The Bone Clocks

So, yes, it happened, but ordinary life carried on at the speed of time, and the following day doesn’t care about all your paranormal adventures in the days before. To the cabdriver, I was just another fare to LaGuardia Airport who’ll leave her glasses on the backseat if he doesn’t check. To the Aer Lingus air steward, I was just another middle-aged lady in economy whose earphones weren’t working. To my hens, I’m a two-legged giant who throws them corn and keeps stealing their eggs. During my “lost weekend” in Manhattan I may have seen a facet of existence that only a few hundred in history have glimpsed, but so what? I could hardly tell anyone. Even Aoife or Sharon would’ve gone, “I believe you believe it, but I think you may need professional help …”

There has been no sequel. Marinus, if she got out of that domed room, has never reappeared and it isn’t going to happen now. I streetviewed 119A a few times and found the tall brownstone townhouse with its varied windows, so someone’s still looking after it—New York real estate is still New York real estate, even as America disintegrates—but I’ve never been back, or tried to find out who’s living there. Once I deviced the Three Lives Bookstore, but when a bookseller answered, I chickened out and hung up before asking if Inez still lived upstairs. One of the last books Sharon sent me before post from Australia stopped getting through was about the twelve Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon, and I sort of felt my time in the Dusk was a bit like that. And now that I was back on earth, I could either go slowly crazy by trying to get back to that other realm, to psychosoterica and 119A and Horology, or not, and just say, “It happened, but it’s over,” and get on with the ordinary stuff of family and life. At first, I wasn’t sure if I could, I dunno, write up the minutes for the Kilcrannog Tidy Towns Committee, knowing that, as we sat there discussing grants for the new playground, souls were migrating across an expanse of Dusk into a blankness called the Last Sea—but I found I could. A few weeks before my sixteenth birthday, I met a woman twice my age in an abortion clinic in the shadow of Wembley Stadium. She was posh and composed. I was a scared, weepy mess. As she lit a new cigarette from the dying ember of the last one, she told me this: “Sweetheart, you’ll be astounded by what you can live with.”

Life has taught me that she was right.

… Zimbra’s barking in my dreams. I wake up in my chair next to the stove, and Zimbra’s still barking, on the side porch. Fuddled, I get up, dropping the half-darned sock, and walk over to the porch: “Zimbra!” But Zimbra can’t hear me; Zimbra’s not even Zimbra, he’s a primeval canine scenting an ancient enemy. Is anyone out there? God, I wish the old security floodlight was still working. Zimbra’s barking stops for one second—long enough for me to hear the terror of hens. Oh, no, not a fox. I grab the torch, open the door only a crack but our dog barges through and scrabbles at what’s probably the fox’s hole under the wire. Dirt flies over me and the chickens are going berserk around the wire walls of their coop. I shine the torch in and can’t see the fox but Zimbra’s in no doubt. One dead hen; two; three; one feebly flapping; and there, two disks on the head of a reddish blur on top of the hen coop. Zimbra—fifteen kilos’ worth of German shepherd crossed with black Labrador with bits of the devil knows what else—squeezes into the cage and launches himself at the henhouse, which topples over while the hens squawk and flap around the wire-mesh enclosure. Quick as a whip, the fox leaps back to the hole and its head’s actually through before Zimbra’s sunk his fangs into its neck. The fox looks at me for a split second before it’s yanked back, shaken, flung, and pounced on. Then its throat’s ripped out and it’s all over. The hens keep panicking until one notices the battle’s over, then they all fall quiet. Zimbra stands over his prey, his maw bloodred. Slowly he returns to himself and I return to myself. The porch door opens and Rafiq’s standing there in his dressing gown. “What happened, Holly? I heard Zim going mental.”

“A fox got into the chickens, love.”

“Oh, bloody hell, no!”

“Language, Rafiq.”

“Sorry. But how many did it get?”

“Only two or three. Zim killed it.”

“Can I see it?”

“No. It’s a dead fox.”

“Can we eat the dead chickens, at least?”

“Too risky. Specially now rabies is back.”

Rafiq’s eyes go even wider: “ Youweren’t bitten, or …”

Bless him. “Back to bed, mister. Really, I’m fine.”