The Name of the Star - Maureen Johnson [70]
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?”
Whatever misery I had caused by my previous question, it was wiped out with this one. They all laughed. Even Stephen, who I didn’t know could laugh.
“Don’t be stupid,” Callum said.
24
GHOSTS, ACCORDING TO THE INTERNET:
Souls, spooks, shades, poltergeists, revenants. Generally regarded to be people returned from the dead, though there are also ghost animals, and ghost ships, and even ghost trains and planes and articles of furniture and plants. Often known to linger around places they lived in or died in, looking sad. Both can and cannot be photographed, though when photographed, may appear as a blob or orb of light. Science rejects and confirms