The Bone Clocks

“ ‘Psychosoterica,’ ” I say. “I don’t know the word.”

Pfe

I’m gaping. I close my mouth. I ask, “How?”

“There is a word,” Pfe

So I manage to mumble, “Telepathy.”

Pfe

Elijah D’Arnoq’s peering at us in the rearview mirror. “ Yes, Mr. Pfe

“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: “ Ididn’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.” Pfe

“So,” my mouth’s dry, “psychosoterica is telepathy?”

“Telepathy is one of its lesser disciplines,” replies Pfe

“Its lesserdisciplines? What else can psychosoterica do?”

A cloud shifts and the fast river’s strafed with light.

Pfe

“Uh …” I have to grope for the answer. “January the second.”

“Correct. January the second. Remember.” Mr. Pfe

·   ·   ·

—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. Pfe

“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 Pfe

They drugged me and lugged me here. But why?

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

Hypnotism? Pfe

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

Then I remember Miss Constantin and King’s College Chapel. What if she caused my zone-out—like Pfe

“We hiatused you, Mr. Anyder,” says Pfe

If that makes sense to him or to D’Arnoq, it makes none to me. “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

“I’d be worried if you did, at this stage.”

I touch my head for signs of damage. “How long was I under?”

Pfe

There, under the masthead: 4. Januar 1992.

Which ca

Pfe

Just now. Yet still Die Zeitinsists today is 4 January 1992.

I feel like I’m falling. Unconscious for two days? No, it’s more likely the newspaper’s a fake. I rustle through its pages, desperate to find evidence that things aren’t what they appear to be.

“It couldbe a fake,” Pfe

I’m head-smashed and, I realize, ravenously hungry. I check my stubble. I shaved this morning, at Holly’s. It’s grown. I stagger back, afraid of Elijah D’Arnoq and this Mr. Pfe

… to where? Our tracks in the snow disappear around a bend. Maybe there’s a car park with a visitor’s center and telephones just out of sight, or maybe it’s thirty kilometers of glacier and crevasses. Back the other way, the narrow mountain shelf on which we stand narrows to a stubborn clump of firs, then it’s near-vertical ice and rock. Pfe

“It seems apt,” says Pfe

I blow on it and sip it cautiously. It’s good. “Thanks.”

“I’ll let you have the recipe.”

“Being moved under hiatus is a double hand grenade in the brain, but”—Pfe