April 5
IN THE SILT OF DREAMS, ill-wishers were cutting off my exits until the one way out was up. I can’t remember which self I am until I find my nightlight’s 05:09 imprinted on the overheated darkness. 119A. More than a mile away across Central Park on the ninth floor of the Empire Hotel, Arkady is preparing to dreamseed Holly Sykes with ōshima standing guard. I pray he won’t be needed. Staying here sticks in my craw, but if I went over to the Empire to help, I could end up triggering the very attack I so fear. Minutes limp by as I trawl New York’s nighttime tinnitus for meaning …
Pointless. I switch on my reading lamp, and gaze around my room. The Vietnamese urn, the scroll of the monkey regarding its own reflection, Lucas Marinus’s harpsichord from Nagasaki obtained by Xi Lo as a gift after a strenuous and improbable hunt … I turn to my place in Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, but my thoughts, if not my soul, are still a mile or two to the west. This never-ending, accursed War. On my weakest days, I wonder why we Atemporals of Horology, who inherit resurrection as birthright, who possess what the Anchorites kill to obtain a twisted variation of, why don’t we just walk away from it? Why do we risk everything for strangers who’ll never know what we’ve done, win or lose? I ask the monkey troubled by its mirrored self: “Why?”
THE HOLY SPIRIT entered Oscar Gomez during last Sunday’s service at his Pentecostal church in Vancouver as the congregation recited Psalm 139. He described it to my friend Adnan Buyoya a few hours later as “knowing what lay in the hearts of his brothers and sisters in Christ, what sins they had yet to repent or to atone for.” Gomez’s conviction that God had bestowed this gift upon him was unshakable, and he was setting about God’s work without delay. He took the SkyTrain to Metropolis, a large suburban shopping mall in the city, and started preaching at the main entrance. Christian street preachers in secular cities are more ignored or mocked than they are listened to, but soon a crowd clotted around the short, earnest Mexican Canadian. Total strangers at Metropolis were baited, often to their astonishment, by Gomez’s startling specificity. One man, for example, was exhorted by Gomez to confess to fathering his sister-in-law Bethany’s baby. A hairdresser was begged to return the four thousand dollars she had stolen from her employer at the Curl Up and Dye hair salon. Gomez told a college dropout called Jed that the cannabis he was growing in his frail grandmother’s garden shed was disfiguring his life and could only end in a custodial sentence. Some blanched, their jaws dropping, and fled. Some angrily accused Gomez of hacking into their slates or working for the NSA, to which he replied, “The Lord has all our lives under surveillance.” Some began to weep, and ask for forgiveness. By the time the mall security guys arrived to escort Gomez from the premises, several dozen slates were filming the proceedings and a protective cordon of onlookers was surrounding the “Seer of Washington Street.” The city cops were summoned. YouTube uploads caught Gomez asking one of his arresters to confess to stamping on the head of an Eritrean immigrant—named—three nights before, while beseeching the other officer to seek counseling for his child pornography addiction, naming both the officer’s log-in and the Russian website. We can only guess at the conversation in the squad car, but en route to the precinct HQ, the destination was changed to Coupland Heights Psychiatric Hospital.
“Swear to God, Iris,” Adnan emailed me that evening, “I walked into the interview room and my first thought was, A seer? This guy looks straighter than my accountant. Straightaway—as if I’d spoken out loud—Oscar Gomez told me, “My father was an accountant, Dr. Buyoya, so maybe I get my straightness from him.” How do you conduct an assessment after that? I thought (or hoped?) I had spoken my initial thought aloud, but soon Gomez was referring to those events from my boyhood in Rwanda that I’d only ever told you and my own analyst about during training.” In Adnan’s second email, sent two hours later, patients at Coupland Heights were worshiping the new inmate as a god. “It’s like ‘The Voorman Problem,’ ” Adnan said, referring to a Crispin Hershey novella we both admired. “I know what my grandparents would call Gomez in Yoruba, but there’s no way to talk about witchcraft in English and keep my job. Please, Iris. Can you help?”
VENI, VIDI, NON vici. By the time I’d located my car in the vast, rainy parking lot, I was drenched, and I got a run in my tights as I clambered in. I was also hammered by anger, despair, and a sense of impotence. I’d failed. My device warbled as a message arrived:
2late marinus 2late. will mrs gomez believe the truth?
