April 1
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.
A SHOEBOX-SIZED PARCEL forwarded by Sadaqat is waiting on the kitchen table, but I haven’t eaten all day, so I put it aside and microwave a dish of stuffed aubergines prepared by my once-a-week housekeeper, Mrs. Tavistock. I crank up the heating. The snow’s all melted but it doesn’t yet feel like spring. I wash down my supper with a glass of rioja, and read an article in the Korean Psychiatric Journal. Only then do I remember the parcel. The sender is one ?ge N?ss-?deg?rd from a school for the deaf in Trondheim, Norway, a country I haven’t visited since I was Klara Koskov. I take the parcel into my study to check it with a handheld explosives detector. The LED stays green, so I remove the two outer skins of brown paper. Inside is a sturdy cardboard box, containing a cocoon of bubble wrap enclosing a second box crafted from mahogany. I lift its hinged lid to find a Ziplock plastic bag containing a Sony Walkman of a chunky 1980s design. Plugged into it is a set of earphones made of metal, plastic, and foam. The Walkman contains a C30 BASF cassette, a brand whose very existence I had forgotten. After deploying the explosives detector on the Walkman, I read the three-page letter that was also stowed in the mahogany box:
?vre Fjellberg Skole for D?ve
Gransveien 13,
7032 TRONDHEIM
Norge/Norway
15 March 2025
Dear “Marinus,”
First, I beg your pardon. I don’t know if “Marinus” is Mr. or Mrs. or Doctor, your family name or your given name. Pardon also my poor English. My name is ?ge N?ss-?deg?rd. Maybe Mrs. Esther Little told you my name, but in this letter, I will assume she did not. I am a seventy-four-year-old Norwegian man who lives in Trondheim, a town of my native Norway. In case you don’t know why a stranger is sending you an old audio machine, here is the full story.
My father established the ?vre Fjellberg School in 1932, because his brother Martin was born with deafness and, in those days, attitudes were primitive. I was born in 1950 and I could sign fluently (in Norwegian, of course) before I was ten. My mother managed the office of ?vre Fjellberg School and my uncle Martin became the groundsman, so, you can imagine, our school and its students were the life of our family. I graduated from Oslo University in 1975 with a degree in education, and I returned to Trondheim to teach at ?vre Fjellberg. I established a Music and Drama Department here, because also I love the violin. Many nondeaf people do not guess that deaf people can enjoy music in various ways, so it was our school’s tradition to work with our local amateur orchestra to produce a spring concert for an audience of both deaf and nondeaf people. Signing, dance, amplification, images, and so on are used. In 1984, when this story happened, I chose Jean Sibelius’s “The Swan of Tuenola” for our annual performance. It is very beautiful. Perhaps you know?
Anyway in 1984, we had one dark cloud above our landscape (do you say this in English?). Namely, the financial position of our school was critical. ?vre Fjellberg is a charitable foundation but we required a big subsidy from Oslo to pay for salaries, and so on. I will not bore you with old politics, but the national government at that time cut our subsidy, to oblige our students to attend another school, two hours away by car. We protested the decision, but without financial independence or political muscle, our precious school was to be shut, after half a century of excellent work. For our family, this was a tragedy.
However, one day in June of 1984, I received a visitor in my office. She was in her fifties, perhaps. She had short gray hair and masculine clothes and a face of many stories. She apologized for disturbing me in foreigner’s Norwegian, then asked if we could speak English. I said yes. She said her name was Esther Little. Esther Little had attended our students’ recent concert and enjoyed it greatly. She had also heard of the school’s bad financial position, and she wished to assist, if possible. I said, “If you have a magic wand, please, I am listening.” Esther Little put a wooden box on my desk. This is the mahogany box I send to you. Inside was a portable cassette player and one cassette tape. Then Esther Little explained this deal. If I keep these items for some years, and then post it to her friend “Marinus” at an address in New York, she would tell her lawyers in Oslo to make a large donation to our school.
