“May I, Marinus?” asks Ōshima. “Please?”
“As if my permission ever mattered to you. But yes. Hard.”
Ōshima fakes a sneeze and suckerkinetics D’Arnoq along the table, clean off the end. He comes to a halt only at the Umber Arch.
Xi Lo did the same to Constantin, I subremark, though he only managed to bowl her about halfway down the table.
“D’Arnoq’s more of a lightweight,” says Ōshima. “It’s an obvious play: long, smooth, table; annoying person. Who could resist?”
“I … guess this means he’s not one of us,” says Holly.
“You,” Elijah D’Arnoq picks himself up and is shouting from the far end of the Chapel, “you,” he points, “will smoulder and shrivel in the heat!” Nine men and a woman melt from the air around him.
“GUESTS, GUESTS, GUESTS!” Baptiste Pfenninger claps his hands and smiles. The First Anchorite is a tall man, utterly at ease in his well-toned, well-dressed body. He sports a fastidiously trimmed, silver-tinged beard. “How the old place loves guests, and so many!” I’d forgotten his bass, actorly voice. “One per quarter is the usual quota, so today’s a very special occasion. Our second very special occasion.” All the men are wearing dinner jackets of various cuts and fashions. Pfenninger’s looks Edwardian. “Marinus, Marinus, welcome. Our only repeat visitor in the Chapel of the Dusk’s history, though, of course, last time you’d left your body back on earth. Ōshima, you’re looking old, burned, tired, and in need of a resurrection. It won’t occur. Thank you for killing Brzycki, by the by; he was showing signs of vegetarianism. Who else? ‘Unalaq’—do I pronounce it correctly? It sounds awfully like a brand of superglue, however one says it. Arkady, Arkady, you’ve got taller since I last sawed your feet off. Remember the rats? Dictators really were dictators in the days of Salazar’s Lisbon. Seventy-two hours you took to die. I’ll see if I can’t beat it with Inez, eh?” Pfenninger clicks his tongue. “A pity L’Ohkna and Roho can’t be here, but Mr. D’Arnoq,” the First Anchorite turns to his double agent, “netted the fattest fish. Good boy. Oh! Last and least, Holly Sykes, mystic lady author turned Irish egg farmer. We’ve never met. I’m Baptiste Pfenninger, interlocutor of this miraculous”—he gestures at the walls and dome—“engine, and, oh, titles, titles, they drag behind one like Marley’s chains, Jacob’s not Bob’s. Two of our number are even more thrilled than I to see you here at last, Holly …”
Dressed in a black velvet gown and gratuitous webs of diamonds, Immaculée Constantin steps forwards. “My singular young lady is all grown-up … menopausal, cancerous, and fallen in with quite the wrong sort. So. Do I match my voice?”
Holly looks at this faceless girlhood figure, speechless.
Constantin’s smile fades, though it was never sincere. “Jacko could carry a dialogue. Only he wasn’t really Jacko by then, was he? Tell me, Holly, did you believe Marinus when she claimed your brother just happened to die of natural causes while Xi Lo was hovering nearby, mmm?”
Seconds pass. Holly’s voice is dry. “What are you saying?”
“Oh, my.” Constantin’s smile fades into pity. “You did believe them? Forget everything I said, I beg you. Gossip is the devil’s radio, and I shan’t be a broadcaster, but … try to put two and two together before you die. I’ll take care of Aoife, too. Just so, you know, she won’t miss you. In fact, why not go the whole hog and kill Sharon and Brendan and collect the full Sykes family set? As it were.”
Esther’s had about three minutes. The Sadaqat denouement should take five, if Pfenninger’s feeling voluble. I calculate our chances for when the psychoduel begins. The newest three Anchorites shouldn’t cause us too much trouble, but the Chapel is devoid of projectiles to kinetic and eleven against four is still eleven against four. We’ll need to buy Esther about seven minutes. Can we hold them off that long?
“You will regret threatening my family,” Holly’s saying. “I swear. I swear to God.”
“Oh, you swear, do you? To God, no less?” Immaculée Constantin looks concerned. “But God’s dead. Why don’t we check if I’ll regret my promises with our friends the Radio People, shall we?” She cups her diamonded ear and pretends to listen. “No, Holly, no. You’re misinformed. I’ll regret nothing; you, however, are going to writhe with remorse that you deserted your secret friend Miss Constantin when you were sweet, seven, and psychic. Think about it. Only one Sykes would have died, instead of five Sykeses plus a Brubeck. You’ll positively scream with regret! Well, Mr. Anyder? Was this brittle-boned widow a screamer in her pliable, pheromonal days?”
Hugo Lamb steps into view. Cleft-chinned, his body preserved at twenty-five years of age, and scornful-eyed. “She was the silent type. Hello, Holly. Funny how things turn out, isn’t it?”
Holly steps back. Being warned about a ghost and seeing him are not the same. “What did they do to you?”
Some of the Anchorites laugh. Hugo looks back at his long-ago lover. “They”—he looks about the Chapel—“cured me. They cured me of a terrible wasting disease called mortality. There’s a lot of it about. The young hold out for a time, but eventually even the hardiest patient gets reduced to a desiccated embryo, a Strudlebug … a veined, scrawny, dribbling … bone clock, whose face betrays how very, very little time they have left.”
“ ‘Betrays’?” Pfenninger steps up. “A segue, Marinus. Did you know we have a supergrass among your Inner Circle?”
I resist the temptation to say, “Yes, we’ve known for a year now.”
“Not Mr. D’Arnoq,” Pfenninger continues. “He only duped you for seven days. Someone who’s been making a monstrous bloody tit of you for a whole year.”
I’ve been dreading this scene. “Don’t, Pfenninger.”
“Yes, it hurts, but veritas vos liberabit—and remember, amusing me is your only means of squeezing out a few extra minutes …”
True. I think of incorporeal Esther, invoking a real psychoferno inside Ōshima’s head. Every second matters. “Amaze and dismay me.”
Pfenninger clicks his fingers at the Umber Arch, and in strolls Sadaqat. His demeanor has changed from humble warden to captain of firing squad. “Hello again, dear friends. Here was my choice: twenty more years of housework, laundry, weeding, growing old, catheters, prostate trouble, or eternal life, free training in the Shaded Way, and the deeds to 119A. Mm. Let me think. For about twenty seconds. Well, well, well, the Way of the Butler just wasn’t for me.”
Holly is shocked: “They trusted you! They were your friends!”
“If you’d known Horology for longer than five days, Ms. Sykes,” Sadaqat walks up to the far end of the long table and leans on it as if he owns it, “you would eventually wake up to the fact that Horology is a club for immortals, who prevent others from attaining their own privileges. They are aristocrats. They are very like a white country — so sorry to bring race into this, but the analogy is spot on — a rich, white, imperial, exploitative bastion, which torpedoes the refugee boats coming from the Land of the Huddled Brown Masses. What I have done is to choose survival. Any living being would do the same.”