The Whitechapel Project

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Previously on Whitechapel

Six killed Liz while under the influence of Jack. During a desperate search of her home, he discovered that she was really Rachel Parks, an agent for the mysterious organization Lacuna. His escape from Liz’s home was interrupted by the arrival of one of Lacuna’s agents. Six took Liz’s appearance and tried to bluff the recently arrived Agent Timm into believing that he was the female agent. Six convinced Timm to put him in contact with the head of Lacuna, Zachery McPhearson. Unfortunately, McPhearson wanted Six to come out to the car parked outside and speak to him directly. Six was left with a handful of bad options, and all while trying desperately to keep Jack from taking over again.

Episode Seventeen – Slipping the Leash

I don’t want to kill Timm.

I try to justify the decision. I have to assume that McPhearson is right outside, and any delay in coming out to meet him will arouse suspicion. While I could theoretically kill Timm and take his skin, it’ll make things worse. The smart move is to keep playing along until I can make my move.

But that’s just an excuse. The reality is that I’m sick of killing. As soon as I play this bluff out, I’m going to go far away from all of this and take some time to think about what I’m going to do about Jack.

Jack.

I feel him moving in the back of my head with just the thought of his name. He’s pushing, trying to gain control. The headache is building again, and it’s getting hard to think straight. I put my hands to my head, trying to keep my brains for squirting out of my eye sockets.

Which means I take my gun off of Timm.

In a second, Timm has me by the throat and shoves me back into the closet. The sudden violence takes me by surprise, and I drop the pistol in the scuffle. Timm bounces my head off the back of the closet, and my headache explodes in intensity. I try to get my hands under his so I can pry his fingers off my neck, but it’s getting hard to see, hard to think straight. I’m starting to fade.

My body suddenly goes limp. I’m not unconscious – my muscles all just spontaneously relax against my will. On instinct I follow the impulse, letting the weight of my body draw Timm off balance. He changes his grip and eases me to the floor before looking back to find the pistol.

Stupid move, asshole.

Jack leaps up and grabs Timm’s head in his hands. Jack twists hard, and I can hear a cracking sound before Timm goes limp in my arms. He eases Timm to the ground, in a parody of how Timm eased me to the ground just a moment ago, before scooping up the pistol.

“Time to kill the stupid motherfucker that thinks he can keep me on a leash.”

He looks and sees Liz’s body. I can feel the warmth and pride flooding through his body (my body) at the sight of his handiwork. He notices the patches of missing skin, and my mouth twists into a smirk. “So, you took her skin,” Jack says. “Clever boy. But we make a terrible woman. I like your idea of taking this one’s skin.”

I try to scream, to fight, to stop Jack from what he’s doing, but I can only watch as his hand spasms into a fist. I can feel the knife forming in his hand, heavy and sharp and perfect, before he slices into Timm’s flesh, peeling his skin off in wet, ragged strips. Each time Jack gets a wet strip he slaps it onto my skin, and I watch it twist and wriggle before burrowing under my own flesh. I don’t feel anything, but whenever I try to close my eyes to block out the grotesque sight, Jack opens them again and takes another slice.

“Nice and easy,” Jack murmurs. “Don’t want to bleed this one out, not yet. Plenty of time to gorge on his blood later.”

He unbuttons Timm’s shirt as he continues. “In bouncing around in your head, I couldn’t help but notice that you’ve been sloppy. Not the good kind of sloppy either – the kind involving blood in your mouth and guts in your hands. No, I’m talking about the kind of sloppy that could get us killed. All this time you’ve been play-acting, pretending to be someone else when you take their skin. But there’s a better way – a much, much better way.”

The knife plunges into Timm’s chest. Jack tries to make a slow, careful incision, but soon he’s ripping ragged chunks of flesh out in his eagerness to get to his prize. I want to be disgusted by this butcher shop autopsy, but I’m swept up in the intensity of Jack’s passion and love of murder. Despite the ferocity of the surgery, there’s very little blood as Jack plunges my hands into Timm’s abdomen. I can feel his fingers gripping around something slick and muscular.

“The heart is for amateurs,” he says as he pulls Timm’s stomach out with both hands. “Everyone tells you that the heart is what you need to know a man, but that’s bullshit. A man’s soul is in his stomach; it’s true. Anyone who has had a bad day can tell you that a good meal will make you feel a hell of a lot better than having some blood pumped around the body.”

He transfers the stomach to my left hand, and the knife appears in my right. He casually uses the knife to slice off a chunk of the stomach. “Now’s the part where I would make some bullshit comment about how you are what you eat, but I can tell you’re not in the mood for bad jokes. So let’s get down to business.”

Jack puts the piece of stomach in my mouth and starts to chew.

The taste of bile and blood floods my tongue as Jack bites down on the rubbery muscle. I want to gag, but my body betrays me, luxuriating in the vile sensations as if I were eating the best steak in the world. The thrill and the excitement of the disgusting pleasure overwhelm me, and Jack revels in the meal.

After a few moments, I feel a strange sense of deja vu. It’s not deja vu, but it feels like it – like you’re seeing the same thing you’ve seen before, but with a different level of knowledge that you can’t quite place. Looking at Timm’s body, I know that this house was purchased a few months ago by Lacuna as part of Rachel Parks’ cover story. I know that he was a new recruit, fresh out of college. He is… he was proud and excited to serve his country, to find and take down dangerous criminals, to be on the path toward becoming James Fucking Bond. I reach down and pick up his pistol, the one that Mr. McPhearson gave him in the car.

As I feel the warm metal of the pistol in my hand, I realize that it’s me that has Timm’s pistol in my hand. Not Jack. Maybe something in acquiring Timm’s knowledge pushed Jack back.

It doesn’t matter. The other thing that eating Timm revealed to me is that McPhearson is waiting for confirmation from Timm that everything is normal, and he was expecting it several minutes ago.

What do I do now?

Try continuing the bluff with McPhearson?

Run out to the car and shoot McPhearson?

Let Jack take control, and see what he does?

Try to kill McPhearson from here with my mind?

Or do I just run?

The choice is yours.

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