There is an anachronism- the book wasn't published until 1900.


The absinthe is a familiar friend, a green glass lens that brings the visions into sharp focus, though Whitechapel is certainly no Oz.

The flash of memory cuts like a surgeon's scalpel: Margaret in the parlor, laughing at him as he lays beside her on the settee to read passages of childrens' stories to her swelling belly. The books were a gift from her cousin in Surrey. He wonders vaguely if etiquette requires the presents be returned in the absence of the blessed event they were intended to celebrate.

He knows the absinthe like a friend, like a lover, like a wife. Or better than a wife, because even after seven years of cleaning up the cast-offs of Whitechapel he can't picture his laughing Margaret as a stiffening corpse. The absinthe is simple: alcohol, sugar, and wormwood. Temporary oblivion sweetened by just enough poison to dangle the promise of permanence, even if it never delivers.

Margaret hated it when he drank, made him rinse the bitter out of his mouth before letting him kiss her. He's never had reason to try opium before now, but he wonders with the first draw what she would have thought about the the scent of his breath.

Then the dragon is pouring into his lungs, coiling into his blood, and he knows. Knows how she will look tomorrow, pale and cold and still, copper pennies covering her eyes as they lower her into the ground. Knows that she would have laughed, would have stolen the sweet smoke with a kiss until all of his breath was hers. Knows that she loves him, even in his self-destructive grief, and she promises never to leave him alone again.

Godley tells him again and again that he's destroying his life, that every time he lights a match for the pipe or the glass he's burning away a little more of himself.

He doesn't understand that Abberline welcomes the fire. That the addictions may be killing him, but the craving for more is all that keeps him from killing himself.

The visions he has now are more frequent, more vivid than they've ever been before. They were barely dreams when he was a child, quickly-forgotten glimpses that only came to mind when his mother gave him the new toy he'd been unknowingly expecting, when he wasn't surprised by his father's unscheduled return. They grew and matured as he himself did; the cracking of his voice was accompanied by the absolute knowledge of his grandmother's impending stroke, just as his first awareness of the opposite sex was overlaid with the plumes on the harness of the carriage-horse that would trample his dog the next day.

Not all of it was sorrow and destruction, something he doesn't know whether to be grateful for or not. He met Margaret at a party, the daughter of one of his father's partners, and saw her walking toward him in her wedding dress before he ever knew her name. He knew what it would be like to love her as they courted, heard her congratulate him on his promotion to inspector while she darned his shirt, felt their son kicking in her belly as she cried over her second miscarriage.

However much he cursed God for her death, he thanked all the angels that they spared him the sight of it.

Every dream, every vision had always been related to him. It wasn't until after her funeral that he started seeing the world for the wretched place he suddenly knew it to be, saw that his mother's pale-lipped smile as she ignored the spots of blood on her handkerchief was just as pointless as a Whitechapel doxy strangled in a dirty alley.

The heavy smoke of opium makes it harder to see that hollow place in his chest, that bottomless well that the absinthe numbs but never fills. It's enough to make him envy the Ripper- whatever madness has hold of the man, it's a madness with passion and purpose. Insanity is a hotter, truer fire than the slow smolder and quick flash he makes do with, a beacon as tempting to him as the biblical bush.

Moses spoke to God, and he had the strength to save his people and part the sea. Abberline wonders who speaks in pictures to him, what voice it is that the Ripper hears. He wonders which of them will have the greater faith.