The Name of the Star

by Maureen Johnson

  “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 l
ight 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.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s brilliant,” Callum said. “Top marks at Eton. That’s as clever as they get. But he’s not a total wanker, like most of those people are—he’s just a little special sometimes. Anyway, from there, I shadowed someone on the Underground for a while. They had me in as a trainee. Stephen taught me about the Shades, about the history, about the new plans for how everything was going to be run. When he thought I was ready, he gave me a terminus.”

  He held up the phone and looked at it with admiration.

  “A terminus?” I said. “That’s what it’s called.”

  Callum nodded.

  “The very first thing I did was go back to that building site. By the time I got there again, the new flats were up. Shiny glass ones, with a gym up top, all full of bankers. I had to look around for a little while, but I found him. I guess he didn’t like the new building much. He was down in the car park, just
wandering around, looking bored. I actually felt sorry for him for a second, poor bastard, doomed to walk around some car park, and whatever monstrosity comes next. He didn’t recognize me. Didn’t think I could see him. He paid me no mind as I walked right up to him, took out my phone, pressed one and nine, and fried him. He’ll never hurt anyone again. But that’s the first day I knew—this was my real calling. I don’t know what I would do without it. It’s the most important thing in my life. It gives you back some control.”

  “When Boo walked up to him, she had her phone out,” I said, putting this together with the memory that was playing over and over in my mind. “I thought she was handing me her phone.”

  “She finally tried to use it,” Callum said, stopping. “God . . .” He leaned over and put his head in his hands. “She doesn’t believe in using the terminus,” he explained. “We fight about it all the time.”

  I’d been so wrapped up in my own part of this that I hadn’t really noticed how Callum and Stephen and Boo felt about each other. I saw they were upset, but . . . now it hit me. They were friends.

  “So,” he said, lifting up his head. “Now you know how we can take care of him. Do you feel better?”

  I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know.

  Jazza was out when I got home, so I was on my own, listening to people talking and laughing in the rooms around mine.

  My desk was a nightmare—an altar to all the work I hadn’t done over the last few days. It was amazing how quickly your academic future could crumble. A week or two and you were totally out of step. I might as well have missed the entire year. I might as well have never come to Wexford. Of course, now I had bigger things to worry about, but I allowed myself a few minutes of panic to take in the enormity of how screwed I was, Ripper stuff aside. It was almost like a mental vacation from the stress of the ghosts and the sight and the murders.

  The dark came fast, and I had to switch on my desk light. Then I heard people getting up and going to dinner. It was already five. I had no appetite, but I had to get out as well. I wasn’t staying here by myself. When I got outside, Callum was gone and the police car had taken his place. Stephen sat in the driver’s seat. He waved me over and opened the door. As soon as I got in, he drove around the corner, away from the prying eyes of people going to dinner.