The Bone Clocks (55 page)

Cheeseman’s voice turns into barbed wire: “Tortured? Swanning around the globe? Fathering children? While I,
I
, was caged in Colombia with killers, drug addicts with HIV, and rusty razors. Which of these fates is torture?”

His hand goes to his coat pocket. A janitor walks down the corridor, whistling. I see him framed in the outer doorway of Betty’s reception.
Yell for help!
urges Hershey the Sodding Terrified. Or run for it. Or beg for forgiveness: “Please don’t orphan my children.” Or negotiate. Or offer to write out a full confession. Or—or—or—

—or let him take his revenge. “Your tormentor,” I begin, “wasn’t gloating, when he came to visit you. He despised his own cowardice, and still does. But this changes nothing. He wants to pay, Richard. He’s only a step away from personal bankruptcy, so if you want cash, he can’t help you. But was it money that you wanted?”

“Weird thing is,” he swivels his head, “now I’m here, I don’t know what to take.”

My shirt’s glued to my body by hot and cold sweat. “Then I’ll sit at my table,” I tell him, “and wait for you to decide. Your tormentor didn’t mean to get you banged up for years, he only meant a—a prank, a stupid prank, but it went nightmarishly wrong. What you decide he owes, he’ll pay. All right?” No, dear reader, it’s not all right. Here in my chair I’m disintegrating. Better to close your eyes. Shut out Richard Cheeseman, my books, the view of white woods. One blast to the head. There are worse ways to go. The kettledrumming in my ears muffles whatever Richard Cheeseman is
doing, and I barely hear the click of the safety catch, or the footsteps. Curiously, I sense the muzzle of the handgun, an inch from my forehead. RUN! BEG! FIGHT! But like a suffering dog who knows what the vet’s needle is for, I remain inert. Bowel and bladder control stay operative. Small mercies. Final seconds. Final thoughts? Anaïs as a little girl, proudly presenting her handmade book,
The Rabbit Family Go on a Picnic
. Juno telling me how the coolest boy in her year told her that, to understand him, she had to read a book called
Desiccated Embryos
. Gabriel in Madrid, growing so fast, so big, smelling of milk, marshy nappies, and talcum powder. A pity I won’t know him, but maybe he’ll find something of me in my best books. Holly, my only friend, really. I’m sorry about the upset my death will cause her. My favorite line from Roth’s
The Human Stain:
“Nothing lasts, and yet nothing passes, either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.” Of how, in a roundabout way, it’s not Richard Cheeseman who’s shooting me no in fact it’s Crispin Hershey’s finger on the trigger as he slips a tiny packet of cocaine into the lining of a suitcase in a hotel room long ago
now
I’m shuddering
now
I clench my body
now
and my eyes are streaming
now
I’m
sorry
I’m
sorry
and
now
he’s
now
me
now
I’m
now
him
now now now …

… and I’m alone. I’m alive, more to the sodding point.

Open your eyes. Go on, don’t be afraid. Open up.

Same old room. The same, but not. Cheeseman’s gone.

Down the faculty stairs he’s walking, in the wake of Inigo Wilderhoff. Across the lobby, through the big glass doors, along a track, out of my story … Hunkering into his coat as the snowy evening creeps through the trees, Vietcong-like. I scrutinize my hand for no reason I know of, marveling at its fleshy robotronics … Clasp the mug. Let the heat hurt. Raise the mug, bring it to your lips and sip. Tea from Darjeeling … Soily leaf and tannin sun bloom across my tongue. Marvel at my Rosetta Stone mouse mat; at the gray-pink beauty of a thumbnail; at how one’s lungs drink in oxygen … Rattle
a fruit Tic-Tac into your palm and pop it in: I know the flavors are synthetic chemicals, but to me it’s a gustatory “Ode to Autumn” by Keats. Nothing attunes you to the beauty of the quotidian like a man who decides not to kill you after all. Scoop up the detritus I knocked to the floor: my pen holder, a plastic spoon, a memory stick, my Lego Man collection. Juno, Anaïs, and I send one another packets as jokey presents. I’m up to five: spaceman, surgeon, Santa, Minotaur—bugger. Who am I missing? I’m on my knees hunting for the fifth among the power cords when my laptop trills.

