Maureen Johnson - The Madness Underneath

“You’re going to quit?”

“I probably would have quit, but…Boo. And Stephen. I don’t think he could cope. We’re like his family, you know? But maybe…maybe I won’t have to. Maybe it’ll all shut down on its own.”

“But you just got permission to keep going.”

“For now,” Callum said. “We still can’t really do anything. You’re the terminus. We’re just some sods who see ghosts and can’t do anything about it. And Stephen should have told us we were in danger of being shut down, but that’s Stephen. Keeps it all to himself. Won’t delegate. It’s driving Boo and me mental. It’s hard, you know? I was good at football. Then I got hurt and got the sight, and I couldn’t play anymore. Then I got this job, and I got a terminus, and everything made sense again. I had control again. I hate to say it, but I get why Newman wanted one so much. I don’t think he should have killed everyone he worked with, but I get him wanting one.”

I curled up in my coat a little. I’d pushed that aspect of Newman’s story out of my mind. Newman had been in the Shades, but when they’d found out he was unstable, they fired him and took away his terminus. Desperate to get it back, he’d confronted the other members of the squad in their old headquarters, in the abandoned King William Street Tube station. He killed them all in his attempts to get a terminus and was himself killed in the process.

It was weird to have the sight. It was weird to be a Shade. It had driven him insane.

“What was it that Newman said to you that night,” Callum asked. “About dying with a terminus?”

“He had some theory that if someone with the sight died holding a terminus, they’d come back. As a ghost, I mean.”

“And he knew this how?”

“I have no idea if he knew it at all,” I replied.

“Stephen is convinced there’s more information that we’ve never been allowed to see. An archive. Maybe he’s right. Maybe Newman had access to things they don’t let us see anymore, but…”

“But?” I said.

“I don’t know. I don’t think they care enough about us to hide anything. And what would be the point of hiding stuff from us? I think he’s being a little paranoid. He hides things from us, and he thinks people are hiding things from him. I mean, if there was a method of making people into ghosts, I guess I could see the point in holding on to that but…no. I don’t know.”

He shook his head and scratched his arm.

“You know they think we’re freaks,” he went on. “You know Thorpe hates dealing with us. And can you blame him?”

We arrived back at Liverpool Street, both of us quiet and pensive. Callum walked me out and down Artillery Lane.

“Really,” I said when we reached the back of my building, “I’ll try harder. Just don’t give up yet, okay?”

“Forget it,” he said, slapping me reassuringly on the shoulder. “I’m just glad you’re back. Things always get interesting when you come around.”

12

I WAS SITTING IN HISTORY ON THURSDAY, LISTENING TO MY teacher go through the list of everything that the exam might possibly cover, when it occurred to me, in a dim and distant way, that I had no idea what he was talking about. I was listening to words, and I recognized them as words, but they were arranged in a way that had no meaning. This is possibly due to the fact that all the people in English history have the same names. William. Edward. Charles. James. Henry. Richard. George. Elizabeth. Mary. Or that there are people with titles that rotate through all these stories. A Prince of Wales here, a Duke of Gloucester there. A Richmond and Buckingham and Guildford and on and on and on.

And when you take English history in England, they sort of assume you know where the hell they’re talking about—that you understand what’s up north and what’s down south and what’s near the water. This is stuff I get when we have to do the Civil War at home. I can picture where Philadelphia is, and South Carolina, and Virginia. These things make sense. I don’t have to look everything up on a map, or try to figure out which of the nine million Duke of Buckinghamshiremondlands they’re talking about, or who was who in the War of the Roses, or why roses? Just, why roses?

Anyway, he was saying words that I was supposed to know, and I was probably supposed to be writing them down. I took a stab at this, writing “Edward” and “James” and “battle of…” It occurred to me I should be more concerned about the fact that I had no idea what was going on, but I felt nothing in particular. At home, I was a top student. Wexford was a much more challenging school, and when I’d first arrived, I was panicked all the time because I couldn’t keep up. Then I was panicked because a murderous ghost was after me. Now I was back, there was no murderous ghost after me, the crack, at last, had passed from my thoughts, and I was so behind as to be out of the race. I felt nothing but a pleasant sleepiness when I looked at my books.

“Aurora,” my teacher said. “A word.”

My history teacher was not, in my experience, an unreasonable person. I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to yell at me for looking spacey. And he didn’t. He did, however, present me with a large, sealed envelope.

“I’m going to have to assess where you are so I can determine what exam questions to set for you next week. This is a short pretest. Take it over to the library. There’s a proctor over there who will monitor your progress and take it from you when you are finished. It’s just thirty minutes. Keep the answers very short and simple—I just need to know where you are in basic terms.”

I felt like I was carrying my own death sentence…or, if not a death sentence, maybe instructions for my own torture. Our librarian, Mrs. Feeley, was indeed expecting me. I was seated by myself at a table. There were only three questions on this pre-exam, with space enough to write a paragraph or two of answer.

Explain the origins of the Bishops’ Wars of 1639 and 1640.

Give the basic timeline and the major events of the English Civil War of 1642 to 1651.

List three immediate repercussions of the Great Fire of London.

These were not unreasonable questions, and should have been easy to anyone following along in class. The third one I could do. The second one I could kind of do. The first one, I had completely forgotten. I’d been given a half hour to do the whole thing. I dithered for a few minutes, trying to figure out if I wanted to start with the one I knew or the ones I didn’t know. Maybe the fact of forcing my brain on to those questions would jog some knowledge. So I jabbed at question two for a bit, penciling some dates in the margins, trying to string them together, adding whatever I could recall. The result was such a broken, spotty timeline that I had to erase it completely. I had wasted time. On to question three.

Three immediate repercussions of the Great Fire. In 1666, a fire starts on Pudding Lane, the most delicious sounding of lanes. London is crowded—the buildings built so far out that they practically touch each other across the street. It spreads quickly, burning for days. It burns down a large portion of the east section of the old city, the one contained within the city walls. Those city walls had stopped just outside of Wexford. This area had been preserved from the fire.

“Five minutes,” Mrs. Feeley said.

Five minutes? How had that happened? I’d just started. Three immediate repercussions…The buildings were rebuilt more safely, in stone and brick, with wider streets. And the fire destroyed many of the rats that spread the plague…

This area had not burned.

The crack was back in my brain.