The Bone Clocks (61 page)

“Dr. Iris Marinus-Fenby, what bloody planet are you
on
?”

“The same one as you. Hugo Lamb now sources prey, just as Miss Constantin sourced you. And if she hadn’t scared you into reporting her so that Yu Leon Marinus was informed about and inoculated you, she would have abducted you and not Jacko.”

Chatter and clinking cutlery is loud and all around us.

Behind us, a girl is dumping her boyfriend in Egyptian Arabic.

“Now, I”—Holly pinches the bridge of her nose—“want to hit you.
Really
hard. What
are
, life-trespassing, fantasy-peddling … I—I—I have no words for you.”

“We’re truly sorry for the intrusion, Ms. Sykes. If there was any alternative at all, we wouldn’t be sitting here.”

“ ‘We’ being who, exactly?”

My back straightens a little. “We are Horology.”

Holly heaves a long, long sigh, meaning,
Where do I start?

“Please.” I place a green key by her saucer. “Take this.”

She stares at it, then me. “What is it? And why would I?”

A couple of zombie-eyed junior doctors troop by, talking medical prognoses. “This key opens the door to the answers and proof you deserve and need. Once inside, go up the stairs to the roof garden. You’ll find me there with a friend or two.”

She finishes her coffee. “My flight home leaves at three
P.M.
tomorrow. I’ll be on it, heading home. Keep your key.”

“Holly,” I say gently, “I
know
you’ve met countless crazies thanks to
The Radio People
. I
know
the Jacko bait has been dangled at you before. But
please
. Take this key. Just in case I’m the real thing. It’s a thousand to one, I know, but I might be. Throw it away at the airport, by all means, but for now, take it. Where’s the harm?”

She holds my gaze for a few seconds, then pushes her empty cup and saucer away, stands, swipes up the key, and puts it into her handbag. She puts two dollars on the photo of Hugo Lamb. “That’s so I owe you nothing,” she mutters. “Don’t call me ‘Holly.’ Goodbye.”

I
N THE SILT OF DREAMS
, ill-wishers were cutting off my exits until the one way out was up. I can’t remember which self I am until I find my nightlight’s 05:09 imprinted on the overheated darkness. 119A. More than a mile away across Central Park on the ninth floor of the Empire Hotel, Arkady is preparing to dreamseed Holly Sykes with Ōshima standing guard. I pray he won’t be needed. Staying here sticks in my craw, but if I went over to the Empire to help, I could end up triggering the very attack I so fear. Minutes limp by as I trawl New York’s nighttime tinnitus for meaning …

Pointless. I switch on my reading lamp, and gaze around my room. The Vietnamese urn, the scroll of the monkey regarding its own reflection, Lucas Marinus’s harpsichord from Nagasaki obtained by Xi Lo as a gift after a strenuous and improbable hunt … I turn to my place in Lucretius’s
De Rerum Natura
, but my thoughts, if not my soul, are still a mile or two to the west. This never-ending, accursed War. On my weakest days, I wonder why we Atemporals of Horology, who inherit resurrection as birthright, who possess what the Anchorites kill to obtain a twisted variation of, why don’t we just walk away from it? Why do we risk everything for strangers who’ll never know what we’ve done, win or lose? I ask the monkey troubled by its mirrored self: “Why?”

T
HE
H
OLY
S
PIRIT
entered Oscar Gomez during last Sunday’s service at his Pentecostal church in Vancouver as the congregation recited Psalm 139. He described it to my friend Adnan Buyoya a few hours later as “knowing what lay in the hearts of his brothers and sisters in
Christ, what sins they had yet to repent or to atone for.” Gomez’s conviction that God had bestowed this gift upon him was unshakable, and he was setting about God’s work without delay. He took the SkyTrain to Metropolis, a large suburban shopping mall in the city, and started preaching at the main entrance. Christian street preachers in secular cities are more ignored or mocked than they are listened to, but soon a crowd clotted around the short, earnest Mexican Canadian. Total strangers at Metropolis were baited, often to their astonishment, by Gomez’s startling specificity. One man, for example, was exhorted by Gomez to confess to fathering his sister-in-law Bethany’s baby. A hairdresser was begged to return the four thousand dollars she had stolen from her employer at the Curl Up and Dye hair salon. Gomez told a college dropout called Jed that the cannabis he was growing in his frail grandmother’s garden shed was disfiguring his life and could only end in a custodial sentence. Some blanched, their jaws dropping, and fled. Some angrily accused Gomez of hacking into their slates or working for the NSA, to which he replied, “The Lord has all our lives under surveillance.” Some began to weep, and ask for forgiveness. By the time the mall security guys arrived to escort Gomez from the premises, several dozen slates were filming the proceedings and a protective cordon of onlookers was surrounding the “Seer of Washington Street.” The city cops were summoned. YouTube uploads caught Gomez asking one of his arresters to confess to stamping on the head of an Eritrean immigrant—named—three nights before, while beseeching the other officer to seek counseling for his child pornography addiction, naming both the officer’s log-in and the Russian website. We can only guess at the conversation in the squad car, but en route to the precinct HQ, the destination was changed to Coupland Heights Psychiatric Hospital.

