The Bone Clocks (75 page)

So that there would be a way back to the world after the Second Mission, but one that only you could navigate. Anyone else
 … 
Both Holly and I think of the three Anchorites who arrived here before us, trapped in a dead end, with a wall of Dusk closing in.

“Does Jacko know we’re here, do you think?”

Transubstantiation is an arcane, powerful act. I can’t invoke it and I don’t know its modii. Xi Lo never even told me he was studying it. The Blind Cathar knew we were in the Chapel, however, so it stands to reason that, yes, Xi Lo—Jacko—knows you’re here.

Holly finds an archway in the right-hand wall, and enters.

If the labyrinth’s round
, I subpoint-out,
we’re now moving away from the center
.

“You have to go out to go in again. This next junction should be a crossroads. A little light, please?” I egress and glow for a moment. A crossroads. Holly takes the left branch. I ingress and fade.

You kept your promise
,
then
, I subsay,
to memorize the path.

“Yeah. Those were Jacko’s last words to me. I stormed off to my boyfriend’s house, and never saw my little brother again. Ruth, my sister-in-law, she was into jewelry making, and turned his sketch into a sort of pendant, made of silver. When I left home I took it away with me. Probably every week of my life I’ve studied it. Left turn coming up.”

We take the left, and pain explodes in our head. Holly spins as she falls and tumbles. Fresh pain shoots through her ankles and knees, and our scorched retinas are dazzled by petals of temporary colors. Through these, as my host lifts her head, I glimpse Constantin, her chakra-eye glowing rose-red, standing over us. “Show me the exit,” the Second Anchorite says maternally, “or I’ll turn you into a screaming human torch to light my path.” Her palm-chakras are glowing red too, a psychobolt in each ready to make good her threat. Holly’s shaking and muttering, “Please don’t please don’t please don’t.” I don’t know what Constantin just heard, how much she knows, how much psychovoltage she’s retained after the battle. Enough to kill us both several times over, I think. I decide to draw her away from Holly, back to the Dusk, so Holly at least has a chance of getting out alive.

I egress, glowing.

Icy and scalding, Constantin demands, “Which one are you?”

Marinus
, I subannounce.

“Marinus. It would be. Time’s short. Lead.”

If you kill us both, you die too.

“Then I’ll die happier, knowing who I killed in the last scene.”

Before I can think of a strategic reply, Constantin’s chakra-eye goes out, her head tilts back, and she slumps to the floor. “I
TOLD
YOU!” Holly makes a throat-scraping, berserking yell, and brings down an indistinct clublike object on our attacker’s head a second time. “
NO
BODY THREATENS MY FAMILY!” And a third time. I glow brightly to find Holly panting over the slumped form of Immaculée Constantin. The Second Anchorite’s head is a mess of blood, white-gold hair, and diamonds. I ingress back into Holly, finding a supernova of fury melting into many other emotions. A few seconds later, Holly empties her stomach in three powerful bursts.

It’s okay, Holly
, I say.
I’m here, it’s fine.

Holly vomits a fourth time.

I synthesize a drop of psychosedative in her pituitary gland.
Okay, I think you’re finished now
.

“I killed someone.” Holly’s shaking. “I killed. It just … sort of … It’s like I wasn’t me. But I know it was.”

I tweak out a little dopamine.
She may be alive … sort of. Shall I check?

“No. No. I’d rather not know.”

As you wish, but what’s the murder weapon?

Holly drops the thing. “Rolling pin.”

Where did you find a rolling pin in here?

“I nicked it from your kitchen at 119A. Put it in my bag.”

Holly stands up. I sedate her ankle and knees.
Why?

“You were all talking about the War, but I didn’t even have a Swiss Army knife. So—yeah, I
know
, hysterical woman, rolling pin, big fat cliché, Crispin would’ve rolled his eyes and said, ‘Oh, come
on
!’ but I wanted … y’know … 
something
. I hate the sight of
blood so I left the knives in the drawer and … so.
Shit
, Marinus. What have I done?”

Killed a 250-year-old Atemporal Carnivore with a fifty-dollar kitchen implement, after putting on a fine impersonation of a sniveling, scared middle-aged woman.

