David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

“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.

• • •

MY 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! ”