“Swear to God, Iris,” Adnan emailed me that evening, “I walked into the interview room and my first thought was,
A seer? This guy looks straighter than my accountant
. Straightaway—as if I’d spoken out loud—Oscar Gomez told me, “My father was an accountant, Dr. Buyoya, so maybe I get my straightness from him.” How do you conduct an assessment after that? I thought (or hoped?) I
had
spoken
my initial thought aloud, but soon Gomez was referring to those events from my boyhood in Rwanda that I’d only ever told you and my own analyst about during training.” In Adnan’s second email, sent two hours later, patients at Coupland Heights were worshiping the new inmate as a god. “It’s like ‘The Voorman Problem,’ ” Adnan said, referring to a Crispin Hershey novella we both admired. “I know what my grandparents would call Gomez in Yoruba, but there’s no way to talk about witchcraft in English and keep my job. Please, Iris. Can you help?”

V
ENI, VIDI, NON
vici. By the time I’d located my car in the vast, rainy parking lot, I was drenched, and I got a run in my tights as I clambered in. I was also hammered by anger, despair, and a sense of impotence. I’d failed. My device warbled as a message arrived:

Answers and implications slid into place, like a self-solving Rubik’s Cube. Topmost was the most obvious, that my device had been hacked by a Carnivore, a gloating Anchorite, who might be incautious and inexperienced enough to let his identity slip. I messaged a half-bluff:

There was a chance that the “Saint Mark” who had promised to accompany Oscar Gomez up Jacob’s Ladder was “Marcus Anyder,” the Anchorite name of Hugo Lamb. My device sat in my clammy hand for one minute, two, three. Just as I gave up, a message arrived.

My bluff had worked, unless I was being double-bluffed back. But, no, a carnivorous psychodecanter acting alone wouldn’t pass
up the chance to rub my nose in my wrong guess, and the “beaten woman” phrase matched L’Ohkna’s profile of Hugo Lamb’s misogyny. As I considered how best to make use of this contact, surely unsanctioned by Constantin or Pfenninger, a third message arrived:

Instinctively, I ducked and tilted the rearview mirror until I could see through the rear window. The glass was beaded with rain. I switched on the car’s battery, and clicked on the rear wiper, to remove the—

The passenger-side window exploded into a thousand tiny hailstones, and the mirror above my head was a brittle supernova of plastic and glass. One shard of plastic shrapnel, the size and shape of a fingernail clipping, lodged itself in my cheek.

I crouched, afraid. A logical portion of my mind was arguing that if the marksman had intended to kill me I would now be staring across the Dusk. But I stayed down for several minutes longer. Atemporality neutralizes death’s poison, but it doesn’t defang death, and old habits of survival linger on, even in us.

T
HAT IS WHY
we prosecute the War, I remind myself in 119A, four days later. The window in my room turns under-ice gray. We bother because of Oscar Gomez, Oscar Gomez’s wife, and his three children. Because nobody else would believe in the animacides committed by a syndicate of soul thieves like the Anchorites or by “freelancers” hunting alone. Because if we spent our metalives amassing the wealth of empires and getting stoned on the opiates of wealth and power, knowing what we know yet doing nothing about it, we would be complicit in the psychoslaughter of the innocents.

My device buzzes. It’s Ōshima’s tone. I fumble the thing like a panicky contestant, drop it, retrieve it, and read:

I fill my lungs with oxygen and blessed relief. The Second Mission is one step closer. Daylight now leaks in around the window. 119A’s ancient plumbing shudders and clanks. I hear feet, a toilet cistern, and cupboard doors. Two or three rooms away, Sadaqat is up.

