The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (23 page)

A hospital bed.

Awakening.

A figure by my side.

Vincent, folded up beneath the curves of his arm, sleeping, his head resting against the mattress where I lay.

I woke from my own Forgetting, from my own encounter with mental death, and I was…

… still myself.

Still me.

Still Harry August and I remembered…

… everything.

I lay still a while, not daring to move in case I woke Vincent with my stirring, and my mind raced. I was still a prisoner in Pietrok-112. I was still a threat to Vincent. I was still dying, my body consumed by the poison I had ingested, but my mind–my mind was my own. Like I had with Akinleye, Vincent would want to test this hypothesis when I woke, would look for any sign that there was still a Harry left in my mind. I would not give it.

Some part of me must have twitched because Vincent jerked awake at my side. Seeing my eyes open, at once he leaned forward
and examined me, as a doctor might examine a patient, looking for responses behind my eyes. I considered speaking, considered reverting back to my native tongue, to my native voice, as Akinleye had, but it seemed an over-complication. Instead I opened my mouth and made an empty baying animal sound of distress, which hardly took any mimickry to achieve, so ravaged was my body by poison and pain.

“Harry?” Vincent was holding my hand, as I had held Akinleye’s, and his face was a picture of concern. “Harry, can you hear me?” He spoke Russian, and I just wailed the louder. Seeing this, he switched to English. “Are you all right? Are you OK?”

He was playing the concerned friend. The cheek of it almost roused me to reply, but there was so little time left, so little life, best not to squander it now. Besides, in the time I had been unconscious more tissue had died inside my body, and now all I could do was lean over the side of the bed and heave up a stomach full of acid and blood. I like to think some of it got on Vincent’s shoes before he managed to jump back. My head was pounding, and someone had lined the inside of my eyes with Velcro, which crackled around the inside of my skull whenever I tried to look. My left eye kept going off in its own direction, creating a bewildering picture of a room with a gap down the middle as my brain tried and failed to join up the confusing sense data coming into its core. Poor old Vincent–the timing couldn’t have been worse for him–not enough time to see if I was faking before I would inevitably die. He chose a bolder test. Leaping back from my bed he waved at two guards, barking in Russian, “Take him!”

They took me, one arm each, and dragged me out of my bed. They hauled me down the corridor–I was in no fit state to be anything other than hauled–and dropped me on my knees in a shower room where a lifetime ago I’d had an encounter with a very friendly lab assistant called Anna. Vincent stood in the door and barked in English, “Kill him!”

What was I meant to do? There was a risk that, by demonstrating comprehension of the order, I would show that my grasp
of language had survived intact. Then again, if I took my own impending death too calmly, that might suggest that I had a residual awareness, an understanding that death was a relief in this scenario. Thankfully, the wretched state of my own body did most of the work for me as, finding itself dragged down a hall and deposited so unceremoniously, it duly went into convulsions which, I suspected, were the penultimate step in departure anyway, and I didn’t even notice when the bullet went into my brain.

My thirteenth life began…

… exactly as it always had.

Berwick-upon-Tweed, the ladies’ washroom. After all the drama I’d been half wondering if I’d wake up the son of a king. If there was any form of divine justice in this universe, it was clearly taking its time in getting round to the affairs of the kalachakra.

The usual process. Passed over to Patrick and Harriet, raised as their own. I began to reclaim memory by the age of three and was, I am informed, a remarkably quiet child of very little note. Aged four I was on the verge of full faculties, and by my sixth birthday I was ready to go out into the world and declare to all members of the Cronus Club the simple truth of Vincent’s plans and the things he would do to achieve them.

I wrote to London, to Charity Hazelmere and the Cronus Club, telling them everything. Vincent Rankis, the quantum mirror, Russia–everything. I felt that there was no time to bother with the whole rigmarole of removing me kindly from my family, so informed Charity that I would be stealing the necessary money and writing myself a suitably adult-sounding letter, and making my own way to Newcastle to explain everything to her in person. All
she needed to do was wait for my telegram and meet me at the station. This haste and urgency, I later realised, probably saved my life.

