The Name of the Star

So when the associate producer of Goode Evening returned from lunch to find the brown-paperwrapped parcel on his desk, he was puzzled. No one in the office claimed any knowledge of having accepted its delivery. The mailroom had no record of it. Someone had been in the office at all times, and yet no one had seen a person walk in and deliver a box. It simply appeared, with the words “Mr James Goode, BBC Centre” written on it in a harsh black scrawl. It had no stamps, no delivery stickers, no bar codes or tracking numbers. It was utterly anonymous.

Which meant that this was a serious breach of security. The producer was already reaching for the phone when James himself came strutting into the office.

“We have a problem,” the producer said. “Breach of security. I think we have to get everyone out.”

“What?” James Goode said the word in the same way normal people usually said things like “you burned my house down?” But the producer was used to this.

“This box,” he said. “No one saw it come in. No postage, no delivery markings, didn’t come through the mailroom. We have to—”

“Don’t be stupid,” James said, taking the box.

“James—”

“Be quiet.”

“James, really—”

But James was already attacking the packaging tape with a pair of scissors. The producer set down the phone softly, closed his eyes, and quietly prayed that he wouldn’t explode in the next few seconds.

“I don’t want people calling health and safety for every little thing,” James went on. “That’s precisely the kind of behavior I . . .”

He silenced himself, which was not normal James Goode behavior. The producer opened his eyes to find James reading a piece of yellow paper.

“James?”

James hissed him silent as he reached into the box gingerly to move aside some wrapping. He started visibly and pushed down the flaps of the box, hiding the contents.

“Listen to me,” James said intently. “Get news on the phone. Tell them to get a camera up here now and that I’m going to need to be on the air in fifteen minutes.”

“What? What are you doing?”

“I have the next piece of the Ripper story. And tell them to be quiet about it. Lock the door. No one else comes into this office.”

Fifteen minutes later, after a protracted argument with the news department, there was a camera in the Goode Evening office and a news producer with a headset talking rapidly to the newsroom. James was sitting at his desk. His awards had been hastily shoved together on the windowsill just behind him, crushed together to fit in the frame. In front of him was the box.

“Are you ready yet?” he snapped. “How bloody difficult is it to stop them jabbering on for two minutes? I’m trying to hand them a story. Tell them to stop doing the bloody weather and—”

“We’re live in ten,” the person from news said. “And nine, eight, seven . . .”

James composed himself for the countdown and was ready at one.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “just after two in the afternoon, I received this package here in my office at BBC Centre.”

He indicated the box, then held up the piece of yellow paper.

“Inside I found this note, which, as you will hear, I have been instructed to read. I am following the instructions in an attempt to save lives . . .”

He began to read.

From hell.Mr Goode, I send you half the Kidne I took from one man prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise. I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer. The camera panned over to show the contents of the box. Nestled in a wad of bubble wrap was a brownish-red object sealed in a plastic zipper-top bag. The object was about the size of a human fist, and there was no mistaking that it was some kind of an organ.

The camera jerked back to James, who continued reading.

I hav already chose my next acquatence and I am eager for the 9th of november as I am hungry and hav the itch. Please show my lovly Kidne on your show Mr Goode and read my note or I may hav to come quick and take more. . . . The screen abruptly switched back to the newsroom. Someone, somewhere at the BBC, had pulled the plug. The anchor apologized for the graphic footage.

Inside his office, James Goode went on. The last sentence of the letter was the money sentence, the one he had practiced reading with the most care, the one he had memorized and could say looking right into the camera. This was, he knew, the sentence no one would ever forget. This was his moment.

He read it, unaware that it was being heard only by himself and the two other people in the room.

THE STAR THAT KILLS

In our lifetime those who kill the newsworld hands them stardom and these are the ways on which I was raised. —Morrissey,

“The Last of the Famous

International Playboys”

16

THE POLICE PACKED UP BY WEDNESDAY MORNING, and the press left as soon as the white tent came down. Jerome’s prediction about the video came true. By that afternoon, every news station on the planet was showing it. It was on the front page of every website. Even though hoaxes were an everyday occurrence, this video was proving hard to dismiss. Video experts had all had a look at it. Facial recognition software confirmed that the woman in the footage was the victim, Fiona Chapman. No one could explain the fact that the killer couldn’t be seen. And it was physically impossible that he was just avoiding the camera. Somehow, he had accessed the footage on both the hard disk and the server and erased himself. Some people thought he had special military cloaking technology.

Three students had been pulled from school. Teachers wanted to be able to leave the school grounds before it got dark at five. In the air, there was a deep sense of unease, everywhere.

As for the mad make-out session with Jerome, I wasn’t sure what it meant. It could have been a part of the general insanity. It could have been stress that kicked our hormones into gear like that. But the fact is, when you live with someone—or on the same campus, I mean—and you have a mad make-out session, you have two choices. You can either indicate that you enjoy your mad make-out sessions and intend to indulge in them at every given opportunity (i.e., Gaenor and Paul, her year twelve boyfriend, known to make out while eating shepherd’s pie, which is not a euphemism), or you do not acknowledge the make-out session, or indeed any physical attraction. There is no middle ground, not at boarding school. I told Jazza, of course. But no one else. Jerome seemed to be doing the same thing. In fact, I was pretty sure he hadn’t told Andrew.

On Wednesday night, Jazza and I sat on our respective beds doing homework while the news played on my computer. After the video came out, watching the news became a matter of habit. The topic, as ever, was the Ripper—in this case, the letter that had been received at the BBC the day before.

“This letter,” the newscaster said, “of course, is based on the famous ‘From Hell’ letter that was received by Mr. George Lusk of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee on October 16, 1888. It’s the only letter out of the hundreds that came in that most Ripper experts think was actually from the killer. We now also know that there was more to the letter, which we didn’t hear. To discuss this, we have Mr. James Goode.”

“Oh, God,” I said. “Please. Not again. Not again with this guy.”

This guy, James Goode, had seemed to be on about half of all the television shows I saw in England before this happened. Now his smug face was on TV all the time, on every station.

“James, many people are saying that you should have turned the package over to the police immediately,” the interviewer said, “not shown the contents on the air.”

“People have a right to know,” James replied, leaning back. “And we arranged it so that one very critical piece of information was left out. Only Scotland Yard and I know the full contents of the message.”

“You’re saying you intended for your own broadcast to be cut off so abruptly?”

“Of course I intended it.”

“Who is this jackass?” I asked. “Why is he always on TV?”

“James Goode? I don’t know. He was a journalist, and they gave him a show. Everyone hates him, but he’s really popular, which makes no sense, I suppose.”

“He’s a jackass,” I repeated, and Jazza nodded sagely.

“It’s always been a subject of debate whether or not the original ‘From Hell’ letter of 1888 was a hoax. That letter, like your letter, contained half a human kidney, which could have come from the fourth victim, Catherine Eddowes. Of course, now we possess the capability to determine these things for certain. It has been confirmed that the kidney sent to you was the left kidney of the fourth victim, Catherine Lord. Why do you think you were chosen, James? Why you, and not the police?”

“I suppose the killer wanted to send a message,” James said. “He wanted to make sure the kidney was seen by as many people as possible, and he knew I had the pull to make that happen.”

“And of course the one thing this last murder has shown is that the killer probably has extensive medical knowledge. This was always a matter of debate in the case of the first Ripper, but this time, there is a consensus amongst the medical professionals involved that this murderer almost certainly has some medical training. The kidney was removed with great skill. We have an image of the kidney taken from that broadcast. Viewers are advised that the following image is quite graphic, and—”

“I am getting so sick of looking at this kidney,” I said.

“It’s a farce,” Jazza replied. “They act like they’re shocked and horrified, and then they show it off twenty times a day.”

“Have you seen the singing kidney video?” I asked.

“Ugh. No.”

“It’s really funny. You should watch it.”

“Can you switch it off?”

The computer was at the end of my bed. I closed it with my socked foot and continued reading my selections from The Diary of Samuel Pepys (which is pronounced Peeps, not Peppies, something I found out the hard way in class)—specifically, a section in which he describes the Great Fire of London. There was a knock at our door. Charlotte opened the door when we called.

“Benton, Deveaux, you’re wanted downstairs.”

In Hawthorne-speak, downstairs meant Call Me Claudia’s apartment, and last names meant the business was in some way official.

“What for?” Jazza asked.

“Sorry. No idea.”

She and her hair left us. Jazza shoved her German off her lap and spun toward me.

“Oh, God . . . ,” she said.

“It’s fine,” I said. “It’s fine. She would have killed us by now if she wanted to.”

“She was probably waiting until the police left.”

“Jazza.”

“Why else would she want us?”

“Jazza,” I said again.

“What do we do?” she said, rocking on the edge of her bed. “Rory? What do we do?”

“We go down.”

“And?”

“And . . . she says stuff,” I said. “I don’t know. We just go.”

We gathered ourselves together, put on our most innocent faces, and walked downstairs as a united front. Claudia called us inside on the very first knock.

“Ah, girls . . .”

I immediately relaxed. It was a cheerful “ah, girls.” Not an “I’m going to murder you now with a hockey stick” kind of “ah, girls.” She gestured for us to take a seat in one of her floral chairs. Jazza swallowed so hard I heard it.

“You’re getting a roommate tomorrow,” she said. “Her name is Bhuvana Chodhari. Late admission.”

“Why is she moving into our room?” I asked. “Eloise has a room all to herself.”

“Eloise has severe allergies. She needs an air purifier in her room.”

This was so obvious and outrageous a lie that I almost laughed out loud. Eloise didn’t have allergies. She smoked more than a tire fire.

“Your room was originally a triple,” Claudia went on. “There’s plenty of space. If you have anything in the third wardrobe, you need to get it out tonight. That will be all, I think.”

We returned to our room and shut the door.

“She knows,” Jazza said.

I nodded.

“This totally blows,” I added.

After briefly analyzing the dimensions, we concluded that there was no way this room was a triple. At most it was maybe four feet wider than the rooms around it, and it did have an extra window, but that was it.

“You never know,” Jazza said. She had recovered from the initial shock and was trying to be the ever-bright-and-cheery one. “She may be lovely. I mean, I like having just the two of us in here, but it might not be bad.”

“We’re losing our sofa.”

I looked mournfully at the extra bed we had turned against the wall and loaded down with Jazza’s two hundred cushions.

“We hardly ever use it,” Jazza babbled on. “And it could have been worse. It could have been so much worse.”

But I think she felt the same way I did. This was our room, our little peaceful spot in the universe, and we’d lost it because we’d snuck out. I fell silent and looked up at the sky through the panes of the window. It was getting dark so much earlier. It came on fast here. The trees were black outlines against the dark lavender of the London night sky.

“Crap,” I said.

17

THE NEXT MORNING, WE TOOK A FINAL LOOK AT OUR room as it was before we headed off to breakfast. When I returned to do a book switch-out after lunch, our room had a new occupant. Bhuvana was stretched out on the bed, talking on the phone. She gave me a little wave and a smile and wrapped up her conversation. She seemed fine with the position of the bed and had redecorated it with a huge pink and gray duvet and a stack of metallic silver and pink pillows. There were bags everywhere—suitcases, duffel bags, shopping bags.

Bhuvana was, as her name suggested, of Indian descent. She had very straight, very black hair, with one bright streak of artificial cherry red on the right side. It was cut into a severe line just at the shoulders, and she had razor-straight bangs. Along with the fact that she wore a lot of black eyeliner and long, dangling gold earrings, she reminded me of pictures of Cleopatra. She clearly wasn’t from India, though. Her accent was as British as they come—fast, urban, kind of Cockney, I guess. I could barely understand her at points.

“Aurora, yeah?” she said as she hung up the phone. She bounced off the bed to embrace me and give me two air kisses.

“Rory,” I corrected her. “You’re Bhuvana?”

“Boo,” she corrected me right back. “Only my gran calls me Bhuvana.”

“Only my grandma calls me Aurora.”

So we had that in common. Boo was several inches taller than me. She too had put her uniform on right away, but she wore it with a swagger, her tie slightly undone and jerked to the side.

“Did your parents just . . . drop you off?” I asked, looking at the stuff piled around the floor.

“Well, I live in London,” she said breezily. “I was in Mumbai visiting family, yeah? And I got sick, which is why I’m late for term. So, yeah, got catching up to do.”

Boo’s things looked like they had been hastily packed—everything randomly shoved into bags. Clothes, mugs, wires, pictures, trinkets. Her clothes were definitely more interesting than ours. Boo tended to lean toward the sparkly, the stretchy, and the dance-friendly.

“I’ve never boarded before,” she said, shoving handfuls of red and purple lace underwear into a drawer. “This is all new to me. Never been away from home.”

“Me neither,” I said.

“Let’s see . . .” She pulled out a wrinkled schedule from her pocket and passed it over to me. I pulled out my own wrinkled schedule from the front pocket of my bag. They were completely identical.

“I guess we do the same stuff,” Boo said, smiling. “Looks like we have hockey now.”

She produced a hockey stick from the rubble, as well as a proper mouth guard—a fancy, fitted one, not the kind you boiled, like mine. She also had the shoes and the pads and a bag to carry them all.

Once we arrived at the field, Claudia gave Boo a short test to determine her level of experience, and it was clear from her reaction that Boo was the girl she had been waiting for all her life. Boo was an athlete. She was fast, she was strong, she was coordinated. She ran up and down the field with that stick like a thing born to run up and down a field with a stick. She nailed me in the face guard with a ball. My new roommate was a champion.

“We play every day?” she asked excitedly as we returned to Hawthorne.

“Every day,” I answered miserably.

“That’s brilliant! We didn’t have much sport at my old school. Sorry about your face. Is it all right?”

“It’s fine,” I said. And it was fine, even though the shock of the blow had sent me flying backward and it had taken two people to help me get up.

From there, we returned for our quick showers, then we had one hour of further maths, which Boo did not like at all. All the confidence of the field drained from her face. I walked her to dinner and introduced her around. Jazza, of course, was gushing and polite, but I could see her taking in the details—the earrings, the stripe in the hair, the sound of Boo’s voice. I couldn’t tell what Jazza was thinking, but from the wideness of her eyes, I sensed faint alarm. Boo was not like us. Boo didn’t read Jane Austen in the tub or play cello for fun. Even with my limited knowledge of English accents, I could hear the rough edges of Boo’s voice. Her accent was urban. She put “yeah” at the end of her sentences.

Boo, for her part, greeted everyone warmly, and she shared my love of meats. We got almost the same meal—sausages and mash with extra gravy. She wasn’t a delicate eater. I liked that.

“You’ll have to take those earrings off, Bhuvana,” Charlotte said from across the table. “Earrings have to be close to the ear—studs or small hoops only. Sorry.”

She didn’t sound even remotely sorry. Boo eyed her, then removed the earrings and set them on the table next to her spoon.

“You’re head girl?” Boo asked, picking up her knife and chopping up a sausage.

“Yes. You can come to me any time you like to help you get settled in.”

“I’m all right,” Boo said. “I have these two.”

She indicated Jazza and me as if we had been friends all our lives.

“And it’s Boo,” she added. “Not Bhuvana. Boo.”

Boo didn’t exactly flex her muscles or punch her fist into her palm, but there was a certain pulling back of the shoulders that suggested that Boo was used to dealing with things in a very different way than Charlotte was used to. It wasn’t hard to imagine Boo grabbing hold of Charlotte’s updo and putting her face down in a plate of mashed potatoes. It was not difficult to imagine this at all.

“Boo,” Charlotte repeated coolly. “Of course.”

Back in our room, Boo continued to unpack. Jazza watched in silence, staring at the pile of heels and sneakers Boo had just dumped out of a plastic bag.

“So, yeah, I was in Mumbai, and I got really sick . . .” She pulled an electric kettle out of a pile of clothes.

“We’re not really supposed to have that in here,” Jaz said worriedly.

“It’s just a kettle,” Boo replied with a smile. “I’ve got to have my tea.”

“Well, me too, but—”

“I’ll hide it, then.”

Boo shoved the kettle on the windowsill and half covered it with Jazza’s lovingly hung curtain.

“But it’s the electricity, I think,” Jazza went on. “I think that the—”

There was a pounding at our door—the kind of heavy thump, thump, thump you might get during a friendly police raid when they come at your door with a battering ram. Jazza jumped a little and mouthed “the kettle, the kettle!” but Boo was already opening the door. Call Me Claudia was standing there, resplendent in a bright plaid dress.

“Bhuvana!” she boomed. “Call me Claudia. Settling in all right?”

“Brilliant, yeah,” Boo said.

“Coming in midterm can be quite difficult. I assume you two will do everything to help her along?”

Jazza and I nodded and mumbled our yeses. Claudia lingered for a moment, a widening smile on her face. She was staring at Boo as if Boo were the source of true Enlightenment.

“Excellent hockey skills,” Claudia said. “Truly excellent.”

“I was captain of mixed hockey at my old school, yeah.”

“Excellent. Well, finish settling in. You know where I am if you need me.”

Boo closed the door behind Claudia. “See?” she said. “No problem with the kettle! So what do you lot do around here?”

“We study,” Jazza said. “And there’s tea and cereal down the hall.”

“For fun?” Boo said.

Jazza was stumped.

“We can’t go out much,” I said. “Studying. Stuff like that.”

“What school were you at before here?” Jazza asked politely.

“Just the local sixth form. But it’s not that good and they thought I was advanced and all, and my gran is paying, so they moved me here.”

Boo dumped out an entire bag’s worth of sequined pillows. Jazza’s gaze moved over all of Boo’s things, the electronics and clothes and accessories. I did the same, trying to figure out what she was looking for—and I saw soon enough. Something was missing. Books. There were no books at all.

“What subjects are you taking?” Jazza asked.

“Oh, same as Rory. French and, um . . .”

Boo flopped down on the ground and stretched herself long across the floor to reach the front pocket of her bag and plucked out the already crinkled schedule. She rolled onto her back to read.

“. . . further maths, literature, art history, and normal history.”

“Are you doing A levels in all of those?” Jazza asked.

“What? Oh, yeah. Well, maybe. Yeah. Some of them.”

Jazza and I sat on our beds on opposite sides of the room judging our new roommate, who was now doing some leg stretches and flashing us her blue lace underwear in the process. Boo went right on talking, unaware or unconcerned by any awkwardness. Mostly, she talked about television shows I didn’t know or had only heard of in passing.

There was nothing wrong with Boo. She was certainly friendly, and I was in no position to judge anyone for their attitude toward their work. Wexford wasn’t the toughest school in England, but it wasn’t the easiest either. Boo’s attitude toward her classes just wasn’t quite right. You didn’t just show up a month late, then roll around on the floor, barely aware of what subjects you were taking.

But then, I realized, I had no idea what happened in England. Maybe it was completely normal to do just that. I was the outsider, not Boo. I’d built up an illusion in this room with Jazza—an illusion that this was home, that I understood the rules here. Boo, quite accidentally, made me remember that I understood very little, and at any moment, the rules could change.

18

GATORS ARE JUST SOMETHING YOU HAVE TO ACCEPT where I come from. Most don’t go anywhere near the houses, even though there are lots of delicious children and dogs there. Every once in a while, though, an alligator has a lightbulb moment and decides to take a stroll and see the world a bit. One day when I was eight or so, I opened the back door, and I saw this thing way at the end of the yard. I remember thinking it was a big black log—so, of course, I went down to look at it, because what’s more exciting than a big log, right? I know. Children are stupid.