Answers and implications slid into place, like a self-solving Rubik’s Cube. Topmost was the most obvious, that my device had been hacked by a Carnivore, a gloating Anchorite, who might be incautious and inexperienced enough to let his identity slip. I messaged a half-bluff:
hugo lamb buried his conscience but it never quite died
There was a chance that the “Saint Mark” who had promised to accompany Oscar Gomez up Jacob’s Ladder was “Marcus Anyder,” the Anchorite name of Hugo Lamb. My device sat in my clammy hand for one minute, two, three. Just as I gave up, a message arrived.
consciences r 4 bone clocks marinus, u r 1 beaten woman
My bluff had worked, unless I was being double-bluffed back. But, no, a carnivorous psychodecanter acting alone wouldn’t pass up the chance to rub my nose in my wrong guess, and the “beaten woman” phrase matched L’Ohkna’s profile of Hugo Lamb’s misogyny. As I considered how best to make use of this contact, surely unsanctioned by Constantin or Pfenninger, a third message arrived:
c yr future marinus c yr rearview mirror
Instinctively, I ducked and tilted the rearview mirror until I could see through the rear window. The glass was beaded with rain. I switched on the car’s battery, and clicked on the rear wiper, to remove the—
The passenger-side window exploded into a thousand tiny hailstones, and the mirror above my head was a brittle supernova of plastic and glass. One shard of plastic shrapnel, the size and shape of a fingernail clipping, lodged itself in my cheek.
I crouched, afraid. A logical portion of my mind was arguing that if the marksman had intended to kill me I would now be staring across the Dusk. But I stayed down for several minutes longer. Atemporality neutralizes death’s poison, but it doesn’t defang death, and old habits of survival linger on, even in us.
THAT IS WHY we prosecute the War, I remind myself in 119A, four days later. The window in my room turns under-ice gray. We bother because of Oscar Gomez, Oscar Gomez’s wife, and his three children. Because nobody else would believe in the animacides committed by a syndicate of soul thieves like the Anchorites or by “freelancers” hunting alone. Because if we spent our metalives amassing the wealth of empires and getting stoned on the opiates of wealth and power, knowing what we know yet doing nothing about it, we would be complicit in the psychoslaughter of the innocents.
My device buzzes. It’s ōshima’s tone. I fumble the thing like a panicky contestant, drop it, retrieve it, and read:
Done. No incidents.
Arkady returning now.
Will shadow Slim Hope.
I fill my lungs with oxygen and blessed relief. The Second Mission is one step closer. Daylight now leaks in around the window. 119A’s ancient plumbing shudders and clanks. I hear feet, a toilet cistern, and cupboard doors. Two or three rooms away, Sadaqat is up.
“SAGE, ROSEMARY, THYME …” Sadaqat, our warden, minder, and would-be traitor, plucks a weed from the raised beds. “I planted parsley too, so we could dine on ‘Scarborough Fair’ but late frost killed it. Some herbs are feebler than others. I’ll try again. Parsley’s rich in iron. Here I planted the onions and leeks, tough customers, and I have high hopes for the rhubarb. Do you remember, Doctor, we grew rhubarb at Dawkins Hospital?”
“I remember the pies,” I tell him.
We’re speaking quietly. Despite the fine-sieved rain and his busy night, Arkady, my fellow Horologist, is practicing Tai Chi among the myrtle and witch hazel across the rooftop courtyard. “This will be a strawberry patch,” Sadaqat points, “and the three fruiting cherry trees I’ll fertilize with the tip of a paintbrush, due to a scarcity of bees here in the East Side. Look! A red cardinal, on the momiji maple. I bought a book about birds, so I know. Those birds on the cloister roof, those are mourning doves. We have starlings nesting under the eaves, up there. They keep me busy with the scrubbing brush, but their droppings make a nutritious fertilizer, so I don’t complain. Here we have the fragrant quarter. Wintersweet, waxflower, and these thorny sticks will become scented roses. The trellis is for honeysuckle and jasmine.”
I notice that Sadaqat’s up-and-down British-Pakistani accent is flattening out. “You’ve worked magic up here, truly.”
Our warden purrs. “Plants want to grow. Just let them.”
“We should have thought of a garden up here decades ago.”
“You are too busy saving souls to think of such things, Doctor. The roof had to be reinforced, which was a challenge …”
Watch out, subwarns Arkady, or he’ll tell you about load-bearing walls and girders until you lose the will to live.
“… but I hired a Polish engineer who proposed a load-bearing—”
“It’s an oasis of calm,” I interrupt, “that we’ll cherish for years.”
