his head stilled him.
“I will never die.”
Troy had frozen in the act of throwing a chair out of the window.
And the voice came again.
“You’ll never be rid of me.”
Troy had put the chair down and gawped around the room.
Hannah screamed in her cot.
He ignored his child and listened to the voice, which said, “’Your lovely, lustful whore of a wife wasn’t one of you, Jonas, but I chose to have her ripped, anyway, because I can—even when I’m trapped. Even when I’m buried. My poison seeps through this city’s veins, Jonas. It can still stain a heart. It can still twist a mind. Every day I call out to someone for blood, and one day I shall have blood. And when I do, I will live again. Long after you are dead. But I’ll hunt your kind, Jonas. I’ll rip and I’ll rip. I’ll eat and I’ll eat. Till there’s five. Till I’m free’.”
“No!” Troy screamed and hurled the chair through the window.
It snapped him back to the present—Hackney Empire, nearly eleven years later.
The audience howling.
“You’re a fraud,” shouted a man with golden whiskers.
“You promised my husband would tell me where he left the silver,” wailed a fat woman.
Another woman cried out, “My little boy is lost on the other side, and he wants his ma.”
Troy raised his hands to quieten them. It made them angrier.
Mr Tolland shuffled on stage in his red velvet jacket and top hat.
Smiling at the audience, he hissed at Troy. “Fuck off, mate, before they kill you.” Then he addressed the mob. “Ladies and gents, ladies and gents, please . . . sometimes, the spirits don’t feel like visiting us . . . ”
“Sometimes we don’t feel like paying,” a man shouted.
Troy plodded off stage and made his way down into the belly of the building, running the gauntlet of smirking entertainers.
In the dressing room, Hannah faced the mirror. She ate an apple and stared at her reflection. Her eyes were brown like chestnuts, her hair gold like her mothers. Troy’s red suitcase sat on the floor next to her.
Hannah’s gaze skipped across to him as he stood in the doorway. Without turning she said, “I heard them shout at you, Daddy.”
“I . . . I couldn’t get through tonight.”
“Perhaps there was no one there.”
“There wasn’t. Not tonight.”
“Perhaps there’s no one there, ever.”
He came to stand beside her and began removing his stage clothes—the Fez, the brightly-colored smoking jacket, and the scarlet necktie.
“You shouldn’t speak like that, Hannah,” he said.
“Why not, Daddy?”
“Because I say so.”
“Don’t be mean.”
“I’m . . . I’m not mean.” He lifted the suitcase and laid it flat on the counter where Hannah sat. “But . . . but the spirits, they can hear you. If we doubt them, they will never come. You have to keep believing, Hannah. If . . . if you stop, there isn’t anyone else to—”
He stopped talking. He was about to say, “There isn’t anyone else to watch for him.”
For the Ripper. For Jack.
No one to see his coming. No one to find him. No one to hunt him. No one to cage him.
But he didn’t say those things. He never had. Hannah didn’t know she had a gift. Maybe it was time she did.
Jonas opened the suitcase. His newspaper cuttings were laid inside, clipped together neatly. His scribbled notes covered sheets of paper, and a leather journal was tucked into a pocket on the inside cover of the suitcase. He started to pack his stage clothes in the case. When he was done, he said, “You are a special girl, Hannah.”
“Thank you, Daddy.”
“You have gifts.”
She turned to face the mirror.
“Daddy, I’m too old for fairytales—”
“No you are not. And you are not too young for the truth. Listen to me, Hannah.”
“Daddy—”
“We are seers. We see the dead. We see the future. We see . . . we see evil.”
“Evil?”
He took a breath and sat next to her. He stared at their reflections in the mirror.
He said, “Before you were born, I fought a monster. An evil thing. They called him Jack back then. But he’s had many names.”
“Why did you fight him?”
“Because we are the only ones who can.”
She said nothing.
“There are a few of us,” he told his daughter. “We are watchmen. We must be vigilant. If . . . if the evil is freed, it is our duty to hunt him down.”
“Why?”
“Or he will kill us. He will kill us and . . . ” He paused, wondering if he should tell her everything and then deciding he should. “And he will rip us open and . . . ”
“Daddy, no!” She leapt to her feet, the chair flying across the room. She reeled away, hands clasped over her ears. “Don’t tell me, don’t tell me!”
He went to follow her, calling her name.
The muffled sound of music came from the stage above.
“Don’t tell me, Daddy,” said Hannah, cowering.
“I must,” he said. “You must know.”
She shook her head violently.
He said, “You must know, because he is not truly dead, Hannah. You must know, and your children must know. Promise me. Promise me. Or if he is resurrected and there is no one to know, no one to see, the people of the world will suffer terrible things. Promise me, Hannah. Do you promise?”