I had gotten about halfway down the yard when I realized the log was moving toward me. Something in the primitive part of my brain immediately said, “Alligator. Alligator. ALLIGATOR.” But for a second, I couldn’t move. I had to stand there and watch the thing come toward me. It looked genuinely happy, like it couldn’t believe its luck. It started slowly, waddling its way closer to get a better look. And there I was, with my brain still saying, “ALLIGATOR. ALLIGATOR.” Something finally clicked, and I started running like hell toward the house, screaming one of those high-pitched screeches only kids can do.

Okay, maybe it didn’t get that close and it didn’t move that much, but it still came toward me, and if you’ve been chased by an alligator at any distance or speed, I don’t think people should get all “But how far was it? And how fast was it going?”

And I’m not saying that having Boo Chodhari in my room was exactly like having an alligator in my yard, but there were certain similarities. It broke the illusion that this space was our own. It wasn’t. The school was just an environment—a little ecosystem—over which we had no control.

My initial assessment was correct—Boo and Jazza were not exactly the best match. Both of them were nice, and both of them tried, but they were simply too different. There were no fights, but they didn’t say much to each other, which was out of character for both of them. And Boo was always around. Always. If I went to study, she went to study. If I went to the bathroom, she needed to “do her teeth” or sit on the radiator and talk and file her nails. And her stuff . . . Her stuff was everywhere. Bras, shirts, papers, cords . . . There was a path of stuff from Boo’s bed to the closet to the door. We had to make our beds and keep things generally kind of tidy. Charlotte could enforce this. Before Boo came, Charlotte never bothered to check our room, because it was always fine. But now she was stopping by once, sometimes twice a day to get Boo to pick her crap up off the floor. This did not breed warm feelings between the two of them.

Also, Boo carried two phones with her at all times. Two. She tried to hide this fact at first, but I’d see her with them both. One was a very new, very shiny phone. The other was older, with actual buttons instead of on-screen ones. I finally asked her why, and she said that she reserved one phone for guys she’d just met. “So they don’t have your regular number, yeah? They have to earn the regular number, once I make sure they’re not creepers.”

And though she dutifully sat with us in our room and in the library or the common room, and she carried around books and opened them, Boo did absolutely no work whatsoever. In fact, she had the power to diminish the concentration of anyone sitting near her. You’d realize that she was humming under her breath or tapping her long nails on the table, or you’d hear the sound of a soap opera or reality show leaking from her headphones, and your own attention would dissipate.

Jazza quickly became obsessed with observing all Boo’s study habits and reporting them to me. The days got shorter. The air got colder and crisper, and my knowledge of Boo Chodhari’s every study habit grew exponentially.

“Has she even started on that essay you have for English literature?” Jazza asked me over breakfast on the three-week anniversary of Boo’s arrival. Boo generally didn’t make it to breakfast. That was the only time I didn’t see her.

“I have no idea,” I said, drinking my lukewarm juice. “I haven’t started it yet.”

“I just don’t understand her,” Jazza said. “She didn’t even bring any books with her. She does literally no work. Literally. She missed a month of school. And why does she always carry those two phones? Who carries two phones?”

I continued eating my all-sausage breakfast, letting Jazza get it out of her system.

“It’s you she likes,” Jazza said. “She always has to go where you go.”

“We’re in the same classes.”

“Your roommate again?” Jerome said as he joined us. This was not a new topic for breakfast.

“I’m finished now,” Jazza said.

Jerome started violently slicing apart his fried eggs. It was fascinating to watch him eat. He chowed down with the speed and force of a well-organized military campaign. He didn’t so much have breakfast as defeat it.

“Bit of news,” he said. “Someone’s donated a pile of money for a Bonfire Night party. No one’s going to be allowed out, so they’re doing something here.”

“What’s Bonfire Night?” I asked.

“Remember, remember the fifth of November?” Jerome said.

“Nope,” I replied. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Guy Fawkes Night,” Jazza explained, sighing at the change in subject. “Fifth of November, 1605. A group of people led by Guy Fawkes had a plan to blow up the Houses of Parliament, the Gunpowder Plot. But he failed and was executed. So on the fifth of November, we burn things.”

“And blow things up,” Jerome added, throwing down his fork. “Fireworks are very important. Anyway, it’s going to be a dance, and it’s fancy dress. Kind of a belated Halloween thing.”

“Formal?” I said.

“Fancy dress means costumes,” Jazza said.

It was clearly one of those mornings when I was particularly American. That happened sometimes.

“Thursday the eighth is the final Ripper night. So they’re having an early Bonfire Night party the Friday before, and then they’re going to lock us in until the Ripper stuff is over. Hope you like being indoors, because we’ll be in all week.”

“I don’t care,” Jazza said. “Just as long as it ends.”

“Who knows?” Jerome said. “Maybe this Ripper wants to keep it going. No reason for him to stop. Maybe he wants to be the new and improved Ripper.”

Jazza shook her head and got up to refill her tea.

“What if he does that?” I asked Jerome. “What happens?”

“Well, then the police have no idea when he’ll strike or where or how many times, and everyone freaks out every single day. I don’t think the eighth of November is the thing to worry about—it’s what comes after. I think that’s when whatever this is really starts.”

“But you’re an insane conspiracy nut,” I pointed out.

“Granted.”

Jerome and I had reached that point where I could say things like that. It was only a slight exaggeration. I ripped off a piece of my doughnut and threw it at him. He had eaten everything on his plate and had no food to fire back with, so he crumpled his napkin and chucked it at my head. Charlotte gave us a reproachful look from the end of the table.

“Don’t make me use my powers on you,” he said quietly.

“I’d like to see you try.”

I sent a low-flying piece of doughnut just inches over the table surface, right at his prefects’ tie.

“Jerome . . . ,” Charlotte said.

“Yes?” he replied, not looking over.

“You know you shouldn’t be doing that.”

“I know many things, Charlotte.”

He turned and gave her a smile and gave me a little shiver. It was pleasantly evil. I remembered now—Charlotte and Andrew had once gone out. Andrew and Jerome were best friends. Jerome probably did know many things. Charlotte simply turned away, as if she had forgotten what was going on.

“Okay,” I said very quietly. “Your powers are a little hot.”

It was as open a declaration as I’d ever made. I waited to see how he would respond. He looked down at his plate, still smiling.

“What’s going on now?” Jazza said, setting down her tea and throwing a leg over the bench.

“We’re annoying Charlotte,” I said.

“Finally,” Jazza replied in a low voice, “a hobby of Jerome’s I can fully support. Carry on.”

I didn’t even mean for it to, but Jazza’s commenting got to me. I started to watch Boo when we sat in the library together that afternoon during our free period. We sat across from each other at a table in the corner, our laptops back to back. I was trying to cram in the writing of the aforementioned essay. This was the first major assignment I’d had for literature—seven to ten pages on any work of my choice that we’d already read. I was doing mine on Samuel Pepys’s diary, mostly because that was the reading I understood the best. Boo had her computer open, but she was reading a gossip site. I could see the reflection in the window.

“What are you working on?” I asked quietly.

“What?” she said, pulling off her headphones.

“What are you working on?”

“Oh. Just reading.”

“What are you doing your essay on?”

“Not sure yet,” she said, yawning.

I gave up and went to get a book. Boo followed me, dawdling along behind me, staring at the books like they were very interesting objects from some other universe. As I made my way to the criticism section, I saw Alistair sprawled in the middle of an aisle, reading. He had his book on the floor and was idly turning the pages with one hand.

“Hi,” I said, switching on his light.

“Hello.”

Boo regarded Alistair with surprise. She immediately walked up to him.

“Oh . . . hello. I’m Bhuvana. Everyone calls me Boo.”

“Boo?”

Boo burst out laughing. Alistair and I just stared at her.

“Sorry,” she said. “I am called Boo. That’s always funny, though.”

Alistair nodded dismissively and turned back to his book.

“It’s nice to meet you,” Boo said. “Really.”

“Is it?” he asked.

“This is Alistair,” I explained to Boo. Then to Alistair I said, “I need a good book on Samuel Pepys.”

“McCalistair. The one with the blue cover and the gold lettering.”

I scanned the shelf for a book that fit this description.

“Rory and I are roommates,” Boo said. “I’m new.”

“Well done,” Alistair replied. “So there are two of you now.”

“Three,” I said. “We have a triple.”

I found the book and held it up to him for confirmation. He nodded. It was huge—a two-hander with a layer of dust on top. I thought we were done, but Boo sat down on the floor next to Alistair.

“Is this your favorite spot?” she asked.

“It’s private,” he said.

“You go,” she said, waving me off. “I’m going to talk to Alistair for a while.”

I had serious doubts about how well that would go down with Alistair, but he raised no objection. If anything, he seemed slightly curious about Boo and her incredibly forthright approach to conversation. Whatever the case, if it gave me five minutes away from her, I was taking it.

I went back downstairs to my table and opened the book. It had a pronounced old book smell, and pages that had been allowed to turn very slightly golden, but not brown with age. Alistair had given me a serious book, one that covered every aspect of Samuel Pepys’s life. It was time to be a serious student, so I found the section of the book devoted to the section of the diary I was reading at the moment and tried to develop an interest. But what I was really watching was the light in the aisle upstairs. It clicked off, and neither Boo nor Alistair emerged, and Boo didn’t switch it back on. They had to be talking, or . . .

It was hard to imagine Boo and Alistair instantly making out, but that actually made a lot more sense than the idea of them having a long conversation. Alistair liked books and emo eighties music and being poetic—and Boo liked the opposite of all of those things.

Her notebooks were there, just inches away from me. I hesitated for a moment, then, using my pen, dragged the one marked Further Maths over to me, keeping one eye on the balcony in case Boo emerged. I flipped open the notebook. Not many pages had been used. The ones that had were covered in doodles and song lyrics and the occasional equation for what looked like good measure. There was no work in it at all, not a single effort to solve a single problem set. I closed the book and pushed it back.

Since I’d already violated her privacy, I decided there was no reason to stop there. I pulled over the history notebook. Same thing. A few scribbled notes, some doodles, but nothing usable. Boo really wasn’t trying, to an alarming extent. Jazza was right. Chances were, Boo would be kicked out soon enough, and we’d get our room back. I wasn’t proud of this thought, but it was the reality.

Boo came out of the aisle above, and I dropped the heavy research book on top of her notebook as she passed along the balcony toward the stairs. Once she was on the stairs, her view was blocked, and I shoved the notebook back to about the place where I’d found it. Boo wasn’t exactly meticulous, so I didn’t think she’d notice if it was an inch or two out of place.

She dropped down in her seat and put her headphones back on. I kept my eyes on the book, as if I’d been reading all along. She had her laptop open, like she was working, but I could see her screen’s reflection in the window. She was watching a soccer match online. We were pretending for each other.

There was something very weird about Boo Chodhari, something more than the fact that she wasn’t doing any work for school. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I had a strong feeling I should be watching her a lot more carefully.

19

SATURDAY MORNING, I HEADED OFF TO ART HISTORY with Boo at my side. Jazza had gone home for the weekend. Boo and I were on our own for a few days. I had been assigned the task of reporting back every single thing Boo did in her absence. I hadn’t told Jazza about the library incident yet, mostly because it really didn’t make me look good. In boarding school, you have to respect other people’s privacy. I couldn’t just say that I’d been looking at Boo’s notes. That violated the unspoken code.

“I still can’t believe this,” Boo groaned as we walked over to the classroom buildings. “Class on Saturday mornings. Isn’t that against the law or something?”

She pronounced the word something like somefink.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably not.”

“I’m going to look it up, because I think it is. Child welfare or somefink.”

In the classroom, everyone was milling around with coats on. Today we were taking one of the trips Mark had promised us on the first day.

“Everyone have their Oyster cards?” Mark asked. “Good. So, we’ll walk over to the Tube together. If we get separated, go to Charing Cross. The museum is right there. We’ll meet in room thirty in one hour’s time.”

Jerome lingered with his hands in his pockets, waiting for me to walk with him. I hadn’t taken the Tube yet since my arrival, so I was nerdily excited about this. Our lives at Wexford were very contained. I was finally going to London, even though I’d been in London the whole time. There was the famous sign—the big red circle with the blue line through it. The white-tiled walls and the dozens of electronic ads that kept time with you as you went down the escalators, changing their displays so you could watch an entire commercial. The floor-toceiling ads for albums and books and concerts and museums. The whoosh of the white trains with the red and blue sliding doors. Boo put her earbuds in immediately and slipped into a daze once on the train. I sat next to Jerome and watched London go by, station after station.

When we got off, we were on Trafalgar Square, the massive plaza with Nelson’s Column and the four big stone lions. The National Gallery was just behind them, a palace-like structure on its own island of cobbles and stone.

“Today,” Mark said, when we finally assembled in room thirty, “I want you to get the feel of the galleries by doing something quite simple and, I think, fun. I want you to partner up and choose one object or subject, then find five treatments of that subject in paintings by five different artists.”

“Partners?” Jerome asked.

“Sure,” I said, trying to smile in a relaxed way.

I don’t think Boo actually knew we were partnering up. She hadn’t taken her earbuds out and was now looking at the assignment sheet with a baffled expression. I hurried Jerome out of the room before she noticed where we had gone. Around us, I could hear other people making their choices—horses, fruit, the Crucifixion, domestic bliss, windmills, the Thames, business transactions. None of these things seemed very interesting.

“So what do you think we should do?” Jerome asked.

We had stopped by The Rokeby Venus, which is a huge painting by Diego Velázquez of a woman lounging around, admiring her face in a mirror held by Cupid. But the picture is painted from behind, so the focus of the painting is mostly her butt.

“I suggest we do ours on ‘five treatments of the human butt,’” I said.

“Agreed,” he said, smiling. “Bottoms it is.”

For the next hour, we went around the National Gallery assessing butts. There are a lot of naked butts in classical paintings. Big, proud, classical butts everywhere, sometimes draped with a little cloth for flavor. We favored the bigger butts with the most detail. We gave points for best cracks, best dimpling, and best smiley curvature around the upper thigh. We differed on only one issue: I liked the reclining butts, Jerome liked the action butts. Butts leading people into battle, butts about to get on a horse, butts giving speeches, butts looking dramatic. Those were his kind of butts. I liked the way the more relaxed butts squished on one side, and the cheeky over-the-shoulder look most of their owners gave. “Behold,” they seemed to say. “Amazing, isn’t it?”

Within an hour, we had three excellent butts on our list. We made notes about the paintings, the periods, the colors, the context, all that. We had just gone back into one of the smaller galleries, one full of tiny paintings, when I felt Jerome standing much closer to me than he really needed to.

“Now, that,” he said, “is a fine butt.”

I looked around. This was primarily a fruit room, with a few paintings of angry priests thrown in for kicks. Only one painting was blocked from my view by a woman standing right in front of it. The woman was wearing a very form-fitting kneelength skirt with a red swing jacket with cropped arms. The jacket stopped right at her waistline, so her butt was well displayed. She even wore seamed black stockings and low, thick heels. Her bobbed hair was elaborately arranged in tight curls, close to the head.

From the loopy smile on his face and the way he was craning his neck a little, I finally figured out that he meant my butt, not hers. It took me a second to realize Jerome could come out with a line that bad—and mean it. I wasn’t even sure how my butt looked in my Wexford skirt. Gray, I guessed. Kind of woolly. But there was a goofy sincerity to his effort that made me flush. We were going to public kiss. Actually here, in this museum, in front of real people and possibly our classmates.

“Sorry,” he said. “I had to say it.”

“It’s okay,” I said, stepping closer. “But I think she heard you.”

“What?” he asked.

We were pretty much face-to-face now, whispering to each other.

“I think she heard you.”

“Who heard me?”

“The lady.”

“What lady?”

We were chest-to-chest and stomach-to-stomach. I had my hands on his waist. He put his hands on my hips as well, but he wasn’t making a kissing face. He was making a “what are you talking about?” face, which is squishier.

The woman turned and looked at us. She had to have heard everything we were saying about her. For someone so dressed up, her face was remarkably plain. She wore no makeup and her skin was dull. More than that, she looked extremely unhappy. She walked out of the gallery, leaving us alone.

“We chased her off,” I said.

“Yeah . . .” Jerome detached his hands from my hips. “Still not following you.”

Just like that, the moment blew away. There would be no kiss. Instead, we were both confused.

“You know what?” I said. “I’m going to go to the bathroom for a second.”

I tried not to run through the maze of rooms, past the pictures of fruit and dogs and kings and sunsets, past the art students doing sketches and the bored tourists milling around trying to look interested. I needed the bathroom. I needed to think. I was getting dizzier by the second. First, I saw a man standing in front of me that my roommate didn’t see. Second, I had just seen a woman standing in front of a painting, and Jerome hadn’t seen her. The first time kind of made sense. It was Ripper night, we were rushing back, we were scared of getting caught, it was dark. Yes, Jazza could have missed him. But there was no way Jerome could have missed what I was talking about today—which meant either we didn’t understand each other at all, or . . .

Or . . .

I found the bathroom finally, and it was empty. I looked at myself in the mirror.

Or I was crazy. Healing Angel Ministry crazy. I certainly wouldn’t be the first in my family to see people or things that weren’t there.

No. It had to be simpler than that. We had to just be misunderstanding each other. I paced the bathroom and tried to come up with some interpretation of his words that made it all make sense, but nothing came to mind.

Boo came in.

“You all right?” she said.

“Uh . . . yeah. Fine.”

“You sure?”

“I just . . . I must not be feeling well. I’m just a little confused.”

“Confused how?”

“It’s nothing,” I said.

I went into one of the stalls and locked the door. Boo stood outside.

“You can tell me,” she said. “Honestly. You can tell me anything, no matter how weird it sounds.”

“Just leave me alone!” I snapped.

Nothing for a moment, then I saw her feet backing away from the stall. She paused by the door, then I heard it open. I looked out to see if she had gone. She had. I emerged and went to the sinks. “I misunderstood,” I said aloud to myself. “That’s all. I don’t get the English stuff yet.”

With that, I splashed some water on my face, fixed on a smile, and stepped out. I would find Jerome. I would make him explain to me what I was missing. We would laugh, then we would kiss with tongue, and all would be well.

As I walked back through the galleries, I saw Boo on the phone, pacing. She never spoke to anyone that intently. Then she hung up and dodged around a group of tourists and headed toward the lobby. Little threads began to connect themselves in my head. I didn’t know what this all added up to, but something was coming together. A strange and sudden impulse came over me.

While we were technically in class, Mark wasn’t watching us—and when the class was over, we were free to leave on our own. And I couldn’t stay here anymore, anyway.

So I followed her.

She stood on Trafalgar Square, just under the museum steps, and made another phone call. I watched this from above, from the raised entrance of the museum. Then she hurried to the entrance of Charing Cross Tube. I went down the stairs after her, tapping my Oyster card on the turnstile, and followed her down the escalators to the tracks. She got on a Northern Line, the black line, and rode the train two stops. At Tottenham Court Road, she switched to the Central Line going east—that was the way back to school. Our stop was Liverpool Street. But at Bank, she switched again, to the District Line, still going east. To keep out of her sight, I had to stay at the far end of the cars and hope she wasn’t paying too much attention. Luckily for me, Boo was Boo, head down, looking at her phone, adjusting her music.

