The Madness Underneath

“Did he break all the money?” Boo said.

“Possibly. It’s the sort of thing he might do.”

We all crammed into a much-too-small elevator and rode to the fourth floor. Stephen led us down to one of the end apartments. He pulled back a framed photograph of a bridge that hung on the wall near the door and produced a key, which he used to open the door.

The flat was dark. The floor-length curtains were closed. He switched on just one light in the middle of the room. We were in a very tastefully, almost clinically decorated living room. There were two sofas facing each other, and between them, a long and low marble table that contained some books of art and photographs that looked like they had never been opened. There were no signs of life in the place, really. Just perfectly positioned vases and decorative bowls.

Stephen went into the other rooms, and I heard more curtains being closed. Callum, Boo, and I milled around. There was one family photograph, pushed back on an occasional table and mostly obscured by a yellow vase. It showed what was clearly Stephen’s family, and it had been taken in someone’s garden, possibly against their will. They all squinted a bit against the sun. His parents looked about how I expected them to look. His father wore a pinstriped suit, his mother a yellow dress and a very large yellow hat with a wide white band. And there was Stephen’s sister, a girl with a surprisingly wide and open grin. Her hair was chestnut brown, and she was freckled. Her arm was looped through Stephen’s. Stephen looked like he was maybe twelve or thirteen in the picture, a bit thin and very uncomfortable. He towered over his mother and sister and was as tall as his father. Even in this photo, it felt like there was something competitive about this, like his dad was standing as straight as he possibly could so his son wouldn’t reach an inch past him.

“We need to get your head looked at,” Boo said. “That’s going to need some stitches.”

“Head wounds always bleed a lot. We need to keep a low profile. I can stitch it myself if it comes to that.”

“Well, let’s clean it,” Boo said.

“You know how to stitch your own head?” I said.

“There are probably instructions online. How hard could it be?”

While Boo helped Stephen clean the wound, Callum crafted a bandage by tearing an undershirt he found in the bedroom into strips, so the top of Stephen’s head was now mummy-wrapped, with a shock of brown hair coming out of the top. Some blood was already leaching through. We gathered in the living room.

“When you were inside the house,” Stephen said, pulling his notepad from his belt, “I pulled up some basic information on the owner. Her name is Jane Quaint, born Jane Anderson. Legally changed her name in 1972. Aside from working in a shop in Yorkshire around 1968, she has no employment history. She got the house in Chelsea from a brother and sister, twins, named Sidney and Sadie Smithfield-Wyatt.”

“She told me about them,” I said. “She said they had the sight. That they were doing some kind of experiment—that they died doing some kind of experiment.”

“Sidney and Sadie committed suicide together in 1973. That’s all I found at first glance, but we can find out more about them. As for Jane, her record is clean. She volunteers time to many victims’ groups, gives substantial sums to charity. Overall, a model citizen.”

“Who runs a cult,” I said. “She said they were going to defeat death.”

“So these people wanted you because you’re a terminus?” Boo said. “Did they say why, or what they planned on doing?”

“Just defeating death. And, I don’t know, killing everyone I know if I didn’t come with them. They know where my parents are.”

“We’ll get a car on their house,” Stephen said. “Could one of you call Thorpe? Make sure that happens?”

He got up and went to the bedroom. Callum fished the phone out of the coat pocket.

“You would think he’d want to make this call,” Callum said. “He always does the talking when it comes to Thorpe.”

“Maybe he’s finally delegating,” Boo said. Then, turning to me, she explained, “We’ve been working on his control issues.”

“So many issues,” Callum said, going through the phone to find the number.

I got up and followed Stephen. He was staring into the closet at a selection of three largely identical shirts. He had removed his own bloody dress shirt. Stephen had a chest. That should not have been a shock to me, but there it was. It wasn’t as bulky as Callum’s, but it had a shape. And it had hair on it—a thin, dark line of it, right at the top, making a V that thinned out about two-thirds of the way to his waist. He immediately slipped the old shirt on, but left it unbuttoned. There was something goofily gallant about that. Like it mattered if I saw him with his shirt off.

