The Corpsewood

5. The Wolf and the Lamb

Date Unknown

My dearest, I first asked of you to remember the tale of the wolf and the lamb. How the wolf justified eating the lamb using whatever distorted reasoning necessary. I wrote to you that I am both the lamb and the wolf, as was Hallenbeck's first monstrosity – the monstrosity that birthed Jack at the tender age of eight.

We have not seen each other in many months, my love. I know I broke your heart after I did not return to you from Dartmoor. I held onto these letters hoping you would read them and understand why I did what I did to those women, but you have to understand that the night I saw the dead ones was not the end of my terror.

I know you have read the papers – checked each day in hopes of learning your lover has been found. But instead you read only of the dreadful crimes I have committed and of the frauds who take credit for their infamy. I am disgusted. A kidney. How could they think I would be so arrogant? My own torment is not to be warped into some sensationalist hyperbole. Do they think I do this for pleasure? For thrills?

Deep down you fear it is me, but you will not say. Now that Hallenbeck, Haas and my father have departed this world, I am the only one left known to mutilate the dead in the way of their practice. Emory knows, but my secret is safe with him. He has become so unhinged and so dependent on the bottle now that my brilliant friend seems unable to keep his sentences together anymore. It was sad to see him that way, but I sympathise. He drinks to mute the presence that followed him out of Wistman's Wood when he found Haas dead. He is a slave to whatever tinctures mute the voice that tells him, 'he who escapes the woods must return to the dead ones'.

My dear, I worry you think this only a story. One born of delusion, fear and guilt. What I did to those five women is not the product of malice, but of self preservation. I have brought with me some unseen horror to Whitechapel and the only means of silencing its whisper on the breeze, a breath on the cusp of hearing, is to surround it with death. It is there the forest's evil lingers for a time, but it is not enough to rid myself of this curse. How many vagrants and whores must I slaughter to be free of it? To sleep at night without visions of hollow faces haunting my dreams? How long until time once again passes as it did, and I can truly see the people passing me in the street, not just their shadows?

And to return to you, my sweetest. You who have been so resilient and understanding. I wish only to hold you close, but these killings cannot continue. I know now why Hallenbeck surrounded himself in his work. The unending cycle of death and decay that plagued his experiments kept the forest's call at bay. But he was stronger than I. He was seventy-six before he returned to the forest to accept a calling that had plagued him since he first set foot there, and blindly I followed him into the same fate. I do not know how much longer I can go on like this. With each innocent life I end, my real name slips away.

But I curse the old man for leading me to the moors in the first place. Do you remember that day he and I argued about the future of his projects? I left that day wanting no further affiliation with his questionable deeds and he told me he would find a way to convince me to continue his path. Neither you nor I knew what he meant at the time... but he has won.

It is the lamb and the wolf of his own design.