She got off at Whitechapel and stepped out onto the incredibly busy road full of market stalls and small restaurants of all kinds—Turkish, Ethiopian, Indian, American fried chicken. Across the street was the Royal London Hospital—a name I vaguely recognized from some news report. Whitechapel was Ripper central. I let her get a little bit ahead of me, but not too far or she’d be swallowed up in the crowd. I had to push my way along to keep her in my sights, weaving around the vendors who sold shopping bags and African masks and umbrellas. It was a busy Saturday afternoon, and the street was packed. The air was thick with the smells of shops selling grilled halal meat and spicy Caribbean chicken and goat. I got stuck several times behind people with bags or Styrofoam containers of food and had to use all the meager skills I had developed dodging hockey balls in the goal to get through. (Despite the fact that Claudia told me every day that dodging the balls was not the point of being in goal, it was the only lesson I learned.)

Boo walked quickly, turning off Whitechapel and heading down a side road, turning again and again, so quickly that within five minutes I knew I could never find my way back on my own. Boo began to wave frantically at someone over in the playground across the street. I looked over and saw a young woman dressed in a brown wool suit. It looked like an old-fashioned kind of uniform—a female soldier’s uniform, but not a modern one. Her dark brown hair was tightly made up in a retro style, medium length and done up in tight curls around the edges, under her hat. She was picking up trash from the playground and throwing it away. No one got that dressed up in some kind of 1940s outfit to clean streets.

Boo glanced both ways and ran across the street, barely missing a car. I stepped behind a big red mailbox and watched her talking to the woman, guiding her over to a more secluded spot. After a minute or two, a police car came down the street. It slowed and pulled up next to the playground. Out of it stepped the young policeman from the day of the murder, the one Jazza thought was a reporter.

I felt myself go cold all over.

“What the hell?” I said out loud.

Now it was the three of them—the woman in the brown wool uniform, the young policeman, and my roommate—all in a very animated conversation. It was like the entire world was colluding to make me feel insane, and it was doing a really good job.

I tried to make sense of the scene. The policeman had to be a real policeman. If he was a reporter, as Jazza suspected, he couldn’t go around in a disguise all the time. He wouldn’t have a police car. Boo had come into the school right after the murders. Boo went everywhere I went. As for the woman in the uniform, I had no idea who she was, and I didn’t care. The fact that Boo and the policeman were talking together in secret was enough.

And then, one of the many other people coming down the street walked through the woman in the uniform.

Through her.

In response to this, the woman simply turned and glanced over her shoulder with a kind of “Well, that was rude” look. This was all I needed to see. There was something wrong with me, no question. I couldn’t stay there hiding behind a mailbox. The little green man came up on the street-crossing sign, so I crossed, my head swimming. I walked right at them. I needed help. I could feel my knees weakening with every step.

“There’s something wrong with me,” I said.

The three of them turned and stared at me.

“Oh, no,” the policeman said. “No . . .”

“I didn’t!” Boo said. “She must have followed me.”

“Are you all right?” the woman asked, striding toward me. “You need to sit down. Come on, now.”

I allowed the woman to guide me to the ground. Boo came over and squatted by my side.

“It’s fine, Rory,” she said. “You’re okay.”

The police officer kept back.

“She needs our help,” Boo said to him. “Come on, Stephen. It was bound to happen.”

The woman in the uniform was still hanging over me.

“Just breathe evenly,” she said. She had one of those voices that you don’t argue with, or even question.

“You’re fine, Rory. Honestly. You’re fine. We’re going to help you. Aren’t we?” Boo looked at Stephen as she said this.

“And do what exactly?” he finally said.

“Take her back to yours,” Boo said. “Talk to her. Jo, help me get her up.”

Boo helped me up on one side while the soldier woman took the other. Boo did most of the lifting. The policeman, Stephen, opened the door to the police car and waved me into the back.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” he said. “But you had probably better come with us now. Come on.”

“Give her a paper bag to breathe into,” the woman in the uniform called to Boo. “Works wonders.”

“I’ll do that,” Boo called. “See you later, yeah?”

As a small crowd of interested onlookers stopped to watch, I allowed Boo and the policeman to put me in the back of the police car.

20

SO I GOT TO RIDE IN A LONDON POLICE CAR.

“My name is Stephen,” the policeman said as he drove. “Stephen Dene.”

“Rory,” I mumbled.

“I know. We met.”

“Oh, yeah. Are you actually a cop?”

“Yes,” he said.

“So am I,” Boo added.

Stephen was taking us right into the center of town. We went around Trafalgar Square, weaving our way around double-decker buses and cabs. We passed the National Gallery, where my day had started, and continued up the road, coming to a stop just a short distance beyond it. Stephen and Boo got out, and Stephen came and opened my door. He offered me his hand to help me out, but I rejected it. I needed to walk on my own. I needed to concentrate on a task, or I would lose my rapidly slipping grasp on reality. We were on a very busy street, full of theaters and shops and people.

“It’s this way,” Stephen said.

They guided me to a small alley. There was a pub hidden down there, and the stage exit of a theater. Then we passed under a brick arch, and the alley got narrower, and suddenly we were on a street that was like something out of Dickens and really out of place with the area around it. Cars couldn’t come down this way—the path was only about six feet wide. The houses were all made of brown brick, with old gaslights in front, huge windows with black panes, and shiny black doors with big brass knockers. You could tell that it used to be a little street of shops, and these were all the old shop windows. The sign on the wall said Goodwin’s Court.

Stephen stopped in front of one of the doors and opened it by entering a code into a number pad. The building was small and quiet, with a very modern but plain entryway and a stairwell that smelled strongly of new carpet and paint. A series of lights came on automatically as we went up the steps to the third floor, where there was just one door. I could hear a television on inside—some kind of sports coverage. Cheering.

“Callum’s home,” Boo said.

Stephen made an affirmative sound and opened the door. The room we walked into felt large, considering the smallness of the street. It was sparsely furnished with two old sofas, a few lamps, and a battered table covered in papers and files and mugs. Everything looked like the cast-off pieces from someone’s grandmother’s house—one floral sofa, one brown. Floral mugs. The rest was IKEA or cheaper. I could tell that the place itself—its size, its newness, its careful maintenance—was well above the price range of its occupants.

The occupant was sitting on one of the sofas, watching a soccer game on television. I saw the back of a head, with black, closely cropped hair, then a heavily muscled arm with a tattoo of some kind of creature holding a stick. The owner of the hair and arm raised himself up from a slouched position to peer over the sofa. It was a guy, one in a tight polo-neck shirt that stretched across his chest. He was probably about my age. It also appeared he knew exactly who I was, because he said, “What’s she doing here?”

“Change of plan,” Stephen said, tearing off his coat and throwing it over a chair.

“Kind of a major change of plan, wouldn’t you say?”

“Turn the television off, will you? This is Callum. Callum, this is Rory.”

“Why is she here?” Callum said again.

“Callum!” Boo said. “Be nice! She just found out about you know what.”

Callum held his bag of food out to me. “Do you want a chip?” he asked. When I shook my head, he dug in and retrieved a burger.

“Are you going to eat that now?” Stephen asked.

“I was eating when you came in! Besides, it’s not going to help her, letting my food get cold. What are you going to do now, exactly?”

“We’re going to explain,” Stephen said.

“Well, this should be interesting.”

“It wasn’t my decision,” Stephen said.

“She needs to know,” Boo cut in.

Their conversation spun around me. I didn’t even try to follow it. Callum switched off the television, and I was planted on one of the sofas. Boo sat with Callum, and Stephen got a kitchen chair and sat directly in front of me.

“What I’m about to tell you is going to be a little hard to accept at first,” he began.

I giggled. I didn’t mean to. Stephen looked over his shoulder at the others. Boo nodded to me encouragingly. Stephen turned back and took a deep breath.

“Have you recently had a brush with death?” he asked.

“They should really include that question in job interviews,” Callum said.

Boo elbowed him hard, and he shut up.

“Think,” Stephen said. “Have you? Has anything happened to you?”

“I choked,” I said after a pause. “A few weeks ago. At dinner.”

“Since that incident, you’ve been seeing people . . . people that other people don’t see. Am I correct?”

I didn’t need to answer. They already knew.

“What’s happening to you is a rare but far from unknown condition,” he said.

“Condition? Like a disease?”

“Not a disease . . . more of an ability. It won’t hurt you in any way.”

Callum was about to interject again, but Boo reached over and punched the underside of his bag of fries.

“Shut it,” she said.

“I didn’t!”

“You were about to.”

“Both of you,” Stephen said, more seriously this time. “Stop. This isn’t easy for her. Remember how it felt.”

Callum and Boo stopped tittering and tried to look composed.

“What you’re seeing—”

“Who,” Boo cut in again. “Who she’s seeing.”

“Who you’re seeing . . . those people are real. But they’re dead.”

Dead people you could see. That meant ghosts. He was saying I saw ghosts.

“Ghosts?” I said.

“Ghosts,” he repeated. “That’s the usual term.”

“I know lots of people who say they can see ghosts,” I said. “They’re all crazy.”

“Most people who claim to be able to see ghosts can’t. Most of the people who claim they have seen ghosts simply have very overactive imaginations or are easily suggestible. But some people can, and we are some of those people.”

“I don’t want to see ghosts,” I said.

“It’s brilliant,” Boo said. “Really. The woman you saw on the street. She’s dead. She’s a ghost. But she’s not scary. She’s lovely. She’s a good friend of mine. She died in the war. She’s so amazing. Her name is Jo.”

“What I’m saying is,” Stephen continued, “the ability is rare, but it’s nothing to be concerned about.”

“Ghosts?” I said again.

“This is going well,” said Callum, shoving a handful of fries into his mouth. “I wish you’d done it this way with me.”

“Let me explain,” Stephen said, adjusting his chair a little to back up an inch or so. “The ability to do what we can do . . . it’s not understood very well, but we do know a few things. Two elements need to be in place. One, you have to have the underlying ability. Possibly it’s genetic, but it doesn’t appear to run in families. Two, you have to come very close to death during your adolescence. This part is key. No one develops the ability after eighteen or nineteen. You have to—”

“Almost die,” Callum said. “We all almost died. We all had the trait. Now we all have the sight.”

They gave me a few moments to process this information. I got up and went to the window. There wasn’t much of a view. I could see the brown brick of the building a few feet away, and a pigeon roost on top of the opposite roof.

“I can see ghosts because I choked?” I finally said.

“Correct,” Stephen replied. “Basically. Yes.”

“But I’m not supposed to be worried about it?”

“Correct.”

“So . . . if I’m not supposed to be worried about it, why am I sitting here with you? You said you were police. What kind of police? Why did the police come to tell me I could see ghosts? How can you even be police? You’re, like, my age.”

“No age requirements in our line of work,” Callum said. “The younger the better, really.”

“This is where it gets a little more complicated,” Stephen said. “We didn’t come to tell you that you can see ghosts. We happened to be working, and this happened to you today, and Boo thought you needed an explanation.”

“Working on what?” I said. “What are you doing?”

“We’re assisting with the investigation. You’re a witness. It’s standard procedure to watch over a witness.”

Finally, I did the math. I was a witness. I could see ghosts. I had seen someone on the night of a Ripper murder, someone Jazza couldn’t see, even though he was right in front of her. Someone whom no camera could film. Someone who left no DNA. Someone who walked away without a trace . . .

I had the not entirely unpleasant sensation of falling. Falling, falling, falling . . .

The Ripper was a ghost. I had seen the Ripper. The ghost Ripper.

“I think she’s figured it out,” Callum said.

“What the hell do you do?” I asked. “If he’s a . . .”

“Ghost,” Boo said.

“Then what do you do? You can’t stop him. You can’t catch him. He knows I saw him. He knows where I live.”

“You need to trust us,” Stephen said, holding up his hands. “You’re actually the safest person in London right now. You need to go on with your life completely as normal.”

“How do I do that?” I asked.

“You’ll adapt,” he said. “I promise. The initial shock wears off quickly. A few days, a week, and you’ll be fine. We’re all fine. Look at us.”

I looked at them—Stephen, so young and so serious. Boo, smiling away next to me. Callum, keeping suspiciously quiet and shoving food into his mouth. They did look pretty normal.

“I’ll be with you,” Boo said. “I’m staying until this is all over. Nothing is going to happen to you.”

“So I just go back?” I said.

“Correct,” Stephen replied.

“And go to class, and play hockey, and talk to my parents—”

“Yes.”

“But what are you going to do?”

“We can’t tell you that,” Stephen said. “I’m sorry. What we do is classified. You can’t tell anyone that we’ve met. You can never discuss this conversation. You just have to trust us. We are police. We are looking after you.”

“How many more of you are there?”

“The entire force is behind us,” Stephen said. “The security services. There are people working on this at every level of government. You have to trust us.”

I had never experienced this feeling before. My heart had been going fast all through this discussion, but now it slowed and I was almost sleepy. My system could take no more. I sat down on the sofa again and put my head back and stared at the ceiling.

“I need to go to bed now,” I said. “I just want to go home.”

“Right,” Stephen said. “I’ll take you two back.”

Boo walked me to the door and out into the hall while Stephen got his coat and keys.

“I’m not one hundred percent sure that was a good idea,” I heard Callum say.

21

AT THE END OF THE SCHOOL YEAR AT THE UNIVERSITY where my parents teach, you can see parakeets in the trees. This is because some students get pets during the year, and they think they’re temporary, because some people are just like that. When they leave campus, they open up the cages and let the birds fly right out of the window.

My uncle Bick has a soft spot in his heart for the birds left behind. During exam week, he drives around looking for them. He really means well, but Uncle Bick can be a little scary looking, with his bushy beard and his battered truck with the WANT TO SEE MY COCKATOO? sticker on the back, cruising around slow by the dorms. Eventually, someone freaks out, and campus security gets called, and Uncle Bick gets pulled over and has to explain that he’s just trying to rescue parakeets. Since they never believe him, he has them call my mom’s office, because she is his sister and his lawyer and a Distinguished Member of the Faculty. Then my mom sits Uncle Bick down and explains where the state of Louisiana stands on Peeping Toms (a fine of five hundred dollars and up to six months in jail), and how it really isn’t good for her career to have her brother repeatedly stopped on campus under suspicion of violating said Peeping Tom law—and then Uncle Bick rails on about the poor little parakeets and how something should be done. After about an hour of this, we all go out for pit barbecue at Big Jim’s Pit of Love because there’s just no point in talking about it anymore. This family ritual of ours signals the start of summer.

One year while out parakeet hunting, Uncle Bick caught a little green one he named Pipsie. Pipsie had clearly had a hard life. When Uncle Bick found her, she was sitting on a stop sign, tweeting her head off. She had a broken wing and was missing one foot. Other parakeets would have given up, but Pipsie was a survivor. She managed to get herself on top of that sign and get rescued. I don’t know how. She couldn’t fly.

Pipsie was undernourished and dehydrated, and her feathers were coming out. Uncle Bick nursed little Pipsie back to health with a care and devotion I couldn’t help but admire. He’d sit for hours, dripping water into her beak through an eyedropper. He fed her mashed food from the end of a coffee stirrer. He bound up her broken wing until it healed.

“Look at how she adapts,” he’d say whenever I came into the shop. “Look at her. She’s a lesson to us all. We can all adapt.”

Which is great, except . . . Pipsie didn’t really adapt. Her wing healed crooked, so she could only fly about six inches off the ground in semicircular patterns. She fell off the perch all the time, so Uncle Bick just kept her in a box on the counter. One day, Pipsie got it in her tiny bird mind that she could fly again. She got up to the edge of the box and surveyed the landscape and spread her crooked wings and went for it. She fell off the counter and landed on the floor, just as the delivery guy swung the door open and rolled in three hundred pounds of birdseed on a hand truck.

This is all I could think about after Stephen told me to “adapt.”

Stephen drove Boo and me back to school, dropping us off a few streets away so that no one would see us coming back to school grounds in a police car. It was only five o’clock. People were filing into the refectory for dinner. I was too nauseous to eat. Boo was starving, though, so we walked over to the local coffee place, where she could get a sandwich. I watched her devour a ham and brie.

“So,” I said, “it’s your job to hang around with me?”

“Pretty much,” she said.

“How does this work?”

“Well, Stephen’s an actual police officer with a uniform and everything. Callum works undercover on the Underground, because there’s loads of ghosts down there. And I’m new. My first assignment was to come and watch over you.”

“So you had something happen to you?” I asked. “That’s why you’re like this?”

“When I was eighteen, I was a bit of a club kid—”

“When you were eighteen? How old are you now?”

“Twenty.”

“Twenty?”

“I’m a fake student,” she said. “With a fake age. Anyway, my friend Violet and I were coming home from a club. She was driving. I knew she was drunk. I should never have gotten in the car. I should have stopped her. But I was kind of drunk myself, and I didn’t always make the best decisions back then. We ran smack into a bollard. There was smoke, we were bloody, Violet was unconscious. I heard this voice telling me to keep calm, to get out of the car. I looked over, and it was Jo. She was standing there. I was crying, completely freaking out, but she talked me through it. We’ve been best friends since then. Actually, I tried to get her a phone for Christmas. She can carry things—not big things, but she can lift things like phones. But it’s kind of hard owning things when you’re a ghost. You don’t have pockets or anything. And people would just see a phone floating around, which would be weird. She picks up trash because she likes to keep busy, and apparently people don’t notice trash moving. They think the wind’s blown it or someone’s thrown it. You have to think about these kinds of things when you’re a ghost.”

“I don’t know if I can do this,” I said.

“Do what?”

“This thing. This thing that I am.”

“Course you can. There’s nothing to do, anyway. It’s just natural, yeah?”

“How am I supposed to do all this work?” I said, running my hands through my hair. “This essay. I have to write it this weekend. I have to write an essay on Samuel Pepys and his stupid frickin’ diary and I can see ghosts.”

I walked around the room, picking up my things, putting them back down again, trying to establish some baseline of reality. Everything seemed the same. Same room. Same Boo. Same ashtray. Same unwashed mug with red wine residue in it.

Boo ate her sandwich and watched me.

“I’ve got it,” she said, brushing the crumbs from her lap onto the floor. “The library.”

As it was a Saturday night and just before dinner, there were only a handful of people in the library, and those who were weren’t the kind who paid much notice to other people. They were all deep in their zones—headphones, computers, books. Boo walked the floor quickly, weaving in and out of all the stacks downstairs, then going upstairs and doing the same thing. Alistair was sprawled on one of the wide windowsills at the end of the literature section, authors Ea–Gr row. He had one leg stretched high, his Doc Martens boot planted flat against the side of the window, the other hanging down. He seemed to be the focus of Boo’s search, because she walked right up to him.

“She knows now,” Boo said.

Alistair lazily lifted his gaze from the book.

“Congratulations,” he said drily.

I still had no idea what we were doing. My thoughts were moving very slowly. They both looked at me, and when I didn’t respond, Boo explained.

“What we just talked about,” Boo said. “Alistair is . . . like that.”

“Like . . .”

