The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(32)
They imprisoned him, not merely away from society but in complete physical immobility, in a crude medieval straitjacket entirely made of metal. They cut out his tongue, cut off his ears, pulled out his eyes, and when he had recovered from all of those, they cut off his hands and his feet as well, just to guarantee that he wasn’t going anywhere. Then they force-fed him down a hollow wooden rod rammed into his throat, keeping him alive in his own silent, wordless, blind madness. They managed to do this for nine years before finally he choked to death, and died, they said, smiling. He was twenty years old.
But the vengeance of the Cronus Club extended beyond death.
Born again where he had begun, the baby Victor Hoeness was at birth snatched from his crib and taken again to a place of imprisonment. By the age of four he’d reached consciousness and, examining him, the members of the Cronus Club concluded there was still enough of his mind left alive that he could be judged responsible for his acts. So it began again: eyes, ears, tongue, hands, feet, all with careful medical precision to ensure that he didn’t die in the process, but all, of course, without painkillers. This time they managed to keep him alive for seven years; he died aged eleven.
“It’s surprisingly difficult to hold a grudge over a few hundred years,” explained Virginia. “Hoeness may have died when he was eleven, but his captors went on living for maybe thirty, forty, fifty years afterwards? After a while the note–‘Must torture Victor Hoeness’–becomes so low down on your to-do list, especially with death in the way between you and doing it–that frankly when the duty comes around again it seems like something of a bore.”
Nevertheless they persisted, and once again examined Hoeness for signs of his old self. This time, however, the baby Hoeness, though born with perfectly functional hands and ears and eyes, seemed incapable of using any of them, though the apparatuses were entirely there. Even as a baby, before achieving full consciousness, he was declared a broken child and his own parents considered giving him away to the care of the church or, so it was whispered, to the rather rougher care of the unloving street. Times were hard–crude, as Virginia would say.
The Cronus Club once again met to make a decision, and all but one voted to end Hoeness’s life for good, terminate his mother’s pregnancy before he was born and end the cycle of vengeance. The only one who rejected the vote was an ouroboran by the name of Koch, and he…
“We call them mnemonics,” explained Virginia. “To put it simply, they remember everything.”
I think she must have seen my eyes light up, my face turn towards her at these words. If she understood my reaction, she was kind enough not to say so. “The general case with us is that, after a few hundred years or so, we begin to forget. It’s perfectly understandable really; the brain is only so vast and it is the natural process of ageing to lose some of what we had. I personally start suffering from dementia around the age of sixty-seven, and I must tell you, being an infant overcoming those recalled symptoms is a thoroughly demoralising process. Mental illness is a deadly threat with our kind. Please do seek help should you be in that predicament, Harry.”
“I wrote letters to my father,” I confessed, the words barely audible to my ears.
“Marvellous, marvellous stuff! Positive attitude. Naturally one of the great advantages of having a fallible memory is that one is still capable of being surprised. Another is that one is capable of overcoming the past. You will find that while facts and figures may remain with you, especially if you attempt to recall them, furious emotions that burned inside begin to diminish. Some won’t. If you are a prideful person then slights will always linger with you, and frankly there’s nothing you can do about that save forget. If you are especially soppy then you may always regret a lost love, even several lives down the line. However, in my experience, time smooths all. One obtains a kind of neutrality after a while, a battering away at the edges as one begins to perceive through endless repetition that this slight was no such thing, or that love was merely a fancy. We have the privilege of seeing the present through the wisdom of the past, and frankly such an honour makes it very hard to take anything too seriously at all.”
Koch was an anomaly of our kind, a kalachakra who recalled all, including things most had forgotten.
“Mnemonics,” said Virginia, “are usually rather strange.”
My heart, tight in my chest.
I had come this far to find my people, and here it was already, spoken in innocence. Mnemonics are rather strange. To a certain class of society, in a certain corner of England, there is no greater failing.
“Koch spoke up, when the Clubs were deciding what to do with Victor Hoeness,” she explained. “ ‘This is not the first cataclysm,’ he said, ‘but the second. You do not remember it, for it was many hundreds of lives ago, and thousands of years. Perhaps if you do remember it, it is merely as a vague darkness in your minds, a distant memory. But I know of it, for I lived through it. A thousand years before now, another of our kin did exactly as Hoeness has done, and it ripped the future apart like a cutlass through soup. How long will we live before we reach one of the two only conclusions left to us? That if anything is to ever change, we must make sacrifices and challenge this rigid system within which we live. Or if nothing is to change at all, then we must watch our own kind constantly, and punish ruthlessly, and live without remorse. You have already decided on Hoeness’s fate, but let my words live as a warning to you all.’