A car alarm went off outside. Stephen tightened the curtains, making sure there was no view of us from outside, though it was hardly possible to close them more than he already had.

“Can you really do all those things you said to Jane?” I asked. “Make cameras turn around when she walks down the street, stuff like that?”

“Maybe half of it. But your parents will be all right, I promise. And so will Charlotte. Our business can be unpredictable, but the police are good at preventing crime and finding kidnap victims. Their house is being turned over as we speak. She’ll be found.”

“Why didn’t you arrest them?”

“Arresting them meant reporting you. And I’d just deliberately crashed into their car. We have to lay low until that mess is taken care of. I wish I could have come up with a more elegant solution, but there was no time. Thorpe already thinks I take too many risks…”

He sat on the end of the bed. I sat next to him. I meant to sit a bit further away, but the way I landed, I was right up against him. I expected him to shift over, but he didn’t.

“I know you’re angry at me,” he said. “About what I said at Dawn’s flat.”

“Whatever,” I said.

“No, not whatever. I want to explain. I don’t want you to think it’s because I think you can’t do it, or that I’m upset that you can do more than I can. It’s not that I don’t think you’re capable…I wasn’t just going to let you sign up for this because your exams weren’t going well and you had nothing else to do.”

He shook his head.

“I didn’t put that the way I wanted to,” he said. “If you joined us, your family could never know what you were doing. Your relationship with them would be severed in many ways. I do this because I have nowhere else to go. My sister was my family, and I barely knew her. I had nothing. I’ve heard you talk about your family, your home. You have somewhere else to go. How would you really feel if you couldn’t go home again?”

“I could go home…”

“No. You couldn’t. Not easily. And everything your family knew about you would be a lie. You would never be able to tell them what was going on in your life. If I enlist you, if people higher up than Thorpe actually realize what you are and what you might be able to do, I don’t think you would just be treated like a member of an agency. You’d be treated like an asset. And assets don’t get to have lives.”

“I never said I wanted to join,” I pointed out. “But if I did, at least I’d be with you guys.”

“And if something happened to us, you’d get whatever sad weirdos they managed to recruit after us. Or you’d have no one. If we were disbanded, this whole part of your life would be a big, blank space. You still have a chance to get out and do something else. I do this because it keeps me sane. I don’t know if I could do anything else. But it’s not easy. A big part of me wishes that I’d been given some other option, but I wasn’t. I’m not saying that’s easy. I’m not even saying that’s what I want. I’m saying you have a chance to have some other kind of life.”

“Maybe I need this life,” I said.

“Has it really gone that well for you so far?”

I shrugged. “I’ve seen worse,” I said.

That got a little smile from him.

“There you go,” I said, elbowing him. “A little smile. I knew you could do it.”

“I’m such a miserable sod.”

“You’re not that bad.”

“I know I am. I don’t want you to end up like me.”

“Trust me,” I said. “I am not going to end up like you.”

His neck was long, and there was just a bit of stubble on it. His mouth, which was so often set in an expressionless straight line, there was a shape to that too. His nose had just a bit of a tiny downward turn. And his eyes, deep set, very tired, were fixed firmly on me.

“Everything is so messed up,” I said. “My parents…I need to call them.”

“That’s not advisable right now. Just wait until we’ve gotten this mess cleared up, at least until morning.”

“Why did I do it? Why did I listen to her?” I hung my head and rubbed my eyes, then pulled myself upright again. “They gave me some drugs. They put it in the food. No wonder the therapy always seemed so intense.”

“Drugs make people suggestible,” Stephen said.

“These people—they’re a cult. I’m telling you. They were talking to me about these El…these mystery things in ancient Greece. Something about Demeter and Persephone and…”

“The Eleusinian Mysteries?” he said.

“That’s the one. Of course you know it.”

“Five years of Latin, four of Greek.”

“God, what am I going to do? Do I go home?”

“We decide nothing tonight, all right? It will all be fine, I promise you. We’ll make it fine.”

He put his arm over my shoulders, which was understandable, because I was upset. But it also seemed very…

I wasn’t sure what it was.

