The interview begins. “May I ask how you know about Anyder?”
“We’ve investigated you. We need to know about everything.”
“Do you work for the security services?”
Pfenninger shakes his head. “Only rarely do our circles overlap.”
“So you have no political agenda?”
“As long as we are left alone, none.”
D’Arnoq slows and drops a gear to take a perilous bend.
Time to be direct: “Who are you, Mr. Pfenninger?”
“We are the Anchorites of the Dusk Chapel of the Blind Cathar of the Thomasite Monastery of Sidelhorn Pass. It’s quite a mouthful, you’ll agree, so we refer to ourselves as the Anchorites.”
“I’d agree it sounds freemasonic. Are you?”
His eyes show a gleam of amusement. “No.”
“Then, Mr. Pfenninger, why does your group exist?”
“To ensure the indefinite survival of the group by inducting its members into the Psychosoterica of the Shaded Way.”
“And you’re the … the founder of this … group?”
Pfenninger looks ahead. Power lines dip and rise from pole to pole. “I am the First Anchorite, yes. Mr. D’Arnoq is now the Fifth Anchorite. Ms. Constantin, whom you met, is the Second.”
Cautiously, D’Arnoq overtakes a salt-spitting truck.
“ ‘Psychosoterica,’ ” I say. “I don’t know the word.”
Pfenninger quotes: “A slumber did my spirit seal, I had no human fears.” He looks like he’s just delivered a subtle punch line, and I realize he just spoke without speaking. His lips were pressed together. Which is not possible. So I must be mistaken. “She seemed a thing that could not feel the touch of earthly years.” Again. His voice sounded in my head, a lush and crisp sound, as if through top-of-the-range earphones. His face defies me to suggest it’s a trick. “No motion has she now, no force; she neither hears nor sees.” No muffled voice, no wobbling throat, no tell-tale gap at the corner of his mouth. A recording? Experimentally, I put my hands over my ears but Pfenninger’s voice is just as clear: “Rolled round in Earth’s diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees.”
I’m gaping. I close my mouth. I ask, “How?”
“There is a word,” Pfenninger says aloud. “Utter it.”
So I manage to mumble, “Telepathy.”
Pfenninger addresses our driver: “Did you hear, Mr. D’Arnoq?”
Elijah D’Arnoq’s peering at us in the rearview mirror. “ Yes, Mr. Pfenninger, I heard.”
“Mr. D’Arnoq accused me of ventriloquism, when I inducted him. As if I were a performer on the music-hall circuit.”
D’Arnoq protests: “ Ididn’t have Mr. Anyder’s education, and if the word ‘telepathy’ was coined back then, it hadn’t reached the Chatham Islands. And I was fried by shell shock. It was 1922.”
“We forgave you decades ago, Mr. D’Arnoq, I and my little wooden puppet with the movable jaw.” Pfenninger glances my way, humor in his eyes, but their banter just makes everything weirder. 1922? Why did D’Arnoq say “1922”? Or did he mean to say 1982? But that doesn’t matter: Telepathy’s real. Telepathy exists. Unless I hallucinated the last sixty seconds. We pass a garage where a mechanic shovels snow. We pass a field where a pale fox stands on a stump, sniffing the air.
“So,” my mouth’s dry, “psychosoterica is telepathy?”
“Telepathy is one of its lesser disciplines,” replies Pfenninger.
“Its lesserdisciplines? What else can psychosoterica do?”
A cloud shifts and the fast river’s strafed with light.
Pfenninger asks, “What is today’s date, Mr. Anyder?”
“Uh …” I have to grope for the answer. “January the second.”
