The Whitechapel Project

Listen to this episode

Download this episode in MP3

Previously on Whitechapel

After Six escaped from the Whitechapel Project, his mysterious comrade-in-arms, Mister Rich, was shot and fell unconscious. In trying to escape from two unknown men in a black van, Six ended up outside an emergency room before facing down two police officers and being stunned with a taser shotgun shell. After lying unconscious for three days, he awoke in a hotel room under an assumed name – M. John Druitt. A quick Internet search combined with the events of recent days pointed him to a startling conclusion: he is the most notorious serial killer in history, Jack the Ripper. He starts to leave the hotel in a panic when he notices someone watching him.

Episode Eleven – Silent Running

I notice an attractive woman watching me. Long black hair frames her long pale face. She wears a charcoal gray suit that is fitted to her lean frame, and she’s looking at me with a finger to her lips.

My first thought is to marvel at how beautiful her throat would look as blood spills out of it. I imagine the warm, wet slash against her cold, white skin, and I force myself to be revolted. I shove the image down, trying to get rid of it, but another image pops back up, like a balloon in water.

… I can smell the faint stench of decay on her breath, taste notes of it on my lips. Her hair is plastered across her face as my fingers clench. I imagine the soft silkiness of her neck in my hands…

She’s the woman from the vision in my cell!

I open my eyes and start to speak, to ask her why she haunts me, but she frantically waves her hands and puts the finger to her lips again. She’s asking me to be silent. I nod in understanding and draw a question mark in the air. Why do we have to be quiet?

She reaches into the jacket of her suit. I get a quick glimpse of cleavage and a black lacy bra, and the image of her lying dead is finally submerged under a soft wave of vague lust. She puts on a pair of small wire-framed glasses and pretends to look for something in the distance, and then under a nearby chair. I feel like laughing out loud – I just found out I’m a perverted serial killer, and here I am playing charades in a five-star hotel with a woman I’ve never met before. I shake my head in confusion, to let her know that I don’t get what she’s trying to tell me, when it hits me. Someone’s looking for me – maybe the men from the black van.

I change my shake to a nod of understanding. She smiles and grabs my arm, yanking on it urgently. I pull out of her grasp for a moment to grab my bag, but she looks reluctant. I hold the bag up to show it to her, but she shakes her head and waves dismissively at it. I can’t tell if she means that I should leave it here or that she doesn’t care about it, but she’s already leaving the room, so I take it with me.

As I follow her to the car, I wonder if this is the mysterious Elizabeth that left me the notes, my alter ego’s wife carrying the name of one of Jack the Ripper’s victims. It would certainly explain how she found me, and maybe how she knows me. But why the silence? Is she mute? Did something happen to her voice? Did my image of slicing her throat somehow sever her ability to speak?

She leads me to the lobby and then points to the ground. Stay here. I nod and sit in a nearby chair as she goes to the front desk. The table next to the chair I’m sitting in has another notepad of the hotel’s stationary and a small, thin pencil like the ones you find on golf courses. I snatch both of them up and put them into my duffel bag – if we’re going to continue to communicate silently, writing things down will be more efficient than acting them out. In a few moments she comes back with a rolling suitcase with a collapsible handle. She deftly slaps the handle in and lays the suitcase on its back, crouching down on the floor to unzip it. As she’s opening the suitcase, I use the opportunity to take another look down the front of her suit coat. I look back up to notice her looking at me, and she smiles and winks. She leans over a little bit more and goes back to digging through her suitcase.

I can feel myself smile at her flirtatious look. A part of me wants to be embarrassed because this woman I’ve never met noticed my casual lechery, but another part of me is strangely comfortable with the exchange. It feels good to think about something normal like admiring a sexy woman, and as long as I’m thinking about her warm body, I’m not thinking about her cold corpse.

The image of her cut throat bobs to the surface again. I force it back down, but my moment of normalcy is shattered.

The woman hands me a worn brown leather coat with a thick lining. I take it and look at it while she puts on a black leather coat of her own. It looks broken in, but not torn up – someone’s taken care of this jacket. Holding onto it, I casually check the pockets, but they’ve all been carefully cleaned out.

She zips up her coat and notices I haven’t put mine on yet. She points to the front doors and wraps her arms around her in a mock shiver. I look to the glass doors, and can see that the snow has piled up a few inches. I nod and shrug into the coat.

She walks toward the front doors, never looking behind her to see if I’m following. The pretty receptionist smiles at us as we leave, and I smile back, trying to feel as normal as possible. We’re a regular couple checking out of their hotel room and going on their way back home, or to their plane flights. Just a mute mystery woman and a psychic serial killer doped up on pain meds out for a casual drive in the Cincinnati snow.

Speaking of pain meds, I start to feel them kick in. I feel my eyes get heavy, but the bracing cold wind wakes me back up in a second. The snow leaks into my socks as I stomp through it toward the parking lot. She pulls a keychain from her pocket, and a nearby silver sedan flashes its lights and honks. The plates are from Miami, and the sticker on the windshield comes from a local rental car company I recognize from an ad I saw in the hotel. She opens the trunk and tosses her suitcase inside before pointing to my bag. I put the bag in alongside the suitcase, and she slams the trunk shut.

That’s when I hear an engine start. I turn my head at the same time as the woman does, and we both notice a black van in the parking lot with its lights on. Two men are sitting inside the van. I can’t tell if they’re the same men that cornered me at the hospital or not.

The woman looks back and me, smiles, and casually gets into the car as if nothing was wrong. I get into the car as well, and wonder what’s going on.

What’s going on?

She’s leading me into a trap.

She doesn’t know about the men following me.

She’s going to help me escape once we get out of the parking lot.

She has her own plans for me, which have nothing to do with the men in the van.

 Loading ...