Should I agree? Esther Little read my thoughts. She said, “No, I am not a drug lord, or a terrorist, or a spy. I am an eccentric philanthropist from Western Australia. The cassette is a message to a friend, Marinus, who will need to hear it when the time is right.” As I write this letter today, I don’t know why I believed her, but sometimes you meet people who you believe. It is an instinct. I believed Esther Little. Her Oslo lawyers were a respectable conservative firm, so perhaps this influenced my decision. I asked, why not did she simply pay her Oslo lawyers to post her box to New York on a certain date in the future? Esther Little said, “Lawyers come and go. Even discreet ones are visible, and they all work for money. But you are an honest man in a quiet corner of the world, and you will live a long time.” Finally, she wrote down the donation she offered. I am sure my face became pale like a ghost when I saw the number on the sheet of paper! Our school would be safe for five years, at least. Esther Little said, “Tell your board of governors that the money was donated from a wealthy anonymous donor who believes in the work of ?vre Fjellberg School. This is the truth.” The box and our deal should be our small secret, is what I understood.
We shook hands. Naturally, my last question was, “When do I post the box to ‘Marinus’ in Manhattan?” Esther Little took a small porcelain statue of Sibelius from a box, put it on a high bookshelf, and said this: On the day Sibelius was smashed into many pieces, that day I must post the box. I thought I had not understood her English, so I examined her request carefully. If the statue broke next week, I must post the box next week. If it broke in year 2000, I must post the box in year 2000. If I die before the statue breaks, then I never post the box. Yes, that was the deal, said Esther Little. “Like I said, I am eccentric,” she said. We said goodbye and, to be honest, when she was gone I wondered if I dreamed her. But next day, the lawyer telephoned from Oslo for our bank account number, and every krone Esther Little promised was transferred. ?vre Fjellberg was safed. Three or four years later, the government ideas changed greatly and big investment was made for our school, but there is no doubt, Mrs. Esther Little rescued us at our worst time. In 2004, I became principal, and I retired a few years ago but I am still a governor, and even today, I use my former office as a study. All those years, Jean Sibelius watched my office, like a man who knows the secret.
You can guess the ending, I think. Yesterday was the first mild day of spring. Like most people in Norway, I opened the window for make air fresh in my office. Students was playing on tennis courts below my window. I left my study to make my morning coffee. I heard a noise. When I returned, Jean Sibelius was on the floor. His chest and head was in many little pieces. There was a tennis ball near. The chance was 10,000 of 1, but the time came. So I am sending the box, as I promised, with this strange story. I hope the message on the cassette is clear after forty years, but I never listened it. If Mrs. Little is still walking this world (if so, surely she is over 100 years old), give her thanks and regards from an honest man in a quiet corner of the world who has lived a long time indeed.
Sincerely,
?ge N?ss-?deg?rd
My heart is sprinting with no sign of a finishing line. A hoax? I get my slate and shirabu “?vre Fjellberg Skole for D?ve”: There it is. A fake website? Possibly, but the Sibelius statue and the Norwegian backwater both smack strongly of Esther Little. If she was planting this marker in June of 1984, she was reacting to glimpses of the Script. If the First Mission was Scripted, then maybe, maybe, it was not the crippling defeat that we’ve believed it was for the last forty-one years. Yet how could the deaths of Xi Lo, Holokai, and Esther Little be part of a bigger scheme? Luckily I have some AA batteries in my desk drawer—they are also nearly extinct—and slot them into the Walkman. Will they still have any juice in them? I plug in the earphones, hesitate, and press play. The spindles rotate. There are a few seconds of silent “header,” then magnetic hiss, then a clunk where the recording begins. I hear a distant motorbike, and a familiar voice whose timbre and croak make my breath catch and my heart ache for my long-lost friend.
“Marinus, it’s Esther on … June 7, 1984. Before we all assemble in Gravesend, I’ve taken a little trip to Trondheim. Nice town. Not a lot going on. Very white—a taxi driver just asked what part of Africa I’m from.” I hear her cackle slightly as she lights a cigarette. “But listen, I got glimpses of the Script, Marinus, about the First Mission. Sketchy and vague, to be sure, but I see fire … flight … and death. Death in the Dusk, and death in a sunny room. If the Script is accurate, I’ll survive, in a manner of speaking, but I’ll need a bolt-hole. I’ll need asylum. It has to be hidden and locked, so when the Anchorites come looking for me, as Constantin will, they’ll miss it. This means I’ll need you to get me out again. I’ll have to get the key to you.” I hear a vitreous rumbling noise, and guess that Esther moved an ashtray across a table. “The Script showed me tombs among the trees, and this name: ‘Blithewood.’ Find it and go there, as soon as you can. You’ll meet someone you know. That person gave me asylum. There are many locks, but already I sent you a sign to tell you which lock the key’ll fit. Find that lock, Marinus. Open it. Bring me back from the dead.” I hear the muffled chimes of an ice-cream van in that Norwegian summer. “Your hearing this cassette is a trigger. An enemy will make a proposal, very soon. Hide this sign. Hide this box. He’s very close to you already. The Script doesn’t say if you can trust him or not. His proposal’ll be the seed of the Second Mission. Things’ll move quickly now. In seven days the War will be over, one way or the other. If all goes well, we’ll meet before then. Until then, then.” Clunk.
