The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

  “Doesn’t work like that. You need a leap of faith to leave your old life behind. True metamorphosis doesn’t come with flowcharts.”

  All around us life goes on, oblivious to my quandary.

  “But I’ll tell you this,” says the New Zealander. “We’ve all been headhunted, except for our founder.” D’Arnoq jerks with his head to the unseen man in the compartment behind. “So I know what you’re feeling right now, Hugo. That space there, between the curb and this car, it’s a chasm. But you’ve been vetted and profiled, and if you cross that chasm, you’ll thrive here. You’ll matter. Whatever you want, now and always, you’ll get.”

  I ask him, “Would you make the same choice again?”

  “Knowing what I now know, I’d kill to get into this car, if I had to. I’d kill. What you’ve seen Miss Constantin do—that pause button of time at King’s College, or the puppeteering of the homeless guy—that’s just the prelude to lesson one. There’s so much more, Hugo.”

  I remember holding Holly in my arms, earlier.

  But it’s the feeling of love that we love, not the person.

  It’s that giddy exhilaration I just experienced, just now.

  The feeling of being chosen and desired and cared about.

  It’s pretty pathetic when you examine it clearheadedly.

  So. This is a real, live Faustian pact I’m being offered.

  I almost smile. Faust tends not to have happy endings.

  But a happy ending like whose? Like Brigadier Philby’s?

  He passed away peacefully, surrounded by family.

  If that’s a happy ending, they’re fucking welcome to it.

  When push comes to shove, what’s Faust without his pact?

  Nothing. No one. We’d never have heard of him. Quinn.

  Dominic Fitzsimmons. Yet another clever postgrad.

  Another gray commuter, swaying on the District Line.

  The Land Cruiser’s rear door clunks open an inch.

  THE MAN—THE FOUNDER—IN the rear of the car acts as if I’m not there, and D’Arnoq says nothing as he drives us away from the town square, so I sit quietly examining my fellow passenger via his reflection in the glass: midforties, frameless glasses, thick if frosted hair; chin cleft, clean-shaven, and a scar over his jawbone, which surely has a story to tell. He has a lean, tough physique. Mittel Europe ex-military? His clothes offer no clues: sturdy ankle-length boots, black moleskin trousers, a leather jacket, once black but battered grayish. If you noticed him in a crowd you might think “architect” or “philosophy lecturer”; but you probably wouldn’t notice him.

  There are only two roads out of La Fontaine Sainte-Agnès. One climbs up to the hamlet of La Gouille, but D’Arnoq takes the other, heading down the valley towards Euseigne. We pass a turning for Chetwynd-Pitt’s chalet, and I wonder if the boys are worried about my safety or just pissed off that I abandoned them to their hookers’ pimp. I wonder, but I don’t care. A minute later we’ve passed the town boundary. The road is banked by rising, falling walls of snow, and D’Arnoq drives with caution—the car has snow tires and the road’s been salted, but this is still Switzerland in January. I unzip my coat and think of Holly looking at the clock above the bar, but regret is for the Normals.

  “We lost you last night,” states my fellow passenger, in a cultured European accent. “The blizzard hid you from us.”

  Now I study him directly. “Yes, I had a disagreement with my host. I’m sorry if it caused you any trouble … sir.”

  “Call me Mr. Pfenninger, Mr. Anyder. ‘Anyder.’ A well-chosen name. The principal river on the island of Utopia.” The man watches the monochrome world of valley walls, snow-buried fields, and farm buildings. A river rushes alongside the road, black and very fast.

  The interview begins. “May I ask how you know about Anyder?”

  “We’ve investigated you. We need to know about everything.”

  “Do you work for the security services?”

  Pfenninger shakes his head. “Only rarely do our circles overlap.”

  “So you have no political agenda?”

  “As long as we are left alone, none.”

  D’Arnoq slows and drops a gear to take a perilous bend.

  Time to be direct: “Who are you, Mr. Pfenninger?”

