Maureen Johnson - The Name of the Star

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

THE RETURN

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

PERSISTENT ENERGY

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

THE STAR THAT KILLS

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

INNER VILENESS

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

WHITE’S ROW, EAST LONDON NOVEMBER 9 2:45 A.M.

TERMINUS TERIMNUS

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Acknowledgements

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS • A DIVISION OF PENGUIN YOUNG READERS GROUP.

Published by The Penguin Group.

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3,

Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.).

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(a division of Penguin Books Ltd.).

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(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd).

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(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd).

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Johannesburg 2196, South Africa.

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.

Copyright © 2011 by Maureen Johnson.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Johnson, Maureen, 1973–

The name of the star / Maureen Johnson. p. cm.—(Shades of London ; bk. 1)

Summary: Rory, of Bénouville, Louisiana, is spending a year at a London boarding school

when she witnesses a murder by a Jack the Ripper copycat and becomes involved with

the very unusual investigation. [1. Boarding schools—Fiction. 2. Schools—Fiction.

3. Murder—Fiction. 4. Witnesses—Fiction. 5. Ghosts—Fiction.

6. London (England)—Fiction. 7. England—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.J634145Nam 2011 [Fic]—dc22 2011009003

ISBN : 978-1-101-53569-1

http://us.penguingroup.com

For Amsler. Thanks for the milk.

DURWARD STREET, EAST LONDON AUGUST 31 4:17 A.M.

THE EYES OF LONDON WERE WATCHING CLAIRE JENKINS.

She didn’t notice them, of course. No one paid attention to the cameras. It was an accepted fact that London has one of the most extensive CCTV systems in the world. The conservative estimate was that there were a million cameras around the city, but the actual number was probably much higher and growing all the time. The feed went to the police, security firms, MI5, and thousands of private individuals—forming a loose and all-encompassing net. It was impossible to do anything in London without the CCTV catching you at some point.

The cameras silently recorded Claire’s progress and tracked her as she turned onto Durward Street. It was four seventeen A.M., and she was supposed to have been at work at four. She had forgotten to set her alarm, and now she was running, trying to get to the Royal London Hospital. Her shift usually got the fallout from last night’s drinking—the alcohol poisonings, the falls, the punch-ups, the car accidents, the occasional knife fight. All the night’s mistakes came to the early-shift nurse.

It had been pouring, clearly. There were puddles all over the place. The one mercy of this doomed morning was that there was only the slightest drizzle now. At least she didn’t have to run through the rain. She got out her phone to send a message to let them know she was close. The phone emitted a tiny halo that encircled her hand, giving it a saintly glow. It was hard to text and walk at the same time, not if she didn’t want to fall off the pavement or walk into a post. Am running lake . . .

Claire had tried to type the word late three times, but it kept coming up as lake . She wasn’t running lake , she was running late . She refused to stop walking and fix it. There was no time to waste. The message would stand.

. . . Be there in 5 . . .

And then she tripped. The cell phone took flight, a little glowing ball of light, free at last before it clattered to the sidewalk and went out.

“Bugger!” she said. “No, no, no . . . don’t be broken . . .”

In her concern over the fate of her phone, Claire first didn’t take notice of the thing she had tripped over, aside from faintly registering that it was somewhat large and weighty and it gave a little when her foot struck it. In the dark, it appeared to be a strangely shaped mound of garbage. Something else put in her way this morning to impede her progress.

She knelt down and felt along the ground for the phone, sinking her knee directly into a puddle.

“Wonderful,” she said to herself as she scrabbled around. The phone was quickly recovered. It appeared to be dark and lifeless. She tried the power button, not expecting any result. To her delight, the phone blinked on, casting its little light around her hand once again.

This was when she first noticed that there was something sticky on her hand. The consistency was extremely familiar, as was the faint metallic smell.

Blood. Her hand was covered in blood. A lot of blood, with a faintly jelly-like consistency that suggested congealing. Congealing blood meant blood that had been here for several minutes, so it couldn’t be her own. Claire shifted around, holding up her phone for light. She could see now that she had tripped over a person. She crawled closer and felt a hand, a hand that was cool, but not cold.

“Hello?” she said. “Can you hear me? Can you speak?”

She got up alongside the figure, a smallish person dressed entirely in motorcycle leathers, wearing a helmet. She reached up to the neck to feel for a pulse.

Where the neck was supposed to be, there was a space.

It took her a moment to process what she was feeling, and in desperation she kept reaching around the edge of the helmet to get to the neck, trying to get a sense of the size of this wound. It went on and on, until Claire realized that the head was barely attached at all, and that the puddle she was kneeling in was almost certainly not rainwater.

The eyes saw it all.

THE RETURN

Then shall the slayer return, and come unto his own city, and unto his own house, unto the city whence he fled. —Joshua 20:6

1

IF YOU LIVE AROUND NEW ORLEANS AND THEY THINK a hurricane might be coming, all hell breaks loose. Not among the residents, really, but on the news. The news wants us to worry desperately about hurricanes. In my town, Bénouville, Louisiana (pronounced locally as Ben-ah-VEEL; population 1,700), hurricane preparations generally include buying more beer, and ice to keep that beer cold when the power goes out. We do have a neighbor with a two-man rowboat lashed on top of the porch roof, all ready to go if the water rises—but that’s Billy Mack, and he started his own religion in the garage, so he’s got a lot more going on than just an extreme concern for personal safety.