Author Edward Bryant, selected "The Night And Its Shadow" by Aaron Albrecht for First Place from 137 entries in the 2005 SFWoE SF/F Contest. Aaron has given SFWoE permission to place his story on our web site for all to read. "The Night And Its Shadow" is an intriguing story of future crime fighters when "flickering" from one time continuum to another is possible.
Keith Demanche has created a fitting piece of art for the story. Below is what he had to say about his artwork.
"I wanted to convey the time travel aspect and alternate dimensions of the story in a messy, hectic sort of way. I used an early 20th century picture for the man and a very recent picture for the woman and placed them merging together to try and bring out the sense of passing through time and space but also being connected to each other.
This story for me was more about loss than any sort of horror or monster, so I chose to focus on the main characters and their journey together."
Now, enjoy reading Aaron Albrecht's story below. After you have read the story, if you care to make a short commment about his story, you may do so by clicking on the "SUBMIT YOUR OPINION" link.
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They have put the Ripper in a tiger cage suspended three meters off the ground in the yard of Newgate prison. The barred slits in the gate allow the public enough room to catch a glimpse but not enough to hurl rocks or offal. The original ill-conceived plan to parade him through the streets caused a riot and the waves of that mob still flow around the walls and gates. Now a few wags have managed to loft rocks in long narrow parabolas up over the walls. Soon the nervous warders will have to move him inside.
Chambrela and Roderick have had their peek - a quick look at a sallow young man, made old by fear - and she turns and buys a meat pie in a grease stained swatch of butcher's paper from a vendor. Roderick looks aghast as she eats with gusto.
"The last time I did something like that I spent four days never straying far from a stinking privy in some outback of another continuum," he says.
Chambrela wipes her pretty mouth prettily on a kerchief. "Bioengineered bacteria in the system for this girl," she says and pats her stomach. "I can digest most anything, most anywhere, most anytime."
Roderick nods in frank admiration.
"We're in agreement then? This is the epicenter of the disruption?" he asks.
They have been tracking for many weeks, through various Londons, various Parises, various Berlins. Their separate paths have brought them together here. It is not, however, their first meeting; only the first of this order of significance.
"This is the source of the aberration. From here all the madness stems," she nods.
They both look back toward the crowd jeering and jostling to get a look through the narrow slits in the prison gate.
"Because they caught him," he says.
"You've been keeping up with the news?" she asks as they walk away. "Epicenter may not be the best word. Shock waves grow weaker the further they get from the source. This is more like a chain reaction. It gets worse, escalates."
Roderick sighs. "That's how it was the last time I checked back home...a couple of days ago."
"You were out of touch for a couple of days?" she asks. This does not fit with the professional image - in some way matching her own - she has of him.
"I stopped checking," he admits. "It was becoming...too grim."
Chambrela watches him, surprised - but not unpleasantly - at this sensitivity. She nods her understanding. He finds out where she is staying and moves to the same hotel, not solely because it is closer to the object of their search. They file separate reports to Centre in the home continuum, each announcing their success and each asking, what now?
The Ripper sits inside the cell where they have moved him. Soon his shield of anonymity will be gone forever. They will hustle him out into the light to be questioned and exposed. For now he sits freed from the manacles and leg irons, but still bound by his terrible need. The black tide is beginning to fill him to the drowning point. Once, long ago, he had feared it would destroy him. But then he discovered release in the act, not of killing, no, but of deconstruction, disassembling. He recalls now a frog he'd dissected, and his first cadaver. The dark waters rise.
Roderick stands and pulls a chair out for her when Chambrela enters the hotel dining room. Around them the sounds of conversation and cutlery on china, the sights of white linen under gas lights.
He's a failed medical student from Edinburgh," she says.
"You got this from Valesta at Centre?" he asks. She does not reply.
"When you sent in your report?" he suggests.
"He seems to have no history of childhood abuse," she says.
