The Madness Underneath

by Maureen Johnson

  “The Tubes ran for years without us zapping anyone,” Boo countered. “They don’t need us to make the Tubes run. And if there are problems, we go and we deal with them. By talking.”

  “And if they don’t listen? Was the Ripper going to listen? And whoever comes next?”

  “None of this is for tonight,” Stephen said, and there was finality in his tone. “It’s late. I have to take Rory back before anyone misses her. We’ll deal with our procedural problems some other time.”

  I said my good-byes. There were more long hugs with Callum and Boo while Stephen stood by the door, keys in hand. And then we were back in the car, going to Wexford.

  “So what happens now?” I asked.

  “You get on with your life,” he said. “You go back to school.”

  I tapped my fingers against the car window.

  “You’re saying if there was something out there, something bad, like the Ripper, no one would force me to go after it.”

  “The Ripper is gone. Newman is gone.”

  “But something like that.”

  “It’s very unlikely that there would be something like that, but yes. That’s what I’m saying.”

  “But Thorpe would,” I said. “He’d make me.”

  “Forget about Thorpe. He’s seen what he needed to see.”

  “He didn’t see anything,” I pointed out.

  “He saw your reaction. That wasn’t faked. He knew that. Anyway, Thorpe is my problem, not yours. Whatever’s happened to you…it’s up to you how you use it. It has to be your decision.”

  “Thorpe could make your life miserable.”

  “You’re suggesting my life isn’t already miserable,” he said, with a slightly too weak effort at a smile. I think he was making a joke. It was very hard to tell with Stephen.

  We were almost back to Wexford when we stopped at a red light just outside of a pub that was still doing Ripper specials—Bloody Marys (“Jack’s drink of choice”) were two for one. It was all a joke now. People had been murdered, but it didn’t matter. It was just Jack the Ripper, and he was dead now, so it was funny to have Bloody Marys and have your picture taken lying on the ground of the crime scene.

  “So,” I said, “all the Ripper stuff. How did that work?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How did they keep it all quiet?”

  “It wasn’t that difficult,” he said. “No one saw what actually happened, except for us. Only you saw how it all ended.”

  “How did they explain the bathroom being smashed up?”

  “The assumed a fight went on—a struggle. The attacker must have broken the mirrors and the window.”

  “But they said the police chased him,” I said. “They pulled a body out of the water.”

  “That was all staged,” he said. “Some cars were sent to chase a potential subject.”

  “And the body?”

  “A John Doe from the mortuary. They assigned it a name and an identity. It was all done very high up. Most of the people involved thought they were part of an actual chase.”

  “But what if people try to write about him?”

  “That was all taken care of,” Stephen said. “The story is that he was just a loner—someone who lived on the street. No neighbors. No living relatives. No one to interview. Just a very unfortunate person with a mental condition.”

  “And all of the CCTV footage that had no one in it?”

  “The footage was all fake. That was proven.”

  “No it wasn’t,” I said.

  “Well,” Stephen said. “It’s fake now.”

  “What about the crack in the floor?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “How did they explain that? I mean, you can break a window or a mirror in a fight, but you can’t crack a tile floor, can you?”

  “You’re telling me that crack wasn’t there before?”

  “No,” I said. “It happened that night. It was a big explosion.”

  “Well,” he said, “we’re just very lucky you survived.”

  We had reached Wexford. He stopped the car at the far end of the cobblestone road.

  “I’ll be able to see you all the way to the door from here,” he said. “It should be open. We unlocked the building and had someone stationed there to make sure no one got in until it was secure again. I’ll be here until you get inside.”

  It felt like we should have a more meaningful good-bye than that, but I wasn’t sure what to say. I’d already hugged him once tonight.

  “Sure,” I said, unfastening my seat belt. “Right. Okay. So, I’ll see you around, or?”

  “You can always reach me,” he said. “If you need me.”

  “Right. Okay. So…”

  I walked up the road alone. The door opened, just as promised, and I looked back down the lane and raised my hand as a final good-bye. I couldn’t really see him—the road was too dark at the end where the car was parked. But it was still there. I could see the headlights, two glowing eyes pointed at me, waiting for me to get to safety.

  7

  “RIGHT,” MARK SAID, SWITCHING THE LIGHTS OUT IN ART history the next morning, “let’s get started. John Constable, English Romantic painter, lived from 1776 until 1837…”

  Art history was a long class—three hours, with two ten-minute breaks that were really more like fifteen minutes, but still. Long. I wrote down the names of paintings and stared at the slides, but my mind was completely elsewhere. It was on the platform at Charing Cross. It was in the car with Stephen and at the flat with Callum and Boo.

  I’d felt something last night, aside from nausea. Something real. Something…exciting? Something that made me feel complete again. Plus, Jerome was pressing his leg against mine—not hard. But it was there. John Constable, English Romantic painter, didn’t stand a chance. (Also, for the record, if someone is called a Romantic, it should mean some sexy times, I think. Instead, what it really means is people in puffy shirts who probably had a lot of real-life sexytimes, but produced almost exclusively pictures of hillsides or people in dramatic poses, like pretending to be Ophelia dead in a swamp. I definitely call shenanigans on this.)

