The Year's Best Horror Stories 22 Read online

  Jackie and the Rippers closed the set by performing the B-side of their single, “Pretty Maids All in a Row.” It was really a showcase for Liz, a “Wipeout”-style drum piece which let her display some of the most intense percussion work the city’s rock fans had ever witnessed. No Vanilla Fudge tedium here—the tune was fast and musical, catchy and melodic, even though its principal instrument was the drumkit. Jackie and Annie joined in on guitars only during the chorus, where Jackie would deliver the song’s sole vocal: a quick cry of, “Catch me when you can, Mister Lusk!” which she let loose when all the instruments simultaneously stopped dead during the electric three-second tacet at the refrain’s end.

  The song completed, they marched triumphantly offstage to the tumultuous cheering and applause of the crowd. They hadn’t played the A-side of their record, “Lonely Nights in Whitechapel.” This was intentional. It was a trick—part of Gary’s strategy—a stunt for which an experienced band might be crucified, but one which a fresh, young band could get away with. By omitting their one and only hit from the set, they had guaranteed themselves an encore.

  The precaution proved unnecessary; the cheering which greeted their reappearance was harder and heavier than before. It continued for almost two full minutes and might have gone on longer if Jackie hadn’t beckoned for silence.

  “This next song,” she said, “is one that I’m sure most of you—”

  “Lone! Ly! Nights! In! White! Chap! El!” they chanted. “Lone! Ly! Nights! In! White! Chap! El!”

  “—have heard. It’s been out for about a year now—”

  “Lone! Ly! Nights! In! White! Chap! El!”

  “—and it’s been doin’ real well for us. It’s called ...” She paused, smiling broadly, and held the microphone down to a short girl with white-orange-white hair who was almost crushed against the stage monitors by the surging mob.

  “Lonely Nights in Whitechapel!” the girl shrieked.

  Liz struck up the drumbeat and Annie pumped out the bass line.

  Jackie stuck the microphone back on its post and danced around the stage with her guitar, her cape flying out behind, as her bandmates played the song’s hypnotic instrumental intro. As the intro concluded, Jackie picked out a two-note melody on her (freshly replaced) high E string and let the last note hang in the air, lingering like a ghost through the phenomenon of electronic sustain. Then she spun back around, pressing her lips close to the knob end of the microphone, and began to sing:

  Eight little hookers with no hope of heaven,

  She chopped out a barrage of eight fast power chords (A-A, A-D, A-D-E-A) before singing the second line:

  Cops may save one, then there’ll be seven,

  She repeated the chord sequence. The crowd was dancing en masse, many of the fans shouting the lyrics along with her as she sang.

  Seven little hookers begging for a shilling,

  One stays in Henage Court, then there’s a killing!

  Liz and Dark Annie kicked the rhythm into high gear for the chorus. The song’s tempo suddenly, dramatically doubled.

  Loooooonely nights in Whitechapel,

  Can make a lady take to the streets,

  All three of the musicians were singing now, the rhythm section backing Jackie on the chorus.

  Loooooonely nights in Whitechapel,

  Can make a lady careless who she meets!

  Loooooonely nights in Whitechapel,

  One more is lying bleeding in the streets ...

  In eleven months of intense rehearsals, Jackie and the Rippers had never sounded as good as they did right now. And they knew it. They were smiling at each other, their instruments locked in perfect union, the music flowing like liquid magic from their hands.

  Six little hookers glad to be alive,

  One cuddles up to Jack, then there are five.

  ‘Four’ and ‘whore’ rhyme fine, it’s true;

  Jack goes to work again, then there are two.

  Backstage after their set, Liz and Dark Annie hugged each other as they tumbled elatedly against the cold walls of their dressing room. Gary popped a champagne cork and Karl passed around the glasses. He had one left over.

  “Where’s Jackie?”

  About fifteen minutes later they found her at the bar across the street, surrounded closely by a group of admirers. Gary shooed them out the door. Karl made sure they stayed there.

