From: drsivana99@yahoo.com   
      
   This recaps some of the action from "A Night Out," from the point of    
   view of the villain. I think it clarifies a lot of the action.    
      
   Feedback: Yes   
   Rated: PG-13   
   Spoilers: oh gosh no. Too late for that!   
      
   THE MIRROR BLED   
   by Chuck Miller   
      
   POV 2:   
      
      
      
   Damn it. The water was up to his knees and the current   
   was shooting through him, up and down his body in   
   great waves. Electricity, the one thing he had to be   
   afraid of. When the Deal was originally struck, there   
   hadn't been such a lot of it about in the world. But   
   that had been a century ago, and things had changed.   
   That was the catch, then, he supposed. There was   
   always a catch when you made a deal with the Devil.   
      
   Here in this city, under this sky, at this time. At the hands of    
   this man Kolchak.   
      
   The current pounded through his flesh and blood and   
   bones, drawing out the moisture, burning, dehydrating.   
   He rolled his eyes to the heavens, the stars. Immortal   
   and unchanging, like him. His thoughts had begun to   
   fragment, chunks of the past mixing with the fading   
   sensations of the present. Bursting, popping, fading   
   in and fading out. A long, long room, the smell of   
   carbolic acid, the stink of dying flesh, urine, death,   
   disease. And then the face and the hands and the Deal…   
   The Deal. And the pact. He had once been a part of a   
   trinity, but the other two members were gone now. It   
   had been a family of sorts, the only one the Ripper   
   had ever had. He did not love them. He didn't love   
   anyone and never had. Even so, he missed them. Janos   
   and Malcolm, his "brothers." They reckoned they would   
   go on into eternity together, indulging their   
   appetites again and again and again, the terrors of   
   the earth. Nightmare creatures, acknowledged only as   
   fiction and superstition by the world at large. They   
   would move into the technology-dependent future, and   
   they would wreak sheer havoc because they could not be   
   quantified or accounted for by any branch of science.   
   Science is God, and God just doesn't know what   
   to do with this.   
      
   The Ripper knew he   
   would not die from this. He wished momentarily that he   
   could as his muscles spasmed and jerked and his teeth   
   chattered and his vision strobed gray, black and   
   white. But that wouldn't happen. Death would not have   
   him now. He was Jack the Ripper. He brought death and   
   scattered the world with it, but he could not succumb   
   to it. The damage was already beginning to heal,   
   even while it was still being inflicted. But the   
   current was taking a grievous toll on him and it would   
   be a very long time before the healing would be   
   complete.   
      
   The mud at the bottom of the pool sucked   
   him down but did not cool him. The current did not   
   cease, it continued to tear at him as he sank. He   
   blinked his eyes, very slowly because they were so   
   dry. His vision was graying out around the edges. On   
   the opposite side of the pool stood the man in the   
   white suit. He reached out a hand, as though he had   
   the power to grasp the man and pull him down too. Too   
   far away… The man had on thick gloves, held a thick   
   black cable that snaked from the electrical box   
   attached to the house, his house, the Ripper's latest   
   home, into the water. Electricity… The man in the   
   white suit must have thought that this was killing him.   
      
   He tried to open his mouth, to cry out, but   
   his jaws were clamped together as though they were   
   wired. He wanted to tell the man what was happening.   
   "I can't die, you fool! I can't DIE!" He sank below   
   the water, into the mud, the current drying out the   
   last few drops of moisture in his body, mummifying   
   him. His vision was swirling with faint colors and   
   gray mist and he saw the house catch fire. Good.   
   Everything will burn, everything he left there will   
   burn. Down he went, into the earth, petrified, but   
   still alive...   
      
   "I'll remember," he wanted to call   
   out, "I'll remember you." The man in the white suit   
   stood watching, his image blurring and disappearing.   
   The Ripper knew his name. It was the reporter.   
   Kolchak. Kolchak was the reason the Ripper had come to   
   Chicago. He came to have his revenge. For this Kolchak, this...    
   mortal human   
   worm... had killed the Ripper's "brothers." Somehow. Somehow he had    
   done it.   
   Janos first. Staked through the heart in Las Vegas, that horrible    
   artificial city in the forsaken desert, a neon sepulcher, monument    
   to greed and stupidity, with a soul as dead as the surrounding    
   desert wastes. But filled with disposable people. It should have    
   served Janos as a hunting ground for months, maybe years. But no.    
   And then Malcolm, a year later, up in Seattle. He had been tracked    
   to his subterranean hidey-hole and done to death. The Ripper's rage    
   upon learning of first one death and then the other had been    
   monumental. He would have thought that nothing could ever surpass    
   it, until he learned the truth behind his "brothers'" respective    
   ends. The same man had killed them both. Carl Kolchak.   
      
   It had been easy to   
   draw the reporter out night after night. The Ripper   
   knew that this Kolchak would be irresistibly drawn to   
   him and his crimes. Kolchak was to have been the final   
   ripped carcass to be left on the streets of this city.   
   He should not have done what he did, this Kolchak. He   
   should not have been able to. Aside from a few   
   prominent idiosyncrasies, Kolchak was an ordinary man.   
   Was it luck? Was there something more to this Kolchak   
   than there appeared to be? If he had only done it   
   once, it might have been a fluke. Twice was stretching   
   the bounds of coincidence. And now...   
      
   Now it appeared that Mr. Kolchak had achieved a   
   hat trick. But it only APPEARED so. Electricity could not kill him.    
   It   
   disrupted the receptors in his brain even in small doses, and this    
   much current   
   could damage and paralyze his body, but only for a time. And time    
   was the one   
   thing he had plenty of. Of the three "brothers," the Ripper likened    
   himself to   
   the little pig in the fable that built his house out of bricks.    
   Janos had had so   
   many vulnerabilities. Malcolm had relied on a difficult and    
   dangerous procedure.   
   But the Ripper... He could walk abroad in daylight, though he seldom    
   did, and a   
   stake in his chest would accomplish nothing more than the ruining of    
   a shirt.   
   There was no alchemical brew that could be withheld to halt his    
   endless   
   perambulation through the ages.   
      
   Ironically, tomorrow was to be the day Kolchak   
   died. All of the planning and arranging had been   
   completed. He had received much in the way of useful   
   information from the other reporter he had met this   
   very night. It never ceased to amuse him-- no matter   
   how much integrity a person had, all you need to do is   
   open them up and show them a bit of their own innards   
   and they are yours to command... After she had given   
   up to him the information he had wanted, he told her,   
   "You would say anything but your prayers." Perhaps she   
   thought that she would be set free. The wound in her   
   abdomen was severe but not necessarily fatal. Severing   
   the carotid artery and the windpipe, however,   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)