“The sniveling part was easy.”

The Dusk’s coming, Holly. Which way now?

She pulls herself together. “A bit of light, please.” I half egress and glow, illuminating the narrow crossroads where the woman lying dead or dying ambushed us. “Which way were we going?”

We spun as we fell, I remember. And Constantin moved around us before she threatened us. I glow brighter, but this just enhances our view of a dead ambusher and a puddle of vomit.
I can’t be sure
.

Panic surges through Holly. I psychosedate it back down.

Then we hear the hum of the approaching Dusk.
Shall I drive?

“Yeah,” Holly croaks. “Please.”

I look at the four passageways. They’re identical.

They’re not. One looks a little lighter.
Holly, there’s only one way through the labyrinth, right?

“Yeah.”

I take the passage that leads to the light, turn right, and ten paces in front of us is the Dusk, filling the tunnel like starry, slow-motion water. There are voices in its smothered ululation.
It doesn’t hurt
, they say in unlabeled languages,
it doesn’t hurt …

“What are we doing?” Holly’s voice rings out.

I turn back.
This is the way we came in. The Dusk’s following us. We came to the crossroads—here.
I step us over Constantin’s body.
Picture Jacko’s maze in your head again. The pendant.

“I’ve got it. Straight on.” I obey. “Left. There’ll be a turning to the right, but ignore it, it’s a dead end … Keep going. Through the next right.” I pass through the tunnel, thinking of the Dusk spilling over Constantin’s body. “Left. On a few paces … On a few more, we’re near the middle, but we have to go out in a circle to avoid a trap ahead. That’s this next left. Go on, through the arch … Now
turn right.” I walk a few paces, still hearing the slosh of the Dusk catching up as the ever-shortening side tunnels and dead ends drain off less and less of its mass and energy. “Ignore that gap to your left … Now turn right. Over the crossroads. Hurry! Turn right, turn left, and we should be—” The archway before us is black, not black with shadow, but solid black, black like the Last Sea is black, a blackness that absorbs the chakra-light I shine from Holly’s palms and bounces nothing back.

I step into—

—A DOMED ROOM
of the same dead Mars-red walls as the labyrinth, but alive with the sharp shadows of many birds. The room is lit by the evening light of a golden apple. “My …” Despite all we’ve seen today, Holly’s breath catches in her throat. “Look at it, Marinus.” The apple hangs in the middle of the chamber, at head-height, with no means of support. “Is it alive?” asks Holly.

I would say
, I subspeculate,
it’s a soul.

Golden apples I’ve heard of in poems and tales throughout my metalife. Golden apples I’ve seen in paintings, and not just the one Venus holds in the Bronzino original that Xi Lo knew so well, though that golden apple strengthens my suspicions about this one. I’ve even held an apple wrought from Kazakh gold in the eleventh century by a craftsman at the court of Suleiman VI, with a leaf of emerald-studded Persian jade and dewdrops of pearl from the Mauritius Islands. But the difference between those golden apples and this one is the difference between reading a love poem and being in love.

Holly’s eyes are welling. “Marinus …”

It’s our way back, Holly. Touch it.

“
Touch
it? I can’t touch it. It’s so …”

Xi Lo created it for you, for this moment.

She takes a step closer. We hear air in feathers.

One touch, Holly. Please. The Dusk’s coming.

Holly reaches out her well-worn, grazed hand.

As I egress from my host, I hear a dove trill.

Holly is gone.

T
HE SHADOW-BIRDS VANISHED
with the apple, and the domed chamber feels like a rather dingy mausoleum. Now I die. I die-die. But I die knowing that Holly Sykes is safe, knowing that a debt Horology owed her has been paid. This is a good way to finish. Aoife still has a mum. I invoke a pale gleam and subask Hugo Lamb,
Why die alone?

He uncloaks and melts out of the air. “Why indeed?” He touches his badly gashed cheek. “Oh,
shit
, look at the state of me! Bloody dinner jackets. My tailor’s this Bangladeshi chap in Savile Row, and he’s a genius, but he only makes twenty suits a year. Why did Xi Lo only leave the one magic ticket back to the world?”

