Stalking Jack the Ripper

Thomas and Audrey see two figures in a lit window of a lodging house, one of whom looks like Audrey’s father. Thomas and Audrey wait outside until two figures emerge: Lord Wadsworth and a woman. Lord Wadsworth gets into his carriage alone and leaves. The woman walks in the other direction, singing drunkenly. Audrey and Thomas follow Lord Wadsworth’s carriage.

At Uncle Jonathan’s the next day, Audrey and Thomas are shocked to read that a woman was killed the night before; Audrey suspects her father and wonders how he slipped away when they had been careful to follow him home.

Just as Audrey reflects that she is attracted to Thomas, Uncle Jonathan bursts in, covered in blood. He leads a group of people, who bring in the mutilated body of the most recent murder victim; Audrey vomits.

She returns to the laboratory, and the three study the body, recording notes and removing samples. The woman’s heart is missing, just as Uncle Jonathan predicted. He suggests that it was removed for transplant to another body.

Thomas tries to discourage her, but Audrey resolves that she will confront her father that evening.

Audrey enters the dining room to confront her father but finds only a footman inside; he tells Audrey that her father and brother have left the house and won’t be back for supper. Frustrated, Audrey insists that the servants should go to bed and that she will wait for her father in his study.

She sees that he has been reading a passage from Paradise Lost by John Milton, in which Satan realizes that hell is within him rather than outside of him because hell is his own mind. Audrey sees that the bookmark is her mother’s locket, and she puts it on. On the wall is a large portrait of her family’s ancestor Jonathan Nathaniel Wadsworth (after whom Nathaniel and Uncle Jonathan are named). Audrey rubs a spot of dirt off it, and the painting springs open, revealing a hidden passageway.

Audrey goes down the passageway and enters a secret laboratory filled with rotting specimens: Flesh is pulled tightly over a mechanical arm, and a heart in a case is being artificially pumped by a machine. She lifts the lid of a large box; inside is her mother’s decaying body onto which fresher pieces of flesh have been grafted. Horrified, Audrey quickly leaves the lab and runs into someone.

Audrey is relieved that it is Nathaniel, not her father. She breathlessly tells him that their father has done terrible things and that they need to go to Scotland Yard. Nathaniel seems dazed and exhausted. Suddenly, he grabs Audrey and forces her into a chair in the laboratory.

He gestures proudly around the room and produces a knife from his sleeve similar to the blade Uncle Jonathan guessed Jack the Ripper would use. Nathaniel moves the body of their mother onto a table as Audrey watches, aghast. Nathaniel explains that he intentionally drugged their father with laudanum, which fueled his opium addiction and distracted him from Nathaniel’s activities.

Nathaniel places the heart, attached to the pumping steam engine, in their mother’s chest cavity. He tells Audrey that he needs a bit of her blood to inject into their mother. Audrey, sickened, begs him to stop. He seems briefly convinced but then explains that they must continue.

Nathaniel ties Audrey up, allegedly for her own safety, as he removes a vile of blood from her. As Audrey pleads with him, their father arrives. Horrified, he orders Nathaniel to untie Audrey, which he does.

Audrey tells her father that she is going to Scotland Yard. Her father reminds her that if she does, Nathaniel will be hanged for his crimes. Audrey replies that her mother would want her to do the right thing, even if it is hard.

Suddenly, Thomas arrives. He explains how he deduced that Nathaniel was Jack the Ripper: He saw cut marks on his fingertips, which suggested that Nathaniel kept a knife in his sleeve.

Nathaniel insists on completing his experiment; he runs a volt of electricity through their mother as he thrusts the syringe of Audrey’s blood into her chest. The metal needle connects with the metal of the cage in her chest, and Nathaniel is electrocuted; he falls to the ground, dead.

Lord Wadsworth sobs, and Audrey screams in grief and horror.

Nathaniel is buried next to his mother. Audrey struggles in the aftermath of the horrific night of discovering her brother was Jack the Ripper, and then watching him die.

Two weeks later, in Uncle Jonathan’s laboratory, Audrey saws open the head of a cadaver to inspect its brain while Jonathan and Thomas watch. A servant comes down to tell Audrey that her father is there; she assumes that he has come to take her home and goes upstairs resignedly.

She is shocked and thrilled when her father tells her that he regrets trying to keep her safe by controlling her; he is sending her to a forensic medical school in Romania with Thomas; it was Thomas’s idea.