“Correct. January the second. Remember.” Mr. Pfenninger looks at me; his pupils shrink and I feel a pinprick in my forehead. I—
· · ·
—BLINK, AND THE Land Cruiser is gone, and I find myself on a wide, long rocky shelf on a steep mountainside in high-altitude sunshine. The only reason I don’t fall over is that I’m already sitting on a cold stone block. I huff a few times in panicky shock; my huffs hang there, like vague, blank speech bubbles. How did I get here? Where is here? Around me are the roofless ruins of what might once have been a chapel. Perhaps a monastery—there are more walls farther away. Knee-deep snow covers the ground; the shelf ends at a low wall, a few feet ahead. Behind the ruins a sheer rock face rears up. I’m in my ski jacket, and my face and ears are throbbing and warm, as if I’ve just undergone hard exertion. All these details are nothing alongside this central, gigantic fact: Just now I was in the back of a car with Mr. Pfenninger. D’Arnoq was driving. And now … now …
“Welcome back,” says Elijah D’Arnoq, to my right.
I gasp, “Christ!”and jump up, slip over, jump up, and crouch in fight-or-flight mode.
“Cool it, Lamb! It’s freaky, I know”—he’s seated and unscrewing a Thermos flask—“but you’re safe.” His silver parka gleams in the light. “As long as you don’t run over the edge, like a headless chicken.”
“D’Arnoq, where … What happened and where are we?”
“Where it all began,” says Pfenninger, and I whirl the other way, fending off a second heart attack. He’s wearing a Russian fur hat and snow boots. “The Thomasite Monastery of the Sidelhorn Pass. What’s left of it.” He kicks through the snow to the low wall and gazes out. “You’d believe in the divine if you lived out your life up here …”
They drugged me and lugged me here. But why?
And how? I drank nothing and ate nothing in the Toyota.
Hypnotism? Pfenninger was staring at me as I went under.
No. Hypnotism’s a cheap twist in crap films. Too stupid.
Then I remember Miss Constantin and King’s College Chapel. What if she caused my zone-out—like Pfenninger just did?
“We hiatused you, Mr. Anyder,” says Pfenninger, “to search you for stowaways. It’s intrusive, but we can’t be too careful.”
If that makes sense to him or to D’Arnoq, it makes none to me. “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”
“I’d be worried if you did, at this stage.”
I touch my head for signs of damage. “How long was I under?”
Pfenninger produces a copy of Die Zeitand hands it to me. On the front page Helmut Kohl is shaking hands with the Sheikh of Saudi Arabia. So what? Don’t tell me the German chancellor is mixed up in this. “The date, Mr. Anyder. Examine the date.”
There, under the masthead: 4. Januar 1992.
Which cannot be right: today is 2 January 1992.
Pfenninger told me to remember it, in the car. Just now.
Just now. Yet still Die Zeitinsists today is 4 January 1992.
I feel like I’m falling. Unconscious for two days? No, it’s more likely the newspaper’s a fake. I rustle through its pages, desperate to find evidence that things aren’t what they appear to be.
“It couldbe a fake,” Pfenninger concedes, “but why construct a falsehood that could be readily demolished?”
I’m head-smashed and, I realize, ravenously hungry. I check my stubble. I shaved this morning, at Holly’s. It’s grown. I stagger back, afraid of Elijah D’Arnoq and this Mr. Pfenninger, these … paranormal … Whateverthefuck they are, I have to get away to—to …
… to where? Our tracks in the snow disappear around a bend. Maybe there’s a car park with a visitor’s center and telephones just out of sight, or maybe it’s thirty kilometers of glacier and crevasses. Back the other way, the narrow mountain shelf on which we stand narrows to a stubborn clump of firs, then it’s near-vertical ice and rock. Pfenninger is studying me, while D’Arnoq is pouring a lumpy liquid into the Thermos cup. I want to scream, “A picnic?”I squeeze the sides of my skull. Get a grip and calm down. It’s late in the afternoon. Clouds are smeared across the sky, beginning to turn metallic. My watch—I left it in Holly’s bathroom. I walk to the low wall, a few paces from Pfenninger, and the ground swoops down fifty meters to a road. There’s an ugly modern bridge over a deep crevasse, and a road sign that I can’t read at this range. The road climbs to the bridge from half a kilometer away, twisting up from slopes dunked in shadow. Beyond the bridge, the road disappears behind a shoulder of the mountain we stand on, near a glassy waterfall that textures the profound silence. Us, the sign, the bridge, and the road surface: there are no other signs of the twentieth century. I ask, “Why did you bring me here?”