The Name of the Star

by Maureen Johnson

  His voice bounced around in all directions, off the curved ceiling, off the bricks and the tiles. He could have been thirty yards away, or he could have been next to me. Two tiny points of light appeared—the glow of the phones. After a moment, this was joined by a thin beam of light from Stephen’s direction, and then from Callum’s. The flashlights.

  “Two lights,” Newman said. “Where’s the third one? Come out, come out . . .”

  I saw Callum’s flashlight beam swing around wildly.

  “Where’d he go?” Callum yelled. “You see him?”

  “Just keep your terminus out,” Stephen called to him. “He can’t go near you. They’re more powerful now than they used to be.”

  “Is that a warning for me?” Newman said. “I still see only two of you. There must be more.”

  “There might have been a larger squad if you hadn’t murdered everyone you worked with,” Stephen replied.

  “It never had to happen that way. I never intended to kill anyone. It was all very unfortunate.”

  “Murdering five people you worked with was unfortunate? Taking on the role of Jack the Ripper was unfortunate?”

  “A means to an end,” Newman said.

  I was pretty sure Stephen was trying to make him talk to get a sense of where he was, but it was still impossible to tell. The acoustics sent the sound of his voice in far too many directions. Stephen reached over and grabbed me, putting his arms around me. He maneuvered us both over to the wall, then slipped from behind me and pushed the terminus into my hands.

  “Hold this,” he whispered. “Keep pressing one and nine. Do not stop. Stay against the wall so he can’t get behind you.”

  I wanted to ask him what he was doing, but I was too afraid to speak. I heard him move away, then there was silence. Nobody said a word. A full minute went by, maybe more, with nothing happening at all. I dug my fingers so hard into the number pad that I could feel my nails slicing into it. It provided a small ball of light around my hands, a glow extending six or eight inches at best.

  The lights suddenly came back on. My pupils contracted in shock, and it took a moment before I could see clearly. I was against the wall by the entryway arches. Callum was flat against the opposite wall, where the platform area was. We stared at each other.

  “Stephen!” he yelled.

  “Here,” Stephen said quietly.

  Stephen was speaking from inside the ticket area, just behind me. The noise didn’t bounce around so much in there. And from the calm way he spoke, I had a terrible feeling that something very bad had happened. Callum came running in my direction, and I slowly peeled myself away from the wall and looked through the arch.

  Stephen was standing on the bottom step, where he had thrown the switch on a set of emergency lights. He was holding his right arm, up near the shoulder. Newman stood a few feet away from him, casually leaning against the old ticket booth.

  “Stephen?” Callum asked.

  “Someone,” Newman said, “was going to go for the lights.”

  “Get him,” Stephen said quietly. “Just get him.”

  “What the hell is happening?” Callum said.

  “Allow me to explain what’s going to happen,” Newman replied. “Your friend has just been injected with an extremely large dose of insulin. Within a few minutes, he will begin to experience shakes and sweating. Then comes the confusion. The weakness. Then breathing will become difficult as the body begins to shut itself down. The dose I’ve given him is fatal without treatment, but easily reversible with a simple injection. I happen to have a syringe ready to go. I will trade it for all three termini. Give them to me, and he lives. Or we stand here and watch him die. And it won’t take long. You won’t have time to run up those steps and call for help. All three, now.”

  “Callum, get him,” Stephen said again. But he already looked pale and was gripping the railing for support.

  “You’re a nutter,” Callum said. There was a tremble in his voice.

  “The real Jack the Ripper was insane,” Newman replied. “No question. What I want is rational. The terminus is the only thing in the world that can hurt me. If I have them, I have no predators. I have nothing to fear. We all want to live without fear. Now put it down and kick it to me. Both of you. And whoever else is out there.”

  “Why don’t you kiss my arse?” Callum snapped. “How about that for an idea?”

  “How about you think of your friend’s welfare?”

