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

by Johnson, Maureen

  “What was it that Newman said to you that night,” Callum asked. “About dying with a terminus?”

  “He had some theory that if someone with the sight died holding a terminus, they’d come back. As a ghost, I mean.”

  “And he knew this how?”

  “I have no idea if he knew it at all,” I replied.

  “Stephen is convinced there’s more information that we’ve never been allowed to see. An archive. Maybe he’s right. Maybe Newman had access to things they don’t let us see anymore, but…”

  “But?” I said.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think they care enough about us to hide anything. And what would be the point of hiding stuff from us? I think he’s being a little paranoid. He hides things from us, and he thinks people are hiding things from him. I mean, if there was a method of making people into ghosts, I guess I could see the point in holding on to that but…no. I don’t know.”

  He shook his head and scratched his arm.

  “You know they think we’re freaks,” he went on. “You know Thorpe hates dealing with us. And can you blame him?”

  We arrived back at Liverpool Street, both of us quiet and pensive. Callum walked me out and down Artillery Lane.

  “Really,” I said when we reached the back of my building, “I’ll try harder. Just don’t give up yet, okay?”

  “Forget it,” he said, slapping me reassuringly on the shoulder. “I’m just glad you’re back. Things always get interesting when you come around.”

  12

  I WAS SITTING IN HISTORY ON THURSDAY, LISTENING TO MY teacher go through the list of everything that the exam might possibly cover, when it occurred to me, in a dim and distant way, that I had no idea what he was talking about. I was listening to words, and I recognized them as words, but they were arranged in a way that had no meaning. This is possibly due to the fact that all the people in English history have the same names. William. Edward. Charles. James. Henry. Richard. George. Elizabeth. Mary. Or that there are people with titles that rotate through all these stories. A Prince of Wales here, a Duke of Gloucester there. A Richmond and Buckingham and Guildford and on and on and on.

  And when you take English history in England, they sort of assume you know where the hell they’re talking about—that you understand what’s up north and what’s down south and what’s near the water. This is stuff I get when we have to do the Civil War at home. I can picture where Philadelphia is, and South Carolina, and Virginia. These things make sense. I don’t have to look everything up on a map, or try to figure out which of the nine million Duke of Buckinghamshiremondlands they’re talking about, or who was who in the War of the Roses, or why roses? Just, why roses?

  Anyway, he was saying words that I was supposed to know, and I was probably supposed to be writing them down. I took a stab at this, writing “Edward” and “James” and “battle of…” It occurred to me I should be more concerned about the fact that I had no idea what was going on, but I felt nothing in particular. At home, I was a top student. Wexford was a much more challenging school, and when I’d first arrived, I was panicked all the time because I couldn’t keep up. Then I was panicked because a murderous ghost was after me. Now I was back, there was no murderous ghost after me, the crack, at last, had passed from my thoughts, and I was so behind as to be out of the race. I felt nothing but a pleasant sleepiness when I looked at my books.

  “Aurora,” my teacher said. “A word.”

  My history teacher was not, in my experience, an unreasonable person. I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to yell at me for looking spacey. And he didn’t. He did, however, present me with a large, sealed envelope.

  “I’m going to have to assess where you are so I can determine what exam questions to set for you next week. This is a short pretest. Take it over to the library. There’s a proctor over there who will monitor your progress and take it from you when you are finished. It’s just thirty minutes. Keep the answers very short and simple—I just need to know where you are in basic terms.”

  I felt like I was carrying my own death sentence…or, if not a death sentence, maybe instructions for my own torture. Our librarian, Mrs. Feeley, was indeed expecting me. I was seated by myself at a table. There were only three questions on this pre-exam, with space enough to write a paragraph or two of answer.

  Explain the origins of the Bishops’ Wars of 1639 and 1640.

  Give the basic timeline and the major events of the English Civil War of 1642 to 1651.

  List three immediate repercussions of the Great Fire of London.

  These were not unreasonable questions, and should have been easy to anyone following along in class. The third one I could do. The second one I could kind of do. The first one, I had completely forgotten. I’d been given a half hour to do the whole thing. I dithered for a few minutes, trying to figure out if I wanted to start with the one I knew or the ones I didn’t know. Maybe the fact of forcing my brain on to those questions would jog some knowledge. So I jabbed at question two for a bit, penciling some dates in the margins, trying to string them together, adding whatever I could recall. The result was such a broken, spotty timeline that I had to erase it completely. I had wasted time. On to question three.

  Three immediate repercussions of the Great Fire. In 1666, a fire starts on Pudding Lane, the most delicious sounding of lanes. London is crowded—the buildings built so far out that they practically touch each other across the street. It spreads quickly, burning for days. It burns down a large portion of the east section of the old city, the one contained within the city walls. Those city walls had stopped just outside of Wexford. This area had been preserved from the fire.

  “Five minutes,” Mrs. Feeley said.

  Five minutes? How had that happened? I’d just started. Three immediate repercussions…The buildings were rebuilt more safely, in stone and brick, with wider streets. And the fire destroyed many of the rats that spread the plague…

  This area had not burned.

  The crack was back in my brain.