  “We are the Anchorites of the Dusk Chapel of the Blind Cathar of the Thomasite Monastery of Sidelhorn Pass. It’s quite a mouthful, you’ll agree, so we refer to ourselves as the Anchorites.”

  “I’d agree it sounds freemasonic. Are you?”

  His eyes show a gleam of amusement. “No.”

  “Then, Mr. Pfenninger, why does your group exist?”

  “To ensure the indefinite survival of the group by inducting its members into the Psychosoterica of the Shaded Way.”

  “And you’re the … the founder of this … group?”

  Pfenninger looks ahead. Power lines dip and rise from pole to pole. “I am the First Anchorite, yes. Mr. D’Arnoq is now the Fifth Anchorite. Ms. Constantin, whom you met, is the Second.”

  Cautiously, D’Arnoq overtakes a salt-spitting truck.

  “ ‘Psychosoterica,’ ” I say. “I don’t know the word.”

  Pfenninger quotes: “A slumber did my spirit seal, I had no human fears.” He looks like he’s just delivered a subtle punch line, and I realize he just spoke without speaking. His lips were pressed together. Which is not possible. So I must be mistaken. “She seemed a thing that could not feel the touch of earthly years.” Again. His voice sounded in my head, a lush and crisp sound, as if through top-of-the-range earphones. His face defies me to suggest it’s a trick. “No motion has she now, no force; she neither hears nor sees.” No muffled voice, no wobbling throat, no tell-tale gap at the corner of his mouth. A recording? Experimentally, I put my hands over my ears but Pfenninger’s voice is just as clear: “Rolled round in Earth’s diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees.”

  I’m gaping. I close my mouth. I ask, “How?”

  “There is a word,” Pfenninger says aloud. “Utter it.”

  So I manage to mumble, “Telepathy.”

  Pfenninger addresses our driver: “Did you hear, Mr. D’Arnoq?”

  Elijah D’Arnoq’s peering at us in the rearview mirror. “Yes, Mr. Pfenninger, I heard.”

  “Mr. D’Arnoq accused me of ventriloquism, when I inducted him. As if I were a performer on the music-hall circuit.”

  D’Arnoq protests: “I didn’t have Mr. Anyder’s education, and if the word ‘telepathy’ was coined back then, it hadn’t reached the Chatham Islands. And I was fried by shell shock. It was 1922.”

  “We forgave you decades ago, Mr. D’Arnoq, I and my little wooden puppet with the movable jaw.” Pfenninger glances my way, humor in his eyes, but their banter just makes everything weirder. 1922? Why did D’Arnoq say “1922”? Or did he mean to say 1982? But that doesn’t matter: Telepathy’s real. Telepathy exists. Unless I hallucinated the last sixty seconds. We pass a garage where a mechanic shovels snow. We pass a field where a pale fox stands on a stump, sniffing the air.

  “So,” my mouth’s dry, “psychosoterica is telepathy?”

  “Telepathy is one of its lesser disciplines,” replies Pfenninger.

  “Its lesser disciplines? What else can psychosoterica do?”

  A cloud shifts and the fast river’s strafed with light.

  Pfenninger asks, “What is today’s date, Mr. Anyder?”

  “Uh …” I have to grope for the answer. “January the second.”

  “Correct. January the second. Remember.” Mr. Pfenninger looks at me; his pupils shrink and I feel a pinprick in my forehead. I—

  • • •

  —BLINK, AND THE Land Cruiser is gone, and I find myself on a wide, long rocky shelf on a steep mountainside in high-altitude sunshine. The only reason I don’t fall over is that I’m already sitting on a cold stone block. I huff a few times in panicky shock; my huffs hang there, like vague, blank speech bubbles. How did I get here? Where
is here? Around me are the roofless ruins of what might once have been a chapel. Perhaps a monastery—there are more walls farther away. Knee-deep snow covers the ground; the shelf ends at a low wall, a few feet ahead. Behind the ruins a sheer rock face rears up. I’m in my ski jacket, and my face and ears are throbbing and warm, as if I’ve just undergone hard exertion. All these details are nothing alongside this central, gigantic fact: Just now I was in the back of a car with Mr. Pfenninger. D’Arnoq was driving. And now … now …

  “Welcome back,” says Elijah D’Arnoq, to my right.

