The The Name of the Star (22 page)

“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.”