And then I realized why Alistair was looking at me like I was so stupid. The eighties look he was rocking—that was no look. That was his actual hairstyle from the actual eighties.

“Oh, my God,” I said. “You’re . . .”

“Yeah! He’s dead.”

Boo said it like she was telling me it was his birthday. Alistair looked . . . like a person. The spiked hair and the rolled jeans and the big trench coat . . . I reached up and touched my own hair—longish, straight, very dark—and was suddenly very glad that I hadn’t dyed it pink, like I’d been considering. Pink hair for a few weeks, fine. Pink hair for eternity, that I wasn’t so sure about.

Which was not a good or decent thought to be thinking. I should have been thinking about the nature of life, the idea of dying at eighteen at school, the idea that for some people, death wasn’t the end. But those were all big thoughts, too big for me right now. So I concentrated on his hair. His eternal hair. His eternal Doc Martens.

I started laughing hysterically. I laughed so hard, I thought I was pretty much going to throw up in the middle of the literature section. Someone came into the end of the aisle and stared at me in annoyance, but I couldn’t stop. When I finally got it under control a little, Alistair slipped down from his perch.

“Come on,” he said. “Might as well show you.”

He walked us down to the ground floor, to the research section, by the librarian’s desk. There was a shelf full of The Wexford Register, the school newspaper, bound in green leather.

“March 1989,” he said.

Boo pulled the 1989 volume down and set it on one of the nearby tables. She flipped through to March. The paper looked weirdly cheap and cheesy, roughly typed. We found a large photo of Alistair on the front of the issue from March 17. He was smiling in the photo, his hair particularly large and obviously bleached blond even in black-and-white. The headline read “Wexford Mourns Death of Student.” “‘Alistair Gilliam died in his sleep on Thursday evening,’” Boo read softly. “‘He was the editor of the school literary magazine and was well-known for his love of poetry and the band the Smiths’ . . . in your sleep?” “Asthma attack,” Alistair said.

I started to giggle again. It rose up in my throat. The librarian looked over with an annoyed expression and put his finger to his lips. Boo nodded, replaced the book, and we returned to the privacy of the upstairs stacks. After checking to make sure we were basically alone, she continued the conversation.

“You didn’t die here,” Boo said quietly. “So why do you come here?”

“Would you want to stay in Aldshot all the time? At least here I can read. Got nothing else to do. Read everything in here—twice. Well, most of it. Lots of it’s shite.”

“It’s great how you can pick up the books and turn pages,” Boo said.

“It took time,” he said. “But what about you two? You usually don’t come in pairs.”

“You’ve met people like us before?” Boo asked.

“One or two over the years. But they’re always alone, and always a bit mental.”

Not a great endorsement of my kind. And from the way Alistair was looking at me, I could tell that he hadn’t quite put me in the nonmental category yet.

“We’re a bit special,” Boo said. “I’m a police officer.”

“You’re a rozzer?” Alistair laughed properly for the first time.

“Yes, me,” she said. “We’re working on the Ripper case. The Ripper is . . . like you.”

“What do you mean, like me? You mean dead?”

Boo nodded.

“Dead, but nothing like me. We’re not all alike, you know.”

“Course!” Boo said. “Sorry!”

“I’m not into killers,” Alistair replied. “I was a vegetarian. Meat is murder, you know.”

“I’m really sorry.”

Boo reached out and touched his arm. He looked solid enough.

“How are you doing that?” I said. “I saw someone walk through that other woman.”

“Oh,” Boo said. “It depends on the person. Some people are really solid. Some are a bit more like air. Alistair is more solid. Can you pass through things? Doors, or walls?”

“I don’t like to,” he said. “I can. It takes time.”

“The more solid, the longer it takes and the harder it is. The ones who are more like air, they can do that more easily, but they’re not as physically strong. It’s harder for them to move things. But all ghosts are people, and you just respect them, no matter what they’re like, yeah?”

Alistair seemed mollified by this ghosts’ rights speech.

“Rory is needed for the investigation, see?” Boo said. “And she’s just found out what she can do, and it takes some time to adjust to that. She has this assignment to do, and obviously, she can’t do it. So, I was thinking, maybe you could help?”

Alistair didn’t, to my surprise, walk away or simply evaporate in disgust (because, for all I knew, he could do that).

“What is it?” he asked.

“Six to eight pages on the major themes of The Diary of Samuel Pepys,” I said automatically.

“The Diary of Samuel Pepys is massive,” Alistair replied.

“Oh . . . I mean, just the part about the fire.”

“The major theme of the part about the fire is the fire.”

“Also . . . rhetorical technique, or something.”

“Could you help us with that?” Boo asked. She had an alarmingly huge smile. “I mean, you’re obviously clever, and we have a murderer to stop. Can you type, or—”

“I don’t type.”

“Or write,” she said quickly. “Can you hold a pen?”

“I haven’t practiced in a while,” he replied. “I used to be able to do it. When do you need it?”

“Tomorrow morning?” I replied.

Alistair tapped his mouth with his fisted hand and thought for a moment.

“I want music,” he said.

“Music!” Boo nodded. “We can get you music! What music do you want?”

“I want Strangeways, Here We Come by the Smiths and Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me by the Cure—”

“Wait, wait . . .”

Boo hurried off. I heard her making her way down the steps. While she was gone, I just stared at Alistair and he stared back at me.

“Pen,” she said as she returned. She held up a pen as proof. “Say those again.”

Alistair repeated his album choices, and Boo wrote them down on her palm.

“And London Calling,” he added, leaning over to make sure she was getting the names right. “I want London Calling by the Clash.”

“I’ll get you these albums tonight,” she said, holding out her hand so he could see what she had written. “And something to play them on. Deal?”

“I suppose,” he said. “Wait . . . I also want The Queen Is Dead. Also by the Smiths.”

“Four albums,” she said, holding up her palm to show him. “One paper. Deal?”

“Deal,” he said.

“See that?” Boo asked when we were outside. “Not scary, is he? And your paper is sorted.”

There was something in what she was saying. Alistair hadn’t scared me. There was really nothing weird about the conversation at all, if you discounted the fact that we had discussed an article about his death.

“Are there any other ghosts around here?” I asked.

“Not that I’ve seen, but sometimes they’re shy. A lot of them love attics, basements, underground areas. People scare them. Funny, isn’t it? People are scared of ghosts, ghosts are scared of people, when there’s no reason for any of it.”

“Except that the Ripper is a ghost,” I said. “There is no humanly possible way for me not to worry about that. And Jerome thinks I’m insane.”

“Oh.” Boo waved her hand dismissively. “He’ll forget.”

“I don’t think he will.”

“Course he will. And it’s only Jerome.”

My silence intrigued her.

“You?” she said. “And Jerome?”

I remained silent.

“Seriously? You and Jerome?”

“It’s not . . . It’s not a—”

“Oh,” she said, smiling hugely. “Then don’t worry. I’ll fix it.”

22

JEROME DIDN’T FORGET. OF COURSE HE DIDN’T FORGET. I saw an invisible woman and ran away from class. No one forgets that. And then I’d hidden myself away for the rest of the day, which didn’t help.

When I walked into breakfast the next morning, I saw him sitting with Andrew. He raised his head when he saw me come in and nodded. Boo and I got into line. She filled up a plate with a full English—eggs, bacon, fried bread, mushrooms, tomatoes. Like me, she could put it away. That morning, though, I had no appetite. I took some toast.

“No sausage?” the lady behind the counter said. “Feeling ill?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Don’t worry so much,” Boo said.

We took our seats, sitting on the opposite side of the table from Jerome and Andrew. They’d left space for us, as normal.

“Hi,” I said.

Jerome looked over at me from the remains of his breakfast.

“No sausage?” he asked.

Apparently my pork consumption habits were a matter of public record. Boo dropped down next to me, her spoon bouncing off her tray and clanking to the floor.

“Rory here,” she said. “Sick all night. Crazy fever. Babbling her head off about ponies.”

“Fever?” This caught Jerome’s attention. “You were ill yesterday?”

“Mmmm,” I said, glancing over at Boo.

“Babbling and babbling, like a babbling thing,” Boo went on. “Madness. Wouldn’t shut up.”

“Have you been to the nurse?” Jerome asked.

“Mmmm?” I said.

“She’s really fine,” Boo said. “Probably some period thing. I go completely mental too. Period fever. It’s the worst.”

This effectively killed all conversation for a while. Boo charged right on, telling us a very long story about how her friend Angela was getting cheated on by her boyfriend, Dave. No one tried to interrupt her. I just got through my toast as quickly as I could and excused myself. Boo was right behind me.

“Fixed that,” she said.

“You told him I had period fever,” I replied. “There’s no such thing as period fever.”

“No such thing as ghosts either.”

“No, there is really no such thing as period fever. There’s a difference between being a guy and being an idiot.”

“Let’s get your essay,” she said, looping her arm through mine.

Boo waltzed me into the library, and I allowed myself to be waltzed. Alistair was tucked into a deep corner in the extremely unpopular microfilm section, behind a machine. Boo had provided him with a tiny iPod, and he was listening to something, eyes closed. I guess the earphones didn’t stay in his ears because he didn’t really have ears, but he managed to hold them up. The music flowed out of them into the air. As we came up, he opened his eyes slowly.

“On the shelf,” he said. “Between the bound copies of The Economist, 1995 and 1996.”

I went to the spot he directed us to. There, between the books, were fifteen handwritten pages, with footnotes and comments scribbled in the margins. I had just pulled these out when Jerome approached us. Boo grabbed them from me.

“Sorry,” he said, “but . . . can we talk?”

“Mmmm?” I replied. No guy had ever asked me if I wanted to talk, not like that. Not like a talk, talk kind of talk—if this was, in fact, a talk, talk “can we talk?” Or whatever.

“You go,” Boo said, shoving the papers into her bag. “I’ll see you later.”

I walked toward Jerome slowly, afraid to look at him. I no longer knew how to behave. I had been assured that I wasn’t insane, but that wasn’t very helpful. There was a ghost ten feet away from us who had done my homework, and Jerome couldn’t see him.

“You’re welcome,” Alistair called after me.

We stepped outside into the steel gray morning. I didn’t care that I was cold.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked. There was something nervous about the way he was standing, his shoulders hunched and his hands deep in his pockets, his arms locked to his sides.

Lacking any better idea, I suggested Spitalfields Market. It was big, it was busy, it was cheerful, and it would distract me a little. It used to be a market for fruits and vegetables. Now it was a ring of boutiques and salons. In the middle was a loosely enclosed space, one half devoted to restaurants, the other to stalls full of everything from tourist junk to handmade jewelry. Shoppers buzzed all around us. The racks were heavy with Jack the Ripper merchandise—top hats, rubber knives, I AM JACK THE RIPPER and JACK IS BACK shirts.

“What’s going on with you?” he finally asked.

What was going on with me? Nothing I could tell Jerome. I’d never be able to tell anyone what was going on with me, with the possible exception of Cousin Diane.

We had passed all the way through the market and were in the small courtyard on the side. We sat down on a bench. Jerome sat close, his leg almost against mine. I got the feeling he was keeping just a little space in case I turned out to be irredeemably insane. But he was giving me this chance now to explain. And explain I would, somehow. I would say something.

“Since the night, with the . . . with the Ripper . . . I’ve been . . . freaked out? A little?”

“That’s understandable,” he said, nodding. He was willing to try this out as an excuse for my behavior. I had to keep him talking about this topic—his favorite.

“Who is Jack the Ripper?” I said.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean, you read everything about Jack the Ripper—who is he? I think I’d feel better if I . . . understood what he was. What it was all about.”

He moved a millimeter or two closer.

“Well, I suppose the first thing is that Jack the Ripper is kind of a myth,” he said.

“How can he be a myth?”

“What’s known for sure is this: there was a string of murders in the Whitechapel area of London in the autumn of 1888. Someone was killing prostitutes, in more or less the same way. There were five murders that seemed to have the same signature—slash to the neck, mutilations to the body, and in some cases, removal and arrangement of the internal organs. So those are known as the Jack the Ripper murders, but some people think there were four murders, some six, some more than that. The best guess is that there were five victims, and that’s what the legend is built around. But that could be completely wrong. If you go to the Ten Bells Pub, for instance, they have a plaque on the wall commemorating six victims. So the facts of the whole thing are unclear, which is part of the reason it’s almost impossible to solve.”

“So this killer is following one version of the story?” I said.

“Right. He’s not even following a very nuanced version of the story. It’s pretty much the Wikipedia version or the version from the movies. The name. That’s another issue. Jack the Ripper never called himself Jack the Ripper. Just like now, there were dozens of hoaxes. Loads of people sent letters to the press claiming to be the murderer. Only about three of these letters were considered to be even possibly real—and now the general opinion is that they’re all fakes. One was the ‘From Hell’ letter, which is the one that James Goode got. Another was signed Jack the Ripper. That one was probably written by someone from the Star newspaper. The Star got famous because of Jack the Ripper. They took the stories of these murders and created one of the first media superstars. And they did a really good job, because here we are, over a hundred years later, still obsessed.”

“But there have been other murderers since,” I said. “Lots of them.”

“But Jack the Ripper was kind of the original. See, he was around when the police force was fairly new and psychology was just starting out. People understood why someone might kill to steal something, or out of anger, or out of jealousy. But here was a man killing for seemingly no reason at all, hunting down vulnerable, poor women, cutting them apart. There was no explanation. What made him so terrifying was that he didn’t need a reason. He just liked to kill. And the papers played the story up until people were mad with fear. He’s the first modern killer.”

“So who did it?” I asked. “They have to know.”

“No,” Jerome said, leaning back. “They don’t know. They never will know. The evidence is gone. The suspects and witnesses are long dead. The vast majority of the original Jack the Ripper case files are gone. Keeping records for the long term wasn’t considered that important back then. Things got thrown away. People took souvenirs. Papers got moved, lost. Lots of records were lost in the war. It’s exceedingly unlikely that we will ever find anything that conclusively identifies Jack the Ripper. But that won’t stop people from trying. They’ve been trying nonstop since 1888. It’s the one magic case that everyone wants to solve and no one can. Pretending to be Jack the Ripper is pretty much the scariest thing you could possibly do because he’s a total unknown. He’s the one that got away with it. Does any of this actually make you feel better?”

“Not really,” I said. “But it’s . . .”

This time, it was definitely me. I leaned into him, and he put his arm over my shoulders. Then I put my head against his, and his curls pressed into my cheek. From there, it was a slow turn of the head until our faces were together. I started pressing my lips into his cheek—just a hint of a kiss, just to see how it went. I felt his shoulders release, and he made a little noise that was partly a groan, partly a sigh. He kissed my neck, up, up, up to my ear. My muscle control began to slip away, as did my sense of my surroundings. My body flushed itself with all the good chemicals that it keeps in reserve for making out. They make you stupid. They make you wobbly. They make you not care about Jack the Ripper or ghosts.

I reached up and ran my hand along the back of his neck, deep into his hair, then I pulled his face closer.

23

CLEARLY, JEROME AND I HAD A COMPLICATED THING going on. He told me scary Jack the Ripper facts, and I had the sudden need to make out with him until I ran out of breath. I would have continued indefinitely if Boo hadn’t bounded up to us like a deranged puppy. Jerome and I detached so quickly that a thin bridge of saliva connected us for a glittering moment. I swung it away.

“Heya!” she said. “Sorry! I didn’t realize you came here too! Came over for a coffee.”

She held up a coffee as proof.

Jerome was so startled that he had a violent coughing fit.

“Well,” he said when he recovered. “I . . . well.

Hello.”

“Hi,” Boo said. She was still standing there, bouncing lightly on the balls of her feet.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’d best get back. I have a physics lab to work on.”

He got up abruptly and left.

“Sorry,” Boo said. “It’s my job to follow. And I wouldn’t have interrupted, but I had an idea. You need a bit more practical experience. It’ll help you. And since you don’t have to do that paper and it’s Sunday, we can go out.”

Boo had an ability to attach herself to me and steer me around. Her grip was like iron. She began to move me out of the market and down the street, toward the Tube. About forty-five minutes later, for the second time in less than twenty-four hours, I turned up on Goodwin’s Court. Boo half dragged me down the alley and pressed the silver buzzer on their front door.

“How do you even know they’re home?” I asked.

“They’ll be home,” she said. “One of them’s always here.”

No answer. Boo buzzed again. There was a crashing noise, followed by an electronic squawk.

“What?” a male voice yelled.

“It’s me!” Boo yelled back. “I have Rory with me!”

“You what?”

I thought it was Callum, but it was hard to tell.

“Let us up!” Boo yelled.

A mumbled something on the other end, and the intercom went dead.

“I don’t think they like it when I come over,” I said.

“Oh, they don’t mind.”

“I think they do.”

Nothing from the door. Boo pushed the intercom again, and this time, the door buzzed open. Again, up the stairs with the automatic lighting. I could see that the staircase was very well maintained, with tasteful framed black-and-white photos up the staircase and a highly polished silver rail. The apartment on the first floor bore a small glass sign on the door:

DYNAMIC DESIGN. Upstairs, Callum was at the door, dressed in the same snug shirt and a pair of shorts. He held a mug of something steaming hot.

“What are you doing?” he asked Boo in a groggy morning voice.

“Just bringing Rory round.”

“Why?”

Boo ignored this and stepped past him, dragging me in with her.

“Where’s Stephen?” Boo asked, taking off her coat and hanging it on the rickety coat stand by the door. Callum collapsed onto the brown sofa and regarded us both with tired eyes.

“Out getting the papers.”

“What are you up to?” she asked.

“What are we always up to?”

He indicated the stacks of papers and folders scattered all over the table and the floor around it. Boo nodded, made a quick circuit of the room, and planted herself next to him. Stephen came in a moment later. He was dressed in a worn and slightly baggy pair of jeans. I’m not sure they were supposed to be baggy; I think he was just thin. With his striped black sweater, red scarf, and glasses, he really looked like a student, probably in the English department. Someone who quoted Shakespeare for fun and used Latin terms for things. He did not, under any circumstances, look like a cop. But as soon as he saw us, he got that look on his face—instantly focused.

“What’s happened?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Boo said. “I just brought Rory round.”

“Why?”

No. They didn’t want me here. Boo had not caught on to this.

“I was thinking,” she said. “We should go ghost-spotting. Rory’s never been.”

Stephen stood there for a minute, gripping his newspaper.

“Can I speak to you in the other room for a moment?” he said.

Boo got up, and the two of them disappeared into another room. Callum continued to sip his tea and watch me. In the other room, I could hear a very animated conversation, one low voice (Stephen’s) and one relatively higher voice (Boo’s). I distinctly heard Stephen say, “We are not social services.” The higher voice seemed to be winning.

“I didn’t ask to come here,” I said. “I mean, here, to this apartment. Today.”

“Oh, I know.” Callum stretched lazily and turned to watch the door where the conversation was going on. Last time, I had taken in the basics about Callum—he was black, he was shorter than Stephen, he was extremely well built, and he wasn’t thrilled about my presence. All of those things remained true today. In the daylight and in slightly less shock, I could take in some more. Like Boo, Callum had an athlete’s build—he wasn’t huge, just well developed in what looked like a very deliberate way. His face was round, with wide, appraising eyes and a mouth that always seemed to be cocked in a half smirk. He had very thick, very straight eyebrows, one of which was sliced through by a scar.

