Maureen Johnson - The Name of the Star

“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 light 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?”