The recording ends, the tape hisses, I press stop. I’m pummeled by guesses, half guesses, and questions. My friends and I have always believed that Esther’s soul succumbed to its injuries after killing Joseph Rh?mes and redacting Holly Sykes’s memory. How else to explain the absence of contact from Esther since 1984? This cassette flags up a dramatic alternative, however. That after the First Mission, Esther’s soul unraveled to a critical, yet not quite fatal, degree. She then sought asylum deep inside an unknowing host, concealed so that no Shaded Way hunter guided by the Counterscript could find and kill her. And that by presending my keys and signs, I could locate and liberate her reraveled soul from its asylum, after forty-one years. This is so slim a hope as to be anorexic. Sentience dissipates after only a few hours in another’s parallax of memories. After so many years of incorporeality, would Esther’s soul even know its name?
I watch Iris Fenby’s reflected face in the window-framed Kleinburg woods. The thickish lips, the flattish nose, the short curly black hair, silvered ever so slightly by middle age. These woods are remnants of the old forest that covered Ontario for most of the Holocene Era. The trees’ war against subdivisions, agro-forestry, sixlane highways, and golf courses is more or less lost. Could Esther Little still be alive? I don’t know. I just don’t know. Esther had command of the Aperture, so why not seek asylum with an Horologist? Because that was too obvious, perhaps. What about the last part of Esther’s message? “An enemy will make a proposal, very soon”? “He’s very close to you already”? It’s midnight in a shielded, bulletproofed house in a well-to-do rural retreat on the northwest fringes of Toronto, forty-one years in the future from the day that Esther spoke the words preserved on this magnetic tape. Even for a precognitive Horologist, it beggars belief that she could accurately have foreseen—
? ? ?
MY DEVICE TRILLS on my lamp stand. Before I answer an instinct makes me hide my parcel from Norway behind some books. My device can’t identify the caller. It’s late. Should I answer? “Yes?”
“Marinus,” says a male voice. “It’s Elijah D’Arnoq.”
I’m shocked by the contact, though after Hugo Lamb’s call in Vancouver, I shouldn’t be. “This is … certainly a surprise.”
A dead silence. “I imagine it must be. I’d feel the same.”
“ ‘Imagine’? ‘Feel’? You flatter yourself.”
“Yeah.” D’Arnoq’s voice is pensive. “Maybe I do.”
Keeping low, I unplug the lamp from the wall so I’m not visible from outside. “I don’t want to seem rude, D’Arnoq, but would you skip to the bit where you gloat about Oscar Gomez, so I can just hang up? It’s late and, as you know, I’ve had a long day.”
A troubled, sloughing silence. “I want it to stop.”
“Stop what? This call? Fine by me. Goodbye—”
“No, Marinus—I want to defect.”
I check the last sentence for errors.
D’Arnoq repeats it like a sulky kid: “I want to defect.”
“So I say, ‘Really?’ and you say, ‘In your dreams.’ When I last attended high school, it went something like that.”
“I can’t … can’t endure another decanting. I want to defect.”
Stranger than the Anchorite’s words is his tone, denuded of the usual swagger. But I’m still a light-year from swallowing this. “Well, D’Arnoq,” I say, “now you’re au fait with the arts of feeling and imagining, try this: If you were on my end of the device, how would you respond to this show of remorse from a high-up Anchorite?”
“I’d be bloody skeptical. I’d ask, ‘Why now?’ ”
“What an excellent place to begin. Why now?”