“How can you promise to make it fine?” I asked.

“You’re alive. You’re safe and with us. It’s already fine. The rest is window dressing.”

“You say that.”

“Because it is.”

The hand that rested on my shoulder rubbed it a bit, comfortingly. Then it gave my shoulder a little squeeze. I leaned into him.

Maybe it was that I was broken. Maybe it was just that I was out of my mind. But it occurred to me that I was going to kiss him. The thought just arrived, certain knowledge, delivered from some greater, more knowledgeable place. I was going to kiss him. Stephen would not want to kiss me. He would back up in horror. And yet, I was still going to do it. I reached over, and I put my hand against his chest, then I moved closer. I could feel just the very tips of the gentle stubble on his cheek brushing against my skin.

“Rory,” he said. But it was a quiet protest, and it went nowhere.

For the first few seconds, he didn’t move—he accepted the kiss like you might accept a spoonful of medicine. Then I heard it, a sigh, like he had finally set down a heavy weight.

I was pretty sure we were both kind of terrified, but I was completely sure that we were both doing this. We kissed slowly, very deliberately, coming together and then pulling apart and looking at each other. Then each kiss got longer, and then it didn’t stop. Stephen put his hand just under the edge of my shirt, holding it on the spot where the scar was. Sometimes the skin around the scar got cold—now it was warm. Now it was alive.

“So Thorpe says that—Seriously?”

Callum was in the doorway.

Stephen mumbled what I think was a very obscene word right against my mouth.

“You realize I now owe Boo five pounds?” Callum said. “Boo! I owe you five pounds!”

“What?” Boo yelled. “In the toilet.”

“She’s in the toilet,” Callum explained. “Can you not mention this? She said this would happen. She’s going to lord this over me.”

Stephen and I separated politely. I stared at my shoes, and Stephen buttoned his shirt.

“You were saying about Thorpe?”

“The freaks have cleared out of the house in Chelsea. Thorpe is having people pull records and look at CCTV. No hit on the house in the West Country yet. And someone’s being dispatched to Rory’s parents. Rory’s parents have registered her as missing.”

“Right,” Stephen said. “It sounds like there’s little we can do right now. We should try to rest. Tomorrow could be a very long day.”

Boo had joined us by then.

“What were you yelling?” she asked Callum.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just telling them what Thorpe said.”

“And I said we should try to get some rest,” Stephen replied.

Boo and I were given the bedroom. Neither of us was very tired. We flopped there, staring at the ceiling.

“My life is a mess,” I said.

“Yeah,” Boo agreed. “It is.”

“Stephen says it’s going to be fine.”

“Probably will be.”

She sounded less convinced.

“I broke up with Jerome. I left Jazza…I feel like I should…”

“Stay here and do nothing?” she suggested.

“I’m not going to call. I need to do something. Maybe…maybe I could write them letters? And then send them when it’s okay?”

“That’s all right,” Boo said. “You could do that. But don’t send them until things are fixed.”

So Boo watched TV, and I found some paper in the desk drawer. I’d only ever written a letter once or twice in my life. I kept changing what I wanted to say and starting over. In the end, Boo was asleep, and I had two very short letters.

Jazzy,

You’re mad at me for running away. Running away is stupid. I know. And nothing I can tell you is going to make what I did seem any less awful or nuts, so let me just say this…you’re one of the best friends I’ve ever had. And if I could tell you all the messed up reasons I had to do this, I would. Just try to believe me when I say it was the best idea at the time. And that I miss you. And that I’m sorry I seem like such a freak and a liar and a weirdo. I think you knew all that and were friends with me anyway.

You’re better than I am. You will not fail German. And you’ll see me again, and I’ll try to explain it all.

You can have whatever you want from my side of the room, including my alligator ashtray.

—Rory

Jerome’s was shorter:

Jerome,

It wasn’t you. It was me. I’m sorry. You deserve a better girlfriend, and you’ll find one. And I promise to be jealous and know that it’s all my fault.

I still think you are disgusting. You know what I mean. Maybe someday you’ll come to America and see my town and then you’ll realize what a narrow escape you made.

