David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

“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.

A pirate. Funny.

An eye patch.

One-eyed.

Lego Man

sodding

pirate.

Holly

tell

her

…

..

.

MY OLD HOUSE LOOKS haunted tonight, silhouetted against Toronto’s smeary glow. Stars are caged like fireflies in the interlacing twigs. I tell the car, “Headlights off, radio off,” and Toru Takemitsu’s From Me Flows What You Call Time stops in midphrase. 23:11, says my car clock. I’m too weighed down to bestir myself. Are we mutants? Have we evolved this way? Or are we designed? Designed by whom? Why did the designer go to such elaborate lengths, only to vacate the stage and leave us wondering why we exist? For entertainment? For perversity? For a joke? To judge us? “To what end?” I ask my car, the night, Canada. My bones, body, and soul feel drained. I rose before five this morning to catch the six fifty-five flight to Vancouver, and when I arrived at Coupland Heights Psychiatric Hospital I found not a patient presenting Messiah Syndrome and acute precognition, but a press pack besieging the main entrance. Inside, my ex-student and friend Dr. Adnan Buyoya was enduring the worst day of his professional life. I sat in on a meeting with Oscar Gomez’s wife, her brother, their lawyer, and a trio of senior managers. The representative from the hospital’s private security company was “unavoidably absent,” though their lawyer was taking notes. Mrs. Gomez’s face was a mess of tear streaks. She swung from misery to fury: “There are TV cameras outside our house! The kids saw their dad on YouTube, but they don’t know if he’s a miracle worker or a criminal or a lunatic or … or … We daren’t switch on the TV or go online, but we can’t help it, either. Where is he? You’re a secure unit — it says so on the signs! How can Oscar just vanish into thin air?”

Adnan Buyoya is a gifted young psychiatrist, but all he could say was he didn’t yet know how Mr. Gomez had escaped from a locked room, unnoticed by hospital staff and unrecorded by the CCTV, which must have malfunctioned. The male nurse who was on duty last night had told Adnan that Mr. Gomez was claiming that Saint Mark had promised to bring Jacob’s Ladder down during the night and take him up to heaven to discuss the building of the Kingdom of God on earth — but, of course, the nurse had hardly taken the warning seriously at the time. The hospital manager assured Mrs. Gomez that the first priority was to locate her husband, and promised a full inquiry into the security breach. Adnan observed that after 750,000 YouTube hits — probably millions by now — it could be only a matter of time before “The Seer of Washington Street” was identified. I said nothing until called upon to predict Mr. Gomez’s next move. I noted that a majority of Messiah Syndromes are short-lived, but owing to Mr. Gomez’s lack of a case history, I had no data upon which to base a guess. “Friggin’ A,” muttered Mrs. Gomez’s brother, “yet another expert who can tell us doodly friggin’ squat.”

I could, in fact, have told Mrs. Gomez’s brother doodly frigging everything, but some truths are inadmissible in the court of the sane. Anyway, Mrs. Gomez would not have believed that she is now a widow, and that her children will die wondering what happened to their father on April 1, 2025. After the meeting, all I could do was to stop Adnan apologizing for summoning me across three Canadian time zones to meet a patient who had escaped hours prior to my arrival. I bade my ex-student and colleague good luck and left Coupland Hospital via the kitchens. It took a while to locate my rented car in the vast, rainy parking lot. When I did, my day took an even stranger turn, and not in a good way.

A barn owl hoots. Move. I can’t sit here all night.