“For centuries,” says Sadaqat, brushing droplets of mist off his vigorous but graying hair, “for you Horologists.”
“Let’s hope so.” Through an ornate wrought-iron screen in the cloister wall, we look down on the street four floors below. Cars crawl along and honk in vain. Umbrellas overtake them, parting for joggers running contraflow. Level with us on the much taller building across the road, an old woman with a neck brace waters the marigolds in her window boxes. New York’s skyscrapers vanish in cloud at about the thirtieth storey. If King Kong were up on the Empire State today, no one at our lowly altitude would believe the truth.
“Mr. Arkady’s Tai Chi,” Sadaqat murmurs, “reminds me of your magickings. How your hands draw on air, you know?” We watch him. Arkady may be gangly, Hungarian, and ponytailed, but the Vietnamese martial-arts master of his last self is still discernible, somehow.
I ask my former patient, “Are you still content with life here?”
Sadaqat is alarmed. “Yes! If I’ve done anything wrong …”
“No. Not at all. I just worry, sometimes, that we’re depriving you of friends, a partner, family … The trappings of normal life.”
Sadaqat removes his glasses and wipes them on his corduroy shirt. “Horology is my family. Partner? I am forty-five. I prefer to go to bed with The Daily Show on my slate, or a Lee Child novel and a cup of chamomile tea. Normal life?” He sniffs. “I have your cause, a library to explore, a garden to tend, and my poetry is becoming a little less awful. I swear, Doctor, every day when I shave I tell myself in the mirror, ‘Sadaqat Dastaani, you are the luckiest schizophrenic, middle-aged, balding, British Pakistani in all Manhattan.”
“If you ever,” I strive to sound casual, “think differently …”
“No, Dr. Marinus. My wagon is hitched to Horology’s.”
Careful, Arkady subwarns me, or he’ll smell a guilty rat.
I can’t quite let it go. “The Second Mission, Sadaqat. We can’t guarantee anyone’s safety. Not yours, not ours.”
“If you want me to go from 119A, Doctor, use your magickery-pokery because I won’t jump ship of my own accord. The Anchorites prey on the psychiatrically vulnerable, yes? If I’d had the correct type of”—Sadaqat taps his head—“soul, they might have taken me, yes? So. Horology’s War is my War. Yes, I am only a pawn, but a game of chess may hinge upon the conduct of a single pawn.”
Marinus, our guest’s arriving, Arkady subinforms me.
With a bruised conscience I tell Sadaqat, “You win.”
Our warden smiles. “I am glad, Doctor.”
“Our guest has arrived.” We walk back to the ironwork to look down on Holly in her Jamaican head-wrap. Across the road, ōshima shows his outline in the room we have above the violin maker’s: I’ll watch the street, he subsuggests, in case any interested parties pass by. Holly approaches the door with the green key I gave her yesterday at the Santorini Café. The Englishwoman’s having a very strange morning. On a wand of willow very near my shoulder, a puffed-up red-winged blackbird performs a loop of arpeggios.
“Who’s a handsome devil, then?” whispers Sadaqat.
I SPEAK FIRST. “We’ve been expecting you, Ms. Sykes. As they say.”
“Welcome to 119A.” Arkady’s voice has a teenage croaky waver.
“You’re safe, Ms. Sykes,” says Sadaqat. “Don’t be afraid.”
Holly is flushed after her climb, but upon seeing Arkady her eyes widen: “It is you … you … you … isn’t it?”
“Yes, I have some explaining to do,” agrees Arkady.
Down in an alley, a dog is barking. Holly’s trembling. “I dreamt you. This morning! You—you’re the same. How did you do that?”
“The acne, right?” Arkady brushes his cheek. “Unforgettable.”
“My dream! You were at my desk, in my room, in my hotel …”
“Writing this address on the jotter.” Arkady picks up the sequence. “Then I asked you to bring Marinus’s green key here and go in. I said, ‘See you in two hours.’ And here we are.”
Holly looks at me, at Arkady, at Sadaqat, at me.
“Dreamseeding,” I comment, “is one of Arkaday’s métiers.”
“My range is lousy,” says my colleague, showing off his modesty. “My room was across the corridor from yours, Ms. Sykes, so I didn’t have far to transverse. Then, when my soul was back in my body, I hurried back here. In a taxi. Dreamseeding of civilians runs counter to our Codex, but you needed some proof of the wild claims made by Marinus the other day, and we’re at war, so I’m afraid we dreamseeded you anyway. Forgive us. Please.”
