The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

  I was not, however, yet privy to the vital information that I truly required to bring Vincent down and stop the quantum mirror being manufactured, and I either had to endure many long years of questionable medical procedures while trying to find out, or I would die and an opportunity would be missed.

  This being so, I resolved to gamble, the most dangerous gamble of my lives.

  “I’m not taking the chemo.”

  1986. We were on the balcony of one of Vincent’s many New York apartments, Central Park to the south, the lights of Manhattan beyond, a sky flecked with grey-brown clouds. The air at street level in New York was getting difficult to breathe, as it had become in most big cities. Too many bright ideas had happened too fast–too many cars, too many air conditioners, too many freezers, too many mobile phones, too many TVs, too many microwaves–and not enough time to consider the consequences. Now New York belched brown sludge into the skies and green slime into the waters around the island, and so it was with the rest of the earth.

  The world is ending.

  We cannot stop it.

  “I’m not taking the chemo,” I repeated a little louder, as Vincent stirred lemon peel at the bottom of a glass.

  “Don’t be ridiculous Harry,” he blurted. “Of course you’ve got to do the chemo, of course!”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m not.”

  He sat down on the recliner next to mine, setting the two glasses–one for him, one for me–on the low metal table between us. He looked up at the sky and, taking his time, said, “Why?”

  “Chemotherapy is a prison sentence. It is six months of house arrest, of nausea without being able to vomit, of a heady heat without being able to find a deep enough cold, of pain with no remedy, of isolation and discomfort, and at the end of it I will still be here, and I will still be dying.”

  “You can’t know that!”

  “I can,” I replied firmly. “I do. I will.”

  “But Harry—”

  “I know it,” I repeated. “I give you my word–I know it.”

  Silence a while. He was waiting perhaps. I took a deep breath and got it out of the way. I had told so few people my secret–no one since the attack on the Cronus Club–the fear and nervousness I experienced were genuine and probably only helped.

  “What would you say if I told you that this is not the first time I have had this disease?”

  “I’d say what the hell do you mean, old thing?”

  “I’ve been through this once before,” I replied. “I had chemotherapy, radiotherapy, drugs–everything–but developed metastases in my brain.”

  “Jesus, Harry! What happened to you?”

  “It’s simple,” I replied. “I died.”

  Silence.

  The traffic grumbled below; the clouds scudded above. I sat and could almost hear Vincent’s brain considering where to go. I let him do his own thinking. It would be informative to see where he came down.

  “Harry,” he said at last, “do you know of a thing called the Cronus Club?”

  “No. Listen. What I’m trying to tell you—”

  “You’re telling me that you have lived this life before,” he said, voice deep and weary. “You were born an orphan and you lived and you died, and when you were born again, you were still you, precisely where you started. That is what you are saying, isn’t it?”

  My turn to be silent.

  My turn to think.

  I let it stretch and stretch and stretch between us. Then, “How? Tell me how. Please?”

  He sighed again and stretched, his legs creaking as he moved. He wasn’t so young now, was Vincent Rankis–this was the oldest I’d ever seen him. “Come with me, Harry,” he said. “There’s something I need to show you.”

  He stood up and headed into the apartment. I followed, our drinks left abandoned on the table. He padded through into his bedroom, opened the wardrobe and reached through a collection of coats and shirts. For a moment I thought he was getting a gun, for I had naturally searched this place while he was out and found two guns–one kept in a drawer by the bed, one at the back of the linen cupboard. He didn’t. Instead, a square metal box was pulled out, a padlock on the front. The box was new–at least new since the last time I’d searched the place–and at my expression of curiosity he smiled reassurance and took it through to the dining room. He had a long glass table, surrounded by eight uncomfortable glass chairs, and he gestured me to sit in one while he unlocked the box and pulled out its contents.

  My stomach curled up in my belly, breath caught on the edge of my lips. At the sound, his eyes flickered to me, curious, and I had to disguise my indiscretion with, “You haven’t said how you know.”

