And in his head, succubi. And in his head eyes watching. And in his head minds impinging. And in his head titillation
for a gardenia
a water lily
a rose
a hyacinth
a pair of phlox
a wild celandine
and a dark flower with petals of obsidian, a stamen of onyx, pistils of anthracite, and the Mind of Hernon, who was the late Juliette’s grandfather.
They watched the entire horror of the mad anatomy lesson. They watched him nick the eyelids. They watched him remove the heart. They watched him slice out the fallopian tubes. They watched him squeeze, till it ruptured, the “ginny” kidney. They watched him slice off the sections of breast till they were nothing but shapeless mounds of bloody meat, and arrange them, one mound each on a still-staring, wide-open, nicked-eyelid eye. They watched.
They watched and they drank from the deep troubled pool of his mind. They sucked deeply at the moist quivering core of his id. And they delighted.
Oh God how Delicious look at that it looks like the uneaten rind of a Pizza or look at That it looks like lumaconi oh god IIIIIwonder what it would be like to Tasteit!
See how smooth the steel.
HE HATES THEM ALL, EVERYONE OF THEM, SOMETHING ABOUT A GIRL, A VENEREAL DISEASE, FEAR OF HIS GOD, CHRIST, THE REVEREND MR. BARNETT, HE…HE WANTS TO FUCK THE REVEREND’S WIFE!
Social reform can only be brought about by concerted effort of a devoted few. Social reform is a justifiable end, condoning any expedient short of decimation of over fifty per cent of the people who will be served by the reforms. The best social reformers are the most audacious. He believes it! How lovely!
YOU PACK OF VAMPIRES, YOU FILTH, YOU SCUM, YOU…
He senses us!
DAMN HIM! DAMN YOU, HERNON, YOU DREW OFF TOO DEEPLY, HE KNOWS WE’RE HERE, THAT’S DISGUSTING, WHAT’S THE SENSE NOW? I’M WITHDRAWING!
Come back, you’ll end the formz…
…back they plunged in the spiral as it spiraled back in upon itself and the darkness of the night of 1888 withdrew. The spiral drew in and in and locked at its most infinitesimal point as the charred and blackened face of the man who had been the bull thistle. He was quite dead. His eyeholes had been burned out; charred wreckage lay where intelligence had lived. They had used him as a focus.
The man from 1888 came back to himself instantly, with a full and eidetic memory of what he had just experienced. It had not been a vision, nor a dream, nor a delusion, nor a product of his mind. It had happened. They had sent him back, erased his mind of the transfer into the future, of Juliette, of everything after the moment outside No. 13 Miller’s Court. And they had set him to work pleasuring them, while they drained off his feelings, his emotions and his unconscious thoughts; while they battened and gorged themselves with the most private sensations. Most of which, till this moment—in a strange feedback—he had not known he possessed. As his mind plunged on from one revelation to the next, he felt himself growing ill. At one concept his mind tried to pull back and plunge him into darkness rather than confront it. But the barriers were down, they had opened new patterns and he could read it all, remember it all. Stinking sex hole, sluts, they have to die. No, that wasn’t the way he thought of women, any women, no matter how low or common. He was a gentleman, and women were to be respected. She had given him the clap. He remembered. The shame and the endless fear till he had gone to his physician father and confessed it. The look on the man’s face. He remembered it all. The way his father had tended him, the way he would have tended a plague victim. It had never been the same between them again. He had tried for the cloth. Social reform hahahaha. All delusion. He had been a mountebank, a clown…and worse. He had slaughtered for something in which not even he believed. They left his mind wide open, and his thoughts stumbled…raced further and further toward the thought of
!EXPLOSION!IN!HIS!MIND!
He fell face forward on the smooth and polished metal pavement, but he never touched. Something arrested his fall, and he hung suspended, bent over at the waist like a ridiculous Punch divested of strings or manipulation from above. A whiff of something invisible, and he was in full possession of his senses almost before they had left him. His mind was forced to look at it:
He wants to fuck the Reverend Mr. Barnett’s wife.
