The Bone Clocks

  KLARA’S TWENTIETH CHRISTMAS came, and her twelfth with the Koskovs. She received fur-lined boots from Dmitry, piano music from Vasilisa, and a sable cloak from the Chernenkos. My journal records that on January 6, 1823, Dmitry gave a sermon on Job and the hidden designs of Providence. The choir of the Church of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin gave only a mediocre performance due to sore throats and colds. Snow lay deep in the gutters, fog and smoke filled the alleyways, the sun was a memory, icicles hung from the eaves, steam snorted white from the horses’ frozen nostrils, and ice floes as big as boats floated on the thundercloudgray Neva River.

  After our midday meal, Vasilisa and I were in the parlor. I was writing a letter in Dutch about osmosis in giant trees to a scholar at Leiden University. My foster mother was marking the French compositions of some of her pupils. The fire gnawed logs. Galina, our housekeeper, was lighting the lamps and tutting about my eyesight when we heard a knock at our door. Jasper, our little dog of uncertain pedigree, went skating and yapping down the hall. Vasilisa and I looked at each other but neither of us was expecting a caller. Through the lace curtain we saw an unknown coach with a veiled window. Galina brought in a card, given to her by a footman at the door. Dubiously, my mother read it aloud: “Mr. Shiloh Davydov. ‘Shiloh’? It sounds foreign to me. Does it sound foreign to you, Klara?” Davydov’s address, however, was the respectable Mussorgky Prospect. “Might they be friends of Uncle Pyotr’s?”

  “Mrs. Davydov is in the coach, too, I’m told,” added Galina.

  With a sudden change of mind that I would later recognize as an Act of Suasion, Vasilisa’s doubts evaporated. “Well, invite them in, Galina! What must they think of us? The poor lady’ll be freezing!”

  “PARDON OUR UNANNOUNCED intrusion,” said a spry man with expansive whiskers, a plangent voice, and dark clothes of a foreign cut, “Mrs. and Miss Koskov. The fault is all mine. I had my letter of introduction written before church, but then our stable boy got kicked by a horse and we had to summon a doctor. With all this brouhaha afoot, I quite neglected to ensure that the letter I had written had in fact been brought to you. My name is Shiloh Davydov, and I am at your service.” He handed his hat to Galina with a smile. “Of Russian extraction from my father, but resident in Marseille, in so far as I am ‘resident’ anywhere. And may I,” even then, I noticed a Chinese cadence to his Russian, “may I present my wife, Mrs. Claudette Davydov, who, Miss Koskov, is better known to you”—he waggled his cane—“by her maiden and pen-name ‘C. Holokai.’ ”

  This was unexpected. I had corresponded with “C. Holokai,” author of a philosophical text on the Transmigration of the Soul, several times, never dreaming that he might be a she. Mrs. Davydov’s dark, inquisitive face hinted at Levantine or Persian extraction. She was dressed in dove-gray silk and wore a necklace of black and white pearls. “Mrs. Koskov,” she addressed Vasilisa, “thank you for your hospitality to two strangers on a winter’s afternoon.” She spoke Russian more slowly than her husband, but enunciated with such great care that her listeners paid close attention. “We should have waited until tomorrow before inviting you to our house, but the name of ‘K. Koskov’ came up only an hour ago at the house of Professor Obel Andropov and I took it as a—as a sign.”

  “The professor is a friend,” said my foster mother.

  “And a classical linguist of the first rank,” I added.

  “Indeed. Well, Professor Andropov told me that the ‘K’ stood for ‘Klara’; and then, on our way home, by chance I glanced out of our coach and saw your father’s church. A hobgoblin told me to see if you were at home, and I’m afraid that I”—Claudette Davydov asked her husband in Arabic how to say the word “succumbed” in Russian, and Shiloh Davydov repeated it for her—“I succumbed.”

  “My, my,” said Vasilisa, blinking at the exotic strangers whom she’d apparently invited into her house. “My. You’re both welcome, I’m sure. My husband will be home presently. Make yourselves as comfortable as you can, I beg you. This is not a palace but …”

  “No palace I ever saw was half so friendly.” Shiloh Davydov looked around our parlor. “My wife’s been excited about meeting ‘K. Koskov’ since the day I resolved to visit Petersburg.”

  “Indeed I have.” Claudette Davydov handed Galina her muff of white fur with murmured thanks. “And to judge from Miss Koskov’s surprise, we both wrote to the other in the mistaken belief that the other was a man—do I surmise correctly, Miss Koskov?”