“S
AGE, ROSEMARY, THYME
 …” Sadaqat, our warden, minder, and would-be traitor, plucks a weed from the raised beds. “I planted parsley too, so we could dine on ‘Scarborough Fair’ but late frost killed it. Some herbs are feebler than others. I’ll try again. Parsley’s rich in iron. Here I planted the onions and leeks, tough customers, and I have high hopes for the rhubarb. Do you remember, Doctor, we grew rhubarb at Dawkins Hospital?”

“I remember the pies,” I tell him.

We’re speaking quietly. Despite the fine-sieved rain and his busy night, Arkady, my fellow Horologist, is practicing Tai Chi among the myrtle and witch hazel across the rooftop courtyard. “This will be a strawberry patch,” Sadaqat points, “and the three fruiting cherry trees I’ll fertilize with the tip of a paintbrush, due to a scarcity of bees here in the East Side. Look! A red cardinal, on the momiji maple. I bought a book about birds, so I know. Those birds on the cloister roof, those are mourning doves. We have starlings nesting under the eaves, up there. They keep me busy with the scrubbing brush, but their droppings make a nutritious fertilizer, so I don’t complain. Here we have the fragrant quarter. Wintersweet, waxflower, and these thorny sticks will become scented roses. The trellis is for honeysuckle and jasmine.”

I notice that Sadaqat’s up-and-down British-Pakistani accent is flattening out. “You’ve worked magic up here, truly.”

Our warden purrs. “Plants want to grow. Just let them.”

“We should have thought of a garden up here decades ago.”

“You are too busy saving souls to think of such things, Doctor. The roof had to be reinforced, which was a challenge …”

Watch out
, subwarns Arkady,
or he’ll tell you about load-bearing walls and girders until you lose the will to live
.

“… but I hired a Polish engineer who proposed a load-bearing—”

“It’s an oasis of calm,” I interrupt, “that we’ll cherish for years.”

“For centuries,” says Sadaqat, brushing droplets of mist off his vigorous but graying hair, “for you Horologists.”

“Let’s hope so.” Through an ornate wrought-iron screen in the cloister wall, we look down on the street four floors below. Cars crawl along and honk in vain. Umbrellas overtake them, parting for joggers running contraflow. Level with us on the much taller building across the road, an old woman with a neck brace waters the marigolds in her window boxes. New York’s skyscrapers vanish in cloud at about the thirtieth storey. If King Kong were up on the Empire State today, no one at our lowly altitude would believe the truth.

“Mr. Arkady’s Tai Chi,” Sadaqat murmurs, “reminds me of your magickings. How your hands draw on air, you know?” We watch him. Arkady may be gangly, Hungarian, and ponytailed, but the Vietnamese martial-arts master of his last self is still discernible, somehow.

I ask my former patient, “Are you still content with life here?”

Sadaqat is alarmed. “Yes! If I’ve done anything wrong …”

“No. Not at
all
. I just worry, sometimes, that we’re depriving you of friends, a partner, family … The trappings of normal life.”

Sadaqat removes his glasses and wipes them on his corduroy shirt. “Horology is my family. Partner? I am forty-five. I prefer to go to bed with
The Daily Show
on my slate, or a Lee Child novel and a cup of chamomile tea. Normal life?” He sniffs. “I have your cause, a library to explore, a garden to tend, and my poetry is becoming a little less awful. I swear, Doctor, every day when I shave I tell myself in the mirror, ‘Sadaqat Dastaani, you are the luckiest schizophrenic, middle-aged, balding, British Pakistani in all Manhattan.”

“If you ever,” I strive to sound casual, “think differently …”

“No, Dr. Marinus. My wagon is hitched to Horology’s.”

Careful,
Arkady subwarns me,
or he’ll smell a guilty rat.

I can’t quite let it go. “The Second Mission, Sadaqat. We can’t guarantee anyone’s safety. Not yours, not ours.”

“If you want me to go from 119A, Doctor, use your magickery-pokery because I won’t jump ship of my own accord. The Anchorites prey on the psychiatrically vulnerable, yes? If I’d had the correct type of”—Sadaqat taps his head—“soul, they might have taken me, yes? So. Horology’s War is my War. Yes, I am only a pawn, but a game of chess may hinge upon the conduct of a single pawn.”