“It’s not now. It’s a … nausea that’s grown over the last … twenty years. But I can’t ignore it anymore. I … I … Look, last year, Rivas-Godoy, the Tenth Anchorite, sourced a five-year-old from Paraisópolis, a favela in S?o Paolo. Enzo was the kid’s name. Enzo had no dad, he was bullied, friendless, his chakra-eye was vivid, and Rivas-Godoy became his big brother … A textbook sourcing. I did the ingress-check and Enzo was pure, no sign of Horology. So I approved him, and was in the Chapel for the Rebirthday when Rivas-Godoy walked Enzo up …”
I’ve bitten back five acidic interruptions already.
“… to meet Santa Claus.” There’s a grimace in D’Arnoq’s voice.
“Santa Claus. Caucasian male. About sixty. Nonexistent.”
“Yeah. Enzo’d been picked on for saying Santa might be real. So Rivas-Godoy told Enzo he’d take him to Lapland. So the Way of Stones became the short cut to the North Pole, the Chapel was Santa’s dining room, and the view over the Dusk, that was … Lapland. Enzo’d never left his favela, so”—D’Arnoq lets out a sigh through his teeth—“he didn’t know any better. Rivas-Godoy said I was the vet in case the reindeer got sick. Enzo said, ‘Wow.’ Then Rivas-Godoy told Enzo, ‘Go see Santa’s papa, Enzo, in the painting. It’s a magic talking picture, go say hello.’ The last minute of Enzo’s life was the happiest one, I suppose. But later, on the Solstice Rebirthday, as we drank the Black Wine, and Rivas-Godoy was laughing about this dumb-ass Brazilian kid … I could hardly empty my glass.”
“But somehow you managed, of course.”
“I’m a high-ranking Anchorite! What choice did I have?”
“Step out of the Aperture halfway down Mariana Trench? You’d cure your guilt, contribute to the local aquafauna, and spare me your oh-so-shiny crocodile tears.”
D’Arnoq’s whisper is broken. “The decanting has to stop.”
“Enzo the S?o Paolo boy must’ve been truly cute. You ought to know, by the way, I’m not sure how secure this device—”
“I’m our hacker-in-chief, nobody can hear us. It wasn’t just Enzo. Or Oscar Gomez, today. It’s all of them. Since the day Pfenninger told me of the Blind Cathar, and what he built, and what it does, I’ve been party to … Look, if you need me to use the word ‘evil,’ I’ll use it. I anesthetized myself against it, of course. I ate the lies. I digested the whole ‘What’s four a year out of eight billion?’ schtick … But I’m sick of it. Of the sourcing, of the grooming, of the murder, of the animacide. Sick of the evil. Horology’s right. You always were.”
“And when your boyish good looks ebb away, D’Arnoq?”
“Then I’d be alive again, and not … what I am now.”
Something creaks on the decking outside.
Am I being set up? I peer out: a raccoon.
“Did you share your new views with Mr. Pfenninger?”
“If you’re going to sit there and take the piss, Marinus, I’ll hang up on you. Apostasy is a capital crime in the Shaded Way Codex. A fact you ought to use, by the way—my only chance of survival is to help you annihilate your enemy before they kill me.”
Damn Elijah D’Arnoq, but I have to ask: “How, exactly, do you suggest we annihilate our enemy?”
“By psycho-demolishing the Chapel of the Dusk.”
“We tried that. You’ll be aware of how it ended.” Though I’m less sure I am, after tonight’s box from Norway.
“Defeat for Horology, but on your First Trespass, you didn’t know what you were dealing with. Did you?”
“Will you cure us of that ignorance?”
D’Arnoq’s pause goes on a long, long time. “Yes, I will.”
I’d give Elijah D’Arnoq’s defection a five percent chance of being genuine, but Esther Little glimpsed it, and if I’m not mistaken, she wants me to treat D’Arnoq as an ally, or at least let him think I believe him. “I’m all ears.”
“No. We need to meet face-to-face, Marinus.”
Down to one percent. He’ll propose a meeting in a man-trap, and its jaws will snap shut. “Where do you suggest?”
The raccoon turns its Zorro-masked face my way.
“Don’t go all Deep Streamy on me, but I’m speaking from your car, on the drive. My balls are freezing. Get a fire going, will you?”