Holly’s at a nervous loss. “Who are you?”
“Me? Arkady Thaly, as of this self. Hi.”
Up in the low cloud an airplane drags itself along.
“This is our warden,” I turn to Sadaqat, “Mr. Dastaani.”
“Oh, I’m just a glorified dogsbody, really,” says Sadaqat, “and normal, like you—well, ‘normal,’ eh? Call me Sadaqat. It’s said ‘Sa-dar-cutt’ with the stress on the ‘dar.’ Think of me as an Afpak Alfred.” Holly looks none the wiser. “Alfred? Batman’s butler. I take care of 119A when my employers are away. I cook. You’re vegetarian, I am told? So are the Horologists. It’s the”—he twirls his finger in the air—“body-and-soul thing. Who’s hungry? I’ve mastered eggs Benedict with smoked tofu, a fine breakfast for a disorienting morning. Could I tempt you?”
119A’S FIRST-FLOOR GALLERY is dominated by an elliptical table of walnut wood that was here when Xi Lo bought the house in the 1890s. The chairs are mismatched, from various eras since. Pearly light enters through the three arched windows. The paintings on the long walls were gifts to Xi Lo or Holokai from the artists: a blushing desert dawn by Georgia O’Keeffe, A. Y. Jackson’s view of Port Radium, Diego Quispe Tito’s Sunset over the Bridge of San Luis Rey, and Faith Nulander’s Hooker and John in Marble Cemetery. At one end is Agnello Bronzino’s Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time. It is worth more than the building and its neighbors combined. “I know this one,” says Holly, staring at the Bronzino. “The original’s in the National Gallery, in London. I used to go and see it in my lunchbreak, when I worked at the homeless center at St. Martin in the Fields.”
“Yes,” I say. Holly doesn’t need a story about how the National’s copy and the original got switched in Vienna in 1860. Anyway, she’s moved on to the Bronzino’s unworthy companion, Self Portrait of Yu Leon Marinus, 1969. Holly recognizes the face and turns to me accusingly. I nod, sheepishly. “Absurd, of course, and sheer arrogance to hang it in this company, but Xi Lo, our founder, insisted. We keep it there for his sake.”
Sadaqat enters from the door by the astrolabe, bringing our drinks on a tray. Nobody has the stomach for eggs Benedict. He asks, “Now, where is everyone sitting?” Holly chooses the gondola chair at the end, nearest the way out. Sadaqat asks our guest, “Irish Breakfast blend, Ms. Sykes? Your mother’s Irish, I believe.”
“She was, yes,” says Holly. “That’s grand, thanks.”
Sadaqat places a matching willow-pattern teapot and teacup, a jug of milk, and a bowl of sugar on a mat. My green tea is brewing in a black iron teapot owned by Choudary Marinus, two selves ago. Arkady drinks coffee from a bowl. Sadaqat puts a lit candle in a stained-glass cup as a centerpiece. “To brighten the place up. It can get a little tomblike in here.”
In a parallel universe the man’s a design fascist, subsays Arkady.
“Just what we need, Sadaqat,” I say. He leaves, pleased.
Holly folds her arms. “You’d better begin. I’m too …”
“We’ve invited you here this morning,” I say, “to learn about us and our cosmology. About Atemporals and psychosoterics.”
This sounds like a business seminar, Marinus, subsays Arkady.
“Hold on,” says Holly. “You lost me at ‘Atemporals.’ ”
“Prick us, we bleed,” says Arkady, cupping his coffee bowl, “tickle us, we laugh, poison us, we die, but after we die, we come back. Marinus here has gone through this—thirty-nine lives, is it?”
“Forty, if we include poor Heidi Cross at her bungalow by the Isle of Sheppey.” I notice Holly watching me for signs of a second head or a maniacal cackle.
“I’m still a newbie,” says Arkady, “on my fifth self. Dying still really freaks me out, in the Dusk, looking over the Dunes …”
“What dusk?” asks Holly. “What dunes?”
“The Dusk,” Arkady says, “between life and death. We see it from the High Ridge. It’s a beautiful, fearsome sight. All the souls, the pale lights, crossing over, blown by the Seaward Wind to the Last Sea. Which, of course, isn’t really a sea at all, but—”
“Wait wait wait.” Holly leans forwards. “You’re saying you’ve died? That you’ve seen all this yourselves?”