  Callum shifted the grip of his terminus.

  “We came down to finish this,” Stephen said. “Just do it, Callum.”

  “You kill me,” Newman said, “you kill him. Your choice.”

  Callum glanced over at me.

  “No surrender?” Newman asked politely. “Maybe you want to be in charge? Maybe that’s why you’re willing to let him die.”

  “Callum!” Stephen said. “Rory! He’s right there! Do it.”

  “No,” Newman said, pointing at Callum. “This one . . . I understand him completely. He won’t let go of that terminus, not for you. Not for anything. I understand. It makes you feel secure, doesn’t it? It gives you back your sanity. It gives you control. The sight is a curse, and the terminus is the only cure. I have sympathy for you. I do. That’s why I’m here. That’s all I want too.”

  There was no sarcasm, no little smile. I think he meant it, every word of it.

  “All of this,” Newman said. “The Ripper, this station . . . all of it was just my way of trying to draw out the squad. I developed a plan that brought you to a place I knew well. I always knew there’d be more of you than of me, more than I could fight off. So I developed a plan in which I could get what I needed and you could all just walk away. He doesn’t have a lot of time, Callum.”

  Newman leaned against the ticket booth and considered us both. I realized that I was holding up my terminus as well, my fingers poised on the one and the nine. I had done it unconsciously. Callum and I were trapped, unable to move forward.

  “I see the way you look,” Newman said to Callum. “The way you hold on to that terminus for dear life. Did one of them get to you, too? Is that how you got the sight? Several of us had experiences like that. We were always a little different, a little more intense. I had my accident when I was eighteen. I’d been given a secondhand motorbike as a gift for getting into Oxford. It was 1978. I was at home, in the New Forest. Lots of dirt lanes to ride on, nothing but ponies in the way. Best summer of my life. Exams done, future ahead of me. It was a perfectly clear evening, the sun still out around nine o’clock, height of June—and I was riding back home from visiting my girlfriend, coming down a stretch of the road I knew perfectly well. Then suddenly, something swung at me, knocking me off the bike. I went flying backward, the bike into a tree. And when I looked up, there was a boy standing over me, laughing. My father’s friends happened to be coming by on their way to the pub, found me and the crashed bike. I told them about the boy. I pointed at him. He was still laughing. They didn’t see him, and I was taken off to the hospital. The doctors assumed, quite reasonably, that I’d been on the bike when it hit the tree and had suffered a head injury.

  “I started seeing people—people that no one else could see. I was involuntarily admitted to a mental hospital for observation for a month. You all know the feeling, I’m sure. You know you’re not insane, and yet the evidence that you are seems overwhelming.”

  I could tell Callum was listening very carefully to all of this, shifting his gaze between Stephen and Newman.

  “As the summer went on, I realized that I had a decision to make. I was either going to remain in this hospital, or I was going to get on with my life. I decided the best thing to do was lie, tell the doctors I couldn’t see or hear them anymore. They assumed I was recovering from my injury, and I was released. I decided, because of my problem, to become a psychiatrist. I was a medical student at Oxford, and when I was done there, I went on to St. Barts. St. Barts is in the old body
-snatcher district. If there’s one place you don’t want to have the sight, it’s in the old body-snatcher district, because that place is thick with them, and they aren’t pleasant. But I finished my training, took my exams, and qualified as a psychiatrist. My first position was with the prison system, working with young offenders. It was good work for me—dealing with people who were young, misunderstood, angry. It was a good place to learn about evil. About fear. About what happens to people who are isolated and confined from a young age. And, it might not surprise you, I encountered four teenagers there who had our sight.”

  Stephen was trying to keep himself together, but he had to sit down on the steps. Callum too was struggling, but the things Newman was saying . . . I knew they resonated with him.