I crumpled that one up. It was too maudlin, and I didn’t even know if I meant it. Because in my mind, I was still kissing Stephen.

That night, I had a dream I went home. Our house was flooded with sunlight, and all my family was there. Even our cat, Pow Pow, who died three years ago, and my aunt Sal, who died when I was twelve.

I’m home, I kept thinking. But I can’t stay. I need to tell them I can’t stay. So I went to each and every member of my family and started to explain to them the nature of life and love. I can’t remember what I said, but I know it was awesome. I understood everything. The sight—it had given me knowledge as well, and I was able to reassure them all. “We’re going to defeat death,” I said.

I think I knew on some level I was parroting what Jane had said to me earlier, but I meant it. There was no death, which was why Aunt Sal and Pow Pow were there, and that was why it was so sunny. I told them about the sight, and everyone was so happy. Especially Cousin Diane, who went around telling everyone that she’d been right all along with her Healing Angel Ministry. And for some reason my cousin Diane also kept trying to give me some ham the whole time. I was having all of these meaningful conversations, and she kept popping up with this package of lunch meat, trying to force me to take slices of the stuff. So I took them to shut her up and flushed them down the toilet, one by one, and she kept turning up with more. It ruined an otherwise very deep and poignant dream. Everything had been so close to perfect except for all of that sliced ham.

I don’t know what time it was when I felt the shaking.

“I don’t want ham,” I said.

“Rory.”

There was light coming through the window, but not much. It was a weak and diluted sky, and Boo was standing over me. The look on her face was very odd, and she had no ham.

“What?” I asked, snorting awake.

“It’s Stephen.”

“What?”

“I can’t wake him up,” she said.

25

OF THE MANY THINGS THAT HAD HAPPENED TO ME IN those last few weeks, the wait for that ambulance was the most surreal.

It had turned into morning—very early morning from the looks of it, because the sky still had a pale cast. Stephen must have fallen asleep sitting on the sofa. His head was tipped back, one hand holding the makeshift bandage in place, the other hanging limply at his side. A fine coating of stubble had blossomed during the night, shadowing his chin. Without his glasses, without his look of constant worry…he looked happy, almost. There was panic at the edge of everything—in Callum and Boo’s voices, in their eyes, in the air itself.

“He was fine,” Boo said, her voice shaking. “He was fine earlier. I just woke up and came in and both of them were asleep, and I tried to wake them, and…Stephen didn’t wake up.”

“Siren,” Callum said, hurrying to the window. “Hear it?”

I did. It was far off, but coming closer fast.

“I’ll go to the gate,” Boo said. “Let them in. What was that code? Do you need that code? What was it?”

“I think there’s someone out there now,” Callum said. “I see someone. You wait for them by the front door. I’ll find the fire stairs, they’ll never be able to get him into the lift. Rory, stay with him?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I will.”

Then it was just me and Stephen. I grabbed his hand. I pinched his arm.

“Wake up,” I said. “Please wake up. Please.”

He continued to rest there, his breath low and shallow, the rest of him unmoving. A few minutes later a male and female paramedic came clomping up the stairs and into the flat. They went right to work, setting down a heavy box of supplies and a backboard. The man checked Stephen’s neck for a pulse and listened to his chest with a stethoscope.

“What happened to him?” the woman asked. “You found him like this this morning?”

“I found him,” Boo said. “He just didn’t wake up.”

“Does he take drugs? Drink? Any medical conditions?”

“There was a car accident,” Callum said. “He hit his head, but he was fine…”

“When?”

“Last night.”

“Airway clear,” the man said. “Pulse is forty-six. Pupils are uneven.”

The blood pressure cuff went on. I listened to the pump and slow, disturbing hiss of the blood pressure cuff. The EMT ripped it off loudly.

“One eighty over sixty. How long ago did you find him like this?” the woman asked.

“I think, I don’t know…” Boo looked to Callum for confirmation. “Fifteen minutes?”

She moved around Stephen, lifting his eyelids and shining a light into them, then she got on her radio.

“St. Mary’s, I’ve got an unresponsive head trauma, GCS four. Pulse is forty-three and dropping.”