  Jackie set her can of malt liquor down on the counter. There were two more beside it, one of them already drained dry. “Christ, did you see that guy out there tonight? Christ, did you see him?”

  “What’d he look like?” asked Liz. “I couldn’t see anything from back behind the cymbals. The glare, ya know.”

  “He looked ... well ... he looked creepy. Like one of those devils in those old-time pictures, those whatchamacallits, uh, woodcuts.”

  They walked back across the street together, bootheels clicking on the asphalt. It was late. The moon loomed large and bright in the clear night sky, stars winking.

  “This dude you saw,” said Liz, “did he do something, or was it just the way he looked?”

  “Both,” Jackie answered quickly. “The worst was when we were playing ‘Venus in Furs.’ He pointed at me.”

  “Big fat hairy deal,” groaned Liz. “Everybody in the whole fuckin’ club was pointing at us.”

  “Not like this,” said Jackie. She shivered and took another slug from her malt liquor can. “It was a real mad kind of pointing. Like he was out to get me or something. He made me break a string,”

  “You always break strings. It’s that note-bending you do.”

  “The first time was note-bending. The second was him.”

  “What was this cat wearing?” asked Gary. “Did he have a mask on or something?”

  She shook her head. “No, he had a real face. And he was wearing a cape and a Sherlock Holmes hat.”

  “A deerstalker,” Gary muttered. “Sounds like this cat was dressed as Jack the Ripper.”

  Jackie nodded. “Yeah ... yeah! He was Jack the Ripper!”

  Their van, a bright red Ford Econoline painted with the band’s logo on each side, was parked out behind the auditorium. It listed grotesquely to one side. Three of its tires had been slashed.

  “I bet it was The Wandering Jews,” said Liz.

  “No,” Jackie said, shaking her head slowly. “It was Jack the Ripper.”

  Dark Annie crouched down by the left front wheel. “Eh, what’s this shit? Somebody wrote something down here—scratched it into the paint.”

  Gary pushed her aside. “It says: ‘Yu better stop playing mi songges’.”

  “See there,” said Jackie. “I told you. It was Jack the Ripper.”

  Gary shrugged. “Well, you know where I got those lyrics for your songs, don’t you?”

  Liz shrugged. “From that little paperback about Jack the Ripper, right?”

  Two weeks later Jackie and the Rippers played their first headlining gig. Gary wanted The Wandering Jews to open the show for them, but the Jews’ manager never returned his phone calls. The Yellow Snowmen did the honors.

  “I went out and took a look at the crowd,” said Dark Annie as she walked into the dressing room. “I think your friend with the itchy index finger is back.”

  Jackie dropped her beer bottle. It shattered on the concrete, spreading hissing foam across the floor. “He is?”

  Dark Annie nodded, her skeleton earrings rattling. “Yep. And he brought his brothers this time. All five hundred of them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Dark Annie shrugged. “Well, I mean that about half the guys in the crowd are dressed like Jack the Ripper, most of ’em with rubber knives. At least I hope they’re rubber. Security must be goin’ apeshit. It’s a madhouse out there. Real horrorshow.”

  The band went onstage a few minutes early. The Yellow Snowmen had been booed off midway through their set.

  The girls opened with “Streets of London” and from the first note the crowd was th
eirs. It was an almost perfect show—new, well-oiled drumsticks and heavier gauge guitar picks (and high E strings) prevented midperformance accidents, although Karl was kept quite busy retuning Dark Annie’s custom skeleton bass. The only noticeable false note in the performance that night came during the final verse of “Lonely Nights in Whitechapel”:

  Two little hookers, shiverin’ with fright,

  Seek a cozy doorway in the middle of the night.

  Jack’s knife flashed, then there’s but one,

  And the last one’s the ripest for Jack’s idea of fun!

