The Bone Clocks

Then her chakra-eye glows dimly. Holly couldn’t have seen it. I subaddress her: Moombaki of the Noongar People.

Nothing. Esther fades like a shadow as the sun goes in.

Her chakra-eye flickers open, shuts, open, shuts. I try to ingress, but instead of strong, coherent memories, like in Holly’s parallax, I find only a nebula of moments. Dewdrops, clinging to a spider’s web on a golden wattle flower; a dead infant, flies drinking from his eyes; eucalyptus trees crackling into flame and parrots shrieking through smoke; a riverbed alive with naked-backed men panning for gold; the warbling throat of a butcher bird; a line of Noongar men in chains, lugging blocks of stone; and then I’m out the other side of Esther’s head. Her mind’s gone. It’s smashed. Just those shards remain.

The hologram solidifies and speaks: “Cold tea do you?”

False hope hurts like a broken rib: Esther, it’s Marinus.

“Five perch. One trout. A slow afternoon.”

This is recorded ghost speech, uttered by the Esther Little whom Holly remembers, not spoken by Esther’s soul here and now.

Esther, you’re trapped in a memory in the mind of Holly Sykes.

A bee lands on the brim of her hat. “Lucky you’re not fussy.”

Esther, yousought asylum here, but you forgot who you are.

“I may need asylum.” She watches me, sniperlike. “A bolt-hole.”

Horology needs you for a Second Mission to the Chapel of the Dusk, Esther. You left me signs.

“You won’t find a shop until you and the boy arrive at Allhallows-on-Sea …”

Esther, what do I do? How can I bring you back?

She fades to a shimmer. I’m too late, years too late. Esther’s soul has cooled to an ember that only Esther herself, or maybe Xi Lo, could have breathed back to life. I cannot. The misery I feel at finding her but losing her this way is insupportable. I look out across the memory-generated Thames. What now? Abort the Second Mission? Resign myself to managing Horology’s slow decline? Circles radiate out from Esther’s float. And Holly’s memory-Esther takes a stick of chalk from her pocket and writes on a slat of wood: MY—

Another word on the next slat: LONG—

Then one more word: NAME—

AS ESTHER WRITES the final E the loop ends, the time resets to three P.M. Once more Esther sits gazing at the Star of Riga, going nowhere, the weather-bleached planks by her foot not yet written on.

Yet those three words mattered. They matter now.

Holly must have thought that Esther Little was a crazy old witch but what if Esther was transmitting an instruction to me? I begin to subrecite Esther Little’s name, her true name, her living name that she taught me three selves ago, to Pablo Antay Marinus in the half hour between night and the pink-and-blue Australian dawn on the Emu’s Claw rock over the Swan River valley. Esther fixed it indelibly, she said. Could she truly have seen so far ahead, so long ago? One by one I subintone the syllables. Hesitantly at first, afraid to make an error and invalidate the sequence, but the pace picks up until the name is the player and I the instrument. Is it wishful thinking, or do I sense a coalescence in the head of the memory-Esther? Word by phrase by line, archaic Wadjuk Noongar gives way to nineteenth-century Wadjuk Noongar. The space around us brightens as particles and threads of Esther’s soul reassemble, reintegrate, reravel …

… and without noticing I’ve finished, I’ve finished.

Esther Little gazes out at the Star of Riga. The ship blasts its horn. Across the water, in Essex, a vehicle reflects a tiny pinprick of June sunshine. Esther picks up her flask and peers down it. It looks as if the loop is restarting.

Why hasn’t it worked?

A subvoice tells me, You speak Noongar like a chain saw.

My soul pulses. My teacher disappeared for forty-one years.

The oldest Horologist looks into her bucket. Not many fish, for forty-one years. I guess my signs found you?

One from Trondheim and one from Poughkeepsie.

Esther allows herself an amused growl. The Script contained an invitation to the Chapel. Is a Second Mission in the offing?

Two days away, or possibly only one by now.

Time we were back, then. Esther’s soul egresses the chakra of her long-ago remembered forehead and hovers, rotating through 360 degrees. Goodbye, she tells the vanished day.

April 6