The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

“154 West Tenth Street,” says Unalaq. “My apartment, mine and my partner’s. I’m Unalaq Swinton. And it’s two o’clock in the afternoon, on the same day. We figured you needed a little sleep.”

  “Oh.” Holly looks at this new character. “Nice to meet you.”

  Unalaq sips her coffee. “The honor’s all mine, Ms. Sykes. Would you like some caffeine? Any other mild stimulant?”

  “Are you like … Marinus and the—the other one, that …?”

  “Arkady? Yes, though I’m younger. This is only my fifth life.”

  Unalaq’s sentence reminds Holly of the world she’s fallen into. “Marinus, those cops … they … I think they wanted to kill.”

  “Hired assassins,” states Ōshima. “Real flesh-and-blood people whose job is not to fix teeth or sell real estate or teach math but to murder. I made them shoot each other before they shot you.”

  Holly swallows. “Who are you? If it’s not rude …”

  Ōshima’s mildly amused. “I’m Ōshima. Yes, I’m another Horologist, too. Enjoying my eleventh life, since we’re counting.”

  “But … you weren’t in the police car … were you?”

  “In spirit, if not in body. For you, I was Ōshima the Friendly Ghost. For your abductors, I was Ōshima the Badass Sonofabitch. Won’t deny it, that felt good.” The city’s hiss and boom are smudged by steady drizzle. “Though our long cold War just got hotter.”

  “Thank you, then, Mr. Ōshima,” says Holly, “if that’s the appropri—” A barbed thought snags her: “Aoife! Marinus—those police officers, theytheythey said Aoife’d been in an accident!”

  I shake my head. “They lied. To lure you into the car.”

  “But they know I’ve got a daughter! What if they hurt her?”

  “Look, look, look. Look at this.” Unalaq passes her a slate. “Aoife’s blog. Today she found three shards of a Phoenician amphora and some cat bones. Posted forty-five minutes ago, at sixteen seventeen Greek time. She’s fine. You can message her, but don’t, don’t, refer to any of today’s events. That would risk embroiling her.”

  Holly reads her daughter’s entry and her panic subsides a notch. “But just ’cause those people haven’t hurt her yet, it doesn’t—”

  “This week the Anchorites’ attention is focused on Manhattan,” says Ōshima. “But to be safe, your daughter has a bodyguard. Roho’s one of us, too.” And one that the Second Mission can ill spare, Ōshima subreminds me.

  Again, Holly is all at sea. She tucks some loose strands of hair under her head-wrap. “Aoife’s on an archaeological dig, on a remote Greek island. How … I mean, why … No.” Holly looks for her shoes. “Look, I just want to go home.”

  I break the brutal truth gently: “You’d get as far as the Empire Hotel, but you wouldn’t leave the building alive. I’m sorry.”

  “Even if you slip through that net,” Ōshima extends the brutal truth more bluntly, “the next time you used an ATM card, your device, your slate, an Anchorite would find you within a few minutes. Even without using those methods, unless you’re hidden by a Deep Stream cloak, they could get to you with a quantum totem.”

  “But I live in the west of Ireland! That’s not gangster country.”

  “You’d not be safe on the goddamn International Space Station, Ms. Sykes,” says Ōshima. “And the Anchorites of the Chapel of the Dusk belong to a higher order of threat than gangsters.”

  She looks at me. “So what must I do to be safe? Stay here forever?”

  “I think,” I tell her, “you’ll only be safe if we win our War.”

  “If we don’t win,” says Unalaq, “it’s over for all of us.”

  Holly Sykes shuts her eyes, giving us one last chance to vanish and to return to her life as it was at Blithewood Cemetery before a slightly chubby African Canadian psychiatrist strolled into view.

  Ten seconds later, we’re still here.

  She sighs and tells Unalaq, “Tea, please. Splash of milk, no sugar.”

  “ ‘HOROLOGY’?” REPEATS Holly in Unalaq’s kitchen. “Isn’t that clocks?”

  “When Xi Lo founded our Horological Society,” I say, “the word meant ‘the study of the measurement of time.’ It was a sort of self-help group, you could say. Our founder was a London surgeon in the 1660s—he appears in Pepys’s diary, by the by—and acquired a house in Greenwich as a headquarters, a storage facility, and a noticeboard to help us stay connected down through time, from one self to the next.”

  “In 1939,” says Unalaq, “we shifted to 119A—where you visited this morning—because of the German threat.”

  “So Horology is a social club for you … Atemporals?”