"Analysis of the subject is not part of our assignment," he says giving her an amused smile.
"So I'm indulging a little hobby of mine. There's no rule against it."
Roderick treasures this discovery, this new side of her revealed. Some bit of personality she has shown him beneath her professionalism.
"Your costume seems quite authentic. Is there a whale bone corset under that?" he asks. He keeps a straight face as if it is merely a question about one of the details of the job.
"This is part of our assignment?"
"I have a personal interest."
She deflects the subject away. Bounces the ball back into the court of his own vulnerability.
"If you checked the news from home you know that it's escalating," she says.
His expression is instantly serious.
"Ten cases in Melbourne. Seven in Atlanta. There seems to be an individual or a team in the Midwest. The M.O. is the same there; shotgun killings in Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Somebody's on the road. And Tokyo. Tokyo has five. With a handgun. Very hard to get handguns in Japan," she says.
Roderick shakes his head, willing it not to be true. "How can it be? Serial killings spreading like a virus, because he's in a cell?"
The Ripper feels like he is choking on toxic fumes, drowning in poison. It builds and builds till he knows he will not be able to endure it, grows stronger as the night stretches long. Like a rabid tiger he paces back and forth finding no escape, no release. His glance darts around the cell. Stops at the bars on an ancient slit of a window. They are medieval. Iron spikes, edged and pointed if blunt with age, point inward. Even reaching his arm through would get him cut. Heedless he throws himself at them. Clasps the bars and pulls himself up. Then falls back but notices when one of the spikes shifts ever so slightly. He turns ready to attack the bars again until he notices the feeling beginning to ebb. In some way he does not comprehend his compulsion has let its stranglehold relax. He falls exhausted to the floor of his cell. Eventually his breathing grows less wild, more regular. His eyes turn again to the bars in the window.
"I said it's escalated," she insists as they are served the main course. Roderick is eating only soup. He knows he'll have no appetite even for that if she goes on. He does not want to hear but there is no way to stop her.
"It's children now. Infants. A maternity ward in Taipei. Seven babies and a ward nurse."
He raises his hands as if fending off a blow.
The Ripper looks around the dark corners of his cell. Glances toward the hall. So far they have not come to disturb him, as if having captured him, they would like to keep as far away as possible. This suits him. He has worked the spike free from the bars, glad that he dislodged it when the frenzy was on him. He wraps it in a handkerchief they've allowed him to keep and puts it in his pocket. It is aged and rusted, an inelegant tool. Still, swung or thrust with enough force....
That night Roderick and Chambrela make love in her room. Later he thinks of the first time he noticed her. It was at a Centre party. Everyone was dressed in their finest. She had won a raffle prize, a small antique porcelain box, brought back from China in some other continuum. Though they had spoken to each other before and sat in on the same meetings, it was the first time he'd seen that she was pretty, even beautiful, when she smiled her delight at the gift.
Other thoughts intrude as he lies listening to her light breathing. He thinks of the picture he's seen of Mary Kelly, the Ripper's final victim. Tries to imagine the same carnage in a maternity ward. Pushes the thought away. A slight buzz on his wrist alerts him to a call from Centre. He rises to dress and return to his room. She reaches out to stop him.
"I'll have the same message," she says.
"Want to check it out in private. Have a chance to process it," he says and continues to dress.
Later they meet in the dining room for breakfast.
"They think he's a conduit," she says.
"I read the response," he growls. "Safety valve would be a better term. Bleeding off the murderous impulse somehow. As long as he's free to work."
For a while neither one speaks.
"It's insane," he says at last. "It can't be. How can one man flush out the killing desire of so many across so many continuums?"
"Yet, this is the only place that he was caught. And when the impulse is on him serial killings go out of control throughout the continuums. For the time being it's the only theory that makes sense."
"Sense you call it! And what they want to do is more madness."
