Polly

By Hannah Carter

August 31st

3:20 a.m.

I crept along the shadows of Buck’s Row in London, humming a song underneath my breath. Brownstone buildings loomed over me, and my foot clacked against a circular black plaque.

I giggled, a slightly intoxicated sound.

“Careful where you’re walking there, missum,” said a voice with a heavy London accent.

I glanced around. Soupy fog slithered among the streetlights and coiled around my feet. I shook my high-heeled boots, which clacked against the brick sidewalk.

The darkness shifted. A tall man with a thick handlebar mustache stepped into the light. His footsteps were silent, and his skin so pasty he looked like a phantom conjured by the fog. Though he wore no top hat, he tipped his head as if he did. “It’s awfully late for a lady like you to be wandering the streets. Have you nowhere to go?”

I shrugged, glancing around. “Oh—you know. This and that. Got into a tiff, we did. Ain’t got money for one of ‘em posh places.” I chuckled. “Stayed at the pub until closing when they threw me out onto the street, all unceremoniously.” I pantomimed a chucking motion—perhaps a little too hard, because I nearly lost my balance and my hat slid into my eyes. “Ah, whoops.” Laughing again, I resituated my headwear.

“I see.” Arrogant disapproval dripped from his voice. “A pity you have no one to walk you home. Shall I?” The man stepped closer, adjusting his pristine white gloves as he walked. “It’s not safe for you to be out alone.” He approached again, and on instinct, I took a step back, almost tripping on an uneven brick.

“Oh, no thank you.” I held out my hands to prevent his advance. “I’m not in any danger.”

“Really?” His voice turned sharp, much like a shark rising from the waves for the attack. “Then you must not know who I am.”

He whipped a knife out from his overcoat and lunged at me.

I slammed my hand down on his wrist, and the weapon clattered to the ground. Phony accent gone, I snapped, “Oh, I know who you are.” He stumbled, which left me an opening to kick his ribs with my high heel. “Jack the Ripper.” He staggered over the same loose brick and circular plaque I’d been standing over for the last few minutes. “They say you can eviscerate a girl in under ten minutes.” I drove my elbow into his back, and he hit the ground with a loud grunt. “Too bad you can’t disembowel her if she’s already dead.” I raised my voice. “Reynolds! I’ve got him!”

My living boyfriend, Reynolds, rushed from an alleyway, a cigarette already lit for the exorcism.

“Get out of the circle, Eliza!” He waved me away, the red embers already falling on the street and dissipating the fog. Once Reynolds made a complete circle with the ashes, any ghost trapped within its boundaries would be exorcised—me included.

“One second!” I drew back and stomped on Jack the Ripper’s face. “That’s for all those poor girls, you monster.”

I might have gotten away with my final act of revenge, except Jack grabbed my ankle and yanked me down. My back hit the pavement, knocking the breath out of me.

“Liza!” Reynolds was a few feet away, too far to help. I turned my head toward the Ripper. Our eyes locked.

Cold. Furious. Dead. But the sort of dead that would have been present even in life, a kind of evil that stole all semblance of humanity from a person.

He reached for my neck, and I twisted his hand back at the wrist. A move Reynolds had taught me—he wouldn’t send me to be poltergeist bait without making sure I could defend myself.

“Move, Liza!” Reynolds cried, right before Jack howled curses.

The first spark of Reynolds’s cigarette ash had caught onto our poltergeist’s leg. His shoe erupted into a bright pyre of flames, and I rolled away, hitting the wall of a Crossrail entrance, a site where a million people came and went. But its construction had stirred up Jack the Ripper’s restless spirit, and ever since, he had claimed a new victim every anniversary of his first kill.

Bells chimed the half hour.

3:30 a.m.

Almost the exact time he’d murdered Mary Ann Nichols.

Now, with a chorus of curses, Jack the Ripper’s poltergeist writhed on the ground. He crawled along the street, hate-filled eyes blazing into me, as flames engulfed his body.

His fingers stretched toward me, but then—gone.

Vanished to whatever afterlife awaited him.

“You okay?” Reynolds kneeled beside me. He swept his hands through his hair, his brown eyes soft and filled with care—a welcome contrast to Jack’s odious glower.

“Yeah. Fine.” He couldn’t help me up—my being a ghost and all—so I propped up on my elbow. “Shame we didn’t learn his identity, though. We could have solved a cold case too.

Reynolds chuckled, rising to his feet. “I’ll go let the boss know we’re done. Then we can go back to the hotel, and I can finally get some sleep.”

I nodded, waving him on. “I’ll be right there. I just dropped something.”

Reynolds dipped his head before he strode off into the fog, hands in his pockets.

When he’d disappeared, I reached over, tracing the letters of the cold black plaque, a recent addition to Durward Street—formerly Buck’s Row.

In Memory of Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols—Murdered Here on August 31st, 1888, by Jack the Ripper.

I had yet to see any sign of her ghost, so I could only hope that meant that Polly had moved on to the afterlife—hopefully one that treated her better than the world had here. “We got him, Polly. We got him.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hannah Carter is just a girl who wakes up every day hoping it will be the day she discovers she’s secretly a mermaid. Her debut novel, Depths of Atlantis, is out through SnowRidge Press now. Her stories have been included in several anthologies: Whispers From Before, The Never Tales, and Havok’s Casting Call and Prismatic. Her flash fiction piece “A Home for Nova” won the 2022 Flash Fiction Realm Award.

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