There was an electronic hiss and a moment of silence.

“Team will be on standby,” a voice crackled back.

“What does that mean?” I asked her. “What’s a GCS?”

“Coma scale,” she said.

“Coma scale? Is he in a coma? Is he…”

“Time to move,” the woman said.

They were moving fast, but nothing seemed fast enough. The coffee table had to be moved. Stephen’s neck was cuffed and secured, then he was moved to the board on the floor.

“Count of three. One, two, three…”

They lifted him up and carried him out, managing the stairs expertly. I followed as they carried him down and put him into the ambulance.

Another blur of activity as Stephen was expertly carried out of the apartment we had come to only hours before. He was put in the ambulance and we followed in a cab. Once at the hospital, we had to separate, with the ambulance going in its entrance. We were dropped off on the street by the A&E waiting room. Inside, there were people with bandages, bloody wounds, slings…all the usual emergency room nonsense. Just broken arms and broken noses and Stephen, unconscious, somewhere.

A man at a desk told us someone would come and speak to us and that we had to wait, so we stood in the waiting area, confused, staring between the desk, the television bolted to the wall, and the vending machine full of chocolate bars and bags of crisps.

“Thorpe,” Boo finally said. “We should phone him. I’ll do it. Give me your phone.”

So she did that, and Callum and I continued to stand around, pacing the tiled floor. About a half an hour later, a young, red haired doctor with a carefully trimmed beard came out into the waiting area and asked who was here with Stephen Dene. We got up and hurried over.

“You’re his friends?” he asked. “You found him un- responsive?”

We said that was us.

“We’re going to need to speak to his relatives. Do you have contact information for his parents, or…”

“His parents are dead,” Callum said quickly.

This surprised Boo and I, but we didn’t contradict him.

“I see,” the doctor said. “Is there someone else?”

“His…uncle,” Boo said. “He’s coming. But…what’s going on? Please. We’re the people he’s closest to. Please.”

After a moment of hesitation, the doctor nodded and took us to a small consulting room. “You stated he had been in a motor vehicle accident?” he asked, closing the door.

“Just a knock,” Callum said. “He seemed fine.”

The doctor nodded and leaned back against the door, looking down, as if thinking.

“In this kind of injury, that often happens. It’s called a lucid interval. The injured person seems to have no symptoms. It’s not the severity of the blow as much as how it occurs, which part of the head is hit. Maybe he complained of a headache, nausea?”

“A headache,” Boo said. “But it didn’t seem bad.”

The doctor scratched at his eyebrow. Then he looked at us with the kind of directness that never means something good has happened.

“Stephen has suffered something called an epidural hematoma,” he said. “The blow to the head caused a rupture, and he’s bleeding between the skull and the dura matter. When this happens, pressure is put on the brain. We’ve attempted to relieve this pressure…the thing about an epidural hematoma is that it has to be treated immediately. This injury occurred somewhere around eleven or twelve hours ago. We’ve drained the blood, but his brain has suffered damage. He is comatose, and we’ve put him on life support.”

“Life support?” Boo said. “But he’ll be fine, right? You fixed it, yeah?”

There was a pause and in the pause, there was everything. All the air went out of the room, and nothing was real. I couldn’t feel my hands and my head was tingling.

“We’ll keep him comfortable,” the doctor went on. “He’ll be in no pain. But decisions need to be made by the family. Do you understand what I am saying?”

No, actually, what he was saying made no sense at all. But it didn’t stop him from saying it. And then, we were moving again, into an elevator, down a hall.

Stephen had been moved to a room on the third floor. He was in a room by himself, much of which was taken up by a large piece of equipment. The window blinds were half-open, and slants of morning light cut across his bed. He was under a hospital blanket, which was tucked midway up his chest. He wore a blue hospital gown. Something about him being stripped out of his uniform, out of his serious sweaters or scarves, stripped bare of the things he wore in the normal world that gave him that appearance of authority, of seriousness…something about that papery gown stamped with the hospital name made it all true.

Boo made a sobbing gasp.