They flicker into being in a dark slum section of a continuum neither of them has ever seen before. Overhead a few street lamps of exotic design cast an odd phosphorescence. Roderick scowls and wipes his eyes as he peers around the oily gloom. In the distance, against a thin line of dusk light, tall structures like giant candles trail rivers of smoke.
"He should feel at home," Chambrela says.
"This is destination one? Where does he go next, when he's had his fun here?" Roderick snaps.
From the shadows comes a short, slim woman - or perhaps only a girl. Her hair is some color Roderick cannot name, yet he feels certain it is natural here, unlike the dark kohl painted on her eyes and in thin lines on her cheeks. She speaks words neither have heard before but the sway of her hips and the smile that has nothing to do with joy or laughter as she sashays near tells Roderick what she is.
Prey for the Ripper.
Roderick shakes his head and hopes it is a negative gesture here. It seems to work. She turns and sways away but not before casting a speculative glance at Chambrela. Down an alley Roderick can make out a child with the same kind of hair foraging among litter. He squints after the woman who has disappeared into the shadows. A sense of wild panic fills him perhaps due to the similarities (odd how even in such alien continuums there are always similarities) to the London that is the Ripper's hunting ground. He must make Chambrela understand. She must agree that this is wrong. He is desperate not to lose the intimacy he has found with her. Desperate that all that he believes and all that he has newly discovered with her not be soiled by this malignancy that is suddenly in their power. For a moment he entertains a wild, childish fantasy. He will find another continuum, pre-industrial, and he will carve and shape it and make a utopia where he and Chambrela will live a cozy life where no storms annoy and serial killers are not even glimpsed in nightmares.
"This place is foul, but we'll be fouler if we do this," he blurts. "We'll be...complicit in the monstrousness of the monster." It is crucial that she sees and does not disagree with this.
Chambrela places gentle fingers on his lips. She takes his hand in hers.
"We'll save others," she says.
He does not nod in agreement.
"What did they do to deserve this?" he says. In the dark alley the child continues to forage for food.
Later he goes alone to Newgate Prison. His credentials from La Securite' are impeccable. He has downloaded bioengineered synapses that make him fluent in French and give him a passable accent. Chambrela wants to accompany him, but it is agreed that a woman of this era would not be involved in this sort of work.
The prison warden, after a bit of puffing and postponing, gives him access to the Ripper.
Roderick hides his reluctance to be near the man and declines the warden's offer to have a guard work with him.
"Remember, I myself am the agent of the law," he says in an accent so foreign to his own speech that he has to resist the urge to laugh. "I do the kick boxing with skill!"
He clasps a small bracelet machined to look like a product of the age to the Ripper's wrist.
"With this we take skin and hair samples," he explains. "Perhaps from these we determine the...how do you say? Method of his madness, no? Now if I might have five minutes of privacy."
The warden and the guard step away letting him know they will be only a short distance down the hall.
Roderick presses a weapon made in the likeness of a knuckle duster derringer into the Ripper's side.
"Don't move, or cry out," he warns. He touches the key control on his own wrist.
If the guard and warden were watching they would see the scene inside the cell ripple as if reflected in water disturbed by a wave and their prisoner and the French policeman are gone.
Outside in an alley near the prison they reappear. Chambrela is waiting for them. Roderick takes the powerful weapon he holds out of the Ripper's ribs and presses it against his neck when she takes the man's left hand in both of hers.
"But what if killing him now will end it all here, across time, across the continuums?" he says and screws the gun into the Ripper's neck.
"And what if it doesn't?" she asks. She is setting the coordinates on the device on the Ripper's wrist. "What if killing him is like deactivating the fail safe for a nuclear device, or...." She looks around at the gaslights on the main street. "...like breaking off the handle on a gas main? What if the murders increase exponentially with him gone. Soon there are no victims at all. Only killers killing other killers."
"This way is better?" he asks exasperated.
"The boffs will need time to determine what's best. For now it's catch and release."
"And track!" Roderick insists.