I received no reply, nor expected one. Charity was always reliable in matters of infant kalachakra. I stole some shillings from Rory Hulne’s desk, wrote myself a very fluent and eloquent letter informing any readers that the bearer of this note was heading to school in London and should be assisted by any willing adults in his path, and, armed with my best–and indeed, only–pair of boots and a sack of stolen fruit, I set off for Newcastle. Getting transport from the local village was impossible–far too easy to confirm with my parents whether they had given me permission for my adventure–but by walking through the night I reached, of all places, Hoxley, where once I had fled from Franklin Phearson and his interest in the future, hundreds of years ago. By presenting my letter and earnestly informing the postmistress that I was an orphan bound for London, I was given not only a ride on the back of her rattling truck, along with two yews and a lazy Labrador, but also some hot bread and lard to see me through.

At Newcastle I went straight to the telegram office. Getting my telegram sent was difficult, mostly because the desk was too high for me to reach, but a kindly lawyer waiting in the queue lifted me up to perch on the counter’s edge as I explained firmly in my piping voice what my mission was, presented my letter and announced I was to wait for my aunt. After some hesitation, my message was sent, and the stationmaster asked me if I had a place to stay for the night. When I said no, he tutted and said it wasn’t right for a boy so young to travel alone, and he was thinking of calling the police, but his wife commanded him to leave me alone and, at her behest, I was given a blanket and a pot of soup and told I could stay as long as I wanted in the office behind the ticket counter, and she’d keep an eye out for my aunty. I thanked her, not least because having to deal with adults’ endless interest in a lone six-year-old boy travelling to London would have been tedious.

I waited.

The longest Charity had ever taken between receiving my telegram and reaching Newcastle was eleven hours, and on that occasion heavy snow had disrupted her journey. After eight hours the stationmaster’s wife asked me if I had anywhere else to go, or if I knew anyone, and the stationmaster tutted again and said he was definitely going to call the police, because it wasn’t right at all, not at all this sort of funny business. I asked to go to the toilet and crawled out the back window while they stood outside.

I stood guard the next day on the hill overlooking the railway bridge within easy running distance of the station. With every train that crawled in from the south, I slunk down to the platform’s edge to look for Charity.

Charity did not come.

I admit I was at a loss. In all my time with the Cronus Club Charity had been a trusty staple of my youth, or if she had not, someone else had come in her stead. And now… I was completely bewildered. A reliable support had been pulled out from beneath me, a crutch on which I hobbled through the hardest part of my life. Should I write again?

Caution instantly advised against it. There were too many questions unanswered, too many dangers still lurking. Vincent had wanted to know my point of origin, but as I was his elder the implication was clear–he must have a colleague, someone older than either him or me, who was capable of killing kalachakra in the womb. The realisation that this must be so suddenly made the preservation of my greatest and only secret essential–under no circumstances must Vincent or his potential, unseen associates learn where I came from. My mind raced. Had I revealed too much in my letters to Charity? My intent hadn’t been to disguise my origins; it was merely the case that she and I were so practised in the art of lifting me out of my childhood I hadn’t felt any great need to expound further on the theme. What about past lives? I had given addresses–never my true address, merely locations near enough to the hall for me to monitor the mail–for previous letters to extract me from my childhood. Could they reveal my location? Certainly they would
narrow the search down uncomfortably. It wouldn’t take a great deal of research to find boys of an appropriate age and quality in such an isolated area.

Then again, was I in any formal records? My illegitimacy, for so much of my life a curse, was suddenly a great blessing, for it occurred to me that there could well be no formal indication of my existence. My biological father would not acknowledge me, and my foster-father despised paperwork nearly as much as he raged whenever candles burned down needlessly, which was to say, disproportionately. Would anyone have even made any effort to prove I existed?

I had memories of my first life, when such things had mattered to me–memories of trying to draw my pension, of having to pay National Insurance for the very first time, bureaucracies confused by my existence. Even the name I gave myself was not true. I was no more Harry August than I was Harry Hulne; by the strict letter of the law I was the son of Lisa Leadmill, died 1919, who gave me no name more than a few syllables whispered on a bathroom floor.

But the simple fact was, I was not dead.

I had not been terminated before I was born.

If Vincent was making efforts to find me in this life, if he was sending out an ally–maybe several–who were older than himself, then clearly they had not succeeded in determining my true point of origin, and I did not think I had given enough information to Charity for them to do so.

