The Bone Clocks (62 page)

Marinus, our guest’s arriving
, Arkady subinforms me.

With a bruised conscience I tell Sadaqat, “You win.”

Our warden smiles. “I am glad, Doctor.”

“Our guest has arrived.” We walk back to the ironwork to look down on Holly in her Jamaican head-wrap. Across the road, Ōshima shows his outline in the room we have above the violin maker’s:
I’ll watch the street
, he subsuggests,
in case any interested parties pass by
. Holly approaches the door with the green key I gave her yesterday at the Santorini Café. The Englishwoman’s having a very strange morning. On a wand of willow very near my shoulder, a puffed-up red-winged blackbird performs a loop of arpeggios.

“Who’s a handsome devil, then?” whispers Sadaqat.

I
SPEAK FIRST
. “We’ve been expecting you, Ms. Sykes. As they say.”

“Welcome to 119A.” Arkady’s voice has a teenage croaky waver.

“You’re safe, Ms. Sykes,” says Sadaqat. “Don’t be afraid.”

Holly is flushed after her climb, but upon seeing Arkady her eyes widen: “It
is
you … you …
you … isn’t
it?”

“Yes, I have some explaining to do,” agrees Arkady.

Down in an alley, a dog is barking. Holly’s trembling. “I
dreamt
you. This morning! You—you’re the same. How did you
do
that?”

“The acne, right?” Arkady brushes his cheek. “Unforgettable.”

“My dream! You were at my desk, in my room, in my hotel …”

“Writing this address on the jotter.” Arkady picks up the sequence. “Then I asked you to bring Marinus’s green key here and go in. I said, ‘See you in two hours.’ And here we are.”

Holly looks at me, at Arkady, at Sadaqat, at me.

“Dreamseeding,” I comment, “is one of Arkaday’s métiers.”

“My range is lousy,” says my colleague, showing off his modesty. “My room was across the corridor from yours, Ms. Sykes, so I didn’t have far to transverse. Then, when my soul was back in my body, I hurried back here. In a taxi. Dreamseeding of civilians runs counter to our Codex, but you needed some proof of the wild claims made by Marinus the other day, and we’re at war, so I’m afraid we dreamseeded you anyway. Forgive us. Please.”

Holly’s at a nervous loss. “Who
are
you?”

“Me? Arkady Thaly, as of this self. Hi.”

Up in the low cloud an airplane drags itself along.

“This is our warden,” I turn to Sadaqat, “Mr. Dastaani.”

“Oh, I’m just a glorified dogsbody, really,” says Sadaqat, “and normal, like you—well, ‘normal,’ eh? Call me Sadaqat. It’s said ‘Sa-
dar
-cutt’ with the stress on the ‘dar.’ Think of me as an Afpak Alfred.” Holly looks none the wiser. “Alfred? Batman’s butler. I take care of 119A when my employers are away. I cook. You’re vegetarian, I am told? So are the Horologists. It’s the”—he twirls his finger in the air—“body-and-soul thing. Who’s hungry? I’ve mastered eggs Benedict with smoked tofu, a fine breakfast for a disorienting morning. Could I tempt you?”

119A’
S FIRST-FLOOR GALLERY
is dominated by an elliptical table of walnut wood that was here when Xi Lo bought the house in the 1890s. The chairs are mismatched, from various eras since. Pearly light enters through the three arched windows. The paintings on the long walls were gifts to Xi Lo or Holokai from the artists: a blushing desert dawn by Georgia O’Keeffe, A. Y. Jackson’s view of Port Radium, Diego Quispe Tito’s
Sunset over the Bridge of San Luis Rey
, and Faith Nulander’s
Hooker and John in Marble Cemetery
.
At one end is Agnello Bronzino’s
Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time
. It is worth more than the building and its neighbors combined. “I know this one,” says Holly, staring at the Bronzino. “The original’s in the National Gallery, in London. I used to go and see it in my lunchbreak, when I worked at the homeless center at St. Martin in the Fields.”

“Yes,” I say. Holly doesn’t need a story about how the National’s copy and the original got switched in Vienna in 1860. Anyway, she’s moved on to the Bronzino’s unworthy companion,
Self Portrait of Yu Leon Marinus, 1969
. Holly recognizes the face and turns to me accusingly. I nod, sheepishly. “Absurd, of course, and sheer arrogance to hang it in this company, but Xi Lo, our founder, insisted. We keep it there for his sake.”

Sadaqat enters from the door by the astrolabe, bringing our drinks on a tray. Nobody has the stomach for eggs Benedict. He asks, “Now, where is everyone sitting?” Holly chooses the gondola chair at the end, nearest the way out. Sadaqat asks our guest, “Irish Breakfast blend, Ms. Sykes? Your mother’s Irish, I believe.”

