The Bone Clocks

After twelve hundred years I had come to think of myself as immune to shock, but I was wrong. Time had not stopped. The fire still burned. I could still hear Galina chopping vegetables out in the kitchen. By instinct, I searched for a pulse in Vasilisa’s wrist and found it, strong and steady. Her breathing was slow and shallow but steady. The same was true for Dmitry. I said their names. They didn’t hear me. They weren’t here. There could be only one cause or, more likely, a pair of causes.

The Davydovs, meanwhile, had returned to normal and were awaiting my response. Standing, feeling out of my depth but furious, I grabbed the poker and told the Davydovs, or whatever the Davydovs were, in a manner not at all like a twenty-year-old Russian priest’s daughter, “If you’ve harmed my parents, I swear—”

“Why would we harm these sincere people?” Shiloh Davydov was surprised. “We’ve performed an Act of Hiatus on them. That’s all.”

Claudette Davydov spoke next: “We were hoping for a private audience with you, Klara. We can unhiatus your foster parents like that”—she clicked her fingers—“and they won’t know they were gone.”

Still viewing the Davydovs as threats, I asked whether a “hiatus” was a phenomenon akin to mesmerism.

“Franz Mesmer is a footling braggart,” replied Claudette Davydov. “We are psychosoterics. Psychosoterics of the Deep Stream.”

Seeing that these words only baffled me, Shiloh Davydov asked, “Have you not witnessed anything like this before, Miss Koskov?”

“No,” I replied. The Davydovs looked at each other, surprised. Shiloh Davydov removed the cigar from Dmitry’s fingers before it scorched them, and rested it in the ashtray. “Won’t you put that poker down? It won’t help your understanding.”

Feeling foolish, I replaced the poker. I heard horses’ hoofs, the jink of bridles, and the cries of a coalman on Primorsky Prospect. Inside our parlor my metalife was entering a new epoch. I asked my guests, “Who areyou? Truly?”

Shiloh Davydov said, “My name is Xi Lo. ‘Shiloh’ is as close as I can get in Europe. My colleague here, who is obliged to be my wife in public, is Holokai. These are the true names we carry with us from our first lives. Our souls’ names, if you will. My first question for you, Miss Klara Koskov, is this: What is your true name?”

In a most unladylike way, I drank a good half of Dmitry’s brandy. So long ago had I buried the dream that I’d one day meet others like me, other Atemporals, that now it was happening, I was woefully, woefully unprepared. “Marinus,” I said, though it came out as a husky squeak, thanks to the brandy. “I am Marinus.”

“Well met, Marinus,” said Claudette Holokai Davydov.

“I know that name,” frowned Xi Lo–in–Shiloh. “How?”

“You would not have slipped my mind,” I assured him.

“Marinus.”Xi Lo stroked his sideburns. “Marinus of Tyre, the cartographer? Any connection? No. Emperor Philip the Arab had a father, Julius Marinus. No. This isan itch I cannot scratch. We glean from your letter that you’re a Returnee, not a Sojourner?”

I confessed that I didn’t understand his question.

The pair looked unsettled by my ignorance. Claudette Holokai said, “Returnees die, go to the Dusk, are resurrected forty-nine days later. Sojourners, like Xi Lo here, just move on to a new body when the old one’s worn out.”

“Then, yes.” I sat back down. “I suppose I am a Returnee.”

“Marinus.” Xi Lo–in–Shiloh watched me. “Are we the first Atemporals you ever met?”

The lump in my throat was a pebble. I nodded.

Claudette-Holokai stole a drag of her companion’s cigar. “Then you’re handling yourself admirably. When Xi Lo broke my isolation, the shock drove away my wits for hours. Some may say they never returned. Well. We bear glad tidings. Or not. There are more of us.”

I poured myself more brandy from Dmitry’s decanter. It helped to dissolve the pebble. “How many of you—of us—are there?”

“Not a large host,” Xi Lo answered. “Seven of us are affiliated in a Horological Society housed in a property in Greenwich, near London. Nine others rejected our overtures, preferring isolation. The door to them stays open if they ever wish for company. We encountered eleven—or twelve, if we include the Swabian—‘self-elected’ Atemporals down the centuries. To cure these Carnivores of their predatory habits is a principal function of us Horologists, and this is exactly what we did.”

Later I would learn what this puzzling terminology entailed.

“If you’ll pardon the indelicate question, Marinus,” Claudette-Holokai’s fingers traced her string of pearls, “when were you born?”

“640 A.D.,” I answered, a little drunk on the novelty of sharing the truth about myself. “I was Sammarinese in my first life. I was the son of a falconer.”