  “It is,” says Unalaq, “but Horology has a curative function, too.”

  “We assassinate,” states Ōshima, “carnivorous Atemporals—like the Anchorites—who consume the psychovoltaic souls of innocent people in order to fuel their own immortality. I thought Marinus told you this earlier.”

  “We do give them a chance to mend their ways,” says Unalaq.

  “But they never do,” says Ōshima, “so we have to mend their ways for them, permanently.”

  “They are serial killers,” I tell Holly. “They murder kids like Jacko, and teenagers like you were. Again and again and again. They don’t stop. Carnivores are addicts and their drug is artificial longevity.”

  Holly asks, “And Hugo Lamb is one of these serial killers?”

  “Yes. He’s sourced prey eleven times since … Switzerland.”

  Holly swivels her eternity ring. “And Jacko was one of you?”

  “Xi Lo founded Horology,” says Ōshima. “Xi Lo led me to the Deep Stream. To psychosoterica. He was irreplaceable.”

  Holly thinks of a small boy with whom she shared only eight Christmases. “How many of there are you?”

  “Seven, definitely. Eight, possibly. Nine, hopefully.”

  Holly frowns. “Quite a small-scale war, then, isn’t it?”

  I think of Oscar Gomez’s wife. “Was there anything ‘small-scale’ about Jacko’s disappearance for the Sykes family? Eight is very few, but we were only ten when we inoculated you. We build networks. We have allies and friends.”

  “And how many Carnivores are there?”

  “We don’t know,” says Unalaq. “Hundreds, worldwide.”

  “But whenever we find one,” Ōshima inserts a meaningful pause, “there soon becomes one less.”

  “The Anchorites endure, however,” I say. “The Anchorites are our enemy through time. Can we prevent all the Carnivores in the world from committing animacide? No. But whom we save, we save, and every one is a victory.”

  Pigeons croon and huddle on Unalaq’s window boxes.

  “Let’s say I believe you,” says Holly. “Why me? Why do these Anchorites want to—Christ, I can’t believe I’m saying this—want to kill me? And what am I to you?” She looks around the table. “Why do I matter in your War?”

  Ōshima and Unalaq look at me. “Because you said ‘Yes,’ forty years ago, to a woman named Esther Little, who was fishing off a rickety wooden pier jutting out over the Thames.”

  Holly stares at me. “How can you possibly know that?”

  “Esther told me about the encounter. That day, in 1984.”

  “You were in Gravesend? That Saturday Jacko went?”

  “My body was. My soul was in Jacko’s skull, as Jacko lay in his bed in the Captain Marlow. Esther Little’s soul was there too, as was the soul of Holokai, another colleague. With Xi Lo’s soul, that made four Greeks hiding in the belly of the Trojan Horse. Miss Constantin appeared in the room, through the Aperture, and ushered Jacko up the Way of Stones into the Chapel of the Dusk.”

  “The place the Blind Cathar built?” Holly’s voice is dry.

  “The place the Blind Cathar built.” Good, she’d taken it in. “Jacko was Constantin’s bait. We’d poked her eye by inoculating you, and we gambled on her not being able to resist poking ours in return by grooming and abducting the saved sister�
�s brother. That part worked, and for the first time Horologists gained access to the oldest, hungriest, and best-guarded psychodecanter in existence. Before we could figure out a means of destroying the place, however, the Blind Cathar awoke. He summoned all the Anchorites and, well, it’s hard to describe a psychosoteric battle at close quarters …”

  “Think of those tennis-ball firing machines, but loaded with hand grenades,” offers Ōshima, “trapped in a shipping container, on a ship caught in a force-ten gale.”

  “It was the worst day in Horology’s history,” I say.

  “We killed five Anchorites,” says Ōshima, “but they killed Xi Lo and Holokai. Killed-killed.”

  “Didn’t they just get … resurrected?” asked Holly.

  “If we die in the Dusk,” I explain, “we die. Terms and conditions. Somehow the Dusk prevents resurrection. I survived because Esther Little fought her way to and fled down the Way of Stones with my soul enwrapped in hers. Alone, I would have perished, but even in Esther’s safekeeping I suffered grievous damage, as did Esther. She opened the Aperture very near where you were, Holly, in the garden of a certain bungalow near the Isle of Sheppey.”

  “I’m guessing the location was no accident?” asks Holly.