“She was, yes,” says Holly. “That’s grand, thanks.”

Sadaqat places a matching willow-pattern teapot and teacup, a jug of milk, and a bowl of sugar on a mat. My green tea is brewing in a black iron teapot owned by Choudary Marinus, two selves ago. Arkady drinks coffee from a bowl. Sadaqat puts a lit candle in a stained-glass cup as a centerpiece. “To brighten the place up. It can get a little tomblike in here.”

In a parallel universe the man’s a design fascist
, subsays Arkady.

“Just what we need, Sadaqat,” I say. He leaves, pleased.

Holly folds her arms. “You’d better begin. I’m too …”

“We’ve invited you here this morning,” I say, “to learn about us and our cosmology. About Atemporals and psychosoterics.”

This sounds like a business seminar, Marinus
, subsays Arkady.

“Hold on,” says Holly. “You lost me at ‘Atemporals.’ ”

“Prick us, we bleed,” says Arkady, cupping his coffee bowl, “tickle us, we laugh, poison us, we die, but
after
we die, we come back. Marinus here has gone through this—thirty-nine lives, is it?”

“Forty, if we include poor Heidi Cross at her bungalow by the Isle of Sheppey.” I notice Holly watching me for signs of a second head or a maniacal cackle.

“I’m still a newbie,” says Arkady, “on my fifth self. Dying still
really
freaks me out, in the Dusk, looking over the Dunes …”

“What dusk?” asks Holly. “What dunes?”

“
The
Dusk,” Arkady says, “between life and death. We see it from the High Ridge. It’s a beautiful, fearsome sight. All the souls, the pale lights, crossing over, blown by the Seaward Wind to the Last Sea. Which, of course, isn’t really a sea at all, but—”

“Wait wait wait.” Holly leans forwards. “You’re saying you’ve died? That you’ve seen all this yourselves?”

Arkady drinks from his coffee bowl, then wipes his lips. “Yes, Ms. Sykes, to both your questions. But the Landward Wind blows our souls back, like it or not. Back over the High Ridge, back into the Light of Day, and then we hear a noise like … a town being dropped, and everything in it smashing to bits.” Arkady asks me, “Fair description?”

“It’ll do. Then we wake up in a new body, a child’s, usually in need of urgent repair, just vacated by its previous owner.”

“At the café,” Holly turns to me, “you said that Hugo Lamb’s lot, the Anchorites, are immortal ‘with terms and conditions.’ Are you and they the same?”

“No. We live in this spiral of resurrections involuntarily. We don’t know how, or why us. We never sought it. Our first selves died in one of the usual ways, we saw the Dusk as Arkady just described, then forty-nine days later we came back.”

“From then on,” Arkady unthreads and rethreads his ponytail, “we’re stuck on repeat. Our second body grew, matured, died;
bam
, we’re back in the Dusk; then,
whoosh
, forty-nine days later, we’re waking up back on earth—in a body of the opposite gender, just to well and truly screw your head up.”

Swearing won’t make you more credible
, I subreprimand him. “What matters,” I tell Holly, “is that no one pays for our atemporality. Its cost we alone pay. Our phylum, if you will, is herbivorous.”

From the street below we hear the screech of brakes.

“So,” asks Holly, “the Anchorites are all carnivores?”

“Every last one.” Arkady runs his finger round his bowl.

Holly rubs her temples. “Are we talking … vampires?”

Arkady groans. “Oh, the V-word! Here it comes again.”

“Carnivores are only metaphorically vampiric,” I tell Holly. “They look as normal, or as abnormal, as any other subset of the population—plumbers, bankers, diabetics. More’s the pity they don’t all look like David Lynch villains. Our work would be easier by far.” I breathe in the bitter green-tea steam and anticipate Holly’s next question. “They feed on souls, Ms. Sykes. Carnivores decant souls, which means abducting people, ideally children,” I hold her freshly unsettled gaze as she thinks about Jacko, “which means killing them, I’m afraid.”

“Which is not nice,” says Arkady. “So Marinus, me, and a few other unthanked individuals—Atemporals for the most part, with some mortal collaborators—make it our business to … take them down. Individual Carnivores rarely give us that much bother—they tend to think they’re the only ones, and operate as carelessly as shoplifters who refuse to believe in store detectives. The problems begin—our War started—when they hunt in a pack.”

“Which is why we’re here, Ms. Sykes,” I sip my tea, “because of one particular pack. ‘The Anchorites of the Chapel of the Dusk of the Blind Cathar of the Thomasite Order of Sidelhorn Pass.”