“What’s the thing on your arm?” I asked, pointing at his tattoo. “Is that some kind of monster?”

“It’s a Chelsea lion,” he said patiently. “For the football club.”

“Oh.”

I wasn’t being stupid. It didn’t look like a lion. It looked like a skinny dragon with no wings.

“So how do you like England so far?” he asked.

“It’s kind of weird. You know. Ghosts. Jack the Ripper.”

He nodded.

“Where are you from?” he said. “That accent?”

“Louisiana.”

“Where’s that again?”

“In the South,” I said.

The conversation in the other room had gone down in volume.

“I don’t even know why he bothered,” he said, stretching again. “Boo was always going to win. Better get dressed.”

He got up and went out of the room, leaving me alone. The apartment, I noticed, looked very much like Boo’s part of the room—stuff everywhere. Maybe seeing ghosts made you give up on cleaning. I could see that certain parts of the room were reserved for certain activities. The coffee table was for eating—it was covered in tinfoil takeout dishes and mugs. The table by the window had a computer and lots of files, with boxes full of more files on the floor. The walls around the table were covered in notes. I had a look at them. They all seemed to relate to the Ripper—dates, locations. I recognized some of the names and photographs of suspects from 1888 from the constant news coverage. What was unusual, though, is that there were comments about these people—places of burial, locations of death, home addresses. It looked like Stephen and Callum and Boo had gone to these places and checked them out, adding notes like “uninhabited” or “no evidence of presence.”

I moved away from the wall of notes when I heard someone returning. Stephen and Boo came back in, followed by Callum, who was now wearing jeans.

“Perhaps we should do an hour or two of ghost-spotting,” Stephen said, not sounding very enthusiastic. Boo was beaming and doing some hamstring stretches.

“We should take her underground,” Callum said. “It’s easier there. It’ll take five minutes, tops.”

“Maybe in the train tunnels,” Boo said. “But not on the platforms.”

“I work there. I should know. I saw about fifty once.”

“You never!”

“I did. Not all in one place, but all around one station.”

“Around one station? So in the tunnels, then.”

“Some of them were in the tunnels. But I’m telling you. Fifty.”

“You’re such a liar,” Boo said with a laugh.

“There’s one hanging around Charing Cross,” Callum said. “I’ve seen her loads of times. Let’s just take her there and get this over with.”

“Fine,” Stephen cut in. “Charing Cross.”

My approval was not needed on the idea.

It was a cool day. The sun was out, and the leaves were just changing. The other three, being English and used to colder weather, wore no coats. I did, and I pulled it tight around me as we walked down the busy streets, past some West End theaters and pubs, around a church and through Trafalgar Square. There were loads of tourists on the square, taking pictures of each other climbing on the huge lions at the base of Nelson’s Column, screaming as legions of pigeons swooped down at their heads. I didn’t really feel like a tourist anymore. I wasn’t sure what I was. I was definitely feeling increasingly self-conscious about being with these three, since I was a clear disruption to the routine and probably an annoyance, but feeling self-conscious was better than feeling crazy. They were ignoring me anyway and having a debate about paperwork.

“So then we fill out a G1 form . . . ,” Stephen was saying.

“What I don’t understand,” Callum replied, “is why we call it G1, since we only have one form. Can’t we just call it the form?”

“We only have one form now,” Stephen said, not looking up. “We might have other forms in the future. Also, G1 is actually shorter than the form.”

“Here’s a better question,” Callum replied. “Why have a form at all? Who’s going to check? Who’s going to care? No one knows we exist. No one wants to know we exist. We’re not taking people to court.”

“’Cause,” Boo said. “We need a record. We need to know what we did. We need it to train other people to do this job. And ghosts are still people. They were someone. Just because they’re not alive—”

“You know what? I think being alive should be a primary way of figuring out who is and who isn’t a person. I think that should be question number one. Are you alive? If yes, go on to question two. If no, you should not be reading this—”

“Oh, that’s such rubbish. One of my best friends happens to be a dead person.”

“All I’m saying is,” Callum said calmly, “since we can do this any way we want—and how often do you get that chance in life?—why did we choose to do this in a way that involves paperwork?”

“I can make a G2 if you want,” Stephen said magnanimously. “Just for you. Special form for interdepartmental incidents involving both the police and the transport system. We’ll call it Callum’s Form. A Callum 2A could be for the Underground. You’d get a Callum 2B for any incidents on buses. Maybe a Callum 2B-2 is any incident that takes place at a bus shelter.”

“I will kill you, you know.”

“And if you do,” Stephen said with a hint of a smile, “and I come back, I am going to haunt the hell out of you.”

We’d reached the steps of the Charing Cross Underground station, and Stephen turned to me and re-included me in the conversation.

“Here’s what you need to understand,” he said in a slightly lecturing tone. “London is one of the world’s oldest continually inhabited cities. We’ve had multiple wars, plagues, fires . . . and we keep building on top of old grave sites. Loads of buildings are built on old plague pits. The Tube system alone was responsible for disturbing thousands of graves. As far as we know, most ghosts tend to stay around the places they died, places that had some major significance in their lives, or, occasionally, the place where their body is buried. Their range varies. But the Tube has lots.”

“Lots and lots and lots,” Callum added as we reached the turnstiles.

Callum waved a pass that got him in for free. The rest of us tapped our Oyster cards, and the gates opened to admit us. I followed them to the escalators.

“The thing you have to remember,” Boo said, “is that ghosts are just people. That’s it. They aren’t scary. They aren’t out to get you”—Callum made a strange noise—“they aren’t spooky or weird, and they don’t fly around with sheets on their heads. They are just dead people who’ve gotten stuck here for a bit. They’re usually quite nice, if a little shy. Normally, they’re lonely and they like to talk, if they can.”

“If they can?”

“There’s a lot to learn,” Stephen said. “They take a lot of forms, some more corporeal than others.”

“So, who becomes a ghost? Everyone?”

“No. It’s fairly rare. From what we can tell, ghosts are people who just haven’t . . . died completely. Their death process isn’t complete, and they don’t leave.”

This I sort of understood. My parents work on a college campus, and I’d spent some time around it. Sometimes people graduate but they don’t leave. They hang around for years, for no reason. I would think of ghosts like that, I decided.

“Ghosts look like people, so you often can’t tell the difference,” Boo said. “You have the ability to see them, but it doesn’t mean you know what you’re looking at.”

“It’s like hunting,” Callum cut in.

“It is nothing like hunting.” Boo elbowed him hard. “They’re people. They look like living people, because you’re used to seeing living people. You assume everyone you see is alive. You have to consciously start separating the living from the dead. It’s tricky at first, but you get the hang of it.”

“She’s down here,” Callum said. “I saw her on the Bakerloo Line platform.”

We followed him down the steps to that platform. The London Tube had such a reassuring, almost clinical appearance— white-tiled walls with black-tiled edges, neat and distinctive signage, the cheerfully colored map . . . signs showing the

WAY OUT and barriers to keep people moving in the right directions . . . staff in purple-blue suits and computer screens showing the status of trains . . . big ad posters and electronic ad boards that flashed mini-commercials. It didn’t look like something dug out of an old plague pit. It looked like a system that had been here for all of time, pumping people through the heart of the city.

A train had just come in, and the platform emptied out except for us and the handful of people who were too slow. Then I noticed the dark arches at each end of the platform, the openings for the trains leading to the tunnels—the wind that blew in with each train came from there. And when the train left, I noticed one woman in particular down at the far end of the platform. The toes of her shoes were just over the edge. She wore a black sweater with a thick cowl neck, a plain gray skirt, and a pair of gray platform shoes. Her hair was long and curled off her face in large wings. I guess what drew me to her—aside from the fact that she didn’t get on the train and her vaguely retro outfit—was her expression. It was the expression of someone who had given up completely. Her skin wasn’t just pale, it was faint and grayish. She was the kind of person you didn’t see, alive or dead.

“That’s her,” I said.

“That’s her,” Callum confirmed. “She looks like a jumper to me. Jumpers do that a lot, stand on the edge and stare out. Never kill yourself in a Tube station. Tip number one. You might end up down here forever, staring at the wall.”

Stephen coughed a little.

“Just giving advice,” Callum said.

“Go talk to her,” Boo said.

“About what?”

“Anything.”

“You want me to walk up to her and say, ‘Are you a ghost?’”

“I do that,” she replied.

“I love it when you get it wrong,” Callum said.

“Once. It happened once.”

“It happened twice,” Stephen said, looking over.

Boo shook her head and waved me down to the end. I hesitated a moment, then followed a few steps behind until we were next to the woman.

“Hello?” Boo said.

The woman turned, ever so slowly, her eyes wide and sad. She was young, maybe in her twenties. Now I could see her frosted, silvery hair and a heavy silver pendant around her neck. It seemed to weigh her head down.

“We aren’t going to hurt you,” Boo assured her. “I’m Boo. This is Rory. I’m a police officer. I’m here to help people like you. Did you die here?”

“I . . .”

The woman’s voice was so faint that it barely qualified as a sound. I felt it more than I heard it. It made me shiver, it was so soft.

“What? You can tell us.”

“I jumped . . .”

“These things happen,” Boo said. “Do you have any friends here in the station?”

The woman shook her head.

“There’s a lovely burial site just a few streets over,” Boo went on. “I’m sure you could meet someone there, make some nice friends.”

“I jumped . . .”

“Yeah, I know. It’s okay.”

“I jumped . . .”

Boo glanced over at me.

“Yeah,” she said. “You said. But can we—”

“I jumped . . .”

“Okay. Well, we’ll come back and visit. Is that all right? You have friends. You’re not invisible to everyone.”

Callum looked very smug as we walked back.

“Jumper?” he asked.

“Yes,” Boo said.

“Give me five pounds.”

“We didn’t have a bet, Callum.”

“I just deserve five pounds. I can tell a suicide from fifty paces.”

“Enough,” Stephen said. “Rory, how did that go?”

“It was okay, I guess,” I said. “Eerie. She just kept saying she jumped. And her voice was . . . cold. Like a cold breath in my ear.”

“She was a quiet one,” Boo said. “Not very strong. Scared.”

“Why do they wear clothes?”

Callum and Boo laughed, but Stephen nodded.

“That’s a very good question,” he said. “They should be naked, or so you’d think, right? Yet they always come back clothed. At least every time I’ve seen them. This lends itself to the theory that what we’re seeing is a kind of manifestation of a vestigial memory, perhaps even a self-perception. So what we’re seeing is less of how they were, but more of how they perceived themselves, at least around the time of their death—”

“Skip this part,” Callum said to him. Then to me, “Stephen talks like that sometimes.”

We returned the way we came, back up the escalators and back into the daylight.

“Now,” Stephen said, “you’ve seen one, and you’ve seen that there’s no—”

But my mind was elsewhere.

“The clothes,” I said. “The guy I saw, if he was the Ripper, he wasn’t wearing old-fashioned clothes. Not, like, Victorian clothes.”

I don’t think Stephen had been concentrating too hard on me until I said that. I almost saw his pupils refocus.

“That’s correct,” he said.

“I told you,” Boo said. “She’s a quick one.”

“So, this Ripper ghost whatever . . . he’s not the Ripper. Not the Ripper from 1888.”

“That’s what we concluded from your description,” Stephen said, sounding somewhat impressed. “So we stopped pursuing that angle.”

“So how do you figure out who he is?”

That made Callum laugh and turn away, clasping his hands behind his head.

“Well,” Stephen said, “we’re using his choices of location, combined with your E-fit image . . .”

“But how do you find some random dead guy from whenever?”

Even Boo turned away now. “We have ways,” Stephen said. The bright look in his eye had gone out, and he stared at the people sitting on the lions. I had asked something they didn’t want to be asked. I got the sense that the more I pressed this, the more unhappy and possibly unhinged I would become. I had to embrace the daylight, the sanity I had at this moment.

“Fine,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself.

“We just wanted to give you some experience with your new ability,” Stephen said. “But we have to get back to work. Boo will take you back.”

“Wait,” I said as Stephen and Callum turned to go, “one more question. If there are ghosts, does that mean there are . . . vampires? And werewolves?”

Whatever misery I had caused by my previous question, it was wiped out with this one. They all laughed. Even Stephen, who I didn’t know could laugh.

“Don’t be stupid,” Callum said.

24

GHOSTS, ACCORDING TO THE INTERNET:

Souls, spooks, shades, poltergeists, revenants. Generally regarded to be people returned from the dead, though there are also ghost animals, and ghost ships, and even ghost trains and planes and articles of furniture and plants. Often known to linger around places they lived in or died in, looking sad. Both can and cannot be photographed, though when photographed, may appear as a blob or orb of light. Science rejects and confirms their existence. Can be contacted through mediums, who are all fakes.

In other words, the Internet was useless at teaching me anything, except that a lot of people had strong feelings about ghosts, and every culture in the world had something to say about them, through all of history. Also, a lot of people online who claimed to be ghost experts were clearly much crazier than anyone from my town, which was saying something.

What was reassuring, I guess, was the sheer number of people who believed in ghosts and who claimed to have seen them. I certainly would never be lonely. And they couldn’t all be crazy.

There were about a half-dozen television shows devoted to the subject of ghost-hunting. I watched a few of these. What I saw were crews of people sneaking around houses with night vision cameras, jumping at every noise and saying, “Did you hear that?” Replaying said noise over and over—and the noise was always a little bump or a door closing. Or they’d have some piece of machinery that they’d hold over a spot in the room and they’d say, “Yup, a ghost was here.”

Not very impressive. Not one of them was seeing an actual, talking person. The shows, I concluded, were all bull, designed to entertain people who really liked to see things about ghosts, no matter how lame they were.

This little research project of mine, however fruitless, was good at keeping my mind level. I was doing something, and doing something was better than doing nothing. And here’s an amazing fact about the human mind: it can cope with a lot. When something new enters your reality that you don’t think you can deal with, your mind deals. It does everything it can to accommodate the new information. When the information is so big and so difficult to process, sometimes your brain skips stress and confusion and goes right to a happy island, a little sweet spot.

My new ability didn’t interfere with my life. I got used to seeing Alistair—and after all, aside from his haircut, there was nothing odd about him. He was just a grumpy dude in the library. Though he was slightly less grumpy now that he had a bunch of albums and something to play them on. He secreted the iPod Boo had given him with his albums somewhere in the library and he made it clear that he was willing to trade homework for more music. We had found a currency that he accepted.

And I saw Boo every day—someone with the same ability that I had—and she wasn’t even remotely bothered by it.

I didn’t forget, exactly, but this new knowledge slipped to the back of my mind . . . and I adapted. I was able to move on to more pressing matters, like the upcoming fancy dress party. After several nights of discussion in our room, we had decided to go to the party as the Zombie Spice Girls. Boo was a natural for Sporty, since she could have thrown either one of us over a wall without breaking a nail. Jazza was going to be Ginger, because she had a red wig and a strong desire to make a dress out of a Union Jack flag. (Although it had been explained to me several times, since Jaz’s uncle was in the navy, that it was called a Union Jack only when it was flown at sea. Otherwise it was just a Union flag. I was learning all kinds of things in London, mostly about ghosts and flags and disbanded girl groups, but still. Learning is good.) I, apparently, was a natural for Scary. I asked them if this was because my hair was dark, and they both just laughed, so I had no idea what that was about. Mostly, our costumes involved putting on some zombie makeup, tight clothes, and high platform shoes that Boo bought in a secondhand store. We had a plastic bone to represent Posh, and if anyone asked about Baby, we were just going to say we ate her.

Boo was down the hall getting some fake tattoos drawn on by Gaenor. Jazza was squeezing herself into her Union Jack dress, which she had made out of a decorative pillowcase. I was trying to tease out my hair as big as it could go.

“You never showed me your essay,” she said, out of the blue. “The one on Pepys. You said you wanted me to read it over.”

“Oh . . .” I rubbed the gray makeup hard into my face. “It wasn’t as bad as I thought.”

“What did you end up writing?”

I had no idea what I’d ended up writing. I’d typed it, but I’d barely read it. It had something to do with the concept of a diary kept for both public and private reading and how that affected the tone of the narrative. So I lied.

“I compared it to modern accounts of major events,” I said. “Like Hurricane Katrina. He was writing about the Great Fire of London, which was where he lived. I wrote about how you talk about things that affect you personally.”

That was actually a genius idea. I only ever have genius ideas after the fact. I should have just written the damn paper.

“You and Boo have been getting along a lot better this week,” she said, doing a chest check. Her dress was really tight. This was a whole new Jazza coming out—almost literally. Normally, I would have started joking about this, but I smelled trouble. Those words meant, “You haven’t told me anything about Boo this week, and now I am convinced you like her better than me.”

“I’ve accepted her,” I said as breezily as I could. “She’s our pet.”

Jazza gave me a slight sideways look as she pulled the dress up a little higher over her girlish assets. It was wrong to refer to Boo as a pet. That was normally the kind of thing Jazza would censure, but she said nothing.

“It could be worse,” I said.

“Of course,” Jazza said, going over to her bureau. “I’m not saying, you know, that I . . . but . . . I’ve . . .”

Boo returned, dressed in a shiny tracksuit with a lopsided ponytail. I was pretty sure those were just some of her actual clothes, and not something she had gotten as a costume.

“Watch this, yeah?” she said, immediately going into a handstand and walking a few steps. Then she tumbled over and crashed into Jazza’s desk, almost knocking over her photos. “Haven’t done that since I was fourteen.”

Jazza looked at me through the mirror as she attached her false eyelashes.

There was a look on her face that suggested a rapidly dwindling patience level.

We had decided to stick together for at least a half hour, so that everyone could comprehend our group costume. We would share custody of Posh the Bone. The prefects had done a really good job transforming the refectory into a Halloween-ish party venue. Eating in here every day, I had forgotten that it was an old church. These decorations really brought that out—the candles in the stained-glass windows, the fake cobwebs strung everywhere, the low lighting. Charlotte, dressed in a very shortskirted policewoman’s outfit, was leading the dancing brigade, jumping around at the front of the room, her long red hair flapping up and down like a matador’s cape. She was head girl, and she would show us how to party if she had to.

I wasn’t really sure why Charlotte had decided to come to the party as a stripper. I found myself at a loss for words as she complimented us on our costumes.

“You’re a . . .” I tried to find the right thing to say. “Really . . . hot cop?”

“I’m Amy Pond,” she said. “From Doctor Who. This is her kissogram outfit.”

It was a good moment to catch sight of Jerome. He was wearing normal clothes with loads of scribbled-on pieces of paper stuck all over them, and his hair sticking up, a coffee mug in his hand.

“Tell me what you want, what you really, really want,” he said.

We had been planning for someone to ask us that.

“Braiiinnnnssss,” we said in unison.

“It’s both sad and incredibly impressive that you were all ready with that one.”

“What are you?” I asked.

“I’m the Ghost of the Night Before Exams.”

“And how long did it take you to come up with that?” Jazza asked.

“I’m a busy man,” he replied.

We formed a group on the side of the dance floor—me, Jazza, Jerome, and occasionally Andrew, Paul and Gaenor. Boo, we quickly discovered, was very serious about her dancing. She was right up front, by the DJ stand, doing complicated moves and the occasional surprise handstand.