  “It was not. While Esther’s soul and mine were reraveling, however, the Third Anchorite, one Joseph Rhîmes, arrived on the scene. He had followed our tracks. He slew Heidi Cross and Ian Fairweather for the hell of it, and was about to kill you, too, when I reraveled myself enough to animate Fairweather. Rhîmes kineticked a weapon into my head, and I died. Forty-nine days later I was resurrected in this body, in a broken-down ambulance in one of Detroit’s more feral zip codes. For a long time I assumed Rhîmes had killed you in the bungalow, and that Esther’s soul had been too badly damaged to reravel. But when I next made contact with 119A, Arkady—in his last self, not the self you met earlier—told me that you hadn’t died. Instead, Joseph Rhîmes’s body had been found at the crime scene.”

  “Only a psychosoteric could have killed Joseph Rhîmes,” says Ōshima. “Rhîmes followed the Shaded Way for seventeen decades.”

  Holly understands. “So you think it was Esther Little?”

  Unalaq says, “It’s the least implausible explanation.”

  “But Esther Little was a … sweet old bat who gave me tea.”

  “Yes,” snorts Ōshima, “and I’m a sweet old boy who rides around all day on my senior citizen’s bus pass.”

  “Why don’t I remember any of this?” says Holly. “And where did Esther Little go after killing this Rhîmes man?”

  “The first question’s simpler,” says Unalaq. “Any psychosoteric can redact memories. It takes skill to do it with precision, but Esther had that skill. She could have done it on her way in.”

  Unconsciously, Holly grips the table. “On her way in—to where?”

  “Into your parallax of memories,” I say. “To the asylum you offered her. Esther’s soul was battered in the Chapel of the Dusk, flamed as she fought our way out down the Way of Stones, and drained to the last psychovolt by killing Joseph Rhîmes.”

  “Her soul would have needed years to reravel,” says Unalaq. “Years when Esther was as vulnerable to attack as someone in a coma.”

  “I … sort of get it.” Holly’s chair creaks. “Esther Little ‘in-gressed’ me, got me away from the crime scene, wiped my memories of what happened … Okay. But where did she go after she … recovered?”

  Ōshima, Unalaq, and I all look at Holly’s head.

  Holly frowns, then understands. “You’re bloody joking.”

  BY SEVEN O’CLOCK, twilight is draping the attic in blues, grays, and blacks. The little lamp on the piano glows daffodil yellow. Four storys below us, I see the manager of the bookshop bidding a staff member good night. He then walks off arm in arm with a petite lady. The couple make an old-fashioned sight under the mist-haloed solars of West Tenth Street. I draw the curtains on the drizzlestreaked bulletproof glass. Ōshima, Unalaq, and I spent the afternoon debriefing Holly further on Horology and our War with the Anchorites, and eating Inez’s pancakes. Going outside would have been a needless risk after this morning’s near disaster, and we’ll avoid 119A until our rendezvous with D’Arnoq on Friday. Arkady and the Deep Stream cloak will keep the place safe. On the evening news the “Police Impostor Fifth Avenue Shootout” was a lead story, with reporters speculating that the dead men were bank robbers who’d had a fatal argument prior to their heist. The national networks haven’t run with the story, due to yesterday’s gun massacre at Beck Creek, Texas, the reignited Senkaku/Diaoyu standoff between China and Japan, and Justin Bieber’s fifth divorce. The Anchorites will know Brzycki was killed by psychosoteric intervention, but how it affects any plans they have for our Second Mission, I cannot guess. I’ve heard nothing from our defector, Elijah D’Arnoq. I hear Unalaq and Holly’s feet on the creaky stairs, and they appear in the doorway.

  “You have a psychiatrist’s couch,” says Holly.

  “Dr. Marinus will see you now,” I say. “Again. Ready?”

  Holly unslippers her feet, and lies back. “I’ve got over half a century of memories stored away, right?”

  I roll up the sleeves of my blouse. “A finite infinity, yes.”

  “How do you know where to look for Esther Little?”

  “I was sent a clue via a cabdriver in Poughkeepsie,” I say.

  Unalaq puts a cushion under Holly’s head. “Relax.”

  “Marinus?” Holly flinches. “Will you see everything I ever did?”

  “That’s how scansion works. But I’m a psychiatrist from the seventh century, remember. There’s not much left that I haven’t seen.”

  Holly’s unsure what to do with her hands. “Do I stay conscious?”

  “I can hiatus you while I scansion you, if you wish.”

  “Uh … No need. Yes. I dunno. You decide.”

  “Very well. Tell me about your house, near Bantry.”

