The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(27)

Virginia, it transpired, made no such allowances.

“Hello, dear boy!” she exclaimed, and at once I recognised her, though it had been twenty-two years since she had slipped me a penknife in a house in the north. She was younger, a woman in her forties, but still dressed for a soirée where the jazz was cool and the men were willing, no concession made in any aspect of her being for the nannying concerns of the present.

I stood at once, an awkward formal gesture, which she immediately dispelled by grabbing me by the shoulders and giving me a kiss on either cheek in recognition of a fashion yet to come. “Harry!” she exclaimed. “My goodness but you are young at the moment, aren’t you?”

I was twenty-two, dressed to convince the world that I was a rather youthful twenty-nine and worthy of consideration in all things. The effect was more of a child playing in his father’s clothes, but then I have never truly mastered my own body. She had her arm hooked into mine and was leading me towards Buckingham Palace–not yet damaged by the Dornier bomber that would eventually hit Victoria station, but that event was only a few months away. “How was the last one?” she asked brightly, sweeping me off down the Mall like a country cousin come to town for a family holiday. “The femoral artery is such a gusher once it gets going, and far fewer little nerve endings round there. I did try to bring you something chemical but it was all done in such a hurry–terrible fuss!”

“Was death the only option?” I asked weakly.

“Darling!” she exclaimed. “You would only have been hunted down and interrogated more, and frankly we couldn’t be handling that. Besides–” a surreptitious nudge that nearly knocked me off my feet “–how would we have known you were really one of us, if you didn’t make this meeting?”

I took a slow, steadying breath. This meeting–this already rather strange meeting–had cost me my life and twenty-two years of expectation. “May I ask, are you going to walk away rapidly in the next fifteen minutes? I only enquire because I have several hundred years of questions, and need to know whether I should start prioritising.”

She gave me a playful slap on the arm. “Dear boy,” she replied, “you have many centuries left in which to ask whatever you like.”





Chapter 24


The Cronus Club.

You and I, we have fought such battles over this.

No one knows who founded it.

Or rather, that is to say, no one knows who has the first idea.

It is usually founded in Babylon around about 3000 BCE. We know this because the founders tend to raise an obelisk in the desert, in a valley with no particular name, on which they write their names and often a message for the future generation. This message is sometimes sincere advice–


BEWARE LONELINESS

SEEK SOLACE

HAVE FAITH



–and material of that sort. Occasionally, if the founders are feeling rather less reverent towards their future readership, they leave a dirty joke. The obelisk itself has become something of an object of fun. One generation of the Cronus Club will often have it moved and hidden in a new place, challenging future descendants to find it. The obelisk remains hidden in this manner for hundreds of years until at last enterprising archaeologists stumble upon it and on its ancient carved stone they too leave their messages, ranging from


IN TIME ALL THINGS ARE REVEALED



through to the rather more mundane


HARRY WOZ ’ERE.



The obelisk itself is never quite the same from one generation to another: it was destroyed in the 1800s by zealous Victorians for being just a little too overtly phallic in its design, another sank to the bottom of the sea while being transported to America. Whatever its purpose, it remains a declaration from the past to all future members of the Cronus Club, that they, the kalachakra of 3000 BCE, were here first and are here to stay.

The rumour goes, however, that the first ever founder of the Cronus Club was not from the deep past at all, but was instead a lady by the name of Sarah Sioban Grey, born some time in the 1740s. A kalachakra, she was one of the first pioneers to actively seek others of her kin, accumulating over many hundreds of years and dozens of deaths a picture of who else within her home town of Boston might be of a similar nature. Kalachakra generally occur at a rate of one in every half million of the population, so her success at finding even a few dozen cannot be underestimated.

And of these few dozen, it quickly occurred to Sarah Sioban Grey that they represented not merely a fellowship in the now, but also a fellowship of the yet to come and what had been. She looked at her colleagues and perceived that where the oldest was nearly ninety years old, this would make him a child at the turn of the century, which she was too young to experience; and where the youngest was merely ten, this made him a grandfather by the time of the American Civil War, and thus a visitor to a future she could never know. To the old man from the past she said, “Here is my knowledge of future events–now go forth and make gold,” and indeed, when she was born again in the 1740s, the old man was already knocking at her door saying, “Hello, young Sarah Sioban Grey. I took your advice and made gold, and now you, little girl, need never work again.” She then returned the favour to the child who would live to see the Civil War, saying, “Here is gold which I will invest. By the time you are grown up and old, it will be a fortune and you need never work again. All I ask in return for this investment is that you pass the favour on to any others of our kin you may meet in the future, that they too are safe and comfortable in this difficult world.” And so the Cronus Club spread, each generation investing for the future. And as it spread forwards in time, so it also spread backwards, the children of now speaking to the grandfathers of yesterday and saying, “The Cronus Club is a fellowship of men–go find for yourself the grandfathers of your youth and as a child say to them, ‘This thing is good.’ ” So each generation set out to find more of its kind, and within just a few cycles of birth and death, the Club had spread not only through space, but also time, propagating itself forwards into the twentieth century and back into the Middle Ages, the death of each member spreading the word of what it was to the very extremes of the times in which they lived.