  He half-shook his head and put the contents of the box on the table.

  It was a crown of wire and electrodes. Leads trailed down from the back, and connectors criss-crossed its surface like hairs on Medusa’s head. The technology was advanced–more advanced than I had ever seen–but the purpose was easy enough to deduce. It was a cortical trigger, a mental bomb–a very advanced device for the Forgetting.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  He carefully laid it down in front of me so I could look. “Do you trust me?” he asked.

  “Yes, absolutely.”

  A Forgetting–would he really do this? Would he dare?

  “Harry,” he explained softly, “you asked me how I know about your… predicament. How I know about your past life, why I believe you when you say that you have died once before.”

  “Tell me.”

  “What if… what if,” he murmured, “you and I have met before? What if I knew, even when I first met you, that this was not your first life, that you are… special? What if I told you that we have been friends, not for ten, twenty or thirty years, but for centuries. What if I told you that I have been trying to protect you for a very, very long time. Would you believe me?”

  “I… don’t know. I wouldn’t know what to say.”

  “You trust me?” he repeated urgently.

  “I… yes. Yes, I do, but listen, all this…”

  “I need you to put this on.” His hand pressed gently against the crown of wires. “There is so much more to you, Harry, than you know, so much more. You think this is… your second? Maybe your second life? But it’s not. You’ve lived for hundreds of years. You have… so much experience, so much to offer. This will help you remember.”

  What a look of doe-eyed sincerity, what an expression of passionate concern.

  I looked from Vincent to the crown and back again.

  Clearly it was not to help me remember.

  Clearly he intended that I should forget.

  All that time, all those years–and worse, a more troubling question. In 1966, using the technologies of the time, Vincent had forced me to go through the Forgetting, and I had remembered. But this–this technology was at least fifty years ahead of that and I had no idea, no idea at all, whether my consciousness could survive this process intact.

  “You trust me, Harry?”

  “This is a lot to take in.”

  “If you need time to think…”

  “What you’re saying…”

  “I can explain everything, but this way you can remember it for yourself.”

  Pride.

  How dare he think I’m so stupid?

  Rage.

  How dare he do this to me again?

  Terror.

  Will I survive?

  Can I remember?

  Do I want to remember?

  The world is ending.

  Now it’s up to you.

  Vengeance.

  I am Harry August, born New Year’s Day 1919.

  I am sixty-eight years old.

  I am eight hundred and ninety-nine.

  I have directly killed seventy-nine men, of whom fifty-three died in war of one kind or another, and indirectly murdered through my actions at least four hundred and seventy-one people who I know of. I have witnessed four suicides, one hundred and twe
lve arrests, three executions, one Forgetting. I have seen the Berlin Wall rise and fall, rise and fall, seen the twin towers collapse in flames and dust, talked with men who scrambled in the mud of the Somme, listened to tales of the Crimean War, heard whispers of the future, seen the tanks roll into Tiananmen Square, walked the course of the Long March, tasted madness in Nuremberg, watched Kennedy die and seen the flash of nuclear fire bursting apart across the ocean.

  None of which now matters to me half as much as this.

  “I trust you,” I said. “Show me how this thing works.”

  Chapter 75

  He set it up in the kitchen. It seemed a very mundane place to erase a man’s mind. I sat on an uncomfortable metal chair as he pottered around me like a man trying to find a clean vacuum bag. I flinched as the first electrode was placed against the side of my skull, and he asked immediately, “Are you OK?”

  “Fine,” I muttered. “Fine.”

  “Would you like something to drink?”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “OK.”

  He eased the hair up from the back of my neck and pushed two more nodes into my skin just beneath the cerebellum. Clearly this was more advanced than the crude methods of Pietrok-112. The metal was cold as he pressed it into my temples, above my eyes, stopping every time I winced to check, are you all right, Harry, are you sure you want to do this?

