Old Ben was an old soul with even older secrets. One who knew much and spoke very little later in life. Who would believe his tales had he chose to share them? Very few. His parents once remarked when he was young that he was an old soul – and how right they were. As old Ben perched deep in thought, he went over his past lives. Like an old scar that wouldn’t heal, his very first memory of life blossomed with blood.
Ben had known many names in his lifetime, and Cain was his first, a name from a time long faded away. He remembered how jealous he was of his brother way back then. How much his brother prospered and gained the favor of God. He felt so much jealous and rage toward his brother that he led him in to the fields they worked and attacked and killed him there. The thing he’d done was so horrible that God spoke and asked him where his brother was. To which he answered with what is believed to be the world’s first sass and snark, “I don’t know. Am I my brother’s keeper?”
God asked him what had he done as his brother’s blood lay freshly spilled upon the earth and with not much remorse at all, he worried about his own life after being punished and driven from the land. He was henceforth a wanderer until his days’ end. A very nasty business killing one’s own blood out of a fit of jealousy and murderous rage. But it seemed to Ben that he was never quite able to get rid of the stains on his hands as he kept bathing in the blood of his perceived enemies.
The next memory centuries later took him to Italy where Gaius Julius Caesar, a roman general and statesman, was on his way to the Theatre of Pompeii. Beforehand, Caesar was told harm would befall him on the Ides of March. He didn’t believe him and mocked the soothsayer. Ben whose name was Cassius then along with one other, led a band of 60 men and each one of them stabbed Julius Caesar to death. And he smiled when it was done.
His last memory…
He walked the streets as a clean and pristine nobleman during the day and stalked the streets of London at night as a blood thirsty madman. He chose his victims carefully but with extreme prejudice. Family secrets run deep. His own mother was said to be a working girl and he had no love or respect for those like her. So he began his work in Whitechapel. Erasing those who soiled society and blemished the lives of others.
There were five of note and a few more…but those five held meaning to him and sent a shock wave of terror throughout the streets of London. He was infamous there and elsewhere in the world. There wouldn’t be another like him.
In the graveyard, outside of an asylum, a dog dug up an old grave and found his old bones. He sat high in a tree looking down on the last grave he ever had feeling a sense of peace that he no longer heard the steady mantra of kill kill kill in his mind. Now there was peace, now there was solace.
The dog kicked the skull belonging to that grave to the surface and Ben landed atop of it. He was last bashed in the head within the walls of the asylum after attacking a doctor who loved torturing his patients with all manner of experiments. Ben…”Jack” wouldn’t have it and went down fighting.
Reborn a raven he rests atop the skull of the man once called Ben and looks back on his life and thinks… it could have been worse, so much worse.
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