Henrietta, with her pious petition to Queen Victoria—”Madam, we, the women of East London, feel horror at the dreadful sins that have been lately committed in our midst…”—asking for the capture of himself, of Jack, whom she would never, not ever suspect was residing right there with her and the Reverend in Toynbee Hall. The thought was laid as naked as her body in the secret dreams he had never remembered upon awakening. All of it, they had left him with opened doors, with unbounded horizons, and he saw himself for what he was.
A psychopath, a butcher, a lecher, a hypocrite, a clown.
“You did this to me! Why did you do this?”
Frenzy cloaked his words. The flower-faces became the solidified hedonists who had taken him back to 1888 on that senseless voyage of slaughter.
Van Cleef, the gardenia-woman, sneered. “Why do you think, you ridiculous bumpkin? (Bumpkin, is that the right colloquialism, Hernon? I’m so uncertain in the mid-dialects.) When you’d done in Juliette, Hernon wanted to send you back. But why should he? He owed us at least three formz, and you did passing well for one of them.”
Jack shouted at them till the cords stood out in his throat. “Was it necessary, this last one? Was it important to do it, to help my reforms…was it?”
Hernon laughed. “Of course not.”
Jack sank to his knees. The City let him do it. “Oh God, oh God almighty, I’ve done what I’ve done…I’m covered with blood…and for nothing, for nothing…”
Cashio, who had been one of the phlox, seemed puzzled. “Why is he concerned about this one, if the others don’t bother him?”
Nosy Verlag, who had been a wild celandine, said sharply, “They do, all of them do. Probe him, you’ll see.”
Cashio’s eyes rolled up in his head an instant, then rolled down and refocused—Jack felt a quicksilver shudder in his mind and it was gone—and he said lackadaisically, “Mm-hmm.”
Jack fumbled with the latch of the Gladstone. He opened the bag and pulled out the foetus in the bottle. Mary Jane Kelly’s unborn child, from November 9th, 1888. He held it in front of his face a moment, then dashed it to the metal pavement. It never struck. It vanished a fraction of an inch from the clean, sterile surface of the City’s street.
“What marvelous loathing!” exulted Rose, who had been a rose.
“Hernon,” said van Cleef, “he’s centering on you. He begins to blame you for all of this.”
Hernon was laughing (without moving his lips) as Jack pulled Juliette’s electrical scalpel from the Gladstone, and lunged. Jack’s words were incoherent, but what he was saying, as he struck, was: “I’ll show you what filth you are! I’ll show you you can’t do this kind of thing! I’ll teach you! You’ll die, all of you!” This is what he was saying, but it came out as one long sustained bray of revenge, frustration, hatred and directed frenzy.
Hernon was still laughing as Jack drove the whisper-thin blade with its shimmering current into his chest. Almost without manipulation on Jack’s part, the blade circumscribed a perfect 360° hole that charred and shriveled, exposing Hernon’s pulsing heart and wet organs. He had time to shriek with confusion before he received Jack’s second thrust, a direct lunge that severed the heart from its attachments. Vena cava superior. Aorta. Arteria pullmonalis. Bronchus principalis.
The heart flopped forward and a spreading wedge of blood under tremendous pressure ejaculated, spraying Jack with such force that it knocked his hat from his head and blinded him. His face was now a dripping black-red collage of features and blood.
Hernon followed his heart, and fell forward, into Jack’s arms. Then the flower-people screamed as one, vanished, and Hernon’s body slipped from Jack’s hands to wink out of existence an instant before it struck at Jack’s feet. The walls around him were clean, unspotted, sterile, metallic, uncaring.
He stood in the street, holding the bloody knife.
“Now!” he screamed, holding the knife aloft. “Now it begins!”
If the city heard, it made no indication, but
[Pressure accelerated in temporal linkages.]
[A section of shining wall on a building eighty miles away changed from silver to rust.]
[In the freezer chambers, two hundred gelatin caps were fed into a ready trough.]
[The weathermaker spoke softly to itself, accepted data and instantly constructed an intangible mnemonic Circuit.]
and in the shining eternal city where night only fell when the inhabitants had need of night and called specifically for night…