  “I cannot deny it, Mrs. Davydov,” I said, as we all sat down.

  “Is it not too much like an absurd farce for the stage?”

  “A wrongheaded world,” sighed Shiloh Davydov, “where women needs must deny their gender for fear that their ideas will be dismissed.”

  We considered the truth of this. “Klara dear,” said Vasilisa, remembering her duty as hostess, “would you feed up the fire while Galina brings refreshments for our guests?”

  “THE SEA IS my business, sir,” replied Shiloh Davydov. Dmitry found the Davydovs’ unexpected company to his liking, and for the men the tea and cakes were superseded by brandy and the box of cigars Shiloh had presented to my foster father. “Shipping, freight, shipyards, shipbuilding, maritime insurance …” He waved a hand vaguely. “I’ve journeyed to Petersburg at the behest of the Russian Admiralty, so naturally I must be discreet about details. We shall be employed here for a year at least, however, and I’ve been granted the use of a government house on Mussorgsky Prospect. Mrs. Koskov, how difficult will it be to engage domestic staff who are both capable and honest? In Marseille, I’m sorry to say, the combination is as rare as hen’s teeth.”

  “The Chernenkos will help,” said Vasilisa. “For Dmitry’s uncle, Pyotr Ivanovich, and his wife, finding a few hen’s teeth is a small matter. Is it not, Dmitry?”

  “They’ll come wrapped in a Golden Fleece, knowing Pyotr.” Dmitry puffed appreciatively on his cigar. “How do you intend to wile away your months in our frozen northern wastes, Mrs. Davydov?”

  “Like my husband, I have the soul of an explorer,” said Claudette Davydov, as if that were a full answer. The fire spat sparks. “First, though, I intend to finish a commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I had even entertained hopes that ‘K. Koskov’ would pay me the honor of casting her eye over my scribblings, if …”

  I said that the honor would be mine, and that we clandestine female scholars were duty-bound to band together. Then I asked if “C. Holokai” had received my last letter, sent the previous August to the Russian legate in Marseille.

  “Indeed I did,” said Claudette Davydov. “My husband, whose love of philosophy is, as you see, as deep as my own, was as fascinated as I was to read about your notion of the Dusk.”

  Now Vasilisa was curious. “What dusk would that be, dear?”

  I disliked lying even by omission to my foster parents, but Atemporality in a Godless, godless universe was not a profitable topic of discussion in our pious household. As I fabricated a prosaic explanation, my glance fell on Shiloh Davydov. His eyes had half closed and a spot glowed in what I knew from my Eastern resurrections was a chakra-eye. I looked at Claudette Davydov. The same spot glowed. Something was happening. I looked at my foster parents and saw that Vasilisa and Dmitry Koskov were as still as living waxworks. Vasilisa still wore her look of concentration, but her mind appeared to have shut down. Or have been shut down. Dmitry’s cigar smoked in his fingers, but his body was motionless.

  After twelve hundred years I had come to think of myself as immune to shock, but I was wrong. Time had not stopped. The fire still burned. I could still hear Galina chopping vegetables out in the kitchen. By instinct, I searched for a pulse in Vasilisa’s wrist and found it, strong and steady. Her breathing was slow and shallow but steady. The same was true for Dmitry. I said their names. They didn’t hear me. They weren’t here. There could be only one cause or, more likely, a pair of causes.

  The Davydovs, meanwhile, had returned to normal and were awaiting my res
ponse. Standing, feeling out of my depth but furious, I grabbed the poker and told the Davydovs, or whatever the Davydovs were, in a manner not at all like a twenty-year-old Russian priest’s daughter, “If you’ve harmed my parents, I swear—”

  “Why would we harm these sincere people?” Shiloh Davydov was surprised. “We’ve performed an Act of Hiatus on them. That’s all.”

  Claudette Davydov spoke next: “We were hoping for a private audience with you, Klara. We can unhiatus your foster parents like that”—she clicked her fingers—“and they won’t know they were gone.”

  Still viewing the Davydovs as threats, I asked whether a “hiatus” was a phenomenon akin to mesmerism.

  “Franz Mesmer is a footling braggart,” replied Claudette Davydov. “We are psychosoterics. Psychosoterics of the Deep Stream.”

  Seeing that these words only baffled me, Shiloh Davydov asked, “Have you not witnessed anything like this before, Miss Koskov?”