Arkady drinks from his coffee bowl, then wipes his lips. “Yes, Ms. Sykes, to both your questions. But the Landward Wind blows our souls back, like it or not. Back over the High Ridge, back into the Light of Day, and then we hear a noise like … a town being dropped, and everything in it smashing to bits.” Arkady asks me, “Fair description?”
“It’ll do. Then we wake up in a new body, a child’s, usually in need of urgent repair, just vacated by its previous owner.”
“At the café,” Holly turns to me, “you said that Hugo Lamb’s lot, the Anchorites, are immortal ‘with terms and conditions.’ Are you and they the same?”
“No. We live in this spiral of resurrections involuntarily. We don’t know how, or why us. We never sought it. Our first selves died in one of the usual ways, we saw the Dusk as Arkady just described, then forty-nine days later we came back.”
“From then on,” Arkady unthreads and rethreads his ponytail, “we’re stuck on repeat. Our second body grew, matured, died; bam, we’re back in the Dusk; then, whoosh, forty-nine days later, we’re waking up back on earth—in a body of the opposite gender, just to well and truly screw your head up.”
Swearing won’t make you more credible, I subreprimand him. “What matters,” I tell Holly, “is that no one pays for our atemporality. Its cost we alone pay. Our phylum, if you will, is herbivorous.”
From the street below we hear the screech of brakes.
“So,” asks Holly, “the Anchorites are all carnivores?”
“Every last one.” Arkady runs his finger round his bowl.
Holly rubs her temples. “Are we talking … vampires?”
Arkady groans. “Oh, the V-word! Here it comes again.”
“Carnivores are only metaphorically vampiric,” I tell Holly. “They look as normal, or as abnormal, as any other subset of the population—plumbers, bankers, diabetics. More’s the pity they don’t all look like David Lynch villains. Our work would be easier by far.” I breathe in the bitter green-tea steam and anticipate Holly’s next question. “They feed on souls, Ms. Sykes. Carnivores decant souls, which means abducting people, ideally children,” I hold her freshly unsettled gaze as she thinks about Jacko, “which means killing them, I’m afraid.”
“Which is not nice,” says Arkady. “So Marinus, me, and a few other unthanked individuals—Atemporals for the most part, with some mortal collaborators—make it our business to … take them down. Individual Carnivores rarely give us that much bother—they tend to think they’re the only ones, and operate as carelessly as shoplifters who refuse to believe in store detectives. The problems begin—our War started—when they hunt in a pack.”
“Which is why we’re here, Ms. Sykes,” I sip my tea, “because of one particular pack. ‘The Anchorites of the Chapel of the Dusk of the Blind Cathar of the Thomasite Order of Sidelhorn Pass.”
“Too long for business cards.” Arkady interlaces his fingers, inverts his hands, and lifts his arms. “Just ‘Anchorites,’ to friends.”
“The Sidelhorn’s a mountain,” says Holly. “In Switzerland.”
“Quite a climb it is, too,” I remark. “Sidelhorn also lends its name to a pass in northern Italy, a road that was old even when Roman legions used it. A Thomasite monastery served as a hostelry on the pass, on the Swiss Valais side, from the ninth century to the last year of the eighteenth. There, in the 1210s, a figure known as the Blind Cathar ontologized into being a conduit into the Dusk.”
Holly scans this blast of history. “The Dusk that lies between …”
“Life and death,” says Arkady. “Good, you’re listening.”
Holly asks, “What’s a Cathar?”
“The Cathars were twelfth- and thirteenth-century heretics,” I say, “in Languedoc. They preached that the world was created not by God but the devil, that matter was evil, that Jesus, as a man, was therefore not the Son of God. The papacy did not approve. In 1198 Pope Innocent III proposed a landgrab that became known as the Albigensian Crusade. The King of France was otherwise engaged, but he gave barons from the north of France his blessing to ride south, kill Cathars, confiscate their lands, and subdue a disloyal region for the French Crown. Heresy is fissiparous, however. What was smashed, splintered. Our Blind Cathar had settled at a Thomasite monastery in distant Valais by, we guess, 1205, 1206. Why he chose the Sidelhorn, we do not know. His name, we do not know. His impetuses for delving into matter, noumena, logos, mind, the soul, the Dusk, we do not know. He appears in only one historical source. Mecthild of Magdeburg’s history of the Episcopal Inquisition dates from the 1270s and describes how, in 1215, the Inquisition sentenced the ‘Blind Cathar’ of Sidelhorn monastery to death for witchcraft. The night before his execution, he was locked in a cell in the monastery. By dawn,” I think of Oscar Gomez, “he had vanished. Mecthild arrived at the conclusion that the heretic’s liege lord Satan had looked after his own.”