Sodding hell—I’m supposed to be Skyping Holly …

A
OIFE
’
S STRONG, CLEAR
voice comes through the speakers. “Crispin?”

“Hi, Aoife. I can hear you but I can’t see you.”

“You have to click the little green icon, cyberauthor.”

I always get this bit wrong. Aoife appears on my screen in the kitchen at Rye. “Hi. Good to see you. How are things in Blithewood?”

“Great to see you too. Everything here’s winding down for the holidays.” I’m slightly afraid to ask: “So, how’s the patient today?”

“Bit rough, to be honest. It’s getting hard for her to keep food down, and she didn’t sleep so well. Very migrainy. The doctor put her to sleep”—Aoife half grimaces—“could’ve phrased that better—an hour ago, so Mum said to say sorry she’s stood you up today, but—” Someone offscreen speaks to Aoife; she frowns, nods, and mumbles a reply I don’t catch. “Look, Crispin, Dr. Fenby wants a word, so I’ll hand you over to my aunt Sharon, if that’s okay?”

“Sure, Aoife, of course. Off you go, see you soon.”

“Ciao then.” Aoife stands up and leaves the screen, trailing pixels, and Holly’s sister enters from the other side. Sharon’s a stockier, worldlier Holly—the Jane Austen to Holly’s Emily Brontë, though I’ve never told either of them that—but today she just looks knackered. “Hello, Globetrotter. How are things?”

Holly’s the critically ill one but they keep asking me how I am.
“Uh, hi, Sharon, yeah, fine. It’s snowing, and—” Richard Cheeseman just dropped by to kill me for letting him rot in a Colombian and British jail for four years, but luckily he changed his mind. “Who’s this new Dr. Fenby Aoife just mentioned? Another consultant?”

“She’s Canadian. She trained with Tom, our GP. A psychiatrist.”

“Oh? Why does your sister need one of them?”

“Um … She’s worked in palliative care with cancer patients for years, and Tom thought Hol might benefit from a new drug that Dr. Fenby—Iris—has been trialing in Toronto. I understood it when she explained it an hour ago, but if I try to repeat it I’ll make it sound all flaky. Tom rates her very highly, though, so we thought—” Sharon yawns, massively. “Sorry, not very ladylike. What was I saying? Yeah, Iris Fenby. That’s about it.”

“Thanks for the update. You look exhausted.”

Sharon smiles. “You look pale as a pot-holer’s arse.”

“Increase the color on your laptop, then. Give me a bronzed glow. Look, Sharon, Holly isn’t—Monday won’t be …”

The school principal gives me a meaningful look over her power-glasses. “Leave your black suit in New York State, mister.”

“Anything I can bring with me?”

“Just yourself. Use your baggage allowance for Carmen and Gabriel. More clobber is not what Hol needs at this point.”

“Does she know that
Wildflowers
is back at number one?”

“Yes, her agent emailed this morning. Holly said she ought to die more often, it’s such a boost for sales.”

“Tell her not to be so sodding ghoulish. See you Monday.”

“Safe journey now, Crispin. God bless.”

“When she wakes, tell her from me … just tell her she’s the best.”

Sharon looks at me at the wrong angle—Skype’s little oddity—and says, “I promise.” Like she’s calming a scared little kid.

The Skype window goes blank. Hershey’s ghost stares back.