“Too long for business cards.” Arkady interlaces his fingers, inverts his hands, and lifts his arms. “Just ‘Anchorites,’ to friends.”

“The Sidelhorn’s a mountain,” says Holly. “In Switzerland.”

“Quite a climb it is, too,” I remark. “Sidelhorn also lends its name to a pass in northern Italy, a road that was old even when Roman legions used it. A Thomasite monastery served as a hostelry on the pass, on the Swiss Valais side, from the ninth century to the last year of the eighteenth. There, in the 1210s, a figure known as the Blind Cathar ontologized into being a conduit into the Dusk.”

Holly scans this blast of history. “The Dusk that lies between …”

“Life and death,” says Arkady. “Good, you’re listening.”

Holly asks, “What’s a Cathar?”

“The Cathars were twelfth- and thirteenth-century heretics,” I say, “in Languedoc. They preached that the world was created not by God but the devil, that matter was evil, that Jesus, as a man, was therefore not the Son of God. The papacy did not approve. In 1198 Pope Innocent III proposed a landgrab that became known as the Albigensian Crusade. The King of France was otherwise engaged, but he gave barons from the north of France his blessing to ride south, kill Cathars, confiscate their lands, and subdue a disloyal region for the French Crown. Heresy is fissiparous, however. What was smashed, splintered. Our Blind Cathar had settled at a Thomasite monastery in distant Valais by, we guess, 1205, 1206. Why he chose the Sidelhorn, we do not know. His name, we do not know. His impetuses for delving into matter, noumena, logos, mind, the soul, the Dusk, we do not know. He appears in only one historical source. Mecthild of Magdeburg’s history of the Episcopal Inquisition dates from the 1270s and describes how, in 1215, the Inquisition sentenced the ‘Blind Cathar’ of Sidelhorn monastery to death for witchcraft. The night before his execution, he was locked in a cell in the monastery. By dawn,” I think of Oscar Gomez, “he had vanished. Mecthild arrived at the conclusion that the heretic’s liege lord Satan had looked after his own.”

“Don’t worry,” says Arkady. “We don’t do Satan.”

“The history lesson’s almost over,” I promise. “Earth spun on its axis, despite the Inquisition’s insistence to the contrary, until the year 1799.” I rest my fingertips on the iron teapot. “A stroke of Napoleon’s pen merged the proud Swiss cantons into a single Helvetican Republic. Not all the Swiss approved of being a client state of France, however, and when promises of religious freedom were reneged upon, many began burning churches and turning on their Paris-appointed masters. Napoleon’s enemies fanned the flames, and in early April a company of Austrian artillery came over the Sidelhorn Pass from Piedmont. Two hundred kegs of gunpowder were stored in the monastery’s cowshed and, by carelessness or sabotage, exploded. Much of the monastery was destroyed, and a rock-fall
swept away a bridge crossing the chasm below. Which is only a footnote in the Revolutionary Wars, but that explosion, in
our
War, equates to the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Shock waves from it ricocheted up to the Chapel of the Dusk, you see, and the Blind Cathar’s long slumber ended.”

The mantelpiece clock measures out eight delicate chimes.

“The Thomasite Order was by then a ghost of its pre-Reformation self, and lacked the money, means, and the will to rebuild its Alpine redoubt. The Helvetican government in Zürich, however, voted to repair the Sidelhorn bridge and position a barracks to guard the strategically vital pass. One Baptiste Pfenninger, an engineer from Martigny, was dispatched to the site to oversee the work, and on a night in late summer, as Pfenninger lay in his room at the barracks trying to sleep, he heard a voice calling his name. The voice sounded both miles away and inches away. His door was bolted on the inside, but Pfenninger saw a strip of air swaying at the foot of his bed. The engineer touched it. He found that the strip of air parted, like a curtain, and through it he saw a round floor and a person-high candle of the type one still finds before Catholic or Orthodox altars. Beyond were slabs of stone, climbing up into darkness. Baptiste Pfenninger was a pragmatic man, not drunk, and of sound mind. His room was on the second floor of a two-story building. Yet he passed through the impossible curtain in the air, known, by the way, as the Aperture, and climbed up the impossible steps. How are you holding up so far, Ms. Sykes?”

Holly’s thumb sits in her clavicle. “I don’t know.”

Arkady is stroking his zits, content to let me talk.

“Baptiste Pfenninger became the first visitor to the Chapel of the Dusk. He found a portrait, or an icon of the Blind Cathar. It had no eyes, yet as Pfenninger stood there, and gazed at it, or was gazed at by it, he saw a dot appear in the icon’s forehead and grow into the black pupil of a lidless eye and …”