  “No,” I replied. The Davydovs looked at each other, surprised. Shiloh Davydov removed the cigar from Dmitry’s fingers before it scorched them, and rested it in the ashtray. “Won’t you put that poker down? It won’t help your understanding.”

  Feeling foolish, I replaced the poker. I heard horses’ hoofs, the jink of bridles, and the cries of a coalman on Primorsky Prospect. Inside our parlor my metalife was entering a new epoch. I asked my guests, “Who are you? Truly?”

  Shiloh Davydov said, “My name is Xi Lo. ‘Shiloh’ is as close as I can get in Europe. My colleague here, who is obliged to be my wife in public, is Holokai. These are the true names we carry with us from our first lives. Our souls’ names, if you will. My first question for you, Miss Klara Koskov, is this: What is your true name?”

  In a most unladylike way, I drank a good half of Dmitry’s brandy. So long ago had I buried the dream that I’d one day meet others like me, other Atemporals, that now it was happening, I was woefully, woefully unprepared. “Marinus,” I said, though it came out as a husky squeak, thanks to the brandy. “I am Marinus.”

  “Well met, Marinus,” said Claudette Holokai Davydov.

  “I know that name,” frowned Xi Lo–in–Shiloh. “How?”

  “You would not have slipped my mind,” I assured him.

  “Marinus.” Xi Lo stroked his sideburns. “Marinus of Tyre, the cartographer? Any connection? No. Emperor Philip the Arab had a father, Julius Marinus. No. This is an itch I cannot scratch. We glean from your letter that you’re a Returnee, not a Sojourner?”

  I confessed that I didn’t understand his question.

  The pair looked unsettled by my ignorance. Claudette Holokai said, “Returnees die, go to the Dusk, are resurrected forty-nine days later. Sojourners, like Xi Lo here, just move on to a new body when the old one’s worn out.”

  “Then, yes.” I sat back down. “I suppose I am a Returnee.”

  “Marinus.” Xi Lo–in–Shiloh watched me. “Are we the first Atemporals you ever met?”

  The lump in my throat was a pebble. I nodded.

  Claudette-Holokai stole a drag of her companion’s cigar. “Then you’re handling yourself admirably. When Xi Lo broke my isolation, the shock drove away my wits for hours. Some may say they never returned. Well. We bear glad tidings. Or not. There are more of us.”

  I poured myself more brandy from Dmitry’s decanter. It helped to dissolve the pebble. “How many of you—of us—are there?”

  “Not a large host,” Xi Lo answered. “Seven of us are affiliated in a Horological Society housed in a property in Greenwich, near London. Nine others rejected our overtures, preferring isolation. The door to them stays open if they ever wish for company. We encountered eleven—or twelve, if we include the Swabian—‘self-elected’ Atemporals down the centuries. To cure these Carnivores of their predatory habits is a principal function of us Horologists, and this is exactly what we did.”

  Later I would learn what this puzzling terminology entailed.

  “If you’ll pardon the indelicate question, Marinus,” Claudette-Holokai’s fingers traced her string of pearls, “when were you born?”

  “640 A.D.,” I answered, a little drunk on the novelty of sharing the truth about myself. “I was Sammarinese in my first life. I was the son of a falconer.”

  Holokai gripped her armchair as if hurtling forward at an incredible speed. “You’re more than twice my age, Marinus! I don’t have an exact birth year, or place. Probably Tahiti, possibly the Marquesas, I’d know if I went back, but I don’t care to. It was a horrible death. My second self was a Muhammadan slave boy in the house of a Jewish silversmith, in Portugal. King João died while I was there, tethering my stay to the fixed pole of 1433. Xi Lo, however …”

  Clouds of aromatic cigar smoke hung at various levels.

  “I was first born at the end of the Zhou Dynasty,” said the man I’d been calling Mr. Davydov, “on a boat in the Yellow River delta. My father was a mercenary. The date would have been around 300 A.D. Fifty lifetimes ago, now, or more. I notice you appear to understand this language without difficulty, Miss Koskov, yes?”

  Only as I nodded did I realize he was speaking in Chinese.

  “I’ve had four Chinese lives.” I pressed my rusted Mandarin back into service. “My last was in the middle years of the Ming, the 1500s. I was a woman in Kunming then. An herbalist.”

  “Your Chinese sounds more modern than that,” said Xi Lo.

