The Name of the Star. Maureen Johnson

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      In her concern over the fate of her phone, Claire first didn’t take notice of the thing she had tripped over, aside from faintly registering that it was somewhat large and weighty and it gave a little when her foot struck it. In the dark, it appeared to be a strangely shaped mound of garbage. Something else put in her way this morning to impede her progress.

      She knelt down and felt along the ground for the phone, sinking her knee directly into a puddle.

      “Wonderful,” she said to herself as she scrabbled around. The phone was quickly recovered. It appeared to be dark and lifeless. She tried the power button, not expecting any result. To her delight, the phone blinked on, casting its little light around her hand once again.

      This was when she first noticed that there was something sticky on her hand. The consistency was extremely familiar, as was the faint metallic smell.

      Blood. Her hand was covered in blood. A lot of blood, with a faintly jelly-like consistency that suggested congealing. Congealing blood meant blood that had been here for several minutes, so it couldn’t be her own. Claire shifted around, holding up her phone for light. She could see now that she had tripped over a person. She crawled closer and felt a hand, a hand that was cool, but not cold.

      “Hello?” she said. “Can you hear me? Can you speak?”

      She got up alongside the figure, a smallish person dressed entirely in motorcycle leathers, wearing a helmet. She reached up to the neck to feel for a pulse.

      Where the neck was supposed to be, there was a space.

      It took her a moment to process what she was feeling, and in desperation she kept reaching around the edge of the helmet to get to the neck, trying to get a sense of the size of this wound. It went on and on, until Claire realized that the head was barely attached at all, and that the puddle she was kneeling in was almost certainly not rainwater.

      The eyes saw it all.

      THE RETURN

      Then shall the slayer return, and come unto his own city, and unto his own house, unto the city whence he fled.

      —Joshua 20:6

      1

      F YOU LIVE AROUND NEW ORLEANS AND THEY THINK a hurricane might be coming, all hell breaks loose. Not among the residents, really, but on the news. The news wants us to worry desperately about hurricanes. In my town, Bénouville, Louisiana (pronounced locally as Ben-ah-VEEL; population 1,700), hurricane preparations generally include buying more beer, and ice to keep that beer cold when the power goes out. We do have a neighbor with a two-man rowboat lashed on top of the porch roof, all ready to go if the water rises—but that’s Billy Mack, and he started his own religion in the garage, so he’s got a lot more going on than just an extreme concern for personal safety.

      Anyway, Bénouville is an unstable place, built on a swamp. Everyone who lives there accepts that it was a terrible place to build a town, but since it’s there, we just go on living in it. Every fifty years or so, everything but the old hotel gets wrecked by a flood or a hurricane—and the same bunch of lunatics comes back and builds new stuff. Many generations of the Deveaux family have lived in beautiful downtown Bénouville, largely because there is no other part to live in. I love where I’m from, don’t get me wrong, but it’s the kind of town that makes you a little crazy if you never leave, even for a little while.

      My parents were the only ones in the family to leave to go to college and then law school. They became law professors at Tulane, in New Orleans. They had long since decided that it would be good for all three of us to spend a little time living outside of Louisiana. Four years ago, right before I started high school, they applied to do a year’s sabbatical teaching American law at the University of Bristol in England. We made an agreement that I could take part in the decision about where I would spend that sabbatical year—it would be my senior year. I said I wanted to go to school in London.

      Bristol and London are really far apart, by English standards. Bristol is in the middle of the country and far to the west, and London is way down south. But really far apart in England is only a few hours on the train. And London is London. So I had decided on a school called Wexford, located in the East End of London. The three of us were all going to fly over together and spend a few days in London, then I would go to school and my parents would go to Bristol, and I would travel back and forth every few weeks.

      But then there was a hurricane warning, and everyone freaked out, and the airlines wiped the schedule. The hurricane teased everyone and rolled around the Gulf before turning into a rainstorm, but by that point our flight had been canceled and everything was a mess for a few days. Eventually, the airline managed to find one empty seat on a flight to New York, and another empty seat on a flight to London from there. Since I was scheduled to be at Wexford before my parents needed to be in Bristol, I got the seat and went by myself.

      Which was fine, actually. It was a long trip—three hours to New York, two hours wandering the airport before taking a six-hour flight to London overnight—but I still liked it. I was awake all night on the flight watching English television and listening to all the English accents on the plane.

      I made my way through the duty-free area right after customs, where they try to get you to buy a few last-minute gallons of perfume and crates of cigarettes. There was a man waiting for me just beyond the doors. He had completely white hair and wore a polo shirt with the name Wexford stitched on the breast. A shock of white chest hair popped out at the collar, and as I approached him, I caught the distinctive, spicy smell of men’s cologne. Lots of cologne.

      “Aurora?” he asked.

      “Rory,” I corrected him. I never use the name Aurora. It was my great-grandmother’s name, and it was dropped on me as kind of a family obligation. Not even my parents use it.

      “I’m Mr. Franks. I’ll be taking you to Wexford. Let me help you with those.”

      I had two incredibly large suitcases, both of which were heavier than I was and were marked with big orange tags that said HEAVY. I needed to bring enough to live for nine months. Nine months in a place that had cold weather. So while I felt justified in bringing these extremely big and heavy bags, I didn’t want someone who looked like a grandfather pulling them, but he insisted.

      “You picked quite the day to arrive, you did,” he said, grunting as he dragged the suitcases along. “Big news this morning. Some nutter’s gone and pulled a Jack the Ripper.”

      I figured “pulled a Jack the Ripper” was one of those English expressions I’d need to learn. I’d been studying them online so I wouldn’t get confused when people started talking to me about “quid” and “Jammy Dodgers” and things like that. This one had not crossed my electronic path.

      “Oh,” I said. “Sure.”

      He led me through the crowds of people trying to get into the elevators that took us up to the parking lot. As we left the building and walked into the lot, I felt the first blast of cool breeze. The London air smelled surprisingly clean and fresh, maybe a little metallic. The sky was an even, high gray. For August, it was ridiculously cold, but all around me I saw people in shorts and T-shirts. I was shivering in my jeans and sweatshirt, and I cursed my flip-flops—which some stupid site told me were good to wear for security reasons. No one mentioned they make your feet freeze on the plane and in England, where they mean something different СКАЧАТЬ