I transverse to where the golden apple hung. Every subatomic particle of it is gone.
Transubstantiation’s draining. The Blind Cathar kept getting fed fresh meat, remember. Xi Lo sustained all this on batteries. Why didn’t you take the one magic ticket back?

He dodges the question. “Got any cigarettes on you, Marinus?”

I’m incorporeal. I don’t even have a body on me
.

A trickle of Dusk appears from the black doorway, like sand.

You’ve sourced, lied
, I subsay,
groomed, lured, murdered …
 “They were clinical murders. They died happy. Ish.”

… as Marcus Anyder, you even killed your old self.

“Do you really want to spend your final moments interviewing me? What do you want? Some big dramatic mea culpa?”

I’m just curious as to why a predator
, I subspell out the obvious,
who has thought about nothing but himself for so many years, and who only last week gloated about killing Oscar Gomez, should now
—

“You’re not still angry about that, are you?”

—
should now nobly lay down his artificially suspended life for a common bone clock. Go on. I promise I won’t tell a soul
.

The muttering of the Dusk is growing. I push the voices away.

Hugo Lamb dusts his sleeves. “You scansioned Holly, I presume?”

Extensively. I had to, to locate Esther Little.

“Did you find us in La Fontaine Saint-Agnès? Holly and I?”

I hesitate too long.

“So you had a good gawp. Well. Now you have your answer.” More Dusk spills in, promising us it won’t hurt, it won’t hurt, it won’t hurt. A third of the floor is covered now. “Did you see her lay into Constantin? Irish blood, Gravesend muscle. Talk about breeding.”

You stood by and
watched
that?

“Never been the have-a-go-hero type, me.”

Constantin recruited you. She was the Second Anchorite.

“I’ve always had a problem with authority figures. Rivas-Godoy turned right when we entered the labyrinth, so that was him finished from the outset, but I followed Constantin. Yes, she recruited me, but she bought into the women-and-children-first doctrine bigtime. So I cloaked myself, got lost, heard Holly, followed you … And here we are. Death-buddies. Who would have thought it?” We watch the sandy Dusk fill the domed chamber, getting deeper. I’m nagged by a thought that I’ve missed something obvious. Hugo Lamb coughs. “Did she love me too, Marinus? I don’t mean after she found out about my little … dalliance with a paranormal cult that scarred her family and attempted to animacide her brother. I mean, that night. In Switzerland. When we were young. Properly young. When Holly and I were snowed in.”

Two-thirds of the floor is covered. Lamb the corporeal has sixty seconds of life before the Dusk reaches him. I can hover a little longer, until the dome is full to the roof, if I really want to.

Then it hits me, what I’ve missed. Hugo Lamb missed it too. Even Constantin missed it. Dodging falling masonry, trying to avoid the Dusk, we all forgot an alternative exit. I could sublaugh. Will it work? If the Dusk got into the Way of Stones and erased the conduit, no … But it was a long way down.

I subask Lamb,
How much voltage do you have left?

“Not a lot. Why? Fancy a psychoduel?”

If I ingress you, we might have enough together.

He’s confused. “To do what?”

To summon the Aperture.

A
T THE FOOT OF THE STAIRS
I hear this thought,
He is on his way
, and goosebumps shimmy up my arms. Who? Up ahead, Zimbra turns to see what’s keeping me. I sift the sounds of the late evening. The stove, clanking as it cools. Waves, shoulder-barging the rocks below the garden. The creaking bones of the old house. The creaking bones of Holly Sykes, come to that. I lean over the banister to peer through the kitchen-sink window up the slope to Mo’s bungalow. Her bedroom light’s on. All well there. No feet on the gravel garden path. Zimbra doesn’t sense a visitor. The hens are quiet, which at this hour is the way we want it. Lorelei and Rafiq are giggling in Lorelei’s room, playing shadow puppets: “That looks nothing
like
a kangaroo, Lol!”; “How would
you
know?”; “Well, how would
you
know?” Not so very long ago, I thought I’d never hear my two orphans laugh like that again.