  “In my last life I lived on the Dutch Factory in Nagasaki, and practiced with some Chinese merchants.”

  Xi Lo nodded at an accelerating pace, before declaring in Russian, “God’s blood! Marinus—the doctor, on Dejima. Big man, red face, white hair, Dutch, an irascible know-it-all. You were there when HMS Phoebus blasted the place to matchwood.”

  I experienced a feeling akin to vertigo. “You were there?”

  “I watched it happen. From the magistrate’s pavilion.”

  “But—who were you? Or who were you ‘in’?”

  “I had several hosts, though no Dutchmen, or I might have known you for an Atemporal, and saved Klara Koskov a world of bother. You Dutch were marooned by the fall of Batavia, you’ll recall, so my route in and out of Japan was via the Chinese trading junks. Magistrate Shiroyama was my host for some weeks.”

  “I visited the magistrate several times. There was a big, buried scandal around his death. But what took you to Nagasaki?”

  “A winding tale,” said Xi Lo, “involving a colleague, Ōshima, who was Japanese in his first life, and a nefarious abbot named Enomoto, who unearthed a pre-Shinto psychodecanter up in Kirishima.”

  “Enomoto visited Dejima. His presence made my skin creep.”

  “The wisdom of skin is underappreciated. I used an Act of Suasion to persuade Shiroyama to end Enomoto’s reign. Poison. Regrettably, it cost the magistrate his life, but such was the arithmetic of sacrifice. My turn will come, one day.”

  Jasper the dog took advantage of Vasilisa’s immobility to jump onto her lap, a liberty that my foster mother never granted.

  I asked, “What’s ‘suasion’? Is it like a ‘hiatus’?”

  “Both are Acts of Psychosoterica,” said Holokai-in-Claudette. “Where an Act of Hiatus freezes, an Act of Suasion forces. I presume your only present means of improving the lots of your lowerborn lives,” she indicated the Koskovs’ warm but humble parlor, “is by acquiring patrons, patronesses, and such?”

  “Yes. And the accrued knowledge of my lifetimes. I gravitate towards medicine. For my female selves, it’s one of the few ways up.”

  Galina was still chopping vegetables in the kitchen.

  “Let us teach you shortcuts, Marinus.” Xi Lo leaned forward, his fingers drumming his cane. “Let us show you new worlds.”

  • • •

  “SOMEONE’S MILES AWAY.” Unalaq leans on the door frame, holding a mug emblazoned with the logo of Metallica, the death-defying heavy-metal group. “The mug? A gift from Inez’s kid brother. Two updates: L’Ohkna’s paid for seven days o
n Holly’s hotel room; and Holly was beginning to stir, so I hiatused her until you’re ready.”

  “Seven days.” I put the felt cover over the piano keys. “I wonder where we’ll be in seven days. To work, then, before Holly’s snatched from under my nose again.”

  “Ōshima said you’d be flagellating yourself.”

  “He’s not up and about already, is he? He didn’t go to bed last night, and he spent the morning being an action hero.”

  “Sixty minutes’ shut-eye and he’s up and off like a cocaine bunny. He’s eating Nutella with a spoon, straight from the jar. I can’t watch.”

  “Where’s Inez? She shouldn’t leave the apartment.”

  “She’s helping Toby, the bookshop owner. Our shield covers the shop, but I’ve warned her not to go further afield. She won’t.”

  “What must she think of all this insanity and danger?”

  “Inez grew up in Oakland, California. That gave her a grounding in the basics. C’mon. Let’s go Esther-hunting.” So I follow her downstairs to the spare room, where Holly is lying hiatused on a sofa bed. Waking her up seems cruel. Ōshima appears from the library. “Sweet tinkling, Marinus.” He mimes piano fingers.

  “I’ll pass my hat around later.” I sit down next to Holly and take her hand, pressing my middle finger against the chakra on her palm.

  I ask my colleagues, “Is everyone ready?”

  HOLLY JERKS UPRIGHT, as if her torso is spring-loaded, and struggles to make sense of a present perfect of homicidal policemen, of my Act of Hiatus, of Ōshima, Unalaq, and me, and of this strange room. She notices she’s digging her nails into my wrist. “Sorry.”

  “It’s perfectly all right, Ms. Sykes. How’s your head?”

  “Scrambled eggs. What part of it was real?”

  “All of it, I’m afraid. Our enemy took you. I’m sorry.”

  Holly doesn’t know what to make of this. “Where am I?”