•   •   •

M
Y OPEN OFFICE
hours last until four-thirty
P.M
and usually I’m busy with a stream of students, but today a hushed apocalypse has depopulated the Hudson Valley and nobody bothered to let me know. I check my email, but there are only two new ones: spam from an antivirus company offering a better spam filter and a happier one from Carmen, saying Gabba’s trying to crawl, and her sister’s given her a pull-out sofabed so I won’t have to knacker my back sleeping on cushions. I send a quick nothingy “Go for it, Gabba!” email back, zip off a second email to cancel my budget hotel in Bradford—I should get a full refund—and a third to tell Maggie that Richard dropped by to see me here at Blithewood, and he looked well. That tectonic plate-shifting encounter may have happened only thirty minutes ago, but already,
already
, it’s turning itself into memory, and memory’s a re-recordable CD-RW, not a once-and-forever CD-R. Lastly I email Zoë to say thanks but I’ll give the ski day at Marc’s parents’ lodge a miss on New Year’s Day. Zoë knows I don’t ski—or renounce the gift of traction in any sphere—so why would I want to be humiliated by my ex-wife’s gymfit, Cayman Islands—tanned husband on the piste? I’ll have an extra afternoon with the girls instead. Send. It’s still only three forty-five, and the fact is I’ve nowhere to go but my empty room in a house I share with three other lecturers. Ewan Rice has three houses at his constant disposal. Crispin Hershey has one room and a shared kitchen. It’s the English Department’s party at a restaurant in Red Hook later, but squid-ink pasta and red snapper after my neardeath experience just seems too … I don’t know, I can’t find the words for it.

Then I notice the kid in the doorway.

“Hello,” I say. “Can I help you?”

“Hi. Yeah.” She’s a rather androgynous she, wrapped in a beetle-black knee-length thermal jacket with a few unmelted snowflakes on her shoulders; shaven-headed, Asian-eyelidded, and a puffy,
marshmallow complexion. Can a gaze be both intense and vacant? A medieval icon’s can be, and so is hers. She doesn’t move.

“Come in,” I prompt her. “Have a seat.”

“I will.” She walks as if distrustful of floors, and sits down as if she’s had some bad experiences with chairs, too. “Soleil Moore.”

She says her name as if I’ll know it. Which, maybe, I do. “Have we met before, Miss Moore?”

“This would be our third encounter, Mr. Hershey.”

“I see—remind me which department you’re in.”

“I dislike departments. I’m a poet and a seer.”

“But … you
are
a student at Blithewood, right?”

“I applied for a scholarship when I learned you’d be teaching here, but Professor Wilderhoff described my work as ‘delusional and not, alas, in a good way.’ ”

“That’s certainly a frank assessment. Look, I’m afraid my surgery hours are only for students who are actually enrolled at Blithewood.”

“We met at Hay-on-Wye, Mr. Hershey, back in 2015.”

“I’m sorry, but I met a lot of people at Hay-on-Wye.”

“I gifted you my first collection:
Soul Carnivores
.”

Bells are ringing, albeit faint, underwater, and off-key.

“… and attended your event at the Shanghai Book Fair.”

I didn’t believe this hour could possibly get trippier, but I could be wrong. “Miss Moore, I—”

“Miss S. Moore.” She says it like it’s a clever punch line. “I left my second book in an embroidered bag on the door handle of your hotel. Room 2929 of the Shanghai Mandarin. Its title is
Your Last Chance
and it’s the big exposé.”

“An exposé”—I sense a fragility here—“about what?”

“The secret war. The secret war waging around us,
inside
us, even. I saw you take
Your Last Chance
out of the bag. You’d spent an hour with Holly Sykes, up in the bar, flipping coins. You remember, Mr. Hershey. I know you do.”

Twin facts: I have a stalker, and she is batshit crazy. “Proof of?”

“Proof that you’re written into the Script.”

“What script are you talking about?”

“
The
Script.” She appears to be shocked. “The first poem in
Your Last Chance
. You
did
read it, Mr. Hershey. Didn’t you?”