The room was hot—we were all sopping wet in no time. The stained-glass windows had a veneer of steam. And unlike American dances, they didn’t screw things up with that awkward slow dance every five or six songs. This was all dance, with lots of remixes, like an actual club. My Scary Spice outfit, which consisted of a sports bra and oversized pants, was actually a blessing. I would have sweat through a shirt.

Jerome and I didn’t dance together, exactly, but we did remain side by side. Every once in a while, he would (seemingly accidentally) touch my waist or my arm. Anything more than that would have been too much of a statement, but I felt I got the message. He also had prefect jobs to do, so he would regularly disappear to refill bowls of food or tend the bar. That was another strange thing—the bar. An actual bar, with actual beer. We had tickets that allowed us two pints each. I have absolutely no idea how this was managed. Jerome had tried to explain it to me—how even though the law was that you had to be eighteen to drink in a pub, the circumstances varied, and at a closed event with teachers somehow this was legal. I got one of my beers, but I was jumping around and sweating too much to drink it. I would have vomited instantly. But two beers seemed to be nothing to the average English student. Everyone else gulped them down, and I was pretty sure that the two-ticket rule was not being very strictly enforced.

As the night wore on, there was a not-unpleasant funk in the air, the scent of beer and dancing. I started to forget any time I wasn’t at this place, with the lights strobing against the stained glass and the stone walls, the teachers in the shadows, checking their phones out of sheer boredom.

In fact, at first I thought he was a teacher. He came up behind Jazza. The suit, the bald head.

“What’s the matter?” Jaz yelled happily.

Of course, she couldn’t see him, even though he was right at her back, standing right up against her. He stroked her shoulder lightly with the tips of his fingers. I saw her twitch a bit and flick at her wig. He stepped around and placed himself between Jazza and me.

“Come outside,” he said. “Do it now.”

I began to back away, very slowly.

“Where are you going?” she yelled.

“Bathroom,” I said quickly.

“Are you ill? You look—”

“No,” I yelled back, shaking my head.

Leaving that room was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I felt the heat of everyone at my back. Outside, it was cold—bright cold, a lifting cold. Every single streetlight was on. Every light in every window. Everything to battle against the dark of the sky, the dark that went up and up and up forever. This thin little halo so low to the ground. The wind was kicking up a fury, spinning leaves and trash around us, and I remember thinking, This is it. I am walking into forever. It was almost funny. Life seemed downright accidental in its brevity, and death a punch line to a lousy joke.

Our footsteps were so loud on the pavement. Well, mine were. I don’t think he had any. And his voice didn’t echo between the buildings. He walked me up to the road, and we walked along beside all the closed shops.

“Just fancied a chat,” he said. “There aren’t many people I can talk to. I’m not sure if you remember where we first met. It was at the Flowers and Archers. The night of the second murder.”

I had no memory of this at all.

“It’s quite an unusual ability, what you have,” he said. “Part genetics, part dumb luck, something you can never talk about to any rational person. I remember the feeling.”

“You were—”

“Oh, yes. I was like you. It’s hard, I know. Upsetting. The dead aren’t supposed to be among the living. It offends the natural order of things. All I ever wanted to do in life was make sense of it. And now, here I am . . . part of the puzzle.”

He smiled at me.

I was cold from the inside out. My hair was cold. My thoughts were cold. It was as if every cell in my body stopped doing its cellular duty and stiffened in place. My blood became still and had no life-giving power, and my breath crystallized and pierced my lungs like shards of glass.

“Have you ever met any more like us?” he asked. “Or are you all alone in the world?”

Some impulse told me to lie to him. Telling him that I did meet some people and that they were the ghost police . . . It seemed like I was asking for more trouble than I was already in.

“Just some weirdos,” I said. “Back home.”

“Ah,” he said. “Some weirdos back home.”

A leaf drifted down from a tree and started to pass slowly through his shoulder on its way to the ground. He flinched a bit and brushed it away.

“Your name—Aurora. It’s very unusual. A family name?”

“My great-grandmother,” I said.

“It’s a name full of meaning. It’s the name of the Roman goddess of dawn and of the polar lights.”

I had Googled my own name before. I knew all this. But I decided not to interrupt him to tell him that I was aware.

“Also,” he added, “of a collection of diamonds right here in London, the Aurora Pyramid of Hope. Lovely name. It’s the largest collection of color diamonds in the world. You should see them under a UV light. Marvelous. Do you have any interest in diamonds?”

That’s when I saw Boo. She was walking toward us very casually, like she didn’t even see him, talking away loudly into her phone in what sounded like a pretend conversation. She must have seen me leave, or seen him. Whatever the case, she was here.

“That girl,” he said. “I’ve seen you with her. I get the sense she annoys you.”

“She’s my new roommate.”

Boo was doing a really good job at pretending she couldn’t see him. She was waving at me and talking really loudly.

“Yeah, yeah,” Boo was saying into the phone. “She’s right here. You talk to her . . .”

“She’s very loud,” the man said. “That’s something I find quite annoying, how everyone speaks so loudly all the time into their mobile phones. Those weren’t around when I was alive. They make people so rude.”

Boo reached out to me, both hands on her phone. She was gripping it strangely, fingers on the keypad.

He lurched forward and grabbed her by the wrists. In one fluid motion, he swung her into the road, directly into the front of a passing car. It was so fast—two seconds, three seconds. I watched her hit the car. I watched her break the front headlight and slide up over the hood and smack into the windshield. Then I watched her roll down as the driver skidded to a stop.

“Next time,” he said, “tell the truth when I ask you a question.”

He was right in my face. I felt no breath coming out of him because, of course, he didn’t breathe. He was just cold. I kept absolutely still until he backed away and walked off. The driver’s screaming stirred me to action. He was out of his car and standing over Boo, saying, “No, no, no . . .”

I stepped into the street, to where Boo was. My legs felt like they weren’t quite connected to my body, but I kept moving forward and got down on the ground next to her. There was some blood on her face from where she’d been cut, but mostly, she looked like she was asleep. Her leg was at a terrible, unnatural angle.

“What was she doing?” the driver cried, grabbing his head. “What was she doing? She jumped—”

“Call for help,” I said.

The man from the car was still clutching his head and having a meltdown, so I had to yell at him. He took out his phone, his hands shaking.

“Boo,” I said, holding her limp hand, “you’re going to be okay. It’s all going to be okay. I promise. You are going to be fine.”

I heard the driver giving the information about where we were, his voice cracking. People hurried up to us. Other people were on phones. But I kept my eyes on Boo, my hand on her hand.

“What happened?” the driver said. “Was she drunk? Did she jump? I don’t understand . . . I don’t understand . . .”

He was almost crying now. Of course he didn’t understand. He’d just been driving his car down the street, and all of a sudden a girl on the sidewalk flung herself into the road. It wasn’t his fault, and it wasn’t her fault.

“Do you hear that?” I said to her, listening to the approaching sirens. “Help’s almost here.”

I heard someone running toward us and looked up to see Stephen. He got to his knees and examined Boo quickly. Then he took the phone that was still in Boo’s grasp.

“Come on,” he said, pulling me to my feet.

“I’m not leaving her.”

“There’s an ambulance and several police cars right behind us. You have to move. Now. Now, Rory. If you want to help her, walk with me.”

I took one last look at my roommate lying in the road, then I let him lead me to the awaiting car, and we sped off, lights flashing.

THE TEN BELLS PUB, WHITECHAPEL NOVEMBER 2 8:20 P.M.

DAMN, IT FELT GOOD TO BE A RIPPEROLOGIST.

That was the first time Richard Eakles had ever been able to say that, even to think it. Being a Ripperologist had never been cool. Since he was fifteen years old, Richard had been obsessed with Jack the Ripper. He read every book. He obsessed over every site. He was on the forums. By the time he was seventeen, he was going to conferences. And now, at twenty-one, he was a webmaster of Ripperfiles.com—the Ripper site and database widely regarded as the best in the world. Oh, some people—they need not be named—had laughed at his hobby before. No one was laughing now. Now he was needed. Ripperologists were the only ones who could help. Ripperologists had been conducting the Ripper investigation for over a hundred years.

In fact, tonight had been his idea. He’d posted it on the forum. Maybe they should have a conference, discuss theories? The idea took off like wildfire within the Ripperology community. Then everyone wanted in on the action. The BCC. CNN. Fox. Sky News. Japan News Network. Agence France-Presse. Reuters. The list went on and on. And it wasn’t just the press that wanted in. Scotland Yard was going to be in attendance as well, and—some people said—MI5. Rippercon was the hottest ticket in London tonight, and he was one of the stars.

And they had the perfect venue, the Ten Bells, the famous pub located smack in the middle of the Ripper zone, a pub frequented by several of the victims back in 1888. These days the Ten Bells was overrun by students and tourist groups fresh off the Jack the Ripper tours. The students came for the cheap drinks and run-down sofas and chairs. The tourists came to take in the ornate original tiling and to drink real English beer in a real English pub where Jack the Ripper had probably been.

Tonight, though . . . it was a lot harder to get in. Satellite news vehicles lined the street. There were police and crowds of onlookers and people with cameras. At least a dozen news reporters were outside, giving reports. The pavement was ablaze in camera lights. Richard had to hold up the badge he wore around his neck and squeeze his way in.

Inside, it was even more intense. The Ten Bells was just a normal-sized pub, not the kind of place where you could really fit a major international news conference. The space behind the bar had been converted into a pit for the news cameras, all trained at the one small table at the front of the room, and the small screen and whiteboard that he had requested for his presentation. The windows had all been covered in heavy material so that no one could look inside.

He had done a little quick research online and found that when you went on camera, you weren’t supposed to wear patterned clothing. It made the camera go crazy or some such. So he had settled for a plain black dress shirt over his black REMEMBER 1888 T-shirt. He took a moment to greet a few of the other prominent Ripper bloggers, who had been allowed to have the few remaining tickets, then took his place at the table. They really had assembled an amazing panel for tonight, the top Ripperologists from around the world. Three of them from England, two from America, one from Japan, one from Italy, and one from France—every one of them an expert on the case.

Since Richard had helped to put this event together, he was going to be speaking first. His presentation was the most general, but outsiders needed the basic facts.

After making sure that everyone was in place, Richard stood up and faced the crowd. God, it was hot in here. He was already sweating. He gripped the dry-erase marker tightly in his hand.

“Good evening,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady. “Tonight’s discussion will focus on the fifth canonical murder in 1888. We’ll start with an overview of that night, then we’ll go into some specifics, some theories, and some 3-D re-creations of the scene. So, let me begin . . .”

So many cameras. So many cameras pointing at him. His whole life had been building to this moment.

“Murder number five,” he said. “Mary Jane Kelly. Last seen alive just after two in the morning on the ninth of November, 1888. Her body was discovered in her lodging rooms around ten forty-five the same morning by her landlord, who had come to collect her rent. Kelly was the only victim to be murdered indoors, and her body was considerably mutilated, most likely because the Ripper had the time and privacy to do things in the way that he . . . really wanted. Her clothes were folded neatly on a chair, and her boots placed by the fire. Hers was also the only crime scene to be photographed. We’re going to put those photos up now. Please be warned that even though these photographs are of a very low quality by modern standards, they are still extremely graphic.”

Richard gave the signal for the lights to be turned down. Even though he had seen this photograph hundreds—maybe thousands of times—it never failed to chill him. This was the photograph that showed just how brutal and terrible the Ripper was, why he needed to be identified, even though he was long dead. The skin of her thighs had been removed and set on a table next to the bed. Her internal organs had been removed, some set around her body in a pattern. Mary Kelly needed justice. Maybe, now that all this was happening, maybe now she would finally get it.

The crowd in the Ten Bells stared at the photograph. It had been shown around a lot in the last few weeks. No one was reacting with the appropriate horror as he ran through her extensive injuries. A few reporters and prominent bloggers took notes. The police sat and listened with folded arms.

“All right,” Richard said, “we can bring the lights back up.”

The lights didn’t come back up.

“All right,” he said, louder. “The lights, please.”

Still no lights. In fact, everything in the room shut down. All the camera lights went out, as did the power on his computer. There were groans and yells as dozens of live-feed cameras went out at once, and people began bumping together in the intense dark.

Richard stayed where he was, by the board, wondering what to do next. Should he just keep talking? Or should he wait until they were on camera again? It was very difficult, this being in the middle of an international news story.

He felt the pen being removed from his hand and the brisk squeaky noise it made on the board. Someone was writing something on the board, but he couldn’t see who. He stepped toward the board, toward the spot where the person had to be and felt around in the dark. There was absolutely no one there.

The pen was gingerly put back into his hand.

“Who are you?” he whispered. “I can’t see you.”

In reply, the unseen person shoved him forcibly up against the board, crushing his face into it. Then the lights came back on.

Richard heard a confused grumble pass around the room as they took in the sight of him splayed against the board, arms spread. As he backed up a few inches and tried to regain his poise, Richard saw something written on the board in large, bold letters:

THE NAME OF THE STAR IS WHAT YOU FEAR

INNER VILENESS

Do we indeed desire the dead

Should still be near us at our side?

Is there no baseness we would hide?

No inner vileness that we dread? —Alfred, Lord Tennyson,

“In Memoriam A.H.H.,”

part 51

25

STEPHEN WAS DRIVING WITH A GRIM, FIXED INTENSITY. We sped past the school, past a huge cluster of news trucks and police cars surrounding Spitalfields Market. I had to sit in the back, because you can’t sit in the front seat of a police car unless you’re actually a police officer—so I must have looked like a criminal to anyone passing by. A young, crying criminal in zombie makeup.

“How did you know where we were?” I said, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand.

“She phoned me and said you had gone missing from the party, then again from the street once she found you.”

“I want to go to the hospital.”

“That’s the last place you’re going,” Stephen said, glancing at me through the rearview mirror. “You’re already in HOLMES.”

“In what?”

“HOLMES. The Home Office Large Major Enquiry System. You’re in the police database, that’s what it means. You’re a witness in the Ripper murders, and you’re under protection by us. And the police establishment doesn’t exactly know we exist. This all just got very, very complicated.”

“Complicated?” I shot back. “Boo’s back there in the road, possibly dead, and all you can say is that this is complicated?”

“I’m trying to keep you safe, to keep you both safe. There was nothing we could do to help her. The ambulance was right behind us. The best thing was to get you out of there.” He took off his policeman’s hat and wiped his forehead.

“Tell me one thing,” he said. “Did anything happen to the Ripper?”

“What?”

“What happened to him after the accident?”

“He walked away,” I said.

“Were there lights?” he said again, more urgently. “Sounds? Anything? Are you sure he walked away?”

“He walked away,” I said again.

Stephen let out a loud, exasperated sound and switched on the car’s lights and sirens. Then he hit the gas, and I was thrown back against the seat by the surge in speed. I could basically determine that we were going west, into the center of London. Within a few minutes, I realized that we were headed toward Goodwin’s Court. When we got there, Stephen pulled the car over abruptly. I had to wait for him to let me out of the back, then he hustled me down the alley and into his building. The automatic lights clicked on as he hurried me up the stairs.

“I have to ring someone,” he said, switching on the overhead light. “You should sit.”

Stephen went down the short hallway and into the room next to the living room, leaving me alone for a moment. The apartment was cold, and it smelled stale. There was a bag of used takeout cartons by the door filled with the remains of Chinese food and fish-and-chips. Clothes were strewn about the sofas and chairs. There had been some kind of paperwork explosion over by the window—masses of manila folders turned open, pages piled and stacked and spread out. All the notes on the walls looked like they had been replaced with new ones.

I could hear Stephen through the thin wall. He was talking to someone very urgently.

“How’s Boo?” I asked when he emerged.

“I don’t know yet. I have someone at the hospital who’ll send me a report. Your school has been told that you’re with the police giving a statement. You need to sit. We have to talk.”

“I don’t want to sit. I want to see my roommate.”

“She’s not your roommate,” Stephen said. “She’s a police officer. And the one thing you can do to help her is to tell me what you know.”

“She’s still my roommate,” I said.

Which was odd. Because not long before, I would have sold Boo to the lowest bidder. Now her welfare was the only thing that mattered.

“Do you want to help her?” Stephen asked. “Then you’ll tell me everything.”

He indicated the sofa. I sat. He pulled up one of the chairs and sat directly in front of me, leaning forward to look me in the eye, as if he could tell when I was leaving something out by studying my pupils up close. I had been grilled by the police before. At least that experience had prepared me for this.

“The school was having a dance—” I said.

“I know,” he cut in.

“You told me to tell you everything,” I snapped. “So are you going to listen or are you going to tell me what you already know?”

Stephen put up his hands, conceding the point.

“Go on,” he said.

“We were having a dance,” I said again. “And we were . . . dancing. Everything was fine. Then he appeared. He was just there . . .”

“He?”

“The man, the guy. The Ripper.” Saying “the Ripper” made me queasy. I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. “He stood right in front of me. I mean . . . I could feel him. I could feel something. He told me to come outside with him . . . I didn’t want to, but . . .”

Only now did it occur to me what might have happened if I hadn’t gone. It was possible that he would have just walked away, that Boo would be fine right now. It was equally possible that he would have shoved a knife directly into Jazza’s neck. And now that I had a chance to run over the possibilities, I felt myself begin to quake.

“He asked me if I knew where we’d met. I thought it was at school, but he said we met at the Flowers and Archers on the night of the second murder—”

“You were at the Flowers and Archers on the night of the second murder?”

“My . . . friend. Jerome. He wanted to go. We just went to the street, not to the pub. You couldn’t get near the pub.”

“I was there,” Stephen said. “And you’re saying he was too?”

“That’s what he said. He said we met there, but I don’t remember him.”

“But he remembered you,” Stephen said. “So you must have reacted to him in some way. Even just looked at him, moved around him. He knew you could see him.”

“Well, yeah. He knows I can see him. He knows I have it. This thing. That we do. Because he had it too.”

“He had the sight?”

Something on Stephen beeped. He slapped his pockets until he found his phone, then read a message. He grabbed the remote and switched on the television. The familiar red BBC logo lit up the room.

The newscaster was standing outside on the street bathed in the glow coming from dozens of cameras and their lighting equipment.

“. . . a very strange evening here at the Ten Bells, where the international Ripper conference was held this evening. Conference organizer Richard Eakles had just started his presentation when witnesses say there was a power cut. Eakles claims that while the room was in darkness, someone pushed him up against the board and wrote a message . . .”

The image cut to a picture of the whiteboard, the words written in all caps, in a firm hand. THE NAME OF THE STAR IS WHAT YOU FEAR.

“The meaning of the message is unclear,” the newscaster went on, “but some people have noted that the quote is similar to one from the Bible . . .”

“That’s from the book of Revelation,” I said. “Our local seafood place puts up quotes from the book of Revelation every week. That’s why we call it Scary Seafood. It’s a quote about the third angel that comes at the end of the world. Something about the star being Wormwood.”

There were piles of books along the walls. Stephen scanned through these for a moment, finally finding one he wanted in a large pile. He managed to extract it, but five or six books on top of it came tumbling down. He ignored this and started flipping through the onionskin pages.

“Where, where, where . . . here. ‘And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as if it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; and the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.’”

On the news, they were back in the studio, and the newscaster was talking to a guest.