  “O-kay. Dooneen Cottage was originally my great-aunt Eilísh’s cottage. It’s on the Sheep’s Head Peninsula, this rocky finger sticking out into the Atlantic. There’s a drop to a cove at the end of the garden, and a path going down to the pier and …”

  AS I INGRESS, I hiatus her. It’s kinder, somehow. Holly’s present-perfect memory, I notice, is dominated by today’s bizarre events, but older memories soon billow around my passing soul like windblown sheets on a washing line. Here’s Holly catching a taxi from the Empire Hotel early this morning. Meeting me at the Santorini Café, and at Blithewood. Landing in Boston last week. I go further back, back to Holly’s pluperfect memory. Holly painting in her studio, spreading seaweed on her potato patch, watching TV with Aoife and Aoife’s boyfriend. Cats. Storm petrels. Jump leads. Mixing mincemeat at Christmas. Kath Sykes’s funeral in Broadstairs. Deeper, faster, like rewind on an old-style DVD, showing one frame every eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four … Too fast. Slow down. Too slow, this is like searching for an earring dropped somewhere in Wyoming, I must take care. Here’s a vivid memory of Dr. Tom Ballantyne: “I sent off three samples to three different labs. Remissions are fickle, yes, but for now, you’re clear. I won’t pretend to understand it—but congratulations.” Deeper, further. Memories of Holly meeting Crispin Hershey in Reykjavik, in Shanghai, on Rottnest Island. They loved each other, I see, but both only half guessed it. Holly’s first U.S. book tour for The Radio People. Holly’s office at the homeless center. Her Welsh friend and colleague Gwyn. Aoife’s face when Holly tells her that Ed died in a missile strike. Olive Sun’s voice on the phone, an hour earlier. Happier days. Watching Aoife perform in The Wizard of Oz while holding Ed’s hand in the darkness. Psychology lectures with the Open University. Look, a glimpse of Hugo Lamb … Stop. Their night in a room in a Swiss ski town, which is none of my business, but what muffled, baffled joy shines in the young man’s eyes. He loved her, too. But the Anchorites came knocking. Fateful or fated? Scripted, Counterscripted? No time. Hurry. Deeper. A vineyard in
France. A slategray sea—is the asylum here? There’s no sign of the freighter. Too far or not far enough? Look closely. The wind must be squally and the engines churning. Stop. No time, no noise. Passengers become photographs of themselves. Gulls, balancing gravity and the battering wind. A squaddie’s tossed away his cigarette, it hangs there, threads of smoke, vapor trailing … This is Holly’s first Channel crossing, back before the tunnel was built. Back further, a year or two or three … An iced “17” on a birthday cake … Further. An abortionist’s clinic in the shadow of Wembley Stadium, a young man on a Norton motorbike outside. Slowly now … A slope of gray months, after Jacko’s disappearance. Picking strawberries …

  And look—look! Blank, redacted scenes. Two hours’ worth. Neatly done. That must be the bungalow murders. Before the blanks I find scenes of a petrol station, and a bridge. Rochester? There are ships below, but we’re still the day after the Star of Riga, not the day of it. Church bells. Back through the night, spent in a church, with a teenage Ed Brubeck. The Script loves foreshadow. Back to the day before the First Mission. Holly on the back of Ed’s bike, fish and chips by the sea, more cycling, Ed’s T-shirt glued to his back with sweat. We pass a couple of anglers, but both look male and neither sports Esther’s famous hat. Esther fished alone. “Angling’s like prayer,” she said. “Even together, you’re alone.” Slow right down. Holly looks at her watch at 4:20, at 3:49, and again at 3:17 before Ed came along. Her backpack’s rubbing her skin, though backpacks were called “rucksacks” in 1984. Holly’s thirsty, angry, and upset. She glances at her watch at 2:58. I’ve gone back too far. “Three on the Day,” begins my marker. I reverse and inch forward, slowly, to the Thames on my left, and … Oh.

  I’ve found you.

  FAR OUT IN the Thames sits a cargo ship, halfway between Kent and Essex, and the name of this quarter-mile-long signpost is the Star of Riga. Esther Little saw the ship “now,” at three P.M. exactly, on June 30, 1984. I had seen the ship earlier in Tilbury Docks, as I waited in a rented flat in Yu Leon Marinus’s body before transversing over the Thames to the Captain Marlow to ingress Jacko’s head. Esther submentioned the freighter as we all waited for Constantin. Holokai submentioned he’d lived in Riga for a few months as Claudette Davydov.