  We emerged, three hours later, our brains swollen with images of sky and damp and moping. Once we got outside, Jerome swayed side to side a bit, like he was standing on a teetering top.

  “What?” I said.

  “What were you going to do today?”

  “Work,” I said. “I guess…work. Because I’m kind of behind.”

  “I have things this afternoon as well, but I was thinking…we could go out? Properly? On a date. Tonight?”

  “A date?” I repeated.

  I’d never been on a real date. I’d ended up going places with people—guy people—but it was always kind of, well…kind of crap. “Dates” seemed to be something that existed in movies or television shows or a more domesticated past where you were wooed in high school and got married upon graduation and immediately gave birth to ten children. They were not something for people like me. But here I was, quasi-boyfriend saying he wanted to take me on an actual date, and I was just staring at him impassively, like a horse watching a mime pretending to walk against the wind.

  “Yes,” I said. “Date. Yes.”

  “Okay,” Jerome said. “Good. So, maybe, instead of dinner? We’ll go out?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Would you like to go to dinner, or to a film?”

  “Sure.”

  “Which one?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Whichever.”

  “Okay, well, we can figure it out.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  We shuffled apart, nodding.

  I was going on a date, a date, a date. I repeated the word in my head as I pressed my finger on the keypad, as I tripped up the steps of Hawthorne. The word beat in time to the creaking of the wood. A date, a date…I shoved open the first fire door and breathed in that strange, clinical carpety smell that li
ved only between the fire doors…open second fire door…a date. A date with my man. My boy. My guy. Boyfriend? Whatever. My future activity had a word, and that word was date.

  Jazza was out, so I had the room to myself. I sat at my desk and looked at my pile of books. I listened to the radiators hiss and clank lightly. I heard people coming back to the hall, doors opening and closing, bits of conversation. All the familiar Wexford noises and smells, and this new one…date.

  I was interrupted in my reverie by a knock at the door. I called for the person to come in, and Charlotte appeared and drifted in. I guess this was the first weird thing, because Charlotte did not drift. Charlotte moved from place to place decisively, like a high-speed train. She walked to class with purpose. She walked to dinner with purpose. She walked to the bathroom with purpose and brushed her teeth with purpose and ran her hands through her hair with purpose.

  “Hello,” she said.

  She sat on Jazza’s bed, drew her knees together, and put her hands on them. She looked at her hands, and then at me. It appeared that we were going to have some kind of talk. I had never had a talk with Charlotte, and I wasn’t sure if I was ready or willing to have a talk with Charlotte. But the one thing I had learned about living at school—you don’t always get a choice in these matters.

  “I don’t know if I could have come back,” she said.

  “Oh, well,” I said. “You know.”

  Charlotte took that empty statement as a profundity and shook her head in understanding. I started to wonder if she was feeling quite right. The Ripper had nailed her in the head with a lamp on the night of my attack.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I wasn’t at first,” she said. “I didn’t sleep at all for a week. I was exhausted and crying a lot. I was having anxiety attacks. I’d shake all over, and my thoughts would race. My parents thought they might have to take me out of school for a while…Then I met this amazing woman. She changed everything.”

  For one terrible second, I thought Charlotte was going to tell me that after getting hit on the head with a lamp, she now saw ghosts. That would not be funny.

  “She’s a therapist.”

  “Oh,” I said, sinking in relief. “I have one of those. It didn’t do much.”

  “She’s really special, though. She changed my life. She’s the only reason I was able to go on with the term. I genuinely feel better after talking to her. I just came from her office, actually. I feel really good.”

  Strangely, I could see how good Charlotte felt. It was something about her eyes, the relaxation in her body.

  “She knows about you, and she says you’re welcome to call. She’s a private practitioner, but she doesn’t charge.”

  “Doesn’t charge?”

  “I think she’s independently wealthy. She only takes clients by referral, and she specifically treats victims of violence. I met her through a friend of Eloise’s.”

  The door opened, and Jazza came in, dragging her cello case.

  “Oh,” she said, seeing Charlotte sitting on her bed. “Hello…”

  Jaz hung by the door, clutching her cello for protection. Charlotte stood slowly and stretched.

  “It really is good to have you back,” Charlotte said. “Here. I just wanted you to have her card, in case you needed it.”

  There was one toss of the red hair and a nod to Jazza as she let herself out.

  “What was that?” Jazza asked.

  “The name of her therapist.” I held up the card. Jazza snorted. Actually snorted.

  “She’s been quite the victim,” Jazza said. “She’s probably furious you’re back to steal the spotlight.”

  It was oddly comforting that the attack had messed someone else up—apparently, much worse than it had messed me up. And yet it was also a little annoying. If anyone had a right to be messed up, it was me. Unless I too was acting like that—seeming wounded at one second, utterly confident in the next, my personality flickering on and off like a yard sale lamp.

  “Did she look weird to you?” I asked. “Like, relaxed?”

  “I have no idea.” Jazza pulled her cello into the room and tucked it into the corner by her closet. Jazza had time for everyone except Charlotte. There was an old feud there, one that predated my arrival. Charlotte was the full moon that brought out the werejazza.