“Not this,” Callum said. “Of all the things it could have been, you know? All of us…all the things that could have happened, and just some little knock in the car…”

“Callum.” Boo was crying freely now, her voice thick. “Callum, don’t.”

“But of all the things that could happen to us…the Ripper. The things we see. The things we do. And some car accident…not even a bad one. It’s just stupid…”

He started to laugh, and the laugh got stranger and louder. He sat down on the floor by the bed and put his head down and laughed. Boo sat with him, and he put his arm over her shoulder. I thought dimly how this was one of those moments Boo had been waiting for for so long, when she would just hug Callum and hold on. She could probably do anything she wanted. But that didn’t matter anymore.

Stephen’s glasses were off. His face was the most relaxed I’d ever seen it, the worried crease between his eyes finally relaxed. I could look at him now in a way I never could before—I could stare as long as I wanted. I had never noticed how high his forehead was, high and elegant, sloping down toward his nose, which was also long and fine. His eyes were darkly lashed, and his eyebrows thicker than I thought they were. The glasses had obscured much of his real aspect. There were the lips I had pressed against mine last night—a slender mouth, long, with a strong tendency to pull down at the corners. He was almost smiling now.

I remembered how, at first, I had felt the tension in his lips, as if he was trying to make a barrier between us—then they had relaxed, parted slightly. And that’s when I had known he wanted to kiss me, wanted to give in. That little parting of the lips, the little sigh that came out…

I would hear that sigh forever. That little, little sound when the whole world seemed to open up.

“He told me if anything happened to him, he didn’t want his family contacted,” Callum said.

I had almost forgotten the two of them were there on the floor on the other side of the bed. They’d gone silent, and I had gone so deep in my thoughts that I was lost. Callum’s hysterical outburst had calmed, and he was leaning forward over his knees, as if ready to spring straight up from the floor.

“We have to call them now, don’t we?” Boo’s voice was hoarse. “Don’t we?”

“No. I think he meant it. It’s about what he wants, not what they want.”

“What does he want?” Boo asked.

“We should wait for Thorpe,” I said. I didn’t even mean to say it. The words came out, dry and automatic. Maybe I was channeling Stephen.

“Thorpe can’t decide,” Callum said. “Thorpe doesn’t know him. We have to decide. We have to do it. Stephen needs us to take care of this for him, not some bureaucrat.”

In the end, we took a vote.

I say that like it was possible. Like we could vote if Stephen lived or died. Like we were even thinking about this like it was really happening. It was more academic, like a question on an exam. If Stephen can’t live without the machine, would he want to live? Would he want to go on, his body forced to breathe, his mind not present or active? It was obvious to all of us that no, he would not want that, but we couldn’t quite say the words that followed. That the machine should go off. That he should be allowed to die. My head was feeling funny and light and my knees were shaking, and I got hiccups at one point and kept playing with the window blinds.

Then we talked to him. We told him stories. I told him about my grandmother’s discount boob job. I told him stories I would never have wanted him to hear, in the hopes that he would suddenly wake up just because I was saying something horrible and embarrassing. Getting my first period. That kind of thing. I didn’t care that Callum and Boo were there. They did the same thing. We told him jokes. Callum offered to show him paperwork to make him wake up.

Thorpe arrived, and brought the doctor back in with him. Every time I’d seen Thorpe before this he was just some guy from the government. The only thing I’d ever noticed about him was that his face looked too young for his white hair. This time, he didn’t wear a suit or a dress shirt or a tie, but a polo neck and some fancy jeans and when he saw Stephen, he fell silent and put his hand over his mouth.

That’s when I thought I was really going to lose it. That’s when the bile came up the back of my throat and there was a roaring in my ears and I wanted to be anywhere but in this terrible room. I wanted to erase the last few months and run back to Louisiana and be back in my bed at home.

“What happens?” Thorpe asked the doctor. “When the machine is off?”

The doctor had positioned himself discreetly in the corner of the room, his arms folded in gentle, professional resignation.

“The body takes over. Things take their course. It can be minutes or hours.”

Thorpe nodded and sniffed once, then looked at the rest of us.

“We’ll need a few moments to talk,” he said to the doctor.