"Yes, of course," she agrees. Chambrela touches the middle finger of her right hand and the fine needle hidden beneath her fingernail to their prisoner's hand, injecting him with a radium signature that can be pin-pointed by Centre.
"But they could apprehend him where we're taking him! They must have some kind of security force," Roderick says.
"He must not be apprehended," she says, but something he hears, the distaste in her voice, tells him she is repeating what she's been told. Roderick thinks of the small woman in the shadows of the place they are going to, of the child who was scrounging there. For a moment he relaxes the pressure on the weapon he holds against the Ripper's neck.
And the Ripper strikes.
He hurls Chambrela against his other captor. Hears the man go down and the gun clatter away on the pavement. Then he swings the spike in the full arc of his long arm. It slices the air. Stops hard in the woman's gut. He has impaled her to the bricks. But, no, the spike is lodged in bone. He wrenches it up. A sound comes out of her. Not a cry or a scream. Something wet and gasping forced up from her torn abdomen.
He cuts her throat.
He would do more but the man is on him with a roar. He is thrown away from his prey. His wrist with the strange bracelet strikes the alley wall and he is gone, flickering out of sight.
Roderick clutches Chambrela to him, down on his knees on dark pavement slick with London filth, her blood, and his tears. He has medicine and technology from the future. They do not save her.
He manages to stifle his sobs. Already he hears sounds of alarm from the prison. The whole incident has taken place in near silence. She did not cry out. They were simply talking and then she was dead. Later this will prey on him. What were the last words she said? Did she make a sound, any kind of warning? He had the gun against the man's neck, the neck of a murderer. A shot would have blown the Ripper's head to misty vapor. Was there a point where, had he been listening, the arc of time, the flow of events could have happened differently? He will not be able to recall. Now there is no time for regret.
The gun lies in the shadows. He retrieves it. A corpse will not transport. He searches her, taking all anomalies from their future - only his future now. To do this he is forced to strip her. When he is finished he looks at her where she lies, torn and bleeding, mostly naked. One more victim in a chain that must not be broken. For a moment he considers following on the trail on the Ripper. But why? He has gone where they wanted to send him. He resets the coordinates on the bracelet he wears and returns to his own continuum.
A month later he reports to Director Capella, his superior at Centre. He has taken no cases during that time. The period has been one of deep debriefing. Daily he has met with his mentors and guides. Capella sits in his vast office high up over the city. Three of the walls are windows and Roderick looks out into blue sky down on buildings far below, but also on much green park land. He often has that far away look in his eyes these days. Sometimes it is pained. Capella taps at read-outs on his desk and listens to information coming over the tiny bug set in his ear. Roderick knows he is reviewing his files.
"It seems that you have recovered from your experience," Capella says at last.
Roderick nods.
"If it's any consolation the explosion of killings stopped almost instantly. There has even been some sort of backlash effect, it seems. Not only is crime down across the continuums but humanitarian acts seem to be up."
Again Roderick only nods. Capella rubs his tired eyes.
"We are keeping track of him, you know? We know where he is. What he does."
Roderick holds up his hands palms out to stop the director from saying more. "I know what he does."
"Sorry. It was a thoughtless comment."
"I still say there must be some other way. Set him loose among other criminals. Let him work his mayhem among those as depraved as he is."
"Yes, yes. We're investigating all possibilities," the director says.
"At any rate it seems that you are fit to return to work." Capella's next words are guarded. "Some who have had your experience...would be tempted to... go back. Disturb the chain of events."
Roderick nods his understanding. The director means that he might wish to step in before Chambrela was killed. Alter things so that she escapes. But Roderick knows this is not what happened. Any Chambrela he rescued would be subtly different than the one he lost. Once dead is gone forever.
"You do not seem to have any such inclinations," the director says. He examines a screen set in his desk to confirm this.
