The Madness Underneath: Book 2 (THE SHADES OF LONDON)

by Johnson, Maureen

  “I thought you might be cold,” he said.

  “I am. It feels good. I just threw up.”

  “She was too fast for me to stop her,” he said. “Sometimes they move quickly, more quickly than us. I couldn’t stop her.”

  I’d seen it. I knew that was true. There was nothing he could have done to stop her if she’d been moving as fast as she really wanted to go. Ghosts are quick when they want to be.

  Still, I wasn’t letting him off the hook that easy. I maintained a steely silence for a few moments.

  “Be mad at me if you want,” he said. “But everything I’ve done has been for good reasons.”

  “Like what?”

  He took off his black glasses and rubbed them on his leg. His leg bounced a little with tension.

  “Rory, I just…it’s…it’s very complicated.”

  “Try me.”

  “Rory…”

  “What’s Thorpe doing?” I said. “Over there, by the door?”

  Thorpe wasn’t over by the door. I’d just said that to distract him. I yanked the keys out of the ignition.

  “Tell me,” I said, shoving them down my shirt and holding them against my chest. “Tell me, or we go nowhere. Tell me or I’ll start screaming. Do you want me to draw lots of attention to what’s going on here? I’ll totally do it.”

  A deep sigh from Stephen. He banged his head gently against his headrest and stared up at the car ceiling.

  “They were going to shut us down. They were happy with the results of the Ripper case, but without a terminus, they didn’t know how we could still function.”

  “You still have one,” I said. “What about the one in the bathroom? The one Jo used on Newman?”

  He reached into his pocket and removed a small plastic vial, then he switched on the interior light so I could look at it. It contained a gray stone.

  “That’s it,” he said. “It’s gone cloudy, as you can see. It doesn’t work anymore. We’ve tried. It’s like a blown lightbulb.”

  “What about the two in the river?” I asked. “Can you get them back? You can get things out of the Thames—guns and evidence and stuff, right?”

  “Guns, maybe, on a good day. But not two extremely small stones. The Thames is a powerful tidal river. Presumably the stones drifted a bit before they sank, and now they’re mixed in somewhere in the millions of tons of sediment and sludge. So you are the only terminus. Then I saw what happened to you…I needed to show Thorpe that there was one terminus left. I also needed a good reason to bring you back. I was never comfortable with you being sent away like that, on your own, with no support. This solved both problems. We’ll be allowed to keep going for a while now that he’s seen.”

  Stephen was right. I couldn’t have stayed there on my own, with no one to talk to. He reached over and took the vial and put it back in his pocket.

  “And how did you do it?” I asked. “How did you bring me back?”

  “Thorpe did that. I honestly don’t know how he set it up. I only know he made a very strong suggestion to your therapist that you should be returned to London. He didn’t give me any details.”

  Of course. Now it all made sense. Julia’s sudden decision that I should return to Wexford. Her obvious lie about all the work I’d done in therapy.

  “It was up to you,” Stephen said. “You were asked if you wanted to return. You said yes.”

  “But I didn’t say I would just…put on some freak show for Thorpe, or blow up some woman. You could have told me where we were going.”

  “I wasn’t sure if you’d agree to just…doing it. But I thought if you saw the pain Diane was in…it was appropriate use, Rory. She was in agony. Now, I’ve told you everything. Give me back the keys. Now.”

  The keys were sweat-stuck to my chest. I knocked them loose and they fell gracefully into my crotch. I picked them up and handed them over. He started the car again and was putting it into reverse, then stopped.

  “Boo and Callum,” he said, his voice smooth and quiet again. “They know you’re back. I can take you to see them now, and we can talk about it. If you want. We can go right now, or we can do it some other time. I don’t know how you’re feeling.”

  The rapid change in emotions, the way he wasn’t looking at me…he was still feeling very guilty. His reasons may have been good, but he still felt bad about using me like that, about keeping things from me.

  I did want to see Boo and Callum. Truth be told, I was still glad to see Stephen. And to tell even more truth, it was just a little bit fun to play with his guilt. And he did feel guilty. And after the last few weeks, I deserved whatever fun I could get.

  “We can go now,” I said in a low voice, rubbing a clear patch in the fog on the window.

  6

  IN JUST A FEW TURNS, WE WERE HEADING TOWARD THE YELLOW glowing eye of the clock at the top of Big Ben. The Houses of Parliament were lit up for the night, and the London Eye loomed just across the water, a neon bluish-purple circle revolving slowly. Everything in this part of London was alight. We crossed the bridge by the Parliament buildings and headed over to the south side of the river.

  We turned past Waterloo station and onto the fairly quiet residential streets beyond. He drove down a street with a chip shop on the corner and pulled the car into the only empty space along the street and turned off the engine.

  “We have a new flat—” he began.

  “I know,” I said.

  This seemed to surprise him. He knew something about me, but I knew something about him as well.

  “Oh. Right. Well, the owner of our old flat decided it was time to start charging three thousand pounds a month again. So that was that, really. Since we did such a good job with the Ripper, Her Majesty’s Government has given us a proper office and somewhere to live. It’s just here.”

