The Bone Clocks

“Marinus, I think I just saw letters, on the wall, at waist height.”

I peer down and find, inscribed like a sculptor’s mark:

“JS?” says Holly. “Jacko? Marinus, that’s how he used to sign his—” A noise like a bell struck under water interrupts her, and we can tell by a change of the air that the Dusk is following us in. “ Left, Marinus,” Holly orders. “Go left.”

There’s no time to ask if, or why, she’s so sure. I obey, hurrying us along the narrow, curving, claustrophobic, and graphite-black passageway. Holly’s fifty-six-year-old heart is pounding hard and I think I sprained her ankle in our last dash across the Chapel. She’s a decade older than Iris, I need to remember. “Trail my fingers along the wall,” she tells me, in little more than a whisper.

If you’re up to driving, I’ll hand you back the controls.

“Yes. Do it.” She steadies herself against the wall for a moment until her vestibular sense rights itself. “Christ, that was weird.”

I could light a psycholamp, but it might attract company.

“If my wild guess is right, I won’t need light. If I’m wrong, a light won’t help. I’ll know one way or the other fairly soon. This passage is still following a curve, wouldn’t you say?”

Yes. It’s an arc, for sure. About a hundred paces so far.

Holly stops. We hear her ragged breath, her thumping heart, and the murmuring of the Dusk. She looks behind us, and a monochromatic gleam blooms in the darkness. Holly holds up her hand and we see its black outline, and even the faint sheen of her wedding ring. The Dusk has its own phosphorescence, I report. It’s flooding the passage behind us, at walking pace. Keep moving.

“Diabolical,” says Holly. She sets off again, and although I’m tempted to scansion her present tense to see what she’s thinking, I decide to trust in her. Fifty more paces and Holly stops, out of breath. Her fear is charged with hope, now. “Am I imagining that, Marinus? What are my right fingertips touching?”

I check, and double-check. Nothing.

She turns to her right, putting out her palms against a void. She touches the sides, and we feel a narrow entrance in the wall. “A little light now, please—just a match-flame?”

I half egress from Holly’s chakra-eye, and invoke a faint glow. My host has seen too much today to be taken aback by light shining from the center of her forehead. In front of us, a short connecting tunnel ends five paces away at another left-right junction. To our left, the original passage curves away. To our right, the Dusk is not far around the bend. “We’re init,” Holly whispers. “Light off, please. I’d rather trust my memory than my eyes.”

If you can talkand walk,I subsay, I’m very, very curious.

Holly walks forwards through the connecting tunnel until her palms meet the wall of a new left-right passage. Holly turns right. “The last time I saw Jacko,” she keeps her voice very low, “I was packing a bag to leave home. Did Xi Lo ever tell you any of this?”

Maybe—I don’t know. It was so long ago.

We’ve gone about ten paces through the darkness when Holly’s left hand registers empty air. Another “connecting” archway. She enters it, walks five paces to another left-right passage, and turns left. These corridors appear to be concentric to one another. “Well, as I was packing, Jacko appeared, with a—a—a labyrinth. He used to draw these big, intricate mazes, just for fun, like. There should be another one opening soon …” After another ten paces of curving darkness, Holly finds a gap on the right and goes through it. For fear of putting her off, I say nothing about the maze Xi Lo once designed for King William of Orange. Through the arch is another left-right branch. Holly goes right. “The labyrinth Jacko gave me that day, though, it was plainer. Just a nest of nine circles, with a few connecting gaps between them. He made me promise to learn it. To learn it so well that, if I ever needed to, I could find my way through it in the darkness, without one mistake …”

And now we’re in it, I finish the sentence.

“Now we’re in it. I s’pose how hardly matters?”

Transubstantiation. The Blind Cathar’s soul became the Chapel of the Dusk. Xi Lo’s soul, I believe, entered the fabric of the Chapel during the First Mission. Once it was inside, Xi Lo became this labyrinth. Like a benign cancer, perhaps?

Holly hurries on. “But why would he do that?”