The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(105)

“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.