Ripper & Rayne - Episode 3: Names of the Dead
The dead can't rest when the living refuse to forget
London, 1979
It started at Charing Cross. People started noticing names etched into tunnel walls overnight. No sign of tools. No witnesses. No idea how anyone had cut the concrete so cleanly.
Every name belonged to someone who’d died somewhere on the tube. A suicide, an accident, workers lost to the endless rebuilds of the Underground.
The oldest inscription was a name from 1934. The newest was two weeks old.
Special Branch had passed it up the line. “Occult considerations.” Which meant Giles and Ethan.
“Graffiti and ghosts,” Ethan said, stepping off the service lift into the gloom. “It’s quite romantic, in a municipal sort of way.”
Giles ran his hand over one of the carvings. “These markings are precise. Masterful carving - not something you could do quickly.”
He traced a finger over the final curve of a letter - a looping serif font, old-fashioned and deliberate. “Someone’s handwriting.”
Ethan crouched beside him, reaching out to touch Giles knee - just for balance, maybe. “You’re tracing ghosts by their penmanship now, Rupert? Romantic.”
Giles gave him a look. “Practical. Everyone leaves a mark.”
“Even on love letters?” Ethan’s grin flickered, half challenge and half memory.
Giles straightened up sharply. “This isn’t about sentiment.”
“No,” Ethan said, still squatting by the last carving, looking up. “It never is with you.”
They followed a paper trail instead.
Giles found a matching signature - H. March - on rosters and records going back several decades. The most consistent connection with all the names, whether it was on Civil Defence rosters from the war, or schedule rotations for the Bakerloo Line.
A recently-retired records clerk. And his son killed in a tunnel collapse. Address for his pension checks still current.
The flat was above a tobacconist on Villiers Street, just up from Embankment. Smelled of dust and tea that had been left to go cold.
Binders lined the walls, stacked and cared for. Kept neat as they could be, respectful. Each labeled in neat blue pen: To be remembered.
Henry March answered the door in his shirtsleeves, surprised but immediately polite. “Is this about the names?” he said, before they even had a chance to ask. “I’ve tried to keep them safe,” he explained as he showed them pages and pages of lists, dates, and deaths. “When I write them down, it stops them vanishing. Stops them being forgotten.”
The air around the binders was trembling faintly. The paper edges shivering in some non-existent draft.
“I’m sorry to say that your comfort’s become more of a prison,” Giles explained gently. “I think you’re binding their souls here. They can’t move on.”
March’s eyes filled with confusion, then fearful tears. “No, no. I do it to give ‘em peace. I make a pot of tea for them every night,” he said. “They keep me company.”
“I know,” said Giles. “But peace isn’t the same as captivity.”
Ethan touched the windowpane with his fingertips, leaning softly against the wall. The glass flexed as his fingers touched it, and a shimmer of reflected faces pressed close, whispering. “They don’t look very peaceful to me.”
March’s voice broke. “But if I stop, they’ll be lost. Forgotten. My boy, too.”
“You have to let them go,” Giles said. “All of them.”
At Giles’ gesture, Ethan pulled a binder from the shelf. The whispering rose into a storm. Pages fluttered, ink seeping through the pages like black tears.
Giles struck a match and dropped it into the hearth. “Rest,” he whispered - laying the binder gently and letting the fire take hold.
March lurched forward, as if suddenly realizing what was happening. “No! You’ll kill them again-” And then he fell, his sentence unfinished. A final sigh lost in the crackle of flame.
The fire itself turned blue. The voices at the window shifted from fury to sounds of relief, a long, slow exhale. And the walls stilled. Names turning to ash as Ethan added more paper to the flame.
“You always did prefer a clean ledger,” Ethan said quietly.
Giles’ face was unreadable. “It’s not about clean. It’s about balance.”
He turned away to attend to the fallen Henry. He didn’t see the last flame guttering, and missed the faint shimmer of letters forming in the soot.
A new name, not written in ink, or by any visible hand: R. James.
Randall. The name Giles never liked to speak aloud.
Ethan glanced at Giles, and reached gently into the hearth. The page was still warm, edges curling but the name intact. It came away easily in his hands. He folded it carefully, slipped it into his jacket.
The soot smudged his thumb like a stain of old blood.
Outside, rain had turned the pavement into dirty mirrors.
“They’ll rest better now,” Giles said, watching the glow from the station mouth.
Ethan lit a cigarette, cupping his hand to protect it from the drizzle. “Rest is a relative term, isn’t it, Rupert?”
Giles didn’t answer. He was watching the wet lights reflected on the street, blurring into each other, like those names had blurred into each other.
As they walked away, the city exhaled.
In Ethan’s pocket, the paper whispered once, softly.
Stories from Ripper & Rayne are available in my Alternate Frequencies section.