“Don’t worry,” says Arkady. “We don’t do Satan.”
“The history lesson’s almost over,” I promise. “Earth spun on its axis, despite the Inquisition’s insistence to the contrary, until the year 1799.” I rest my fingertips on the iron teapot. “A stroke of Napoleon’s pen merged the proud Swiss cantons into a single Helvetican Republic. Not all the Swiss approved of being a client state of France, however, and when promises of religious freedom were reneged upon, many began burning churches and turning on their Paris-appointed masters. Napoleon’s enemies fanned the flames, and in early April a company of Austrian artillery came over the Sidelhorn Pass from Piedmont. Two hundred kegs of gunpowder were stored in the monastery’s cowshed and, by carelessness or sabotage, exploded. Much of the monastery was destroyed, and a rock-fall swept away a bridge crossing the chasm below. Which is only a footnote in the Revolutionary Wars, but that explosion, in our War, equates to the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Shock waves from it ricocheted up to the Chapel of the Dusk, you see, and the Blind Cathar’s long slumber ended.”
The mantelpiece clock measures out eight delicate chimes.
“The Thomasite Order was by then a ghost of its pre-Reformation self, and lacked the money, means, and the will to rebuild its Alpine redoubt. The Helvetican government in Zürich, however, voted to repair the Sidelhorn bridge and position a barracks to guard the strategically vital pass. One Baptiste Pfenninger, an engineer from Martigny, was dispatched to the site to oversee the work, and on a night in late summer, as Pfenninger lay in his room at the barracks trying to sleep, he heard a voice calling his name. The voice sounded both miles away and inches away. His door was bolted on the inside, but Pfenninger saw a strip of air swaying at the foot of his bed. The engineer touched it. He found that the strip of air parted, like a curtain, and through it he saw a round floor and a person-high candle of the type one still finds before Catholic or Orthodox altars. Beyond were slabs of stone, climbing up into darkness. Baptiste Pfenninger was a pragmatic man, not drunk, and of sound mind. His room was on the second floor of a two-story building. Yet he passed through the impossible curtain in the air, known, by the way, as the Aperture, and climbed up the impossible steps. How are you holding up so far, Ms. Sykes?”
Holly’s thumb sits in her clavicle. “I don’t know.”
Arkady is stroking his zits, content to let me talk.
“Baptiste Pfenninger became the first visitor to the Chapel of the Dusk. He found a portrait, or an icon of the Blind Cathar. It had no eyes, yet as Pfenninger stood there, and gazed at it, or was gazed at by it, he saw a dot appear in the icon’s forehead and grow into the black pupil of a lidless eye and …”
“I saw that! Where’s it from?”
I look at Arkady, who shrugs slightly in reply. “It’s what the icon of the Blind Cathar does, shortly before it decants a soul.”
Holly addresses me with a fresh urgency. “Listen. The weekend Jacko went missing. That dot-to-eye on a forehead thing. I—I—I had a—a daymare in an underpass, near Rochester. I left it out of The Radio People, it just read like a bad description of an acid trip. But it happened.”
Arkady subasks me, What if Xi Lo was cording images to her during the First Mission?
Why keep that from us? I hunt for a better idea. What if Jacko and Holly were already corded, as two psychosoteric siblings?
Arkady’s biting his thumb knuckle, a habit from his last life. Possibly. The cord’s remnants may have led Esther to Holly as you fled the Chapel. Like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs.
“ ’Scuse me,” Holly’s saying, “but I am still here. What’s Jacko got to do with this medieval monk and a Napoleonic engineer?”
The candle flame in its stained-glass jar is tall and still.
“The Blind Cathar and the engineer talked,” I say, “and agreed upon a covenant, a pact of mutual assistance. We can’t be sure—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. This monk had been in his Chapel of the Dusk for, what, six hundred years? Now he’s inviting up visitors and making deals. What’s he been eating since the Middle Ages?”
“Naturally, the Blind Cathar had transubstantiated,” I explain.
Holly leans back. “Is transwhateveritis even a word?”