  I looked at the card. Clearly, this woman had talent if she had fixed Charlotte, but in the end, she was just another therapist I couldn’t talk to. I dropped the card into my top desk drawer.

  “I have a date tonight,” I said. “An actual date.”

  “This seems to surprise you.”

  “No.” I reclined back on the bed. “I just…a date. It’s so formal-sounding.”

  “Is it formal?”

  “I think we’re getting dinner,” I said.

  Dinner and…perhaps we could have a redo on the making-out fiasco. I spent a pleasant few minutes visualizing what that might entail. I got to the part where the imaginary hand was just sliding under my imaginary shirt…

  Where it encountered my scar. My terrible, nasty, jagged, ugly scar. The imaginary hand withdrew in horror. My actual hand reached up under the bottom of my shirt to see if the scar felt as bad as it looked. It could definitely be felt. What was my boyfriend going to do when he saw my scar? My newly labeled boyfriend, who had only tentatively ventured into that territory anyway. My shirt had never come off. I had no idea when we would get to the shirt-off phase. Maybe now we never would, because we’d both know what was under there, aside from the customary attractions.

  “I need to show you something,” I said to Jazza. “And I need you to be honest with me. Can you be honest with me?”

  “Of course.”

  “No, I mean actually honest.”

  I stood up and lifted my shirt, pulling it up to just under my chest, revealing my abdomen. I had grown used to the scar. It had to be a shock to see it for the first time, all Frankensteiny with the hash marks across the cut line where the sutures were made.

  “It looks bad,” I said, poking at it to show her. “But it doesn’t hurt anymore.”

  “It doesn’t look…that bad. It’s not that bad.”

  It was totally that bad. Her pained expression and wide eyes and massive lie told me that. It was time to stop talking about it.

  “Actually,” I said, lowering my shirt, “I’ve seen worse scars. I told you about the time my grandma got a questionable boob job in Baton Rouge a few years ago?”

  “No?”

  “She got the boob job because she had a coupon for it. Twenty percent off. She had a surgery coupon. She got her boobs on sale. Those scars were worse.”

  This was a partial lie. My grandma really did get her boob job with a 20 percent off coupon from the local paper. We were pretty horrified when we found out, but we found out pretty late, after the surgery was over and she’d been recovering for two weeks. I don’t think there was any bad scarring, though. That was the part I was lying about.

  “They definitely don’t seem real,” I went on. “They don’t move. But they’re real-ish. They’re bigger, and they stick straight out. She calls them ‘my new front porch’ whenever she talks about them, which is a lot. She wears these low-cut tops and says, ‘Just getting some sun on my new front porch.’”

  That part was entirely true.

  “What I think,” she said, as she repositioned herself and straightened up, “is that you are very brave. And it looks fine. It’s not bad. It’s not. It’s just—a line.”

  “But my bikini modeling career is over,” I said. “Unless it’s for pirate bikinis. They don’t mind it if you have a bitchin’ scar when you wear a pirate bikini. That would be amazing. A little skull and crossbones on each boob—”

  Jazza held up a hand, possibly because I was saying “boob” too often.

  “You don’t have to make jokes,” she said. “Have you been downstairs? To where it happened?”

  “I skipped that,” I said.

&nb
sp; “Do you want to go now? You and me,” Jazza said, offering her hand. “Together.”

  There was something about Jazza Benton that just made the world stable and right. She could rock a sensible sweater and mutter at you in German. I’d missed her face, with her big cheeks and small-animal-of-the-forest eyes.

  I went downstairs with her.

  The bathroom was at the end of the short hallway, just a few doors down from the common room. Even as we walked just a few feet in its direction, it was like we were in a different world, a world where I descended into somewhere quiet, where my fears lived. The door was new. I’d heard that the last door had been broken down when the police came in, ripped right off the wall. I pushed it open.

  The light was on. The bathroom used to have an on-off switch, but it appeared that it would now be illuminated at all times.

  There it was. Just a bathroom. The smashed window had been replaced, as had the shattered mirrors. There was a faint tang of fresh paint as well. The crack in the floor was still there, though an attempt had been made to fill it in with some kind of white substance. The spot where I’d been stabbed was over by the sinks. I went over and stood there, running my hand down the wall. I’d slumped here. I’d slid down. I remembered looking around this room and thinking that this was where I was going to die.

  But I didn’t.

  I walked across the room, to the toilet stall where I’d seen—and accidentally blasted—the woman. I pushed the door open.

  There was a toilet. Nothing more.

  “Just a bathroom,” I said.

  “Just a bathroom,” Jazza repeated.

  I looked at the crack in the floor. It was a lot like my scar. The room and I had been broken, and we had a similarly shaped reminder of what had happened to us. And if the Ripper came back, which he wouldn’t, I would blast him into a giant ball of white light and smoke. One brush of my hand, and that was all it would take. I was empowered, literally. That’s what I had to remember. I was bigger and badder than any ghost that crossed my path. That hadn’t occurred to me before. They needed to fear me. I’d never been fearsome before.

  “Better?” she said.