Laughing Jack

                For what felt like the millionth time I swigged my coffee and stared at the computer screen until my eyes hurt. My fingers rested on the keyboard and I felt the smooth plastic beneath their tips, the sensation tingling ever so softly with anticipation. Any second now, I told myself, words would come spilling out of my fingers and onto the screen. Another grand blockbuster would be ready.

Any Second... Now...

                Nothing. Not a single word made it onto the screen. Not a title, not a sentence, not even a good idea. What ever wave I had been riding for six years had crashed into a solid wall. I was burnt out and frazzled to death. I had first made it into what might be called the big time when my third novel found itself as the latest hot property of airport novels. A newspaper article revealed the “intriguing background” of the story, and then a larger newspaper had run a feature, and suddenly I was a blockbuster. Apparently for my “startling revelations and unbeatable level of research.” Yeah sure, it was “unbeatable research”, I read a god damned book. There was nothing in “The Texas Shadows” that hadn’t been written in other books before. All that stuff about JFK, the Mob, UFOs and Monroe? A sham. Of course it was! I pilfered it all from other books, it had all been the substance of the silly season news paper specials since the seventies, as well as the over sized volumes in the bookshop that always promise “the final word!” or “the truth at last!” I just wrapped it in a mediocre thriller. Then prefaced it with a page that read:

All the organisations and conspiracies in this novel are true.

All the science has been proven.

                The critics loved it. I didn’t specifically say I had done the research myself, I didn’t deny that I had either. That front page was as much a fiction as anything else as far as I was concerned. And you know what? When Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks were starring in the movie of my novel, and the shelves were stuffed with books called “The real Shadows of Texas” or “The Texas Truth” I soon learnt a new truth: It doesn’t matter who said something first, or who takes legal action against whom. It matters who wrote the more popular book.

                So I wrote another. I wrote a simple chase thriller and found a quirky “fact” to wrap it around. This time it was the Shroud of Turin. “The Million Threads” followed a grizzled former priest and a scholar with hips to die for as they discovered it might have been a fake by artisans, or monks, or some secret society. Or better yet it was Jesus’ shroud, but proved he was alive when he was taken from the cross.

                The church hated it. Sceptics hated it. Readers loved it! Another hit.

                Then there was Choking World, my Global Warming debunking novel. That I didn’t like so much. There was too much science that I had to pretend I understood when I was dragged on TV discussions, or signing tours, or interviews. But hey, at the end of the day I’m just a writer, it is up to the reader to make up their own mind. (Man, I love that sentence! Gets you out of so many scrapes!)

                So there I was, six years in to the big time, and in need of the third book in a three book deal. Writers block had struck me. I swigged yet more coffee and closed down my computer. I needed to think.

                It hit me several days later. I was in a bookshop, fishing for ideas when I saw how many books there were about four little killings: Jack the Ripper. He was amazing! A few months of murders, and suddenly every one had a pet theory and a prime suspect. And oh, what wonderful suspects. Prince Albert Victor, the royal surgeon, actors, politicians, scientists, and even, oh yes, William Sickert! A famous artist!

                I bought a shelf full of books and returned home to start my master piece. I sat on my sofa, music low, a pad of paper and coloured pens on my lap. Who should I “discover” to be the killer. Sickert? Oh, he was a lovely target. A celebrity, with pictures that could decorate the book, the shadowy hand of free masons and conspiracy. Was it a royal conspiracy? No, too popular, people might recognise it. Plus, Sickert was touted by some fairly big names anyway, so it might not seem so much “my” discovery. And the more I read about the idea, well, there were holes. How could he have information that only the killer had, if the writers source was a newspaper? The killer could have, you know, read the newspaper.

                I cribbed more ideas, hit the internet, trolled through every magazine and web site I could find for information. There were too many ideas, too many stories, too many factors that would make good reading. But they had all been done before. They were all too well known.

                I was on the verge for giving up, when an idea struck me. Why didn’t I... Why didn’t I solve the case. For real. I could find the one true, undisputed identity of Jack the Ripper. It would not matter who it was. Even if it was one of the overly familiar names and face, I would be doing something new: Proving it, not just having a theory. Not just saying “This is who I believe” did it. I would know it for sure.

                And best of all, I would know I got it right, because I would cheat.

