The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(118)

You will send men to find me, and with little difficulty they will indeed stumble on my corpse. Akinleye will be gone, her work done for this day. As well as the empty needle, they will find these words and bring them to you, I trust, in the hospital. Your eye will scan this page and with my very first words you will know–you will know as you already must know, as you can no longer deny in the pit of your belly, that you have lost.

You have lost.

And in another life, a life yet to come, a seven-year-old boy will walk down a lane beyond south London with a cardboard box in his hand. He will stop before a house whose gardens smell of rhododendrons and hear the whistle of a passing train. A father and a mother will be in that place. His name is Howard, hers is Ursula. Their gardener, who keeps the flowers so fragrant, goes by the name of Rankis.

This seven-year-old child will approach these strangers and, with the innocence of youth, offer them something from his cardboard box. An apple, maybe, or an orange. A caramel sweet, a piece of sticky toffee pudding–the detail is not important, for who would refuse a gift from such an innocent child? The father, the mother, maybe even the gardener too, for caution is not for such events, each will take something from the boy, and thank him, and eat it as he turns and walks away up the lane.

I promise the poison will be quick.

And Vincent Rankis will never be born.

And all will be as it should.

Time will continue.

The Clubs will spread their fingers across the aeons, and nothing will change.

We will not be gods, you or I.

We will not look into that mirror.

Instead, for those few days you have left, you are mortal at last.