The doctor excused himself again. Thorpe came to the foot of the bed and looked long and hard at Stephen.

“You’ve talked?” he asked us quietly. “I think we all know what he would say.”

Our silence confirmed this.

“This should never have happened,” Thorpe said. “I should never have allowed it to happen. It all went too fast. There should have been more time, more training…”

He trailed off, and shook his head once.

“I can speak to the doctor,” he said. “I can…”

I missed the rest of what he said, though I got the gist that it was something about dealing with actually giving the order and saying he was Stephen’s uncle. I was distracted by what I remembered. I remembered being on the floor of the bathroom, after the knife had gone in. I remembered the curious feeling of the wound. My body, unable to make tactile sense of the slash, told me it was an itch with a faint tingle. The blood was coming out so quickly—it couldn’t possibly be mine. And through the roaring in my ears, I heard Newman explain to me what he was going to do. He gave me the terminus and he told me that he had a theory—a little theory—that people with the sight who died with a terminus might come back.

“I can fix this,” I said. It was sudden. It just popped out of my mouth, and it got everyone’s attention.

“What?” Thorpe said.

“I can fix this,” I said again. “Newman…he had a theory…about people who had the sight. If they died in contact with a terminus they might…”

Callum stood, and the look on his face was like thunder.

“No,” he said. “No.”

Boo leapt up right after, but there was a very different expression on her face. Her face said yes.

“What are you saying?” Thorpe said. “You can keep him from dying? You can…”

“She’s saying she wants to keep him here by making him some thing that isn’t alive or dead,” Callum replied. “And she’s not doing it.”

“You need to get over your prejudices, yeah?” Boo snapped.

Callum moved past Thorpe and came around to my side of the bed, and the way he was moving, I got the distinct impression that he would not hesitate to use force on me. I gripped the bedrail.

“You won’t do this to him,” he said to me. No one had ever quite spoken to me in this tone before, not even Newman. It was a clear threat, and the message was that I was the enemy. I would be stopped.

“Callum,” Boo said. “Callum, she can save him.”

“You don’t do this!” Callum’s voice was a roar, and he yelled right into my face. “You don’t do this to my friend. You don’t touch him.”

He shoved the adjustable bed table, hard. He didn’t shove it at me, but at the wall, as a warning. I became stone. I didn’t care. As far as I was concerned, my hand was now welded to the bed.

“Callum.” Thorpe’s voice didn’t have the anger, but the threat was no less serious. “Step away from her and leave the room.”

“I’m not leaving.” He was over me, looking down into my face.

“You’re leaving now or you’ll be removed.”

“So remove me.”

“Is that what Stephen would want? Now?” There was enough emotion in Thorpe’s voice to make Callum turn and look at him. “Would he want you to be fighting over him?”

“He wouldn’t want to come back like that,” Callum said. “Maybe you want it, to study him or something. Maybe you want it”—this was to Boo—“because you think that would help. And you…”

He had nothing for me. “But he would want to just be allowed to go.”

“You don’t know that,” Boo said. “You don’t. You’ve always been angry at them. You think they’re evil, that they don’t belong. They’re ghosts, not monsters, and they can be happy. They can be productive. You can’t decide what he would want based on how you feel.”

I took Stephen’s hand. It was very cool. Not cold, but it was definitely not the hand of someone full of life. And already, I felt a kind of strange feeling. It wasn’t like the times I would touch a ghost and feel myself being drawn in. This was a light sensation that started in the fingers and spread along the back of the hand, up the side of my arm, resting a moment at the pulse point inside of my elbow. It was a gentle numbness, like pins and needles, but without any discomfort. And my hand and arm grew warm as they touched his cold skin. In fact, I was starting to feel warm all over.

I looked at the machine that told me Stephen was still alive. The fight continued around me, but I was no longer part of it. I wasn’t in this room at all. I was somewhere with Stephen that was entirely separate from the hospital or anything else I had known. It wasn’t that I was certain of my decision. I wasn’t really thinking anymore. I wasn’t blind or deaf. I mean, I saw security come. I saw Callum deciding to leave rather than be pulled out. I saw Boo crying, and Thorpe shutting the door and putting a hand on her shoulder. I saw friendships being ripped apart and hearts broken, and it wasn’t that I didn’t care…it was just all happening behind some kind of pane of glass that kept me and Stephen separate.