  “Then one day a man came up to me in the street and asked me if I’d like to put my abilities to good use. I still don’t know who he was—someone quite high up in the Met or in MI5, I suppose. It turns out they had started reviewing files at psychiatric institutions to see if anyone was reporting a very specific set of delusions—reporting that they could see ghosts after a near-death experience. A brilliant way of recruiting, really.

  “I was taken to Whitehall, to a small office, and the Shades were explained to me. They knew what I was. They liked that I had worked in the prison system. They liked everything about me. They gave me the one thing I had wanted since my accident—a weapon. Something to protect me against these things I was seeing. They gave me some control over my life. The day I became a Shade, I was truly happy for the first time since I was seventeen. I’ll bet it was the same for you.

  “I knew we were doing the jobs of bin men, cleaning ghosts off Tube platforms and out of old houses, but I didn’t care. For the first time in my life, I was happy. But I couldn’t help my nature. The others—they were drawn from ordinary police stock. I was an academic. I was a doctor. A scientist.

  “There used to be a form of treatment for schizophrenics called insulin shock therapy. The patients would be brought in over the course of several weeks and regularly put into insulin shock, going deeper and deeper each time. Eventually, they’d be put into daily comas and brought out again after an hour or so. Not a very pleasant process, and the results were debatable. But I saw another use for the procedure. I devised a series of experiments to test different areas of the brain, to try to determine which one caused people to develop the sight. But to do this, I needed to re-create the conditions under which the sight develops. Namely, I had to bring the body into a state that mimicked the onset of death. Insulin shock therapy did just that. Paranormal neuropsychiatry, and I was the only person in the world qualified to practice it.

  “My status as a Shade gave me unrestricted access, and they already knew me as a doctor. So I went back to the places I had worked before. My idea was simple. I would take the young people I’d met who had the sight, and I would say I was giving them experimental therapy. Getting insulin isn’t difficult, nor is the process of putting someone into a diabetic coma. It’s a bit of a risky procedure, but done carefully it causes no lasting harm. And I would be working on youths in the prison system, people already considered irredeemable. I performed my work for two years, taking the same subjects down about a dozen times each. I also conducted physical and psychological examinations.

  “No one knew about this research of mine,” he continued. “I had planned on revealing it only when I had a clear result, at which point I would certainly have been given a proper lab and resources to continue. Finding out what controls the ability to see the dead? That’s a valuable asset. So I still did all of my normal duties—removing ghosts from buildings, getting trains working, all the mundane things they had us do. In my spare time, I did my real work. I had just located a fifth subject, a young girl. I began the process with her. To this day, I’m not sure what went wrong. I took her down—and she didn’t come back up. That’s when the powers that be discovered the work I’d been doing. They should have thanked me, despite the mistake. They didn’t.”

  I was convinced now that Newman was telling us the truth. He may have been a murderer, and evil, but he was also honest. At least he was right now.

  “The trouble with joining a secret government agency is that they can’t really fire you. And they couldn’t exactly put me on trial either. No . . . the whole thing had to be very quiet. I was removed from this station, my powers stripped, and my terminus was taken away. I came down here that day to talk to my fellow Shades, and to take a terminus. I needed it. I couldn’t go back to the way it was before, having nothing to protect me. I brought the gun because . . . I had to get them to see sense, to give me one. But they wouldn’t. They just wouldn’t cooperate. I suppose they didn’t think I’d shoot . . .”

  “Callum!” Stephen said weakly.

  “You can let him die,” Newman said, “or you can save him, right now.”

  “Let me see it,” Callum said. “Let me see the syringe.”

  “I can’t do that,” Newman said. “Not until you each set your terminus down and kick it over to me.”

  “You could be lying.”

  “But you know my history now. You know why I killed. You know what I want. I want you to save him. I want to protect those with the sight. I just also want to protect myself. There is absolutely no reason we can’t all walk away from this.”

  Then he looked right at me.