  I recalled the woman I’d seen, and accidentally destroyed, in the bathroom. Could she have been from around that time? It was possible. I’d been looking at a lot of paintings from the mid-1600s in art history and they looked very similar, but peasant dress in the Middle Ages and Renaissance probably didn’t change all that much. I was going to have to start studying clothing history if I was going to see these people.

  But if this area hadn’t burned, what had been here? What was underneath Wexford? Maybe that was where I should start. There had to be maps.

  “Time’s up,” she said.

  I had only written part of the answer to one question.

  “Can I ask something?” I said, passing back the paper.

  “Of course,” Mrs. Feeley said.

  “What used to be here?”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “On this site.”

  “Wexford was originally built as a workhouse.”

  “No, I mean further back than that. I mean this whole area.”

  “Well, I don’t know the entire history of the site, but what period are you wondering about?”

  “Around the Great Fire. Maybe just before and after?”

  “Well,” she said, “in that period, this area would have been just outside the boundaries of the London Wall. Quite literally just outside of. Bishopsgate was a boundary street. There would certainly have been a number of fields. Henry the Eighth also used the area to store artillery and train soldiers. That’s why the streets have the names they do—Gun Street, Artillery Lane.”

  “Are there maps?”

  “We don’t have much of a cartography section, but there is quite a collection at the British Library.”

  “Is that far?”

  “Not at all. It’s just next to King’s Cross station.”

  Having tanked my pretest, I still had three hours left to kill in the afternoon. If I hurried, I could probably be there within a half an hour or so. />
  The words British Library call to mind something ancient. I was expecting a grand old building. Instead, it was a modern place, with lots of interactive screens, weird tables with “stand-up chairs,” which were essentially boards you could lean against and work standing up, and swish cafés.

  It turned out there were multiple map rooms, but to access them, I first had to go downstairs to a room full of lockers, where we had to leave our coats, all liquids, and all pens. Everything we were going to carry with us (money, computers, paper, pencils) had to go in a clear plastic shopping bag. Then I had to get a library ID card. Then I had to go online and spend half an hour trying to figure out what I needed. Then I had to order it. I put in the request and was told that my maps would be available in about an hour to an hour and a half, so I walked around for a while and watched other people study. I obsessively checked my status, waiting for the message telling me that my map had come. Finally, it arrived. I was handed a stack of massive, flat portfolios, like huge folders, which I gingerly carried over to one of the nearby tables. I opened up all the flaps of the first one, revealing a single page inside. It looked almost new, yet it was from 1658, and they were letting me touch it.

  It was a close-up view of London back when London took up mostly just a single mile along the Thames, encased by a wall. The artist had drawn ships sailing down the Thames, rows of houses, and arches all along the London wall. (These were the actual “gates” of the wall, and their names still existed: Bishopsgate, Aldgate, Moorgate…I knew all of these places.) I had to look close, but I could see windmills and trees and even tiny little people. There were fields in places I knew to be bustling parts of East London.

  And there was Artillery Lane, spelled here “Artillerie Lane,” the very street that ran along Wexford, where the Royal Gunpowder was located. It was next to something called the Artillerie Garden. I looked this one up quickly online—it was a munitions storehouse and training ground for the military. Just across Bishopsgate, in a little warren of buildings, I saw the word Bedlam.

  I’d heard that before. My grandmother used it a lot to mean insane. Like, when her two little dogs heard the can opener going, her kitchen became Bedlam.

  I looked up Bedlam. Bedlam—the Bethlehem Royal Hospital. One of the world’s first psychiatric facilities, except what all the information described hardly sounded like compassionate medical care. There were manacles and chains and all forms of restraints, buckets of water, cold and terrifying cells. The public could even come in and pay to see the patients. It was a human zoo. Mad preachers shouted from the windows and gained devoted followings. Brilliant but sick patients drew elaborate diagrams of mind-controlling machines. The hospital had been in several locations, but for quite a while, it was that tiny tower with the flag, which sat where Liverpool Street station is now.

  Wexford was practically on top of it.

  Now my mind was moving swiftly. If the hospital had been there, presumably many people had died there. Presumably they needed to be buried. I looked up “Bedlam burials” and was rewarded instantly with many hits. Current Archaeology had a front cover story called “Bedlam Burials.” There was a picture of a skeleton neatly packed in the dirt, being unearthed. I turned up more articles on lots of skeletons being uncovered. They’d found them in 1863, when they were building Broad Street station, which was long gone, but had been close by. And in 1911, they found piles and piles more when they were tunneling their way to Liverpool Street.

  We were sitting right on top of the graveyard of the world’s most infamous mental institution, which is arguably many hundreds of times worse than being on top of the old haunted burial grounds that things are always being built on in America. Loads of mad ghosts…who might be disturbed by, say, a major explosion that might have, quite possibly, opened up some kind of crack that they could pass through? And they might, for instance, kill people with hammers…

  Now I had a reason to call Stephen.

  Stephen wasn’t answering his phone. I tried several times as I ran back to the Tube and wound my way through the insane King’s Cross rush-hour traffic in an attempt to get back to Wexford before anyone noticed I had gone. I got home fifteen minutes before dinner. Jazza was sitting on her bed, looking like a small child who’d just seen a wolf eat her pet bunny.