It surprised me how clinical the next part was—how calm. The smoothness of it. I just watched and held on, and I thought about how there are systems for things, about how all things have happened before. People die every day, and there are systems for it. The doctor heard the decision and nodded and told us it was the right one. A few people came in, and we gathered around, and things were shut off. I hadn’t noticed just how noisy the machine was until it was off.

The monitors were still plugged in, and they still beeped away, but slowly. And we were left in privacy.

• • •

It happened at nine forty-six in the morning.

Right before that, things had gotten very slow—the beeps and wiggles. People started to come in more often. I held his hand harder. The beeps became a flat, droning noise. I closed my eyes. Then something was pulling on me. Not something muscular, not something I could see, but something gentle yet unyielding. It reminded me of a science lesson in grade school when they gave us a box of magnets and let us play with them, and I made one tiny magnet pull another across a small distance and lock together.

You are not going anywhere, I said to him, in my mind. You are not going anywhere. You are staying here. You are staying with me.

I could still feel the activity around me. I was profoundly aware of Boo at my left side.

DO YOU HEAR ME? YOU ARE NOT…

It almost knocked me down. I was pulling on something, or it was pulling on me. And the space behind my eyes went white. The world went away entirely. Even the white went away, and everything was a bright nothing. Unlike the other times, it wasn’t just a flash. I was calm and still and the world was gone, but that was fine. I had become something else, I had joined something larger. Maybe I was water. Maybe I was a drop of water in the ocean. Maybe I was a particle of light. I was the same as everything around me, and everything around me was peaceful.

I wanted to stay here.

There was whiteness. There was falling. I was falling a hundred feet, a thousand feet, but at no particular speed.

And then there were edges of things. Round things. A red line and a black lump. A face—Boo’s. My head was forced between my knees, and when I opened my eyes, the hospital floor came back into violent, sudden focus.

“Sorry,” I said. Because I knew what was coming next.

I threw up. A plastic basin was shoved in the approximately right spot and I did my best to aim for it. Someone helped me into a chair. I was put in a forward-facing position, slumped over my knees. Boo knelt down next to me.

“Is he—”

She nodded.

“Did it work?” she whispered, stroking my hair.

“I…don’t know. Something happened.”

“I’ll look for him,” she said. “You all right? I’ll look.”

Boo was gone for what seemed like forever. I finally lifted myself up and sat back normally. When I did that, I saw Stephen lying there, exactly as before. He looked no different, but all was silence, and his chest did not move.

Thorpe’s eyes were red.

“How long does it take?” I asked when Boo returned. “Before they…you know. Appear.”

“Jo said that when it happened to her, she thinks she woke up right after, but she was never sure,” Boo said. “It could have been hours, or even a day or two.”

“Alistair said it was right away,” I added. “He was asleep, and then he was standing outside of himself. Do they always show up where they die?”

“He could be anywhere,” she said. “It’s often tied to the place of death, but not always. I’ve heard of other places people end up. He could be at the flat. He could be at his parents’ house, though I doubt that. He’s bound to be somewhere. We just have to find him.”

“Unless it didn’t work,” I said.

“I know he’s here,” Boo said, nodding. “We need to start looking. We do the hospital. We do the flat, both the old one and the new one. And if that fails, we come back here and do it again. Yeah?”

It was then that I understood everything. There would be no train to Bristol. There might be no return to Wexford, or America. Life was being written, right now, in real time. I was not going home. I was staying here. I would find Charlotte. I was going to make Jane pay.

And I would find Stephen.

maureen johnson is the New York Times bestselling author of more than ten young-adult novels, including 13 Little Blue Envelopes, The Last Little Blue Envelope, Devilish, The Bermudez Triangle, Let It Snow, and Suite Scarlett. She divides her time between New York City and Guildford, England. Maureen also spends far too much time online.

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