David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

Another gray commuter, swaying on the District Line.

The Land Cruiser’s rear door clunks open an inch.

THE MAN — THE FOUNDER — IN the rear of the car acts as if I’m not there, and D’Arnoq says nothing as he drives us away from the town square, so I sit quietly examining my fellow passenger via his reflection in the glass: midforties, frameless glasses, thick if frosted hair; chin cleft, clean-shaven, and a scar over his jawbone, which surely has a story to tell. He has a lean, tough physique. Mittel Europe ex-military? His clothes offer no clues: sturdy ankle-length boots, black moleskin trousers, a leather jacket, once black but battered grayish. If you noticed him in a crowd you might think “architect” or “philosophy lecturer”; but you probably wouldn’t notice him.

There are only two roads out of La Fontaine Sainte-Agnès. 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: “ I didn’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 lesser disciplines? 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—

• • •

— BLINK, AND THE Land Cruiser is gone, and I find myself on a wide, long rocky shelf on a steep mountainside in high-altitude sunshine. The only reason I don’t fall over is that I’m already sitting on a cold stone block. I huff a few times in panicky shock; my huffs hang there, like vague, blank speech bubbles. How did I get here? Where is here? Around me are the roofless ruins of what might once have been a chapel. Perhaps a monastery — there are more walls farther away. Knee-deep snow covers the ground; the shelf ends at a low wall, a few feet ahead. Behind the ruins a sheer rock face rears up. I’m in my ski jacket, and my face and ears are throbbing and warm, as if I’ve just undergone hard exertion. All these details are nothing alongside this central, gigantic fact: Just now I was in the back of a car with Mr. Pfenninger. D’Arnoq was driving. And now … now …

“Welcome back,” says Elijah D’Arnoq, to my right.

I gasp, “Christ!” and jump up, slip over, jump up, and crouch in fight-or-flight mode.

“Cool it, Lamb! It’s freaky, I know”—he’s seated and unscrewing a Thermos flask—“but you’re safe.” His silver parka gleams in the light. “As long as you don’t run over the edge, like a headless chicken.”

“D’Arnoq, where … What happened and where are we?”

“Where it all began,” says Pfenninger, and I whirl the other way, fending off a second heart attack. He’s wearing a Russian fur hat and snow boots. “The Thomasite Monastery of the Sidelhorn Pass. What’s left of it.” He kicks through the snow to the low wall and gazes out. “You’d believe in the divine if you lived out your life up here …”

They drugged me and lugged me here. But why?

And how? I drank nothing and ate nothing in the Toyota.

Hypnotism? Pfenninger was staring at me as I went under.

No. Hypnotism’s a cheap twist in crap films. Too stupid.