“The Blind Cathar’s body had died,” says Arkady, “but his mind and soul—which, for the purposes of our chat, are the same—had entered into the fabric of the Chapel. The Blind Cathar interfaced with Pfenninger via the icon.”
Holly considers this. “So the builder became the building?”
“After a fashion,” Arkady replies. “You could say so.”
“The bridge and the garrison at the Sidelhorn Pass were finished ahead of winter,” I pick up the thread, “and Baptiste Pfenninger returned to his family in Martigny. But the following spring he went on a fishing trip up to Lake d’Emosson, where, one evening, he took a boat onto the water. The boat was found, the body never was.”
“I get it,” Holly says. “The same as Hugo Lamb.”
Rain is softly muttering at 119A’s windows. “Jump forward six years to 1805. A new orphanage opened its doors in the Marais district of Paris. Its founder and director was a sturdy Frenchman called Martin Leclerc, whose father had amassed a colonial fortune in Africa, and who now wished to give sustenance, shelter, and scripture to the capital’s war orphans. 1805 was a bad time to be a foreigner in Paris, and Leclerc’s French had a Germanic slant, but his friends attributed his foreignness to a Prussian mother and a Hamburg education. These same friends, many of whom were the cream of imperial society, did not know that Martin Leclerc’s real name was Baptiste Pfenninger. One imagines the accusations of insanity that would have greeted the idea that Leclerc had set up his orphanage to source and groom Engifted children. That is, children who showed evidence of psychosoteric voltage or an active chakra-eye.”
Holly looks at Arkady, who narrows his eyes like a pondering interpreter. “Psychic gifts. Like you, aged seven.”
“Why would a … a Swiss engineer, who faked his own death and is now a French orphanage owner—right?—want psychic children?”
Arkady says, “The Anchorites fuel their atemporality by feeding on souls, as Marinus said. But not just any old soul will do; only the souls of the Engifted can be decanted. Like organ donation, where only one in a thousand is a compatible match. Around every equinox and solstice, the soul’s owner has to be lured up the Way of Stones into the Chapel. Once there, the hapless visitor stares at the icon of the Blind Cathar, who then decants the visitor’s soul into Black Wine. The body is disposed of through a Chapel window, and the Twelve Anchorites assemble at a ritual known as a Rebirthday where they drink the Black Wine, and for a season—three months or so—no cellular subdivision occurs in their bodies. Which is why Hugo Lamb’s body has remained in its midtwenties state, while his mind and soul are over fifty years old.”
Holly suspends judgment, for now. “Why’s Pfenninger now in Paris when you get to the ‘Chapel’ via a ruined Swiss monastery?”
“Any Anchorite can summon the Aperture anywhere.” Arkady lowers his palm over the candle flame. “And open it anywhere, too, from the inside. The Aperture’s why this War’s gone on for 160 years. For all intents and purposes the Anchorites are able to teleport themselves from place to place. It’s both the ultimate getaway car and a method of surprise attack.”
Holly’s voice cracks as she realizes something: “Miss Constantin?”
“Immaculée Constantin is Pfenninger’s deputy. We don’t know why the First Anchorite recruited her as the Second, but she was the governess of the girls’ wing of the Marais orphanage. No less a personage than Talleyrand referred to Madame Constantin as ‘a Sword-wielding Seraphim in a Woman’s Form.’ Eighteen decades pass and we find her in Gravesend, grooming Holly Sykes. She made a rare error in your case, however, by spooking you, so that one of my ex-students brought you to my attention. I inoculated you by draining off your psychosoteric voltage and rendering you unfit for Black Wine. Miss Constantin was annoyed, of course, and although she never forgot Holly Sykes or her promising brother Jacko, she moved on.”
“The arithmetic keeps them busy,” says Arkady. “The Anchorites keep their numbers to twelve, so each individual member must source a decantible guest once every three years. Their prey can’t be drugged, bagged, and dragged up to the Chapel. Anchorites must befriend their prey, like Constantin befriended you. If the prey isn’t conscious and calm during decanting, the Black Wine’s tainted. It’s a delicate vintage.”
The figures in the painting watch us. The stories they could tell.
“Am I to understand,” Holly gathers her strength, “that Miss Constantin and the Anchorites abducted Jacko and … drank his soul? Is this what you’re really saying?”
The clock’s tick is either loud or quiet, depending.
“The thing about Jacko is …” I close my eyes and subsay Wish me luck to Arkady, “… he was one of us.”
Maybe it’s thunder somewhere, or maybe a garbage truck.