  On the final line, Jackie’s voice seemed to catch on the name “Jack”—and as she made the first downstroke in the salvo of power chords at the lyric’s conclusion, the tip of her guitar pick completely missed the strings. Fortunately Dark Annie’s bass was miked loud enough to take up the slack, keeping the chop-chop rhythm steady.

  “What happened out there at the end?” Long Liz asked afterwards during the backstage hubbub, adding, “Don’t tell me it was Jack the Ripper.”

  Jackie took a slug from a bottle of Wild Turkey before she answered. “That fucker pointed at me, just like the last time.”

  “Forget it, Jackie. He’s probably just some geek working for The Wandering Jews. As long as you keep letting him break your concentration during shows, even if it’s just for a second, you’re giving him exactly what he wants.”

  Jackie took a long, deep draw from the bottle.

  Long Liz stood up. “And givin’ head to that Turkey isn’t gonna help anything.”

  Jackie walked out of the dressing room, bottle in hand.

  It was the last time they ever saw her alive.

  Half an hour later Karl found her in the stairwell at the far end of the backstage area, “with her belly opened up like it was a suitcase.” The Fulton County coroner later determined she’d died before the mutilations began. Somebody’d strangled her. They used a guitar string.

  A high E.

  On the wall beside her corpse, the murderer had written something in her blood: “The Jews are nott the bande that will be blamed for nuthing.”

  The detectives working the case immediately descended on the four members of The Wandering Jews, but cleared them within hours. The Jews had been playing a sold-out date at a club in South Carolina at the time of the killing. Their alibi was irrefutable. They had 623 witnesses.

  A week after the murder, Gary received a small parcel mailed to his home address. It contained a dried lump of flesh. A bloodstained note enclosed said, “Them is mi sonnges yu were playing. Never play them agin.”

  The police were unable to trace the package, but their forensic joes matched the bloodtype to Jackie’s.

  “The only thing they’ve really figured out for sure,” Gary told the surviving Rippers, “is that the killer is definitely left-handed.”

  “Oh, that really narrows it down, doesn’t it?” said Dark Annie, shaking her head in disbelief. The shock of purple hair flopped down over her forehead.

  “Yeah,” Liz muttered. She dabbed a tissue to her eyes. “Now it’s narrowed down to what? Only a few million, maybe a few billion suspects?”

  Gary nodded slowly. “I know it’s not much to go on, but there’s one thing about it that’s sorta important—a hundred years ago the London police were pretty sure that the real Jack the Ripper was left-handed. The cops told me something about pursuing that angle.”

  Dark Annie stomped on the floor with her bootheel. “Fuckin’ terrific. They’re gonna go out lookin’ for a left-handed guy who’s dead and buried? That oughta make it real easy to find the sicko who killed Jackie.”

  “Yeah,” said Liz. “Somebody who’s left-handed and dead. Could be anyone from Billy the Kid to Jimi Hendrix.”

  At first Gary tried to keep the story quiet, holding back the details from the rock press. But when absurdly distorted rumors began to surface in some of the more widely distributed fanzines—and when the band’s single suddenly became a nationwide sensation as a result of the attendant publicity—he switched tracks and decided to milk the story for all it was worth. A cassette of the final concert, recorded off the mix board, was remastered and immediately released on Moonlight Records. It sold briskly, and when Jackie and the Rippers were featured on the cover of Spin the next month, Gary’s phone rang off the hook with major labels making offers on the rights to reissue the record under their own imprint.

  A deal was struck. Within 60 days, Warner Brothers put out The Final Encore by Jackie and the Rippers on their Sire Records affiliate. It hit the top ten on the Billboard charts just three weeks later, a feat accomplished with the aid of a hastily assembled video made up from publicity photos and a reel of sloppy camcorder footage that Karl had shot at one of their rehearsals. Tour offers poured in.

  Gary licked his lips. “Call yourselves the Rippers. No Jackie. Just the Rippers.”

  Anne nodded. “So far so good. What else? A new guitarist?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. But the way I see it, for now anyway, it’s just the two of you. Liz can switch to guitar; we’ll scrap the drums for a little while. And I’m talkin’ acoustic here.”