  He pointed at one of the many largely identical buildings along the road—plain brick houses in a row, the kind found all over the city. Definitely not as fancy as the old place.

  “There’s one more thing,” he said. “I told Callum and Boo there was a meeting tonight, but not what it was about. For two reasons. One, I didn’t know what would happen. It was possible that you wouldn’t go through with it or it wouldn’t work. And two, Boo. She would never have stood for it. And I couldn’t tell Callum without telling Boo. They never knew how close we were to being shut down.”

  “Sounds like you’ve been keeping a lot of secrets,” I said.

  “It goes with the job. Come on.”

  We entered a very narrow hall, stepping on a pile of mail and flyers as we passed inside. There was weird textured wallpaper in the hall, and a light that didn’t quite do the job it was meant for. It glowed down, making a puddle of light in the vestibule, but the stairs were shrouded in darkness. There was no handrail, and the carpet on the steps was slippery from being trod on too many times. I put my hands on the walls and supported myself as I went up, my fingers running over the Braille of the wallpaper. Another jingle of keys. I heard voices inside the apartment on the landing—one low, laughing. The other high-pitched and insistent. I knew that last voice very well. I had lived with that voice.

  When he opened the door and I poked my head inside, I recognized a lot of the furniture from the old flat, including the two old sofas and the unstable kitchen table with mismatched chairs. The other flat had been larger, so everything was crammed in, leaving barely enough room to get around. Books were piled on the floor, all along the walls, piles and piles of them in varying heights. There were also document boxes and piles of thick folders. Maps and notes were taped all over the walls, which were covered in more textured wallpaper, this time in a mustard yellow. It was particularly jarring when combined with the red Scotch plaid curtains that were drawn tightly shut over the front windows.

  A head popped over the top of the sofa, then the rest of Callum appeared as he climbed over the back of the sofa to get to me.

  “Hey!” he said. “Look who it is!”

  Callum gav
e me a big hug, wrapping me in his extremely impressive arm and chest muscles. Boo was on the other sofa, her leg in a cast, stretched out. Boo had been trying to protect me from the Ripper, and he had thrown her in front of a car.

  “Get off her, you perv!” she yelled at Callum. “Come here!”

  I crossed over and gave her a hug. Boo had touched up her hair in exciting new ways. She’d previously had a sharp-cut black bob, kind of a Louise Brooks look, with a deep red streak. She had added a touch of violet to the edge of her bangs, so that there was a strong purple line running right above her eyes. It looked like a fashionable lobotomy scar.

  “How long will that be on?” I said, pointing at the cast.

  “Just a few more days, but I’m getting used to it. I have to crawl up the stairs on my bum…”

  “It’s very entertaining,” Callum said.

  “Make us some tea,” Boo commanded. “Mine’s gone cold, and Rory needs some.”

  “I cannot wait until that thing is off your leg,” Callum muttered.

  “Make one for me too,” Stephen said.

  Boo pulled on my arm, causing me to fall onto the sofa next to her.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “Okay.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m okay enough. What about you?”

  “You know,” she said, shrugging. Boo and Jo had been best friends, and Jo’s death—or her after-death death—had been a terrible blow. The pain of that blow was still evident in her expression, but like me, she was shuffling onward.

  “I’m doing some research,” she said, patting some folders that sat next to her on the sofa. “As soon as this cast comes off, I start my training. I’m either going to go in as an Underground employee, like Callum, or I’ll do an apprenticeship at British Gas.”

  Boo told me some more about her future job prospects, showing me glossy brochures of people in coveralls looking intently at pipes and wires and going down ladders into dark underground places. The prospect really did seem to delight her. Stephen went to a desk by the window and poked at his laptop in a way that suggested he was just trying to stay out of our conversation for a moment.

  “Gas company workers can get in anywhere,” she said, “all the good underground spaces. I’d look good with a safety helmet, yeah? Toolbelt?”

  “You don’t even need tools,” Callum said, passing by with some cups of tea balanced on a large book. “You’ve got those talons. You could probably pry open a manhole with those things.”

  Boo stretched out her fingers, displaying her long, fake purple nails, then slashed playfully at Callum’s hip. She accepted the teas, passing one to me, and Callum moved on to Stephen.

  “That’s my atlas,” Stephen said, observing the object Callum was using as a tray.

  “Sorry, love.”

  “I’ve told you about that.”

  “No one needs an atlas,” Callum said, passing him the last mug. “What with the Internet and all. Here’s your tea.”

  Stephen came over to join us, and the atmosphere in the room settled instantly.

  “Right,” Stephen said. “So, tonight, we had a meeting with Thorpe…”

  “I still don’t understand why you had to have a meeting at two in the morning,” Boo said.

  “That’s when it had to happen,” Stephen said.

  Callum glanced over at Boo.

  “And we have official clearance to continue,” Stephen finished.

  “Clearance to continue?” Boo asked. “They were going to shut us down?”

  “It was being discussed.”