  “Aurora,” he said. “You’ve been exceptionally brave, and you’re not even on the squad. You’ve risked your life to save others. I swear to you—if you set that down and kick it to me, I will be as good as my word. Give it to me.”

  Stephen put his head down. I think he knew what I was about to do and he couldn’t watch. I couldn’t watch him die. I slowly put the terminus on the filthy floor and gave it a kick. It landed more or less by Newman.

  Now that I’d surrendered, the entire burden was on Callum. He looked as sick as Stephen. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, as if preparing to make a dash. His body was ready, but his mind was not.

  “Now you, son,” Newman said.

  “Don’t call me son! Don’t you speak to me.”

  Newman closed his mouth and raised his arms to the side, making himself a wide and open target.

  “You decide,” he said. “I accept my fate. If you can live with the death of your friend, I can accept my end here. It’s been a noble fight for all concerned.”

  Stephen could no longer plead. He had slumped against the wall and his eyes were half closed. Callum raised himself up on the balls of his feet, knees flexed. He was going to do it. I was sure of it.

  And then he just opened his hands and let the terminus go.

  “Kick it here,” Newman said quietly.

  Callum delivered a perfect side-of-the-foot kick, sending it right to Newman. I’d never seen anyone that agonized. He rubbed his hands over his face and held them there in a prayer formation.

  “Give us the medicine,” he said.

  “When I get the third one,” Newman said.

  His demeanor had changed also. His eyes had widened and there was an energy about him—he looked alive.

  “The third one isn’t here,” Callum replied.

  “Liar!”

  It was a piercing yell, with an echo.

  “It’s not here,” Callum said again, pulling his hands away from his face and sighing. “But if you save him, I’ll take you to it.”

  “Oh no,” Newman said. He began to pace. “He will die, do you understand? And it will be your fault. Do you hear me? Your fault!”

  Newman was yelling to the third person he still believed was crouching in the darkness—maybe in the stairs, maybe in the tunnels. He snatched up the two termini at his feet and began to pace, looking through the archways, looking up the steps, searching for the last Shade. Stephen was going to die for nothing unless . . .

  Unless someone could talk Newman down, someone he could believe. Someone who held no threat. Someone he�
��d talked to before. Someone like me.

  “I’ll take you,” I said.

  35

  THERE WAS A SOUND FROM THE STEPS, ONE SMALL groan from Stephen as he heard me say these words. Newman stopped pacing and stared at me, a wild look in his eye. He went back to the ticket counter and smacked both of the termini down, hard, then cracked open their cheap casing like two plastic Easter eggs. He ripped out the wiry innards, plucking the diamonds from each one, and pushed the empty, broken phones to the floor. Once this was done, he retrieved his knife, which was sitting there on the counter. He crossed the room in a few long strides and came right up to my face.

  “Are you lying to me?” he asked, digging the point into my chin.

  “No,” I said through clenched teeth. It was hard to talk. Newman pressed the knife even harder, forcing my mouth closed. I felt the tip of the blade slip into my flesh, digging a small hole. Up close, he had a rotten smell that burned the inside of my nose. He no longer looked completely in control of himself.

  He twisted the knife once, then grabbed me by the hair and dragged me across the room toward the ticket booth.

  “Reach in there,” he said, pointing the knife at some old boards that sealed off the old ticket window.

  The boards gave when I pushed at them, and I was able to get my hand into the opening, though I couldn’t see what I was reaching for. What I felt mostly was grime and cobwebs, and I was certain I was thrusting my hand into a place that had long been a nest for rats and mice. I felt what seemed like pencils, and some little rock-like things that were probably petrified rodent turds, but then I hit something smooth and thin and plasticky. I carefully pulled this out of the opening. It was a syringe, capped and pristine, and full of something.

  “Take the cap off and inject him,” Newman said.

  “Where?”

  “In the upper arm.”

  I approached Stephen, who looked up at me with a sweatslicked face.

  “Don’t do this,” he said. “Don’t let him have it.”