“. . . most people here feel that this incident was some kind of stunt, but some concerns have been raised that the real Ripper did somehow manage to leave this message. And if he did, it could have some serious implications. Sir Guy, what do you make of this?”

“Well,” the guest said, “I don’t think we can rule this out as a threat of terrorism. The Bible quote clearly indicates poisoned water. I think we would be remiss if we didn’t consider the possibility that this entire incident has been a form of terrorist attack, designed to cause London to . . .”

Stephen turned off the television, and the room went quiet.

“Right,” he said, after a moment. He left the room and went down the hall. He returned with some clothes and a rough red towel. “You can change into these. They’ll be more comfortable.”

Their bathroom was a pretty no-frills place, just two toothbrushes, two towels, two razors. I scrubbed my skin with a bar of hand soap, turning the makeup to a gray runny mess that stung my eyes and took ten minutes to rinse off. I left big gray streaks all over the towels. When I looked at myself in the mirror, my skin was pale and raw, my eyes were red, and my hair was wet and streaked with makeup and soap. The sight of my reflection almost brought me to tears for some reason. I had to sit on the edge of the bathtub and take a few deep breaths. Then I stripped off the costume and picked up the things Stephen had given me. One turned out to be a pair of sweatpants that said ETON down the leg. The lettering had been broken up from lots of washings and wearings; the words were cracked. Eton was a name I knew. There was also an oversized and overwashed polo-neck shirt from some event called the Wallingford Regatta. Stephen was well over six foot, and I just about made it to five foot four, so I had to roll up the cuffs of the sweats in order to walk.

As I picked up my clothes, I felt my phone in my pocket. I removed it and found that I had several messages from Jazza and Jerome, wanting to know if I was all right. I would answer them later. When I emerged, Stephen was in the kitchen, staring at the kettle as it boiled. He was staring at it so intently, in fact, I wondered if he wasn’t controlling the boil with his mind.

“I’m making tea,” he said, keeping his gaze on the kettle.

The kitchen was as plain as everything else in the apartment, but the appliances that were built in were high quality—all stainless steel and sleek. The counters were made of a sparkling granite, and the cabinets were smoked glass. The surroundings didn’t match the small card table that served as a dining table, or the plastic folding chairs, or the mismatched mugs.

“I spoke to someone at the hospital,” he said. “She’s awake. They’re x-raying her now. She seems to have several broken bones. They’re not sure of the extent of it, but she’s awake. That’s something.”

I took a seat at the table and pulled my feet up onto the chair. The kettle rumbled and clicked off. He dropped two tea bags into mugs.

“This is a nice place,” I said, just to make it less quiet.

“We got it at a steep discount.” He brought the mugs over to the table. Mine had a chip on the rim. “We could never afford to live around here, but . . . there was another inhabitant who was giving all the other tenants trouble. No one wanted to live here. We sorted it out.”

“A ghost?”

He nodded.

I wrapped my arms around my legs and placed my forehead on my knees.

“You’re the only police looking for the real Ripper, right?” I asked. “Because the regular police can’t see him. What if you can’t stop him?”

“We can,” he said. He set a box of shelf-stable milk in front of me, punctuating his remark. He had said all he was going to say about that. We sat in silence for a few moments, looking at our tea but neither of us drinking it. We just let it steep, darker and darker, like our thoughts. The kitchen wasn’t very well lit, so there was a closeness—a gloom around us.

“What happened to you?” I asked. “To make you like this?”

He tapped his mug with his spoon, considering his answer.

“Boating accident. At school.”

“Eton,” I said, pointing at the leg of the pants. “That’s where you went?”

“Yes.”

“And how long have you been . . . this? A policeman, or whatever you are?”

“Two years.”

Stephen removed the tea bag and set it on a lid from a takeout container. He seemed to be weighing something in his mind. He took a long breath and exhaled loudly.

“Everyone’s always known that London is full of ghosts,” he said. “It’s a particularly haunted city. And in that spirit of organizing things and controlling the empire, it was decided—very quietly—that something needed to be done, some kind of watch needed to be kept. But belief in ghosts, and science, and law and order, these things didn’t really go together. Back in 1882, a group of prominent scientists founded the Society for Psychical Research, probably the most respectable and serious attempt to study the subject of the afterlife. This was right in the middle of the development of the police force and the security service. The police system itself isn’t that old. The London Metropolitan Police was founded in 1829, and the Security Services—which is MI5 and things like that—in 1909. So in 1919, with the help of the Society for Psychical Research, the Shades were born.”

“The Shades?”

“It’s another word for ghosts. MI5 are called the spooks, and we were a lot smaller and stranger. A shady little branch. I think they used to call us Scotland Graveyard as well. Anyway, we were around for years. Very secret. Never very large. But in the Thatcher years . . . someone got wind of the group and didn’t like it. I don’t know what happened . . . something political. But they shut it down in the early nineties. Two years ago, they decided to start it up again. They found me. I was the first one.”

“How did they find you?”

“It’s complicated,” he said. “And classified.”

“So, are you a cop? A real one?”

“I am,” he said. “I was trained. The uniform is real. The car was issued to me.”

There was a jingle of keys in the door, and Callum entered, wearing a London Tube uniform.

“What’s going on?” he asked. “I got your message.”

“There’s been an accident,” Stephen said.

“What sort of accident?”

“Boo—”

“Boo got hit by a car,” I said. “The Ripper came after me. Boo tried to help, and he threw her in front of a car.”

For a moment, Callum couldn’t speak. He leaned against the counter and put his hand to his forehead.

“Is she—”

“She’s hurt,” Stephen said, “but she’s alive. I had to get Rory away from the scene.”

“Alive? Conscious alive? How alive?”

“She wasn’t conscious at the scene,” Stephen said.

Callum just stared at me.

“It’s not her fault,” Stephen said.

“I know that,” Callum replied, but he wasn’t acting like he knew that. “Please tell me she got him. Please tell me that. Please let that be the upshot of all this . . .”

“It sounds like she tried,” Stephen said. “But no.”

“It was a mistake to send her in alone,” Callum snapped. “I told you it was a mistake. I told you we should have just stayed at the school.”

“We needed to investigate—”

“Investigate what? What exactly have we come up with so far?”

“He spoke to Rory,” Stephen said, his voice rising. “We learned a few things. We learned he had the sight when he was alive. That’s probably why he’s been trailing Rory. That’s probably why he killed at Wexford. He found someone who could see him, who could hear him.”

“Oh, good,” Callum said. “Well, then. Sounds like we’ve solved it.”

“Callum!” Stephen’s voice went deep when he yelled. I could feel the sonic boom in my stomach. “You aren’t helping. So either stop it now or go outside and walk it off.”

For a moment, I thought they were going to have a fight—a real, physical one. Callum stood up, straightened, and stormed out of the room. I heard a door slam somewhere else in the apartment.

“Sorry,” Stephen said quietly. “He’ll calm down in a moment.”

I could hear things being thrown around in the other room. Then the door opened again and Callum joined us, rattling the table and spilling our tea with the force of sitting down.

“So what do we know?” he asked.

“Someone is clearing up the red tape. He’ll tell me when it’s all right for me to take Rory back to Wexford. Until then, we should stay here with her.”

“We should be out there, dealing with him.”

“I’d like that too,” Stephen said, “but we have no idea where he’s gone. But in the meantime, we can work with what he’s said this evening. He’s been communicating.”

Stephen quickly brought Callum up to speed on the various messages while I drank some tea and kept my head down. I was a little frightened of both of them at the moment. Boo was hurt because of me.

“There was something written on a wall after one of the Ripper killings in 1888,” Stephen said. “After the fourth murder—a bit of anti-Semitic graffiti. Most people think it was a false lead, that it wasn’t written by the Ripper at all—or if it was, it was probably written to lead the police down the wrong path. This message feels wrong . . .”

“Maybe he just wanted to turn up at that Rippercon thing,” Callum said. “Do a signing for the fans.”

“Possibly,” Stephen said. “Everything he’s done so far has been about attracting an audience. The very act of imitating Jack the Ripper is an attempt to get attention and cause fear. He commits murders in full view of CCTV cameras. He sent a message to the BBC to be read aloud on television. Tonight, he pulled Rory aside. And then he wrote a message right in front of half the world’s press, directing us to a phrase from the Bible. It’s all been very, very specific and theatrical.”

“But everyone’s going to think this Richard Eakles guy wrote that,” Callum said. “Apart from us, no one’s going to believe his story that an invisible man knocked him aside to write some weird, possibly Bible-related message. At least the one about Rory was clear.”

“What one about Rory?” I said.

Callum backed away from the table a little and played with the edge of the plastic tablecloth. Stephen exhaled long and slow.

“There’s one part of this we haven’t mentioned,” Stephen said, staring at Callum. “We didn’t want you to be unduly alarmed. It’s all under control—”

“What message about Rory?” I said again.

“The James Goode letter,” he said. “There was one final sentence that confirmed in our minds that what you had seen was real. It wasn’t read on the air. It said . . . I look forward to visiting the one with the sight to know me and plucking out her eyes.”

Both of them remained silent while I took this in. I stared into the depths of the teacup. I was from Louisiana. Bénouville, Louisiana. Not from here. I was from the land of hot weather and storms and big box stores, of freaks and crawfish and unstable McMansions. Home. I needed home.

“You are the only lead,” Stephen said. “Every other avenue has been tried. The paper and the package that was sent to the BBC . . . analyzed over and over. Paper and box and wrapping from Ryman’s stationers—one of thousands they sell every year. Not particularly helpful, as he obviously didn’t buy it—an invisible man can’t walk into a shop and buy a box—so we couldn’t trace it at the point of sale. CCTV turned up nothing, as is now well-known. No physical evidence at any crime scene to tie back to the killer—again, obvious to us, baffling to the lab. We only had you. From you, we at least knew he wasn’t the original Jack the Ripper, because of his appearance . . .”

I think he saw that none of this was helping, so he shut up.

“The plan is simple,” he said. “You stay at Wexford, and we stay near you. Very near you. If he comes anywhere near you—”

“He came near me tonight,” I said.

“So we double our protection,” Stephen said. “It won’t happen again. But now you know, and you have to listen to us, and you have to trust us.”

“What can you do?” I said, my voice shaking. “If he comes near me, what can you do about it?”

Callum opened his mouth to speak, but Stephen shook his head.

“We take care of it,” Stephen said. “The details are covered under the Official Secrets Act. You can be angry. You can be upset. You can be whatever you want. But the truth is, we’re the only people who can keep you safe. And we will keep you safe. It’s not only our job, but now he’s hurt our friend, and that happens to bother us quite a lot.”

“I could go home,” I said.

“Running away won’t help. Going home probably wouldn’t even deter him, if he’s serious. The ghosts we’ve encountered operate basically in the same manner as humans in terms of general locomotion. While most tend to haunt one place, there are plenty that have much larger territories. The Ripper seems comfortable moving around the East End. There’s no reason I can think of that he wouldn’t be able to travel.”

He didn’t sugarcoat it. The bluntness was oddly calming.

“So you stay where we can do something about it,” he went on. “And you try to live your life as normally as you can.”

“Like you two?” I asked.

It was a bit of a low blow, but Callum laughed.

“I think she’s getting it,” he said.

26

IT WAS ALMOST THREE IN THE MORNING WHEN STEPHEN dropped me off at Wexford, but there were lots of lights on in the windows. I saw people looking out as I stepped from the police car.

“For the next few days, Callum and I will be keeping an eye on you,” he said. “One of us will always be around. And remember, you have to say she stepped out into the road and didn’t see the car.”

Claudia threw open the door before Stephen hit the buzzer. I never thought I’d be happy to see her, but there was something reassuring about her indomitable presence. She checked me over with what seemed like genuine concern, then sent me upstairs while she spoke to Stephen. I gave him a final nod of good night from the steps.

Jazza was awake. Every light in our room was on, including my bedside light. The moment I stepped in the door, she sprang up and threw her arms around me.

“Is she okay?”

“I think so,” I said. “Well, she’s awake. She has some broken bones.”

“What happened? You went to the toilet, and you never came back.”

“I was just feeling a little sick,” I said. “I went out for some air. I walked around the block. And . . . she followed me. She was on the phone. I guess she . . . she just didn’t see the car.”

“God, I feel so terrible. All those things I said about her. But she really is sweet. Oh, God, but she really doesn’t pay attention, does she? Are you all right?”

“Fine,” I lied. I mean, I was physically intact, but inside, I was quaking.

“I warmed your cheese for you,” she said, pointing at the radiator.

“I love it when you talk dirty.”

I was in no shape to eat any Cheez Whiz, so I went right to my bureau to get out my pajamas.

“Where did you get those clothes?” Jazza asked.

“Oh . . . they lent them to me.”

I quickly removed the Eton sweats and shoved them into my laundry bag.

“The police lent you clothes from Eton?”

“I guess they had them around or something.”

“Rory . . . you leave the party and Boo follows, then Boo gets hit by a car . . . I don’t know. I don’t want to pry, but . . . what’s going on?”

For just a second, I thought about telling her. I wanted her to know. I imagined all the words coming out of my mouth, the whole ridiculous story.

But I couldn’t do that.

“It’s all just . . . a lot of bad luck.”

Jazza slumped a bit. I wasn’t sure if it was relief or disappointment. Luckily, we didn’t have to talk about this anymore, because there was a knock and pretty much everyone from the hall came in to get the news.

When I closed my eyes that night, two things ran through my mind: the image of Boo on the street, and the Ripper himself.

No one understood. Not my classmates. Not my teachers. Not the police.

Jazza slept. I didn’t.

They probably would have let me skip class the next morning, but there was no point. I’d been in my bed for hours, doing nothing but staring at the ceiling and listening to Jazza breathe and trying to distract myself from the endless, terrifying thoughts. At six, I got up and showered. I was sticky with sweat, a sweat that had nothing to do with being hot and everything to do with being awake so long. I yanked my uniform from the end of the bed, pulled a shirt from a hanger. I couldn’t bother putting my hair up, or even brushing it. I just smacked it down with my hands.

I skipped breakfast and went right to art history. No one hid their interest when I walked into the room. I’m not sure if it was the news about Boo or my general appearance. At home, people would have asked. People would have been crawling all over me for information. At Wexford, they seemed to extract what they wanted to know by covert staring.

Mark, a Wexford outsider, was oblivious to the drama of the night before. “Today,” he said cheerfully, “I thought we’d cover something topical. We’re going to talk about depictions of violence in art. And where I’d like to start is by taking a look at an artist called Walter Sickert. Sickert was an English impressionist who painted urban scenes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sickert is often brought up when discussing Jack the Ripper. There are a number of reasons for this . . .”

I rubbed my head. There was no escaping the Ripper. He was everywhere.

“Sickert was obsessed with the Jack the Ripper crimes. He believed he had rented a room formerly occupied by Jack the Ripper, and he made a painting of it entitled Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom. Some people even believe that Sickert was Jack the Ripper, but I’m not sure those claims have much to do with reality.”

A painting appeared on the screen. It was a dark room, a bed in the middle. Plain, brooding, dark.

“Another reason,” Mark said, “was the fact that in 1908, Sickert painted a series of paintings based on a real-life murder, the Camden Town Murder. The murder had taken place the year before, and the scene was similar to that of the last murder victim in the Jack the Ripper murders, Mary Kelly—certainly in the setting.”

A click. A new painting. A woman lying on a bed, naked, her head turned away. A man sitting on the edge of the bed, mourning over what he had done.

“Art of a murder scene,” Mark said. “Death is a common theme in painting. The Crucifixion has been painted thousands of times. The executions of kings. The killings of saints. But this painting is more about the murderer than the victim. It even encourages us to feel mercy for him. This painting from the series is called What Shall We Do for the Rent ?”

Mark went on, telling us all about English impressionists and the brushstrokes and the light. I just kept staring straight ahead at the still figure on the bed—the shaded, almost forgotten figure of the woman.

I didn’t have any mercy for the killer.

An hour and a half into class, we had a bathroom break. I was the first one out the door.

“I’m not going back in there,” I said to Jerome. “I don’t know if you can . . . prefect-arrest me or something. But I’m not going back.”

“I’m not going to prefect-arrest you,” he said. “But I should walk you back to your building. I’ll tell Mark you were ill.”

So Jerome walked me the thirty or so feet back to Hawthorne. We had just about reached the door when he stopped.

“Only a few more days,” he said. “It’s almost over.”

Jerome hesitated, then put his hand on the side of my head, leaned down, and kissed me.

When I looked up, I just caught sight of Stephen. He was sitting on a bench in the square, pretending to read. He wore a sweater and jeans and a scarf, no uniform. He immediately removed and played with his glasses, turning away from the sight of the kissing. But he had seen it, and that felt weird. I stepped away from Jerome.

“Thanks,” I said. I meant for the walk back to the building, but it sounded like I meant the kiss.

“Did you see the thing on the news?” Jerome asked. “About the message? How everyone thinks it’s from the Bible, and it might be about terrorism? I don’t think it is—neither do any of the people on the Ripper boards. The name of the star . . . it’s not from the Bible—he means the name Jack the Ripper. That’s the name of the Star.”

“What?”

“Jack the Ripper never called himself Jack the Ripper. The name came from a letter sent to the Central News Agency. It was a hoax, and almost definitely written by a reporter from the Star newspaper. That was the paper that made the Ripper famous. The whole thing was kind of a media creation. When he says ‘the name of the star is what you fear,’ he means it—everyone’s afraid of this idea of the Ripper, this thing that gets bigger and bigger because of the news. And he’s the star of the show, right? It’s a joke. It’s a sick one, but it’s a joke. It’s bad, but . . . it’s not terrorism or anything. At least, I don’t think so. If that helps.”

He raised his hand and walked back toward the classroom building. I had nowhere to be. I’d just ditched my only Saturday obligation, and everyone else was in class. All was quiet in Wexford’s little square of London. I could hear various instruments being played in the music rooms. Jazza’s cello was certainly among them, but I couldn’t pick it out of the general noise.

I walked away from school and to the main shopping road, which was crowded with people out doing Saturday errands. I went into our local coffee shop, for lack of any better destination, and stood in the stupidly long line and ordered myself the first drink that came to mind. There were no tables to sit at, so I leaned at the bar by the window. Stephen came in and stood next to me.

“I heard what your friend said.”

“Hi,” I replied.

“It makes quite a bit of sense, actually. I should have thought of that. The Star newspaper. He’s right. The name of the star is what you fear . . . People are scared of the name Jack the Ripper. He’s not talking about the Bible at all. He’s laughing at everyone for all the attention he’s getting. He’s laughing at the Ripperologists, the police, the media . . .”

I looked out at the street—what I’d come to know as a typical one in London. Most of the buildings very low, colorful shop fronts, lots of advertisements for cheap phones and good deals on drinks. The occasional red double-decker bus going by. The more than occasional tourist with a map, a camera, and one of those Jack the Ripper top hats they were selling at the souvenir stalls.

“But Callum had a good point last night,” Stephen added. “We’re the only people who know Richard Eakles didn’t write that message on the board. I feel like . . . I feel like I’m being played with. Personally.”

“What about Jo?” I asked. “Someone should tell her what happened.”

The change in topic threw him.

“What?”

“Jo,” I said again, “is Boo’s best friend.”

