The Bone Clocks

The chopping board hurtles across the living room into the back of Heidi’s head. I hear a noise like a spoon going into an eggshell. It should’ve knocked Heidi’s body forward, like a skittle, but instead she’s picked up by—by—by—nobody, while Rhоmes spins his hands and makes sort of snapping motions, and Heidi’s body spins too, herkily-jerkily. Snap, crackle, pop, goes her spine, and her lower jawbone’s half off and blood’s trickling from a hole in her forehead, like a bullet went in. Rhоmes does a backhand slap in the air, and Heidi’s mangled body’s flung against a picture of a robin sat on a spade, then lands on its head and tumbles in a heap.

Now it’s like I’ve got headphones superglued over my ears and through one speaker I’ve got “None of This Is Happening” blaring and through the other “All of This Is Happening” going over and over at full blast. But when Rhоmes speaks, he speaks quietly and I hear every wrinkle in every word. “Don’t you ever have days when you’re just so glad to be alive you want to”—he turns to me—“howl at the sun? Now, I believe I was squeezing the life out of you …” He pushes the air towards me, palm-first, then lifts his hand; I’m slammed against the wall and shoved upwards by some invisible force till my head bumps the ceiling. Rhоmes leaps onto the arm of the sofa, like he’s going to kiss me. I try to hit him but both my hands are pinned back and once again my lungs’ve closed off. One of the whites of Rhоmes’s eyes is darkening to red, like a tiny vein’s burst: “Xi Lo inherited Jacko’s fraternal love for you, which pleases me. Killing you won’t bring my lost Anchorites back, but Horology owes us a blood debt now, and every penny counts. Just so you know.” My vision’s fading and the pain in my brain’s blotting everything out, and—

The tip of a sharp tongue slides from his mouth.

Reddened, metallic, an inch from my nose. A knife?

Rhоmes’s eyeballs roll back, and as his eyelids shut, I slip down to the floor, and he falls off the arm of the sofa. When the back of his head hits the floor, the knife blade is rammed out a couple more inches, flecky with white goo. It’s easily the most disgusting thing I’ve seen in my life and I can’t even scream.

“Lucky shot.” Ian drags himself in, gripping the counters.

It can only be me he’s talking to. There’s nobody left. Ian frowns at Heidi’s twisted body. “See you next time, Marinus. It’s time you got a newer vehicle, anyhow.”

What? Not “Oh, Holy Christ!” or “Heidi, no, Heidi, no, no!”? Ian looks at Rhоmes’s body. “On bad days you wonder, ‘Why not just back off from the war and lead a quiet metalife?’ Then you see a scene like this and remember why.” Last, Ian twists his busted head my way. “Sorry you had to witness all this.”

I slow my breathing, slower, and—“Who …” I can’t do more.

“You weren’t fussy about the tea. Remember?”

The old woman by the Thames. Esther Little? How could Ian know that? I’ve fallen through a floor and landed in a wrong place.

In the bungalow hallway a cuckoo clock goes off.

“Holly Sykes,” says Ian, or Esther Little, if it is Esther Little, but how’s that possible? “I claim asylum.”

Two dead people are lying here. Rhоmes’s blood’s soaking into the carpet.

“Holly, this body’s dying. I’ll redact what you’ve seen from your present perfect, for your own peace of mind, then I’ll hide deep, deep, deep in—” Now Ian-or-Esther-Little topples over like a pile of books. Only one eye’s open now, with half his face shoved up on the squashed sofa cushion. His eyes look like Davenport’s, the collie we had before Newky, when we had him put down at the vet’s. “Please.”

The word lifts a spell, suddenly, and I kneel by this Esther-Little-inside-Ian, if that’s what it is. “What can I do?”

The eyeball twitches behind its closing lid. “Asylum.”

I just wanted more green tea, but a promise is a promise. Plus, whatever just happened, I’m only alive ’cause Rhоmes is dead, and Rhоmes is only dead ’cause of Ian or Esther Little or whoever this is. I’m in debt. “Sure … Esther. What do I do?”

“Middle finger.” A thirsty ghost in a dead mouth. “Forehead.”

So I press my middle finger against Ian’s forehead. “Like this?”

Ian’s leg twitches a bit, and stops. “Lower.”

So I move my middle finger down an inch. “Here?”

The working half of Ian’s mouth twists. “There …”