“No, I did not read your poetry, because it isn’t my sodding—”

“Stop!”
She lets out a corroded sob and sinks her fingers into the arm of the chair until they whiten. She tilts her head back and tells a face that isn’t there on the ceiling: “He didn’t even
read
it! Damn. Damn.
Damn
. Damn.
Damn!
”

“Young lady, you have to see things from—”

“
You
don’t get to ‘young lady’
me
. Not after,” Soleil Moore’s fingers writhe individually, “all that time! Money! Blood!”

“Why is it my job to get your poetry published?”

“Because
Soul Carnivores
explains about the apex predators; because
Your Final Chance
exposes the Anchorites’ methods; because the Anchorites have a door to anywhere and can abduct
anyone;
and because you, Mr. Hershey,
you are of the Script
.”

“Look, Miss Moore—
what
sodding script?”

Her eyes flip open wider, like a mad toy’s: “You’re
in
it, Mr. Hershey. As am I. And Holly Sykes—the Anchorites took her brother. You do know that. You wrote yourself into the Script. You describe it in ‘The Voorman Problem.’ What you wrote, in that story, that’s what the Carnivores do. You can’t deny it. You can’t.”

“ ‘The Voorman Problem’? I wrote that years ago. Apart from the prison doctor and Belgium vanishing, I barely remember it.”

“It no longer matters.” Soleil Moore calms down, or appears to. “Plan A was to alert the world through poetry. That failed. So we’ll have to resort to Plan B.”

“Well,” I want her gone, “the very best of luck with Plan B. Now I really must get back to work and—”

“You gave me Plan B yourself, at Hay-on-Wye.”

“Miss Moore, please don’t make me call security.”

“Your role is to bring my work to the world’s attention. I prayed and prayed that you’d do it by endorsement, but I didn’t grasp the magnitude of the sacrifice necessary. I’m sorry, Mr. Hershey.”

“That’s quite all right, young lady. But please leave.”

Soleil Moore stands up … in tears? “I’m sorry.”

A
SUPERNATURAL FORCE
flung Hershey backward and off his swivel chair. Soleil Moore stood over him. Five more shots followed, so shocking, so close, they didn’t even hurt. Hershey’s cheek is against the rough carpet. His ribcage is punched open. Holy buggery. Shot. Really actually bloody shot, me, here, now. The carpet’s drinking up blood. Mine.
Copious
quantities.
COPIOUS
. Seven-letter Scrabble score. Can Hershey move any part of his body, dear reader? No, he cannot. Snow boots. Inches away. Sno boots. No
w
. Listen. A voice. Loving, ebbing, flowing. Mum? Don’t be so Disney. Soleil Moore. Miss S. Moore. Ah, of course! Esmiss Esmoore. E. M. Forster’s best book. His best character. “You’re famous, Mr. Hershey, so now they’ll read my poems. The news, the Internet, the FBI, the CIA, the UN, the Vatican—not even the Anchorites can cover it up … We’re martyrs, you and I, in the War. So was my sister. They lured her away, you see. She told me about them, but I thought it was just her illness talking. I’ll never forgive myself. But I can wake up the world from its ignorance. Its deadly ignorance. Once humanity knows we are the Anchorites’ food supply—its salmon farm—then we can resist. Rise up. Hunt them down.” Soleil Moore’s mouth continues to move, but the sound is gone. Reality’s shrinking. It was up at the Canadian border; now it stops at Albany; now it’s smaller than Blithewood Campus. The snowy woods, the library, the bunker, the bad cafeteria, all gone, all snuffed. Death by lunatic. Who would have thought it? Carpet of dots. Not dots.
Spirals
. All these weeks. Treading on spirals. Look. In the crack. Filing cabinet and skirting board.
Spider
. All dried out. Desiccated. Where the vacuum nozzle won’t go.
A spider, a spiral, a …
 what? The fifth Lego Man. Inches away. On his side. Like me. Look.