  I gasp, “Christ!” and jump up, slip over, jump up, and crouch in fight-or-flight mode.

  “Cool it, Lamb! It’s freaky, I know”—he’s seated and unscrewing a Thermos flask—“but you’re safe.” His silver parka gleams in the light. “As long as you don’t run over the edge, like a headless chicken.”

  “D’Arnoq, where … What happened and where are we?”

  “Where it all began,” says Pfenninger, and I whirl the other way, fending off a second heart attack. He’s wearing a Russian fur hat and snow boots. “The Thomasite Monastery of the Sidelhorn Pass. What’s left of it.” He kicks through the snow to the low wall and gazes out. “You’d believe in the divine if you lived out your life up here …”

  They drugged me and lugged me here. But why?

  And how? I drank nothing and ate nothing in the Toyota.

  Hypnotism? Pfenninger was staring at me as I went under.

  No. Hypnotism’s a cheap twist in crap films. Too stupid.

  Then I remember Miss Constantin and King’s College Chapel. What if she caused my zone-out—like Pfenninger just did?

  “We hiatused you, Mr. Anyder,” says Pfenninger, “to search you for stowaways. It’s intrusive, but we can’t be too careful.”

  If that makes sense to him or to D’Arnoq, it makes none to me. “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

  “I’d be worried if you did, at this stage.”

  I touch my head for signs of damage. “How long was I under?”

  Pfenninger produces a copy of Die Zeit and hands it to me. On the front page Helmut Kohl is shaking hands with the Sheikh of Saudi Arabia. So what? Don’t tell me the German chancellor is mixed up in this. “The date, Mr. Anyder. Examine the date.”

  There, under the masthead: 4. Januar 1992.

  Which cannot be right: today is 2 January 1992.

  Pfenninger told me to remember it, in the car. Just now.

  Just now. Yet still Die Zeit insists today is 4 January 1992.

  I feel like I’m falling. Unconscious for two days? No, it’s more likely the newspaper’s a fake. I rustle through its pages, desperate to find evidence that things aren’t what they appear to be.

  “It could be a fake,” Pfenninger concedes, “but why construct a falsehood that could be readily demolished?”

  I’m head-smashed and, I realize, ravenously hungry. I check my stubble. I shaved this morning, at Holly’s. It’s grown. I stagger back, afraid of Elijah D’Arnoq and this Mr. Pfenninger, these … paranormal … Whateverthefuck they are, I have to get away to—to …

  … to where? Our tracks in the snow disappear around a bend. Maybe there’s a car park with a visitor’s center and telephones just out of sight, or maybe it’s thirty kilometers of glacier and crevasses. Back the other way, the narrow mountain shelf on which we stand narrows to a stubborn clump of firs, then it’s near-vertical ice and rock. Pfenninger is studying me, while D’Arnoq is pouring a lumpy liquid into the Thermos cup. I want to scream, “A picnic?” I squeeze the sides of my skull. Get a grip and calm down. It’s late in the afternoon. Clouds are smeared across the sky, beginning to turn metallic. My watch—I left it in Holly’s bathroom. I walk to the low wall, a few paces from Pfenninger, and the ground swoops down fifty meters to a road. There’s an ugly modern bridge over a deep crevasse, and a road sign that I can’t read at this range. The road climbs to the bridge from half a kilometer away, twisting up from slopes dunked in shadow. Beyond the bridge, the road disappears behind a shoulder of the mountain we stand on, near a glassy waterfall that textures the profound silence. Us, the sign, the bridge, and the road surface: there are no other signs of the twentieth century. I ask, “Why did you bring me here?”

