The Name of the Star - Maureen Johnson [27]
The cameras had not failed, but her mind was slowly grasping what they had captured. And what they had captured made no sense. She became bizarrely calm, and played back the footage in the right order. Then she rewound and played it back again. Then she went to the kitchen and poured herself another juice glass full of whiskey. She threw up into the sink, wiped her mouth, and drank a glass of water.
She couldn’t keep this to herself. She would go mad.
PERSISTENT ENERGY
Instead of describing a ‘ghost’ as a dead person permitted to communicate with the living, let us define it as a manifestation of a persistent energy.
—Fred Myers,
Proceedings of the Society
for Psychical Research 6,
1889
10
THE AUTUMN OF 1888 WAS KNOWN AS THE AUTUMN of Terror. Jack the Ripper was out there somewhere, in the fog, waiting with his knife. He could strike anywhere, at any time. The thing about autumn this year was that everyone knew precisely when the Ripper was going to strike, if he kept up with the schedule he’d set so far. The next date was September 30. That was when Jack the Ripper struck twice, so it was referred to as “the Double Event.” The Double Event was a big part of the reason Jack the Ripper was seen as so amazingly scary—he managed these brutal and somewhat complicated murders right under the eye of the police, and no one saw a thing.
On that point, the past and the present were exactly alike.
The police had nothing. So, to help them, thousands more people joined the ranks of amateur detectives. They flew in from around the world. There was, the news reported, a 25 percent increase in tourism during the month of September. Hotels in London were getting unprecedented numbers of reservations. And all those people came to hang out in our neighborhood, to crawl over every inch of the East End. You couldn’t walk anywhere without someone taking pictures or making a video. The Ten Bells, which is the Ripper pub where the victims used to drink, was just a few streets over and had lines of people waiting to get in that stretched down the block. Hundreds of people shuffled past our buildings every day on any one of the ten Jack the Ripper walking tours that crossed our campus (until Mount Everest complained, and they rerouted around the corner).
The Ripper shaped our school life as well. The school had sent out letters to all our parents assuring them that we would be kept under nonstop lock-and-key surveillance, so really, school was the best place for us to be, and it was best to proceed as normal and not disrupt anyone’s studies. On the night following the second murder, they changed all the rules about leaving school grounds. We had to be present and accounted for by eight o’clock every night, including weekends. We could be in our houses or the library. Prefects were stationed in both of these places, and they had clipboards with all our names. You had to check out with the prefect at your house, then check in with the prefect at the front desk of the library, then vice versa when you went home.
This caused major outrage, as it effectively killed all social life for the month of September. Everyone was used to being able to go to the pub on the weekends, or to parties. All that was over. In response, people started stocking their rooms with large amounts of alcohol, until an additional set of rules gave the prefects the power to do spot checks. Huge quantities were confiscated, making many people wonder what Everest was doing with all that booze. Somewhere on the school grounds, there was a Big Rock Candy Mountain of alcohol—a magical closet filled to the ceiling.
During that precious hour or so between dinner and eight o’clock, everyone would run out to whatever shop was still open to get their provisions for the night, whatever they might be. Some people got coffees. Some people got food. Some people ran to Boots, the pharmacy, to get shampoo or toothpaste. Some people ran to a pub for an incredibly fast round of drinks. Some people would vanish completely