  “I’m sure,” I replied. “It’s fine.”

  I couldn’t stop myself, couldn’t slow my own breathing; it grew faster and faster as the moment of truth approached. He pulled some duct tape out of a drawer and said, “I think it would be safer if we taped your hands down–are you OK with that?”

  Sure, why not.

  “You look very nervous.”

  I don’t like medical things.

  “It’ll be fine. This will be fine. You’ll be able to remember everything, very soon.”

  Wasn’t that nice.

  He taped my hands to the arms of the chair with thick layers of duct tape. I almost wished he’d spit in my eye, declare his loathing of me, at least then I would have an excuse to scream, to rage. He didn’t. He checked the positioning of the wires across my skull, across my face, then bent down so his head was entirely level with mine. “It’s for the best, Harry,” he explained. “I know that won’t matter to you, but really, this is how it has to be.”

  I couldn’t answer. Knew I should, and couldn’t, couldn’t find words between the breath, between the effort of breathing. He stepped round behind me to adjust the leads and I squeezed my eyes tight shut, shaking all over, my toes shaking in their socks, knees turned to jelly, oh God, oh God, oh—

  Darkness.

  Chapter 76

  You cannot miss a thing you do not remember.

  Perhaps Vincent was right. Perhaps he was being kind.

  Vincent’s new device, his new toy for the Forgetting, had several disadvantages. I believe he hadn’t had a chance to test it properly for, at its application, it killed me stone dead.

  My name is Harry August, born New Year’s Day 1919, Berwick-upon-Tweed station, and I remembered…

  … everything.

  Charity came to me when I was six years old, discreetly this time, quietly, slipping into my life sideways through the Hulnes, ready to debrief me, question me about my time with Vincent–no glamour, no shouting, no wealth, no Cronus Club. It took her six months to convince the Hulnes to let her “adopt” me, and as soon as I was out of the house I was whisked away to Leeds, where a new Mr and Mrs August were waiting to raise me in exchange for a heavy donation of cash and a sense of good deeds and charitable works. The paperwork was in place, the groundwork accomplished–Vincent knew where to find me now, if he wanted to look.

  Charity said, “You know, Harry, you really don’t have to do this. There are other ways.”

  Of course there are other ways. Let’s find Vincent again; let’s strap him down and hack off his feet, his hands, cut out his eyes, slice open his nose, carve our signatures in his skin; let’s make him swallow hot tar; let’s break every bone in his feet one at a time until…

  … until he dies, having told us nothing. Nothing at all. Vincent Rankis is not Victor Hoeness. He knows perfectly well what he is doing, and he will die defending it. So much for torture.

  “What if we make him forget?”

  Akinleye, a child, stood by the seashore, face furrowed with hundreds of years of concern–how quickly the centuries had caught up with her, how heavy they weighed. Was it a consequence of being reborn so close to the attack on the Cronus Club? Had she been forced by these events to take responsibility? Or maybe we were simply the sum of our memories, and this new Akinleye was the sum of hers.

  “I’m a mnemonic.” I had never spoken these words out loud. “I remember… everything. Simply… everything. Twice Vincent has tried the Forgetting on me, and twice he has failed. He is also a mnemonic. It will not work on him. Or worse–far worse. Like me he will feign having forgotten, and destroy us.”

  The Cronus Club in my fifteenth life was not the Club of my first eight hundred or so years. Its members were coming back, those who had survived Virginia’s purges. Those who had been forced to forget were now on their third lives, and the messages were slowly trickling back through the generations–the Club of the twentieth century is back, and we have dire warnings for all. Messages were received in carved stone from the 1800s, enquiring after us, asking what had happened to the Club to cause the twentieth century suddenly to go so quiet. The messages from the future were darker, passed down from child to pensioner, whispered back from the twenty-first century.