  “It seems apt,” says Pfenninger, “since we’re in Switzerland, anyway. But first line your stomach: You’ve eaten nothing since Tuesday.” D’Arnoq’s next to me with a steaming cup. I smell chicken and sage and my stomach groans. “Don’t burn your tongue.”

  I blow on it and sip it cautiously. It’s good. “Thanks.”

  “I’ll let you have the recipe.”

  “Being moved under hiatus is a double hand grenade in the brain, but”—Pfenninger clears the snow off the low wall and motions for me to sit down next to him—“a quarantine period was necessary before we let you into our realm. You’ve been in a chalet near Oberwald since noon of the second, not far from here, and we brought you here this morning. This peak is Galmihorn; that one is Leckihorn; over there, we have Sidelhorn.”

  I ask him, “Are you from here, Mr. Pfenninger?”

  Pfenninger watches me. “The same canton. I was born in Martigny, in 1758. Yes, 1758. I trained as an engineer, and in spring 1799, in the employ of the Helvetica Republic, I came here to oversee repairs to an ancestor of that bridge, spanning the chasm below.”

  Now, if Pfenninger believes that, he’s insane. I turn to D’Arnoq, hoping for supportive sanity.

  “Born in 1897, me,” says D’Arnoq, drolly, “as a very far-flung subject of Queen Victoria, in a stone-and-turf house out on Pitt Island—three hundred klicks east of New Zealand. Aged eighteen, I went on the sheep boat to Christchurch with my cousin. First time on the mainland, first time in a brothel, and first time in a recruiting office. Signed up for the Anzacs—it was either foreign adventures for king and empire or sixty years of sheep, rain, and incest on Pitt Island. I arrived in Gallipoli, and you know your history, so you’ll know what was waiting for me there. Mr. Pfenninger found me in a hospital outside Lyme Regis, after the war. I became an Anchorite at twenty-eight, hence my eternal boyish good looks. But I’m ninety-four years old next week. So, hey. The lunatics have you surrounded, Lamb.”

  I look at Pfenninger. At D’Arnoq. At Pfenninger. The telepathy, the hiatuses, and the Yeti merely ask me to redefine what the mind can do, but this claim violates a more fundamental law. “Are you saying—”

  “Yes,” says Pfenninger.

  “That Anchorites—”

  “Yes,” says D’Arnoq.

  “Don’t die?”

  “No,” frowns Pfenninger. “Of course we die—if we’re attacked, or in accidents. But what we don’t do is age. Anatomically, anyway.”

  I look away at the waterfall. They’re mad, or liars, or—most disturbing of all—neither. My head’s too hot so I remove my hat. Something’s cutting into my wrist—Holly’s thin black hair-band. I take it off. “Gentlemen,” I address the view, “I have no idea what to think or say.”

  “Far wiser,” says Pfenninger, “to defer judgement than rush to the wrong one. “Let us show you the Dusk Chapel.”

  I look around for another building. “Where is it?”

  “Not far,” says Pfenninger. “See that broken archway? Watch.”

  Elijah D’Arnoq notices my anxiety. “We won’t put you to sleep again. Scout’s honor.”

  The broken archway frames a view of a pine tree, virgin snowy ground, and a steep rock face. Moments hop by, birdlike. The sky’s blue as a high note and the mountains nearly transparent. Hear the waterfall’s skiff, spatter, and rumble. I glance at D’Arnoq, whose eyes are fixed where mine should be. “Watch.” So I obey, and notice an optical illusion. The view through the archway begins to sway, as if it were only printed on a drape, caught by a breeze, and now pulled aside by an elegant white hand in a trim Prussian-blue sleeve. Miss Constantin, bone-white and golden, looks out, flinching at the sudden bright cold. “The Aperture,
” murmurs Elijah D’Arnoq. “Ours.”

  I surrender. Portals appear in thin air. People have pause buttons. Telepathy is as real as telephones.

  The impossible is negotiable.

  What is possible is malleable.

  Miss Constantin asks me, “Are you joining us, Mr. Anyder?”