The Bone Clocks

The recording ends, the tape hisses, I press stop. I’m pummeled by guesses, half guesses, and questions. My friends and I have always believed that Esther’s soul succumbed to its injuries after killing Joseph Rhоmes and redacting Holly Sykes’s memory. How else to explain the absence of contact from Esther since 1984? This cassette flags up a dramatic alternative, however. That after the First Mission, Esther’s soul unraveled to a critical, yet not quitefatal, degree. She then sought asylum deep inside an unknowing host, concealed so that no Shaded Way hunter guided by the Counterscript could find and kill her. And that by presending my keys and signs, I could locate and liberate her reraveled soul from its asylum, after forty-one years. This is so slim a hope as to be anorexic. Sentience dissipates after only a few hours in another’s parallax of memories. After so many years of incorporeality, would Esther’s soul even know its name?

I watch Iris Fenby’s reflected face in the window-framed Kleinburg woods. The thickish lips, the flattish nose, the short curly black hair, silvered ever so slightly by middle age. These woods are remnants of the old forest that covered Ontario for most of the Holocene Era. The trees’ war against subdivisions, agro-forestry, sixlane highways, and golf courses is more or less lost. Could Esther Little still be alive? I don’t know. I just don’t know. Esther had command of the Aperture, so why not seek asylum with an Horologist? Because that was too obvious, perhaps. What about the last part of Esther’s message? “An enemy will make a proposal, very soon”? “He’s very close to you already”? It’s midnight in a shielded, bulletproofed house in a well-to-do rural retreat on the northwest fringes of Toronto, forty-one years in the future from the day that Esther spoke the words preserved on this magnetic tape. Even for a precognitive Horologist, it beggars belief that she could accurately have foreseen—

·   ·   ·

MY DEVICE TRILLS on my lamp stand. Before I answer an instinct makes me hide my parcel from Norway behind some books. My device can’t identify the caller. It’s late. Should I answer? “Yes?”

“Marinus,” says a male voice. “It’s Elijah D’Arnoq.”

I’m shocked by the contact, though after Hugo Lamb’s call in Vancouver, I shouldn’t be. “This is … certainly a surprise.”

A dead silence. “I imagine it must be. I’d feel the same.”

“ ‘Imagine’? ‘Feel’? You flatter yourself.”

“Yeah.” D’Arnoq’s voice is pensive. “Maybe I do.”

Keeping low, I unplug the lamp from the wall so I’m not visible from outside. “I don’t want to seem rude, D’Arnoq, but would you skip to the bit where you gloat about Oscar Gomez, so I can just hang up? It’s late and, as you know, I’ve had a long day.”

A troubled, sloughing silence. “I want it to stop.”

“Stop what? This call? Fine by me. Goodbye—”

“ No, Marinus—I want to defect.”

I check the last sentence for errors.

D’Arnoq repeats it like a sulky kid: “I want to defect.”

“So I say, ‘Really?’ and you say, ‘In your dreams.’ When I last attended high school, it went something like that.”

“I can’t … can’t endure another decanting. I want to defect.”

Stranger than the Anchorite’s words is his tone, denuded of the usual swagger. But I’m still a light-year from swallowing this. “Well, D’Arnoq,” I say, “now you’re au fait with the arts of feeling and imagining, try this: If you were on my end of the device, how would you respond to this show of remorse from a high-up Anchorite?”

“I’d be bloody skeptical. I’d ask, ‘Why now?’ ”

“What an excellent place to begin. Why now?”

“It’s not now. It’s a … nausea that’s grown over the last … twenty years. But I can’t ignore it anymore. I … I … Look, last year, Rivas-Godoy, the Tenth Anchorite, sourced a five-year-old from Paraisуpolis, a favela in Sгo Paolo. Enzo was the kid’s name. Enzo had no dad, he was bullied, friendless, his chakra-eye was vivid, and Rivas-Godoy became his big brother … A textbook sourcing. I did the ingress-check and Enzo was pure, no sign of Horology. So I approved him, and was in the Chapel for the Rebirthday when Rivas-Godoy walked Enzo up …”

I’ve bitten back five acidic interruptions already.

“… to meet Santa Claus.” There’s a grimace in D’Arnoq’s voice.

“Santa Claus. Caucasian male. About sixty. Nonexistent.”