And what of Charity?

What of her fate? Why did she not come?

This last matter, more than any other, prompted me to my course of action. I sneaked back into Newcastle station and boarded the first train to London.

I didn’t buy a ticket.

No one prosecutes a six-year-old for fare-jumping.

Back to London.

London in 1925 was a city on the verge of change. In Stoke Newington the day I arrived the mayor installed a new horse
trough for passing beasts to drink at, and within a few hours of its ceremonial opening it was struck by a car that lost control on the corner. Everyone knew that change was coming, but as no one quite knew what shape that change would be, society seemed to wobble, balancing on a precipice, the old clinging on with one hand as the new pushed and shoved with the other. Costermongers fought with grocers, Labour with Liberal, while the Tories stayed aloof, reluctantly resigned to the reforms that were inevitable but tactfully hoping their rivals would push through the most controversial measures. Universal suffrage was the banner of the moment, as women who’d fought for political equality now turned their attention to social equality–the right to smoke, drink and party like any man about town. It was everything that my grandmother Constance would not have approved of, but then she had never really approved of anything since the 1870s.

It was easy for a boy to pass through these streets. Packs of infant thieves still abounded in the alleys and outside the brothels around King’s Cross, and Holborn, for all its aspirant imperial grandeur, was as yet all façade and no belly. I moved with confidence, eyed up by the coppers but not stopped, heading deeper into the city, in search of the Cronus Club. The coal-soaked air turned white stone black; even the newer buildings were already scrawled with initials and messages scraped into the dirt. But there was the passage where the Cronus Club had been, where I had first met Virginia that warm summer’s day at the height of the Blitz, and we had talked of time and protocol, and lounged between the dust sheets. There the door, and there no sign. Not a brass plaque. Nothing at all.

I knocked anyway.

A maid in a stiff white apron and hat that was three parts frill to one part headpiece answered.

“Yeah?” she demanded. “What you want?”

I lied instinctively. “Do you buy oranges?” I asked.

“What? No! Push off!”

“Please, ma’am,” I blurted. “Finest Cronus oranges.”

“Piss off, you little tyke,” she retorted and, for good measure, gave me a half-hearted prod with her foot as she slammed the door shut in my face.

I stood, stunned, in the street, staring at nothing.

The Cronus Club was gone. I looked frantically for signs, for clues, messages left in iron, in stone, hints in any form as to where it could be–nothing. Turning wildly in the street I looked up for a notch in a gutter, for any smear of a suggestion, and saw a curtain twitch overhead.

My heart froze.

But of course.

Stupid stupid stupid.

Of course, even if you’d destroyed it, you’d leave watchers on the Cronus Club to see who came out of the woodwork.

Well, I’d come out of the woodwork all right, with the intelligence of the idiot child I appeared to be.

I didn’t try to fight, didn’t try to see who was looking at me from behind the grubby brown curtain overhead. I simply put my head down and ran.

I had no choice.

I slunk back to Berwick.

Back to Hulne House, back to Patrick and Harriet, to Rory and Constance. Back to where I’d come from, back where it all began.

I arrived, four days after I’d left, grimy, tired, bedraggled. A thief child who’d run away and found nowhere to run to. Harriet wept when she saw me, held me close and rocked me in her arms, sobbed until my clothes were damp with it. Patrick took me out the back and gave me the worst hiding of my life. Then, he dragged me up to the house and made me apologise, still bleeding, to Mr Hulne and all the family, who told me I was very lucky that I wasn’t being thrown out entirely, to starve like the little brat I was, and that from now on I would have to work every day and every night until I’d made it up to them, nasty, ungrateful child that I was.

I took my beating and humiliation in silence. I had no choice. The luxury, the lifeline of my last few lives had been pulled out from beneath my feet. I was six years old. I was seven hundred and fifty. I was being hunted.

The Hulnes refused to pay for me to go to school, and Patrick, humiliated by my escapade, didn’t argue the point. Harriet began dying early in this life, and I wondered if, in my way, I had contributed. I stayed by her bed to the end, feeding her poppy juice thieved from my aunt Victoria and holding her hand in silence. Perhaps my vigil gave me some credit in Patrick’s eyes, for her funeral was the first time he looked me in the face since I had run away, and after that the beatings grew less.