“Oh. Of course.” He scratched his head. “Yes. Of course.”

“So I want to go and talk to her.”

“I suppose that’s fine,” he said. “Though I don’t have the car with me. I don’t drive it when I’m not in uniform.”

We took the Tube together. Stephen didn’t say much, and the trip wasn’t long from Wexford. We found Jo down the street from the playground where I’d first seen her. She was wandering along, picking up trash.

“I’ll let you . . . ,” Stephen said. “Perhaps you should . . .”

It was the first time I’d seen him unsure of what to do.

“I’ll do it,” I said.

“I’ll wait right here.”

I came up behind Jo. She didn’t turn. I guess she was used to people being close to her, or just going through her.

“Hi,” I said. “It’s me. Rory. You remember . . . from the other day?”

She turned in surprise.

“Of course!” Jo said. “Feeling better? That must have been a right old shock.”

“I’m fine,” I said, “but Boo . . .”

I stopped talking for a moment as a woman went by, pushing a stroller. She was so unbearably slow. I wanted to come up behind her and shove her along so I could continue talking. Jo stopped and let her get some distance on us.

“She was hit by a car,” I said.

“Is she all right?”

“She’s alive,” I said. “Hurt. She’s in the hospital. The Ripper did this to her. He came after me, and Boo protected me. That’s how she got hit. He threw her in front of a car. I just thought . . . someone should tell you.”

A lot of people, when they hear bad news, they take a deep breath, or they hyperventilate. Jo didn’t do any of these things, because Jo didn’t breathe. She bent down and picked up a used coffee cup. It seemed to take all her strength, so I took it from her and carried it the three feet to the trash can.

“You needn’t do that,” she said. “I can carry those. Sandwich wrappers, coffee cups, aluminum cans. I can lift them. One day, I saw a girl sitting at the café just up the road. She set her purse down next to her. A man came by and took it. She had no idea. I happened to be walking past, and I reached over and snatched it back from him and set it next to her. Now, that was hard, but I did it. She was never the wiser, but it gave him a good fright. This is my street. I keep it clean and safe.”

She didn’t show much emotion, but I got the sense that she dealt with her shock by keeping busy or talking. She needed someone to talk to.

“Did you live here?” I asked.

“No. I died right over there. Do you see that block of flats?” She pointed at a modern apartment building. “Those are quite new. Back in my day, this was a row of houses. That’s where it happened. I didn’t live here in my life, but after that, it became my home. Strange impulse, to stay where you died. I don’t quite know why I do it . . .”

“What happened?” I asked. “If that’s okay to ask.”

“Oh, that’s no bother,” she said almost cheerfully. “Luftwaffe raid. Tenth of May, 1941. That was the last big night of the Blitz. That was the night the Germans hit St. James’s Palace and the Houses of Parliament. I worked in communications, sending coded messages and reports on what was going on in London. We had a small telegraph office located quite near here. A bomb hit the end of the road and destroyed everything along this street, including most of these houses. I came out after the bombs fell. You could hear survivors under the rubble. I was helping get a little girl out from under a pile of the stuff when the rest of her house fell on us both. And that was it, really. Thirteen hundred people died that night. I was just one of them.”

It was all very matter-of-fact.

“When did you know you were a ghost?”

“Oh, immediately,” she said. “One moment I was helping the girl out of the rubble—the next, I was looking down at the rubble and watching someone lift me out of it, and it was abundantly clear that I was dead. It was a shock, of course. The bombing raids had stopped for a while, but there was so much destruction all around . . . there was so much to do. I would sometimes find someone who had been gravely injured, and they could see me, and I would sit and talk to them. I’d pick little things out of the rubble—photographs, things like that. I was still useful. I just refused to slip away. At first, it was difficult. For the longest time, weeks, I was too weak to do anything except linger on the spot where I died. I had no form that I could see. But I managed to pull myself away from the rubble. I suppose I made myself, really. You mustn’t let these kinds of things get in your way. It’s as Prime Minister Churchill said: ‘Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty.’ A wonderful speech. He gave it after my death, but it was quoted all over. I’ve always gone by those words. They’ve gotten me through many years.”

Jo’s literal “never say die” attitude was somewhat overwhelming, but one thing was clear—she knew about fear. She knew what it felt like and how to deal with it.

“I’m afraid,” I said. “I’m really afraid. The Ripper is . . . he wants me.”

Now that I’d said it, it felt true and real. Jo faced me and looked me in the eye.

“Jack the Ripper was just a man. He wasn’t magic. Even Hitler was just a man. This Ripper is nothing more than that.”

“He’s a ghost,” I corrected her. “An incredibly powerful ghost.”

“But ghosts are just people. We just seem more frightening, I suppose, because we represent something unknown. We can’t usually be seen. We’re not supposed to be here. And there are good people who can catch this Ripper.”

“I know,” I said, “but . . . they’re all . . . really young. Like me.”

“Who do you think goes into the army? Young people. This entire nation was defended by young people. Young people on the battlefield. Young people in airplanes. Young people in the headquarters, breaking codes. The number of people I knew who lied to sign up at fifteen and sixteen . . .”

She trailed off, watching a guy lingering around a bike that was clearly not his. She smoothed out the jacket of her uniform, though it wasn’t wrinkled. It probably couldn’t wrinkle.

“Thank you for letting me know,” she said. “Not everyone considers me—worth informing. You’re like Boo, very conscientious. She’s a good girl. A bit of an ongoing project, but a good girl. Now I should go and see to that bicycle.”

Jo marched across the street, barely checking to see if cars were coming her way. Halfway across, in the path of a tiny sportscar, she turned back.

“Fear can’t hurt you,” she said. “When it washes over you, give it no power. It’s a snake with no venom. Remember that. That knowledge can save you.”

With just an inch or so to spare, she stepped out of the path of the car and continued on her way.

27

I CAN BARELY REMEMBER WHAT I DID FOR THE NEXT few days. Classes were canceled all week. Callum and Stephen took turns keeping watch. And the days ticked by. November 4, November 5, November 6 . . . The news kept track even if I didn’t.

On Wednesday, the seventh of November, I woke around five in the morning. My brain had suddenly clicked back on, and my heart was racing. I sat up and looked around the dark room, examining every formation. That was my nightstand next to my bed. There was my bureau. There was the wardrobe door, slightly open, but not enough for someone to hide behind. There was Jazza, asleep in her bed. I grabbed my hockey stick and stabbed around under my bed, but felt nothing. Then I realized that that wasn’t a very good test for a ghost, so I stood up on the bed and jumped out as quietly as I could, then got down on the floor and looked underneath. No one was there. Jazza shifted, but she didn’t wake.

I took my robe and bath basket and walked quietly down to the bathroom, where I examined every stall and every cubicle before taking my shower, and even then, I kept the curtain partway open. I didn’t care if anyone walked in.

I went to breakfast as soon as it opened, long before Jazza was out of bed. I saw Callum standing on the corner, over by the refectory. He was wearing a dark blue London Underground suit with an orange Day-Glo vest over the jacket, and he had a clipboard. If he had planned on trying to blend in, that wasn’t really working.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Pretending to survey traffic patterns for a new bus route. I have a clipboard and everything.”

“Did you guys make that up?”

“Course we made it up,” he said. “It was the only thing we could think of to justify my standing in front of a school all day, and the clipboard was the only prop we had. And you shouldn’t be seen talking to me, so keep moving.”

He turned back to his clipboard, ending the conversation. I hurried away from him, feeling stupid.

I was the only person at breakfast at that hour. I tried to eat my normal plate of sausages but could only get down some juice and the bitter, lava-hot coffee. For entertainment, I read the brass plaques on the wall—names of former students and their various achievements. I looked at the stained-glass image of the lamb in the window above me, but that only reminded me that lambs are famous for being led to slaughter, or sometimes hanging out with lions in ill-advised relationships.

I had to know what they could do to stop the Ripper. I had to find out, or I would go insane. I got up, shoved my tray into the rack, and went back outside and right up to Callum.

“I just said—”

“I want to see what you do,” I said.

“You’re looking at it.”

“No, I mean . . . I want to see how you take care of them.”

He kicked at the cobbles.

“I can’t do that,” he said.

“So how am I supposed to stay sane?” I asked. “Don’t you think I deserve to know what can be done? I’m defenseless. Show me.”

“Do you have any idea how many forms I’ve had to sign saying that I’d never talk about this?”

“So you’d rather stand around here with a clipboard all day? If you don’t show me, I will stand here and stare at you. I will follow you. I will do everything you don’t want me to do. I am giving you no choice.”

The corner of Callum’s mouth twitched slightly. “No choice?” he said.

“You have no idea how reckless I can be.”

He looked around, up and down the street, toward the square. Then he walked away for a few moments and made a call.

“Here’s the agreement,” he said when he walked back to me. “You don’t tell anyone. Not Stephen. Definitely not Boo. No one.”

“This never happened. I wasn’t here.”

“And it stays that way. I got a call from Bethnal Green station earlier. They’re having a problem there. Come on, then.”

We walked to Liverpool Street station. Along the way, I also counted the cameras—thirty-six that I saw, and probably loads more I didn’t. Cameras attached to the corners of buildings, to traffic lights, in deep window wells and perched high on stone ledges, sharing poles with streetlights . . . so many cameras, and not one of them would do the slightest bit of good when it came to the Ripper.

At Liverpool Street, he flashed a badge to get into the station, and I tapped my Oyster card on the reader. By the time I was going through the gate, he was halfway down the escalator, and I had to hurry to keep pace with him.

“What do they think you do, exactly?” I asked when we got on the train.

“I’m officially employed by the London Underground. They think I’m an engineer. That’s what my file says, anyway. It also says I’m twenty-five.”

“Are you?”

“No. I’m twenty.”

“So what do they do when they figure out you can’t . . . engineer?”

“People get my name and number from other station managers, and they only call me when things are . . . not right. I show up, and the problem goes away. A lot of people, in my experience, really don’t want to know the details. If they knew how many of their problems I fix, how many trains I keep on time . . . I’m probably the most important employee they have.”

“And the most humble,” I added.

“Humility is overrated.” He smiled. “It’s a big area to cover. There’s a whole world down here. The Tube itself has about two hundred and fifty miles of track, but the majority of what I do concerns the parts that are actually underground, about one hundred and twelve miles of functional track, plus all the unused tunnels and service tunnels.”

The train whizzed along. All I could see out of the windows was dark, and occasionally the suggestion of the brick walls of the tunnel around us.

“This station we’re going to is one I work at a lot. They know me. It was the site of the largest loss of life in any Tube station, anywhere on the network. It was used as an air raid shelter during the war. One night, they were testing antiaircraft weapons near here—a secret test. The people heard what sounded like an air raid and ran like hell for this station. Someone tripped and fell on the stairs, and soon hundreds of people were crushed in the stairwell. A hundred and seventy-three people died, and a lot of them seem to have stuck around.”

With that, the recorded voice announced that we were pulling into Bethnal Green. When we got off, the station was extremely quiet. A man with a large belly and a face full of broken capillaries was waiting on the platform.

“All right, Mitchell,” he said with a nod. “Who’s she?”

“In training. She’ll stay on the platform. What’s the problem?”

“Eastbound track. They get to the train stop. Then they stop moving, no matter how fast they’re going.”

Callum nodded, like he knew exactly what this meant.

“All right. Normal rules apply.”

“Right.”

The man walked off, leaving us.

“What are the normal rules?” I asked.

“He walks away and has a tea break and doesn’t ask any questions.”

Callum set his bag down on the station platform and removed his jacket, then jumped up high, throwing the jacket over the CCTV camera pointed at the end of the track.

“Do the same with your coat to the one down there,” he said, pointing me to a camera toward the middle of the platform.

I took off my coat and got under the camera. It was up pretty high, but I managed to get my coat over it after a few throws. Callum went to the far end of the platform, where there was a safety gate about chest high. It was loaded down with safety signs. Everything about this gate said, “No. Don’t. Go back. Wrong. Death is certain beyond this point.” Callum opened the gate, which gave access to a few steps that led down to the track level.

“So,” Callum said, “the train stops are malfunctioning. The train stops are the controls at the beginning and middle of the track at every Tube station. If a train approaches at anything faster than ten miles an hour, the switch is tripped, and the train stops automatically. Now, this is really important. Look down. How many rails do you see?”

I looked down. I saw three rails—two of track, and a third, heavier one running through the middle. They were all resting on blocks of some kind, about two feet off the ground.

“Three,” I said.

“Okay. Best bet, don’t step on any of them. But the one you really can’t step on is that third one, because you’ll fry. The trick is you walk in the space between the rails. It’s wider on this side. Walk really, really carefully. It’s not complicated, but if you mess up, you’ll die, so pay attention. You wanted to learn. This is how you learn.”

Callum smiled slyly. I wasn’t sure if he was joking. I decided not to ask. I followed him down the steps. The entrance to the Tube tunnel was in front of us—a semicircle of light black that led into an unknown pitch-black. Callum put a flashlight into my hand.

“Keep it pointed forward and down. Walk slow and steady and don’t jump if you see a rat. They’ll run from you, don’t worry.”

I did as he said, trying to act totally unconcerned about the electric rail or the rats or the dark. Once in the tunnel, the temperature immediately dropped a few degrees. About twenty feet in, there was a man. He was right between the rail and the sloping brick wall of the tunnel. He wore a rough work shirt and boots, loose gray flannel pants, no coat.

“I hate this station,” Callum said under his breath.

When I shined my light directly onto the man, he was harder to see. He was so pale and fragile, he was like a trick of the light, a kind of visible sadness in the dark of the tunnel.

“Listen, mate,” Callum said. “I’m really sorry. But you’re going to have to stop messing with that switch. Just stay away from it, all right?”

“My family . . . ,” the man said.

“A lot of times,” Callum said, never taking his eyes off the man, “they don’t even mean to do the things they do. Their presence just interferes with the electronics. I doubt he even knows he’s been tripping the switch. You didn’t even mean to do that, did you?”

“My family . . .”

“Poor bastard,” Callum said. “All right, Ror. Come closer. Up here.”

There was a shallow lip along the wall of the tunnel that Callum stood on so I could get closer to the man. As I did, the air got palpably colder and more sour. The man’s eyes were milky. He had no pupils. His expression was impossibly sad.

Callum took the flashlight from my hand and replaced it with his cell phone. He had the same old model as Boo.

“Here’s what I want you to do,” he said. “Press down on the numbers one and nine. Press hard, and keep pressing.”

“What?”

“Just do it. Go on. You have to be within a foot or so.”

I positioned my fingers on the one and nine and was about to press when Callum reached over and moved my arms forward, so that my hands and the phone accidentally went right through the man’s rib cage. I just felt the slightest sensation as I broke through him, like I’d put my fist through an inflated paper bag. This made me flinch for a second, but the man hardly seemed to notice that I had inserted myself into his chest cavity.

“Good,” Callum said. “Now press, both at once, hard!”

I tightened my grip, digging my nails into the number pad. I immediately felt a change in the air around us—there was a very slight but steadily growing warmth, and my hands began to shake.

“Keep holding,” Callum said. “It vibrates a little. Just keep pressing.”

The man looked down at himself, at my hands clasped in a prayerlike position in his chest, shaking, holding the phone with all my might. A second or two later, there was a bright blip, like a lightbulb going out—except it was a huge lightbulb, the size of a person. There was no noise, but there was a light rush of air and a weird, sweet smell that I can only describe as burning flowers and hair.

And he was gone.

28

WE WERE IN A SMALL SQUARE OUTSIDE OF A CHURCH. The vicar was opening the door for the morning service and was unhappy to find me quietly being sick into a crisp pile of fallen leaves. It felt bizarrely good, vomiting in this clean, blowy air. It meant I was alive and not in the tunnel. It meant that smell was out of my nostrils.

“Feel better?” Callum asked when I stood up.

“What did I just do?”

“You took care of the problem.”

“Yeah, but what did I do? Did I just kill someone?”

“You can’t kill a dead person,” Callum said. “Makes no sense.”

I made my way over to a stone bench and collapsed onto it, turning my face up to get as much of the dampness as I could.

“But I just did something. He . . . exploded. Or something. What happened to him?”

“We have no idea,” Callum said. “They just go away. You wanted to know. Now you know.”

“What I know is that you fight ghosts with phones.”

“It’s called a terminus,” he said.

The vicar was staring at us from the top of the steps. Though the throwing up had made me a little shaky, every step brought some strength back. Whatever I had expelled, I was glad it was gone.

“Stephen told me he was in a boating accident,” I said. “What happened to you?”

Callum leaned back and stretched out his legs.

“We had just moved here from Manchester. My parents had split up a year before, and we were moving around a lot, house to house. My mum got a job down here, and we moved to Mile End. I was a good footballer. I was on track to go professional. I know a lot of people say things like that, but I really was. I was in training. I’d been scouted. A few more years, they figured, and I’d be up for it. Football was all I had and all I did. No matter where we went, my mum always saw to it that I had my training. So it was December. It was pissing down rain, freezing. The buses weren’t running properly. A kid I went to school with had showed me this shortcut through this estate they were ripping down. You weren’t supposed to go in there. They had fencing all around it and warning signs, but that wasn’t stopping anyone.”

“Estate? Like a mansion?”

“No, no,” he said. “An estate is public housing. You call them projects or something like that. Some of them are rough places. This one was one of the worst—it had been ripped apart, was stinking, falling to pieces, completely dangerous in every way. So they moved everyone out and shut it down. They were building a block of fancy new flats in its place. So in I go, jogging through, no problem. Good shortcut home. And then . . . I see the wire. Severed. Live. On the ground. Sending out sparks. And here I was, standing in this lake-sized puddle not ten feet away from it. I saw the thing come off the ground. I saw it lift up and move. And then it bullwhipped into the water, and I felt the first shock hit . . . and then, I saw him. He had long hair and this weird yellow shirt with a big collar, some brown sleeveless jumper over it, bell-bottoms, and these shoes . . . red-and-white ones, with two-inch soles. He was like no one I’d ever seen before, right out of the seventies. He hadn’t been there a second ago, but I could see that he was holding the wire and he was laughing. And then I realized that my legs were shaking. I fell to my knees. He kind of teased the wire over the water, and I was saying, ‘No, no, don’t.’ He just kept laughing. I tried to move, but I fell into the water on my face. After that, I can’t remember. I survived, of course. The whole thing was caught on CCTV, so someone in security saw it all happen. Of course, what they saw was me trespassing and then having some kind of seizure and falling into the water I was standing in. They found the wire when they got there, of course, and realized I’d been electrocuted. I told them about the other kid, but when they looked at the footage, I was alone. And that was the beginning . . .”

Callum looked up at the church spire. The vicar had given up his staring and left us alone.

“Something happened to me in that water,” he said. “Something happened to my legs. Because after that day, I couldn’t run right. I couldn’t kick right. I lost all my nerve. The only thing I could do, play football, was taken from me. But then a few weeks later, a man showed up at my door to ask me if I wanted a job. He already knew everything about me—my family, my football. I needed some convincing it was all real, but then I agreed. First, they sent me off for some training, police stuff mostly. Then I met Stephen. He was in charge. We didn’t get on at first, but he’s all right, Stephen. Once he started training me, it was obvious why they picked him to be in charge.”