                Bare with me, this is where things tend to get a little strange, but I promise I will explain it to you as best as I am able. As I said before, all that science stuff confuses me, but I have become an expert at pretending to know how this stuff works. When I was working on the TV special “Broken Pentagons and other 9/11 answers” I met this guys at Cambridge who run a huge computer. It’s a computer that contains big fish tanks full of green slime. Membranes. Basically they grew their circuit boards. They gave me pamphlets about how it is the height of computing science that replicates how real brains work.

                They are using it to replicate London in the past. They are filling that slime full of knowledge, and census records and some sort of “artificial reality” that makes the people in that city act like they did in life, or how they are most likely to have acted.

                Best of all, you can step into a holographic projection and see the city, up close and personal, from standing over the city like a god, to walking the streets among the hawkers and gents. Fantastic! All I had to do was get them to factor in the murders, then, wait by one of the crime scenes to see who did it. Then: BOOM! Best seller!

                So, one rainy Tuesday I arrived at Gatwick, stayed in a hotel, then drove to the ware house outside of Cambridge where the computer was being built on a misty Wednesday. I had my briefcase stuffed full of facts of Jack The Ripper. I had big glossy photographs of all the prime suspects, the writer, the authors, the Princes, the Surgeons, the Actors and Free Masons and repressed homosexuals and mad hatters and syphilis riddled lunatics. Who ever he was, I would find him.

                The Hologram chamber was huge, around the size of a mobile classroom. Inside it had sheer white walls and an air temperature that was always a constant one degree c. I stepped inside and the doors hissed closed behind me. “Ok, locking them now.” A technician told me, over the intercom. I heard the doors hissing again, as the locks operated.

                An image flickered to life, it was a little out of focus, but almost real. If you ignored the fact that all the bricks had exactly the same lichen patterns and cracks, you would believe it was real. I was in London, in the Victorian era. Amazing! Then people were added, they moved like real people, they walked, they chatted, they breathed and they believed. They were real. I was invisible to them, a child ran through me like a ghost, and I felt a prickle of static as my hairs stood on end. It was a bizarre feeling. I looked around. I was where I needed to be, outside Mary Kelly’s apartment. The scene of the last murder. I walked inside, sat next to her bed, and waited.

                I lay the photographs on the floor around my feet in a semi circle. There was a soft chortle from the door, and drunken singing in a soft Irish lilt. Mary Kelly was home. The books said she was beautiful, and in a way she was. She was not yet thirty, and although life in London had been hard on her, she had a youthful way of moving and smiling and talking to herself that softened the damage to her skin and hair and nails. She was a little drunk and a little too pleased with herself, and quickly went to bed, where she fell into a child like sleep, hugging the blankets around her. I waited some more. A shadow passed the window. I stifled a gasp. But realised from my notes it was her landlord passing by as he said in his statement.

                Time passed. I lost track. I was amusing myself by being nosey to her shelves and cupboards and drawers. As you can imagine in a site such as this the technical staff had had a treasure trove of references to work from when recreating it. That which could not be replicated from evidence was recreated by best guesses. It was amazing. As I leant close to her bed, I could see the way Mary breathed, and snored and her eyes twitched with distant dreams. She could almost have been...Human.

                Behind me a window broke. A gloved hand lunged in for the key on the sill, and a few moments later the figure lurched into the doorway. “Freeze programme!” I screamed, with a little too much fear in my voice. It was almost as though I believed he could have... No, that was stupid, he was a bunch of loosely bonded photons. He could not have tickled me. He and everything else froze, a second in time for ever paused for me.

                I walked around him, he was not overly tall, in a long coat, a white scarf, a flat cap, with a bushy orange flecked moustache and a frown of concentration. I scooped up my photographs. He was not Prince Albert Victor, or the painter, or the actor, or the Police Commissioner, or the writer, the Lawyer, or... Anyone.

                Jack the Ripper was a nobody. A face in the crowd, a man on the street. His face meant nothing. Nothing.

“Who are you?” I demanded to the air around me. “Who are you? You are no one!” I lifted my head. “Cancel the programme and let me out!” There was no answer.

“Open the doors!” I screamed. There was no answer.

“Technician?” I yelped. There was only silence. “Any one?”

                Behind me, Jack started to move.