In the wake of Harriet’s death, and refusing to see her unacknowledged nephew grow up entirely wild, my aunt Alexandra secretly took to teaching me letters. Naturally, I knew all she had to say, but I was so grateful for the company, for the conversation, the books and the encouragement she gave me that I indulged her, a tiny compensation for her great gift. Five months in, Constance found out, and the argument between the two was audible even from the fish pond outside. Alexandra had more guts than I’d given her credit for, as her visits, in the aftermath of the argument, became even more regular. She was impressed by how fast I learned and, having no children of her own, failed to appreciate fully how abnormal my development was. As she became more a part of my life, Patrick grew less, until, by the age of twelve, barely a word passed between us, and no more seemed required.

I was biding my time and had very little choice but to do so until such time as I could pass for an adult. By my fifteenth birthday I considered that I could perhaps get away with the deceit, and, as manner is half the battle, I certainly had the bearing and intellectual capacity to pull it off. I went to Alexandra, asked to borrow some small amount of money, wrote her a letter thanking her for her kindnesses, and another to Patrick expressing the same, and left the very next day without looking back.

My task was that of a historian. I needed to learn the fate of the Cronus Club without exposing my own survival. It seemed likely that, whatever had happened to the Club, those in the know would be hiding. It also seemed likely that, no matter how determined Vincent’s reach, he could probably not influence kalachakra more than a few generations older than his own. There would
have been a London Cronus Club before, maybe not in the 1900s, but possibly in the 1800s and surely in the 1700s, or even if Vincent had somehow managed to stamp out all trace of it so far in the past, there would be other branches, in other cities, which he had not affected. I had to find them.

I began my research in the University of London library. Security was almost non-existent, and it was easy enough to pass as a student, swaggering my way into the reading room to pull out tomes on the social history of London. I also began, very cautiously, sending out feelers to other cities. Telegrams to academics in Paris and Berlin, never kalachakra themselves but those who might have an interest in society, enquiring after the Cronus Club on their turfs. Paris came back with nothing, and so did Berlin. In desperation, I sent messages further afield. New York, Boston, Moscow, Rome, Madrid–all silent. The Beijing Cronus Club was, I knew, in too much turmoil at this time anyway to necessarily answer enquiries, as it spent a large part of the 1920s–40s as a shadow Club, referring its members to more prosperous and reliable institutions. Finally I received a hit from a collector of trivia in Vienna, who reported that in 1903 a organisation called the Cronus Club had held a party for the city’s ambassadors and their wives, but in all the troubles of the First World War it had closed its doors and never reopened them.

In London I scoured the history books and finally found a reference in the
London Gazette
to the Club. In the year 1909 the directors of the Cronus Club were closing its doors owing to “a lack of suitable member interest”. That was almost all I could find.

1909.

The date gave me a clue and to a degree some relief. The Cronus Club had existed until the end of the nineteenth century, which suggested that whatever allies Vincent might have, they could not extend too far back in time. A child born in 1895 would by 1901 have recovered enough mental faculties to hunt down kalachakra at their point of origin and terminate their births. By 1909 the trend would have been noticed, the threat to the Club clear, and suddenly the organisation which was meant to protect
its members would be a trap, a lure, and a danger to all who sought its aid.

Then again, even if the London branch was being so targeted, I couldn’t believe the scale of these events, global in their proportion. No one, not even Vincent, could possibly have discovered the points of origins of so many ouroborans and wiped them out, not on such a massive scale. Even as that thought passed through my brain, another promptly occurred–that Vincent did not necessarily need to know the points of origins of Club members to kill them; he merely needed to make them forget. That would do the job well enough, and whole generations of the Cronus Club would tumble. Finding mature Cronus Club members would be easy enough, and I had no idea what kind of action Vincent had taken against them in my last life, since I had died too young to observe. He could have had forty years, maybe more, in which to hunt down every kalachakra on the planet and wipe their thoughts or, as he had intended to do with me, determine their point of origin. Either would be devastating and yes, potentially damaging on a global scale.

If this was so, then I needed to find a survivor, someone to confirm my suspicions.

I headed to Vienna.