  In our last lives, the voices said, the world was not the world we knew. Technology had changed–time had changed–and many of us simply were not born. We haven’t heard from the twenty-second century at all. We have no idea what happened to them. Please leave your answers in stone.

  So the effect of our calamity rippled forward, spreading its wave through time. I dared not give an answer to the future Clubs, not even a time capsule sealed for five hundred years’ time. The risk of it being discovered by Vincent in this time, of him learning how close we were to pursuing and punishing him, was too great. I would not risk the safety of everything I had sought simply out of compassion for a century I had not seen.

  My contact with the Club was therefore strictly limited. In the early years it was with Akinleye alone–she alone did I trust with the secret of what I was doing. In later years, Charity too was admitted to the fold. Charity’s role was crucial, for she generated the paperwork relating to my fictional life that I needed, documents which confirmed the story I had told Vincent in my previous life: of being an orphan, of Mr and Mrs August in Leeds, everything which might be needed to prove to Vincent that I was who I claimed to be. Now, my memory wiped again, I had to live the life of an ordinary linear boy, become my cover story, and so I went to school every day in Leeds and did my best not to embarrass anyone or myself, performing with the aim of achieving an average B+ grade until the age of seventeen, when I was resolved to give myself some chance of going to university and studying something I hadn’t studied before. Law, perhaps. I could see myself becoming lost very easily in the dry but thick volumes of wisdom that subject contained.

  As it turned out, obtaining B+ came more naturally than I had expected. Questions designed for a fourteen-year-old brain baffled me in my old age. Asked to write an essay on the Spanish Armada, I presented six thousand words charting its causes, course and consequences. I had tried very hard to stop myself, losing nearly three thousand words from the overall bulk before submission, but the more I looked at the question the more I could not conceive what the teacher desired. A blow-by-blow account of events? It seemed the most obvious, and so I tried to give it but found myself utterly unable to avoid writing why Philip II chose to link up with the Duke of Parma or why the English fleet sent fireships into the Armada off Calais. The eventual grade for my essay was a grudging A–and a note in the margin
requesting that I stick to the matter at hand. I chose from that point on to disregard my teacher entirely, and occupied my brain in his class by inventing first a shorthand derived from Sanskrit, then a longhand derived from Korean designed to ensure the minimum motion of the pen between each letter and the most logical calligraphical unity between letters of certain types. When I was finally caught doing this, I was dismissed as the world’s most idle doodler, given three lashes on the hand with a ruler and made to sit at the back of the class.

  Two boys, a would-be alpha of the pack, supported by an omega too slow to realise that the top dog needed his minion’s adoration to assure himself of his superiority, attempted playground bullying after that incident. My name not rhyming with anything particularly obscene that their young minds could come up with, they settled instead for a little pushing, a little shoving, a little shouting, and when finally, bored with their discourse, I turned round, looked them in the eye and politely informed them that I would rip the ears off the next one who laid a finger on me, the omega burst out crying, and I once again received three smacks of the ruler to my left hand and also detention. To spite my teacher, my next week’s project was learning how to write ambidextrously, creating no end of confusion as to which of my hands was the one that could be most conveniently smashed about with a stick while leaving me best able to do my homework. My teacher finally realised that I was in fact able to write with either hand just as I was beginning to step up the quality of schoolwork in expectation of the slog through to university, when…

  “Are you Harry?”

  A child’s voice, young, interested, unbroken. I was sixteen; the boy looked about nine. He was wearing a grey cap, grey jacket, white shirt, navy-blue striped tie and white socks, which he’d pulled up almost to his pink kneecaps. He held a satchel over one shoulder, and a bag of hard sweets, stuck together on the paper, in his other hand. Vincent Rankis’s face still had a lot of growing out to do, and it was immediately apparent that the years between ten and eighteen were not necessarily going to be kind in this regard. The already-thin hair sticking down from beneath his cap foretold its scarcity in later life, but his eyes glistened with the old, familiar intelligence.