  A month later they were ready.

  The house was full. The established fans, the recent converts, the curious, the ghoulish, the record company reps, and the press. The mood in the crowd was electric, but strangely subdued. Only a brief cheer passed through the hall as the lights went down.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” came the emcee’s voice, “Sire Records recording artists, the Rippers!”

  Applause.

  A large overhead spotlight cast a disc of light on the stage floor. Two black barstools stood there, each with a Martin acoustic guitar propped beside it. Long Liz and Dark Annie entered from opposite sides, each wearing a hooded black robe and moving somberly toward their instrument. They took their seats on the stools and lifted the guitars to their laps.

  Dark Annie brushed her hood back.

  There was a loud gasp from near the front of the crowd, and a buzz passed quickly through the multitude.

  Dark Annie’s purple hair was gone. She was shaved bald.

  And so was Long Liz, who pulled back her own hood a moment later. “Because we remember Jackie,” she said, “we’d like—”

  Annie completed the sentence. “—to do some very special songs tonight, in her honor.” She ran her pick down the 12 strings of her guitar and slowly, beautifully, began to play the melody to Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart Again,” her voice heavy with emotion as she mimicked the breathy vocals of Joy Division’s suicidal singer, Ian Curtis.

  Long Liz joined in, playing rhythm on a six-string and providing backing vocals. There were tears in her eyes.

  The crowd watched in hushed awe. Hardly anyone moved throughout the entire 80-minute set.

  And what a set.

  Each song had been carefully selected—every one of them a haunting tune made popular by a rock star who’d died prematurely. “Three Steps to Heaven” by Eddie Cochran (car crash). “Sad Mood” by Sam Cooke (gunshot). “Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding (plane crash). “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis Presley (drugs). “No Matter What” by Badfinger (hanging). “Lost Woman” by the Yardbirds (electrocution). “Rave On” by Buddy Holly (plane crash). “Piece of My Heart” by Janis Joplin (drugs).

  And more.

  Each song played with somber reverence on the two mellow instruments and sung clearly, with heartfelt passion by Dark Annie.

  The crowd remained silent through the performance. The only sound they made was an occasional cough or, more frequently, a faint sob. Their applause didn’t begin until almost 15 full seconds after the two girls left the stage.

  The chanting began very slowly, but it built to a tremendous roar. “We want the Rippers! We want the Rippers!”

  Walking back onto the stage, gripping each other’s hands tightly, Liz and Annie faced the chanting multitude and beckoned for silence. When it finally came, Annie said only, “Liste
n and you might hear Jackie tonight.”

  They played “Lonely Nights in Whitechapel” as an instrumental.

  In the dressing room afterward, Dark Annie was the first to speak. “He was out there,” she said. “I saw him. The one who points.”

  Liz plopped down into a chair. “When?”

  “Right there at the end of ‘Lonely Nights.’ He pushed up front and pointed. Just like Jackie said he pointed at her. He was pointing at me like that!” Annie started to cry.

  Liz went over and put her arms around her. “Maybe it was just some sickie who read about that pointing stuff in the papers and figured he’d scare us.”

  Gary shook his head. “No way. I anticipated that a long time ago. The pointing bit was one of the few things I managed to keep from the press.”

  “Annie, I think you should have a good strong drink—but just one—and go straight home.”

  She did.

  The neighbors found her early the next morning.

  She’d been tied to the back railing of her apartment building, her hands bound with guitar strings. The coroner estimated that the murderer spent more than a quarter of an hour working on her with his knife. The worst was what he’d done after he killed her.

  The police couldn’t find him. What they did find was another note, written in the same ragged script.

  It said, “I told yu to stoppe playing mi songges.”

  A year later, having unearthed no further clues, they retired the case.

  “Gary,” Long Liz shrieked, hysterical with anger, “get it through your goddamn concrete skull once and for all—I am never, ever going to play onstage again! You got that straight?”