The Bone Clocks

There are only two roads out of La Fontaine Sainte-Agnиs. One climbs up to the hamlet of La Gouille, but D’Arnoq takes the other, heading down the valley towards Euseigne. We pass a turning for Chetwynd-Pitt’s chalet, and I wonder if the boys are worried about my safety or just pissed off that I abandoned them to their hookers’ pimp. I wonder, but I don’t care. A minute later we’ve passed the town boundary. The road is banked by rising, falling walls of snow, and D’Arnoq drives with caution—the car has snow tires and the road’s been salted, but this is still Switzerland in January. I unzip my coat and think of Holly looking at the clock above the bar, but regret is for the Normals.

“We lost you last night,” states my fellow passenger, in a cultured European accent. “The blizzard hid you from us.”

Now I study him directly. “Yes, I had a disagreement with my host. I’m sorry if it caused you any trouble … sir.”

“Call me Mr. Pfenninger, Mr. Anyder. ‘Anyder.’ A well-chosen name. The principal river on the island of Utopia.” The man watches the monochrome world of valley walls, snow-buried fields, and farm buildings. A river rushes alongside the road, black and very fast.

The interview begins. “May I ask how you know about Anyder?”

“We’ve investigated you. We need to know about everything.”

“Do you work for the security services?”

Pfenninger shakes his head. “Only rarely do our circles overlap.”

“So you have no political agenda?”

“As long as we are left alone, none.”

D’Arnoq slows and drops a gear to take a perilous bend.

Time to be direct: “Who are you, Mr. Pfenninger?”

“We are the Anchorites of the Dusk Chapel of the Blind Cathar of the Thomasite Monastery of Sidelhorn Pass. It’s quite a mouthful, you’ll agree, so we refer to ourselves as the Anchorites.”

“I’d agree it sounds freemasonic. Are you?”

His eyes show a gleam of amusement. “No.”

“Then, Mr. Pfenninger, why does your group exist?”

“To ensure the indefinite survival of the group by inducting its members into the Psychosoterica of the Shaded Way.”

“And you’re the … the founder of this … group?”

Pfenninger looks ahead. Power lines dip and rise from pole to pole. “I am the First Anchorite, yes. Mr. D’Arnoq is now the Fifth Anchorite. Ms. Constantin, whom you met, is the Second.”

Cautiously, D’Arnoq overtakes a salt-spitting truck.

“ ‘Psychosoterica,’ ” I say. “I don’t know the word.”

Pfenninger quotes: “A slumber did my spirit seal, I had no human fears.” He looks like he’s just delivered a subtle punch line, and I realize he just spoke without speaking. His lips were pressed together. Which is not possible. So I must be mistaken. “She seemed a thing that could not feel the touch of earthly years.” Again. His voice sounded in my head, a lush and crisp sound, as if through top-of-the-range earphones. His face defies me to suggest it’s a trick. “No motion has she now, no force; she neither hears nor sees.” No muffled voice, no wobbling throat, no tell-tale gap at the corner of his mouth. A recording? Experimentally, I put my hands over my ears but Pfenninger’s voice is just as clear: “Rolled round in Earth’s diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees.”

I’m gaping. I close my mouth. I ask, “How?”

“There is a word,” Pfenninger says aloud. “Utter it.”

So I manage to mumble, “Telepathy.”

Pfenninger addresses our driver: “Did you hear, Mr. D’Arnoq?”

Elijah D’Arnoq’s peering at us in the rearview mirror. “ Yes, Mr. Pfenninger, I heard.”

“Mr. D’Arnoq accused me of ventriloquism, when I inducted him. As if I were a performer on the music-hall circuit.”

D’Arnoq protests: “ Ididn’t have Mr. Anyder’s education, and if the word ‘telepathy’ was coined back then, it hadn’t reached the Chatham Islands. And I was fried by shell shock. It was 1922.”

“We forgave you decades ago, Mr. D’Arnoq, I and my little wooden puppet with the movable jaw.” Pfenninger glances my way, humor in his eyes, but their banter just makes everything weirder. 1922? Why did D’Arnoq say “1922”? Or did he mean to say 1982? But that doesn’t matter: Telepathy’s real. Telepathy exists. Unless I hallucinated the last sixty seconds. We pass a garage where a mechanic shovels snow. We pass a field where a pale fox stands on a stump, sniffing the air.

“So,” my mouth’s dry, “psychosoterica is telepathy?”

“Telepathy is one of its lesser disciplines,” replies Pfenninger.

“Its lesserdisciplines? What else can psychosoterica do?”

A cloud shifts and the fast river’s strafed with light.

Pfenninger asks, “What is today’s date, Mr. Anyder?”

“Uh …” I have to grope for the answer. “January the second.”

“Correct. January the second. Remember.” Mr. Pfenninger looks at me; his pupils shrink and I feel a pinprick in my forehead. I—

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