Maureen Johnson - The Name of the Star

“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.”

“That’s what we concluded from your description,” Stephen said, sounding somewhat impressed. “So we stopped pursuing that angle.”

“So how do you figure out who he is?”

That made Callum laugh and turn away, clasping his hands behind his head.

“Well,” Stephen said, “we’re using his choices of location, combined with your E-fit image . . .”

“But how do you find some random dead guy from whenever?”

Even Boo turned away now. “We have ways,” Stephen said. The bright look in his eye had gone out, and he stared at the people sitting on the lions. I had asked something they didn’t want to be asked. I got the sense that the more I pressed this, the more unhappy and possibly unhinged I would become. I had to embrace the daylight, the sanity I had at this moment.

“Fine,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself.

“We just wanted to give you some experience with your new ability,” Stephen said. “But we have to get back to work. Boo will take you back.”

“Wait,” I said as Stephen and Callum turned to go, “one more question. If there are ghosts, does that mean there are . . . vampires? And werewolves?”