Amanda Martín’s suggestion that they investigate murders in present-day San Francisco—a city no less shrouded in fog—the game took on a more realistic dimension. Celeste Roko, the famous astrologer, had predicted a bloodbath in the city, and Amanda decided to take this unique opportunity to put the art of divination to the test. To do so she enlisted the help of the other Ripper players and her best friend, Blake Jackson—her grandfather, coincidentally—little suspecting that the game would turn violent and that her mother, Indiana Jackson, would number among its victims.
The kids who played Ripper were a select group of freaks and geeks from around the world who had first met up online to hunt down and destroy the mysterious Jack the Ripper, tackling obstacles and enemies along the way. As games master, Amanda was responsible for plotting these adventures, carefully bearing in mind the strengths and weaknesses of the players’ alter egos.
A boy in New Zealand who had been paralyzed by an accident and was confined to a wheelchair—but whose mind was still free to explore fantastical worlds, to live in the past or in the future—created the character of Esmeralda, a cunning and curious gypsy girl. A shy, lonely teenager who lived with his mother in New Jersey, and who for two years now had left his bedroom only to go to the bathroom, played Sir Edmond Paddington, a bigoted, cantankerous retired English colonel—an invaluable character, since he was an expert in weapons and military strategy. A nineteen-year-old girl in Montreal who had spent much of her short life in the hospital suffering from an eating disorder, had created Abatha, a psychic capable of reading minds, manipulating memories, and communicating with the dead. A thirteen-year-old African American orphan with an IQ of 156 and a scholarship to an academy in Reno for gifted children decided to be Sherlock Holmes, since logic and deductive reasoning came effortlessly to him.
In the beginning, Amanda did not have her own character. Her role was simply to oversee the game and make sure players respected the rules; but given the impending bloodbath, she allowed herself to bend those rules a little. She moved the action of the game from London, 1888, to San Francisco, 2011. Furthermore—now in direct breach of the rules—she created for herself a henchman named Kabel, a dim-witted but loyal and obedient hunchback she tasked with obeying her every whim, however ridiculous. It didn’t escape her grandfather’s notice that the henchman’s name was an anagram of his own. At sixty-four, Blake Jackson was much too old for children’s games, but he agreed to participate in Ripper so he and his granddaughter would have something more in common than horror movies, chess matches, and the brainteasers they set each other—puzzles and problems he sometimes managed to solve by consulting a couple of friends who were professors of philosophy and mathematics at Berkeley.
Lying facedown on the massage table, Ryan Miller was dozing under the healing hands of Indiana Jackson, a first-degree Reiki practitioner, well versed in the techniques developed by the Japanese Buddhist Mikao Usui in 1922. Having read sixty-odd pages on the subject, Ryan knew that there was no scientific proof that Reiki was actually beneficial, but he figured it had to have some mysterious power, since it had been denounced by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2009 as dangerous to Christian spiritual welfare.
Indiana worked in Treatment Room 8 on the second floor of North Beach’s famous Holistic Clinic, in the heart of San Francisco’s Little Italy. The door to the surgery was painted indigo—the color of spirituality—and the walls were pale green, the color of health. A sign in copperplate script read INDIANA, HEALER, and beneath it was a list of the therapies she offered: intuitive massage, Reiki, magnet therapy, crystal therapy, aromatherapy. One wall of the tiny waiting room was decorated with a garish tapestry, bought from an Asian store, of the Hindu goddess Shakti as a sensual young woman with long raven hair, dressed all in red and adorned with golden jewels. In one hand she held a sword, in another a flower. The goddess was depicted as having many arms, and each hand held one of the symbols of her power—which ranged from a musical instrument to something that looked like a cell phone. Indiana was such a devout disciple of Shakti that she had once considered taking her name until her father, Blake Jackson, managed to convince her that a Hindu goddess’s name was not appropriate for a tall, voluptuous blond American with the looks of an inflatable doll.
Given the nature of his work and his background in the military, Ryan was a skeptic, yet he gratefully surrendered to Indiana’s tender ministrations. He left each session feeling weightless and euphoric—something that could be explained either as a placebo effect combined with his puppyish infatuation with the healer, as his friend Pedro Alarcón suggested, or, as Indiana insisted, by the fact that his chakras were now correctly aligned. This peaceful hour was the most pleasurable in his solitary existence, and Ryan experienced more intimacy in his healing sessions with Indiana than he did in his strenuous sexual gymnastics with Jennifer Yang, the most regular of his lovers. He was a tall, heavyset man with the neck and shoulders of a wrestler, arms as thick and stout as tree trunks, and the delicate hands of a pastry chef. He had dark, close-cropped hair streaked with gray, teeth that seemed too white to be natural, pale gray eyes, a broken nose, and thirteen visible scars, including his stump. Indiana suspected he had other scars, but she hadn’t seen him without his boxer shorts. Yet.
“How do you feel?” the healer asked.
“Great. I’m starving, though—that’s probably because I smell like dessert.”
“That’s orange essential oil. If you’re just going to make fun, I don’t know why you bother coming.”
“To see you, babe, why else?”
“In that case, my therapies aren’t right for you,” Indiana snapped.
“You know I’m just kidding, Indi.”
“Orange oil is a youthful and happy essence—two qualities you seem to lack, Ryan. And I’ll have you know that Reiki is so powerful that second-degree practitioners are capable of ‘distance healing’; they can work without the patient even being present—though I’d probably need to spend twenty years studying in Japan to get to level two.”
“Don’t even think about distance healing. Without you here, this would be a lousy deal.”
“Healing is not a deal!”
“Everyone’s got to make a living. You charge less than your colleagues at the Holistic Clinic. Do you know how much Yumiko charges for a single acupuncture session?”
“I’ve no idea, and it’s none of my business.”
“Nearly twice as much as you,” said Ryan. “Why don’t you let me pay you more?”
“You’re my friend. I’d rather you didn’t pay at all, but if I didn’t let you pay, you probably wouldn’t come back. You won’t allow yourself to be in anyone’s debt. Pride is your great sin.”
“Would you miss me?”
“No, because we’d still see each other as friends. But I bet you’d miss me. Come on, admit it, these sessions have really helped. Remember how much pain you were in when you first came? Next week, we’ll do a session of magnet therapy.”
“And a massage, please. You’ve got the hands of an angel.”
“Okay, and a massage. Now get your clothes on, I’ve got another client waiting.”
“Don’t