  “Hey,” I said. “How’s my favorite roommate?”

  “Have I told you that I’m wretched at German?”

  “You tell me that daily,” I said. “But I don’t believe you.”

  “Well, I’m not good enough for someone applying to study German.”

  “But you’re good enough for me, and isn’t that what counts?”

  “Not really. I’m going to fail.”

  I had no idea how she was doing in German, but I doubted she was going to fail. I was going to fail. I was the failure of our room.

  “Do you have any Cheez Whiz?”

  Things had to be bad if she wanted predinner Cheez Whiz.

  “Do I have any Cheez Whiz? She asks stupid questions, my roommate. Heater or microwave?”

  “Microwave.”

  While I was in Bristol, I had been sent three jars of my favorite substance on earth. I took one of them from my bottom desk drawer. I was carrying the cheezy goodness back down the hall when Charlotte materialized from the direction of the fire doors.

  “How are you doing?” she asked.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Are you keeping up with everything okay?”

  I couldn’t say yes to this and keep a straight face. Plus, from the way she curled up the question at the end, I got the distinct impression that Charlotte already knew the score.

  “It’s an ongoing process,” I said, sticking the jar into the microwave.

  “That’s a great way of looking at it. I heard you saw Jane. She’s great, isn’t she?”

  “She’s good,” I said.

  We both watched the jar revolve slowly.

  “Is she helping you?”

  “I just went the once.”

  “Well, she’s really great, I think. I think you already look better.”

  The microwave beeped, and I opened it up.

  “I’m glad,” I said. I smiled and maneuvered around her to get back to my room. I liked Jane too, but there was something deeply unnerving in the way Charlotte liked her. Charlotte liked Jane too much. I didn’t even know what that meant, or why it was a problem.

  Maybe I had therapy jealousy.

  I stuck my finger into the container and helped myself to a bit of the cheez, only to scald myself. I quickly put it in my mouth and bounced open the door with my elbow.

  “Is Charlotte kind of creepy?” I asked Jazza, kicking the door shut behind me.

  “Creepy how?”

  “Just…creepy. I don’t know. Creepy.”

  “It’s not the first word I would use to describe her.”

  Jazza was digging around in her tuck chest for a suitable snack with which to consume the Cheez Whiz. Cheez Whiz is a very forgiving food—you just need something slightly more stable than Cheez Whiz to eat it with. I have been known to eat it with slices of actual cheese.

  “Is she different, though? Since the attack?”

  “Definitely different,” Jazza said. “A little nicer, but in an unctuous way. She wants to help all the time. I don’t need her help. Is that what you mean by creepy?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “I suppose that’s good,” Jazza said, sighing a little. She could never be mean for more than a minute or two at a time, then something clicked inside her. “I know she’s going to therapy. It must be helping. I mean, I know she was hurt. But you were hurt worse.”

  That was true. I really was. I was holding on to the title.

  My phone was ringing, and Stephen’s name came up. I had to answer this, but I couldn’t answer it in front of Jazza, and this was going to be a problem. We didn’t leave the room to answer phone calls. But I had no choice in the matter, and bounced up with a qu
ick “Be right back!”

  “Where have you been?” I said.

  “Doing my job. What’s wrong?”

  I hurried down the hall and stood in the vestibule between the fire doors. This was as close to privacy as I was going to get.

  “I don’t have long,” I said. “I’m in my building. People around.”

  I launched into what I had discovered. He didn’t interrupt me. I went through all my notes. The location of Bedlam, how far it was from Wexford, the burial pit discovery. He listened to it all, and somehow, though he was totally silent, I knew I was catching his interest. Stephen liked research. He liked map reference numbers and dates and the word cartography.

  “All right,” he said. “You’re right. It’s worth knowing.”

  “What would you normally do next?”

  “Talk to the suspect.”

  “Okay. So let’s do that.”

  “The suspect in question is in a mental health facility under close guard.”

  Jazza waved to me and began to approach.

  “Have to go,” I said. “Can you just…”

  “All right,” he said, sighing a little. “I’ll look into it.”

  I was in French on Friday when my phone vibrated in my pocket. I managed to slide it out and hide it in my lap, in the folds of my skirt. It was a message from Stephen.

  Going to speak with suspect in Royal Gunpowder incident tomorrow morning.

  I had long mastered the art of typing texts with one finger without really looking. Well, without looking much.

  What time are you picking me up?

  His response was quick:

  Picking you up for what?

  I’m going with you.

  Out of the question.

  My teacher was looking in my direction now. I quickly pressed the phone between my thighs, vanishing it.

  “Let me just cover the things you’ve been able to do so far,” I said. The minute I got out of class, I had called Stephen. I was not giving up on this. I paced the green with the phone to my ear. The middle of the green was actually the safest place to talk. Too many people along the edges. “You convinced my therapist that she had to let me come back to school. You busted into my school’s security system. You arranged for me to be taken to a Tube station in the middle of the night to do a show for Thorpe—”