Shortly afterwards the interview ends. Roderick is free to travel the continuums again. Neither the director nor his mentors and guides suspect his motives for wanting to travel back. He will find a continuum where the Ripper has not been apprehended. He will, indeed, put himself in the path of the Ripper's depredations but not with any object of stopping him. He smiles a bit as he considers the conundrum it will cause to the law enforcement agents in that time and place.
The Ripper's first male victim.
It will not bring Chambrela back. It will not cause so much as a ripple across the continuums. But, he will become part of the unbroken chain of sacrifice and that will give meaning to her death.
He leaves the building, stops to watch the sunset, staring off into distances where he cannot find what he has lost.
SFWoE Note: SFWoE thanks Aaron Albrecht, the author of "The Night And Its Shadow," for allowing SFWoE to place his SFWoE 2005 Contest First Place Story on the SFWoE Website. If you would like to learn more about the author, please read SFWoE's interview with Aaron.
Well, what's your opinion of Aaron's story? SFWoE invites you to send us your comments on "The Night And Its Shadow." Please keep your opinion relatively short and to the point, and we will place your remarks online.
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This is a well-written and haunting story. I enjoyed it. Keep up the good work.The artwork was great too.
--- Angie Lofthouse Elk Ridge, UT USA
Aaron Albrecht's "The Night And Its Shadow" is a very good short story.
--- Barry Wood Nova Scotia, Canada
A very imaginative story, Aaron. I enjoyed it quite a lot. It was an honor competing with you, sir.
--- Daniel Akselrod Brooklyn, NY USA
From personal experience I know how hard it is to pull off a present tense story, but this one is done seamlessly.Great job, Aaron.
--- Lenny Royter Brooklyn, NY USA
There are a million Ripper stories out there, and in my humble opinion 99% of them are routine. This story is clever and new and nicely done. It is tightly written, moving, inventive, surprising, and a worthy winner.Congratulations and well done.
--- Todd Treichel Leesburg, VA USA
I have read Ripper stories before and I really did not care much for them. However, your story was different and I enjoyed it very much. It was very interesting and well written.Thank you, Aaron. Keep writing!
--- Delphine Lartet Nancy, France
A great read -- I particularly loved the last line which seems to awaken the "night and its shadow" in all of us.Congratulations Aaron!
--- Sue Gunderson Sister Bay, WI USA
Thoroughly enjoyed this -- loved the continuum twist.I want to know more about Chambrela and Roderick!
--- C. M. Cunz Rehoboth, MA USA
So much thanks to Mr. Albrecht for writing this wonderful story and thanks to SFWoE for putting the story on the Internet.Aaron, you should keep writing stories like this one.
--- Karl Muller Trier, Germany
Terrific story and very interesting to say the least.Congratulations to Aaron for a job well done.
--- Joe Vicas Waterbury, CT USA
This is the third story by Aaron Albrecht that I've read. While the first two were excellent works, he really raised the bar on this piece!Congratulations Aaron! MORE PLEASE!
--- Daniel C. Morey Robinson, KS USA
The proof is in the pudding. The pudding tastes great. That's great! I love the style of writing and would love to see more of these. Keep up the good work.In Cali we would call it "wicked sick" -- a high compliment.
--- Lawrence Hollien Monterey, CA USA
There are many good stories about the Ripper. And this is one of them.What I like most about Aaron Albrecht's story is that it is different than many of the Ripper stories and; therefore, interesting!
Well done Aaron.
--- Jack White Dallas, TX USA
I truly liked this story. What I liked about it most was the way the author told the story: quick and to the point.I look forward to reading more of Mr. Albrecht's work.
--- Amber Albertson Los Angeles, CA USA
I enjoyed Aaron's story, as I do not get to read too many stories written in the present tense. So his story was a change of pace for me.Thanks, Aaron. Keep up the good work!
--- Russ Johns New York, NY USA
I liked the story, I liked the artwork, and I thank SFWoE for making it possible for me to read Aaron's winning story.
--- Bobby Wells San Jose, CA USA