“Jacko was my brother.” Holly speaks slowly. “He was seven.”
“His body was seven,” says Arkady. “But his body was the vehicle for the soul of Xi Lo, an Horologist. Xi Lo was much, much older.”
Holly’s shaking her head, wrestling with this outrage.
I ask, “Remember when Jacko had meningitis, when he was five?”
“Of course I do. He damn nearly died.”
The only way is on. “Ms. Sykes, Jacko did die that day.”
This is an affront, a trampling, and Holly’s at breaking point. “Er, sorry—but he bloody didn’t die! I was bloody there!”
There’s no way to make this easier. “Jack Martin Sykes’s soul left his body at two twenty-three A.M. on the sixteenth of October, 1981. By two twenty-four, the soul of Xi Lo, the oldest and best of Horologists, was in possession of your brother’s body. Even as your father was yelling for a medic, Jacko’s body was out of danger. But Jacko’s soul was crossing the Dusk.”
Ominous silence. “So …” Holly’s nostrils dilate, “… my little brother’s a zombie, you’re saying?”
“Jacko was Jacko’s body,” says Arkady, “with Jacko’s habits of mind, but with Xi Lo’s soul and memories.”
She shudders, lost. “Why say such a thing?”
“Good question,” says Arkady. “Why would we, if it wasn’t true?”
Holly stands up and her chair topples backwards. “It usually comes down to an attempt to get money.”
“Horology was founded in 1598,” Arkady says aloofly. “We’ve made a few investments down the years. Your nest eggs are safe.”
Behave, I suborder Arkady. “Consider Jacko’s oddities,” I ask Holly. “Why would a British boy listen to Chinese radio?”
“Because … Jacko found it soothing.”
“Mandarin was Xi Lo’s mother tongue,” I explain.
“English was Jacko’s mother tongue! My mum was his mum! The Captain Marlow was his home. His family’s us. We loved him. We still do.” Holly’s blinking back tears. “Even today.”
“And Xi Lo–in–Jack loved you too,” I say gently. “Very much. He even loved Newky, the smelliest dog in Kent. None of that love was a lie. But none of what we’re telling is a lie, either. Xi Lo’s soul was older than your pub. Older than England. Older than Christianity.”
Holly’s heard enough. She picks up the knocked-over chair. “My plane flies back to Dublin this afternoon, and I’ll be on it. As you spoke, there were … bits I believed, bits I can’t. A lot of it, I just don’t know. The dreamseeding stuff was incredible. But … it’s taken me so long to stop blaming myself for Jacko, and you’re ripping that scar tissue off.” She puts on her coat. “I lead a quiet life with books and cats in the west of Ireland. Little, local, normal stuff. The Holly Sykes who wrote The Radio People, she might’ve believed in your Atemporals, in your magic monks, but I’m not her anymore. If you are Marinus, good luck with … whatever.” Holly retrieves her handbag, puts the green key on the table, and goes to the door. “Goodbye. I’m off.”
Shall I suasion her to stay? subasks Arkady.
If her cooperation is coerced, it’s not cooperation.
“We understand,” I tell Holly. “Thanks for visiting.”
Arkady subreminds me, What about Esther?
Too much, too fast, too soon. Say something nice.
“Sorry I was rude,” says Arkady. “Growing pains.”
Holly says, “Tell Batman’s butler goodbye.”
“I will,” I answer, “and au revoir, Ms. Sykes.”
Holly has closed the door. By now the Anchorites’ll know she’s here, substates Arkady. Shall we have ōshima shadow her?
I’m unconvinced. Pfenninger won’t abort his meticulous plans on a premature strike.
If they suspect that Esther Little is walled up inside Holly’s head, Arkady’s fingers make a gun, they’ll strike all right, and hard.
I drink cooled tea, trying to see this morning from the Anchorites’ view. How could they know that Esther’s in Holly?
They can’t know for sure. Arkady cleans his glasses on the sleeve of his Nehru shirt. But they could guess, and off her to be safe.
“ ‘Off her’? Too many gangster films, Arkady.” My device trills. The screen reads PRIVATE CALLER and I intuit it’s bad news even before I hear Elijah D’Arnoq: “Thank God, Marinus. It’s me, D’Arnoq. Look, I just found out: Constantin dispatched a cell to abduct and scansion Holly Sykes. It won’t be consensual. Stop them.”
The words sink in. “When?”
“Right now,” answers D’Arnoq.
“Where?” I ask.