  “And you didn’t mention this?” Boo said.

  “They were concerned because we don’t have the termini anymore,” Stephen said.

  “And so am I,” Callum said, his voice edged with anger. “Please tell me this solution involves getting some new ones.”

  “It does,” Stephen said. “It involves Rory.”

  Callum and Boo looked at me expectantly. Stephen cleared his throat a bit.

  “She…is a terminus.”

  I can’t fault Callum and Boo for not knowing what to say to that.

  “You’re shitting me,” Callum said, after a moment.

  “I’m not,” Stephen said. “I can only assume that it happened at some point after the final Ripper attack. Which is why you need to tell us everything that happened to you from the minute of impact.”

  Now the focus was back on me. Julia had been trying for weeks to get me to this very point—the point of the knife as it went in, those minutes when I was slumped on the floor, when I saw the blood coming out of my own abdomen. When the Ripper—his name was Alexander Newman—told me that I was going to die.

  It was not something I felt like talking about. But there did seem to be a compelling reason for me to do so—there was a logic to telling them.

  “He cut me,” I said. “He said he did it in such a way that I would bleed and die slowly. He gave me the terminus.”

  “He gave it to you?” Callum said.

  “I couldn’t move. He said he had this theory that if someone with the sight died connected to a terminus, that person might come back…because he had died holding one. He wanted to see what happened when I died. And then…Jo came through the door.”

  “The door was locked,” Stephen said.

  “She went through the door.”

  “That would have hurt her,” Boo said quietly. “She told me that hurt. She said it felt like being ripped apart.”

  I paused for a moment out of respect for that. I didn’t know Jo could feel pain, or that she’d felt it coming to get me.

  “And once Jo came into the room?” Stephen prompted.

  “She took the terminus from me, and she went after Newman with it. That’s when…everything blew up. There was a really bright light, and the mirrors smashed. And then they were gone, and I passed out.”

  “When did you first know what you could do?” he asked. “Was it on the bench, in Bristol?”

  Callum and Boo looked over in confusion, but I guess they decided to let me keep talking. This story was full of weird surprises.

  “No,” I said. “There was one before that, on the day I left Wexford. I found a woman in the bathroom where it all happened. I went down there before I left school, just to look at the room, and I found her in a stall.”

  “Had she been there before?”

  “No,” I said. “I’d never seen her before. I have no idea where she came from. She was hiding in the bathroom stall, and she looked really scared. She didn’t speak. I don’t think she could. I just reached out…I was telling her it was okay. I didn’t know. I just touched her. And it happened.”

  “Did you have to touch her in any special way?” Callum asked. “I mean, did you have to keep your hand on her?”

  “I don’t know. I just touched her on the shoulder. It happened right away, I think.”

  “Any physical effects after that?” Stephen asked.

  “My arm tingled.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “No.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not pain. I sort of feel like my arm is being sucked into something, and then it starts to shake. It feels…electrified, I guess. The rest of it is like normal terminus stuff. There’s a light. There’s a burning smell. But that’s it.”

  “But tonight you were physically ill,” Stephen said.

  “Tonight?” Boo cut in. “That’s where you were? I mean, what if it’s dangerous? What if it hurts her?”

  “I thought about that,” Stephen said. “But it’s doubtful we could ever find that out. Much like our sight, it may not come up on any kind of examination. I suppose we can schedule a full physical workup…”

  But now that Boo had brought it up, this new possibility was going to be on my mind. What if it did hurt me? What if having an internal terminus was like having cancer?

  Or what if it made me super healthy?

  God, I was tired.
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  “Stop,” I said, holding up my hand. “Can we just…stop? I’ve had enough medical stuff in the last few weeks, so…just, don’t.”

  That ended that part of the conversation and they all looked very uncomfortable. Even among my freaky friends I was a freak.

  “Let me make one thing clear,” Stephen said. “Rory is not a weapon. How she uses her ability is entirely up to her.”

  “And that’s fine,” Callum said, “but we aren’t police if we have no power to do anything. This is still the problem, even though Rory is a terminus. If she isn’t around, and if she isn’t—don’t take this the wrong way, Rory—willing or able, where does that leave us?”

  “It leaves us exactly where we’ve been for the last few weeks,” Boo said. “We can still do our jobs, just without weapons. Regular police don’t carry guns.”

  “But they have units with guns if they need them. Don’t they? There are armed response units.”

  “Callum is making a valid point,” Stephen said, “but I agree with you, Boo. The squad long predated the terminus. According to what records I have, they didn’t get them until the seventies.”

  “Where did they come from?” I asked.

  “That’s unclear,” Stephen said, scratching his jawline.

  “They must have come from somewhere,” I said.

  “They clearly did come from somewhere, but that somewhere isn’t known to us. Diamonds come from a range of places. Africa. India. Russia. Canada.”

  “It doesn’t matter where they came from,” Callum said. “We don’t have them now, and we need them. For weeks, I’ve been getting calls. All kinds of problems on the Tube. Trains being delayed, dangerous situations where people could be hurt or even killed.”

  “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.”