The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

by Claire North

  For all this, her views are arguably rather parochial.

  “It’s all very well to ask us to get involved,” she exclaimed. “But how?”

  Twelfth life.

  It’s rare to see a gathering of the Cronus Club. Members drift in and out all the time, but a full regional assembly–invitees summoned by cards with gold trim, agenda: the end of the world–is a sight to see. At six years old I was the youngest. At eighty-two, Wilbur Mawn was the oldest. As a child Wilbur had met the Duke of Wellington, and when growing up as a young man in London he had swapped cards with men who had fought for, and against, revolution in France. Now he was to be our next messenger, a man shortly due to die, who could, by his death, bring the message back to 1844–the world is ending and we don’t know why. So what are you going to do about it?

  “Nothing!” declared Philip Hopper, son of a Devon farmer with a taste for adventure that had led him to die in the Second World War six times, the Korean War twice, and Vietnam once, as a rather decrepit war correspondent no army would employ. “The factors are too many, the information too vague! We either need more information or nothing at all, since we can’t begin to determine what’s at work here.”

  “I think,” suggested Anya, a White Russian refugee who tended to abandon the White Russian cause for a more comfortable life abroad in 1904 with a sigh of inevitability, “the issue concerns the speeding-up. The end of the world is speeding up–it is happening earlier in every life. That implies that the cause is changing, and what, we must ask, is the cause of change?”

  Eyes turned to me. I was both messenger boy and, by dint of being the youngest, the most widely assumed to be in touch with modern scientific reasoning on the subject, if you considered the 1990s to be modern.

  “In every life we lead, regardless of every death we pass,” I said, “the world around us is unchanged. There is always rebellion in 1917; there is always war in 1939; Kennedy will always be shot and trains will always be late. These are linear events which do not vary, as far as we can observe, from life to life. The only variable factors are us. If the world is changing, we are the ones who change it.”

  “Against the rules of the Cronus Club!” interrupted Charity furiously, never one to be distracted by the bigger picture.

  “The question therefore becomes,” I went on, legs dangling from the chair on which I was perched, “not why is the world ending. But who?”

  Chapter 30

  Killing an ouroboran is hard, but I would argue that killing a linear mortal can often be harder, for you cannot simply prevent their birth in one life and have that serve as death for all. Each murder must be conducted each life, a matter as routine as brushing teeth or trimming nails. The key is consistency.

  It was 1951 and I was living in London.

  Her name was Rosemary Dawsett: she was twenty-one years old and liked money. I was lonely and liked her. I won’t pretend it was a profound relationship, but it was, in its own way, reasonably honest. I didn’t ask for exclusivity, and she didn’t attempt to extort, though she could see that I was a reasonably wealthy gentleman. Then one day she missed our meeting, and I went to her lodging and found her, in the bath, wrists slashed. The police called it suicide, dismissing her as one more dead tart, but I looked and I saw. The blade had gone too deep into her right wrist, slashing the tendons; she couldn’t have been strong enough to hold it for the next cut on her left, and besides there were no hesitation marks, no signs of doubt, no note, no shuffling around as she tried to get the angle right or worked up her courage. As someone practised in the art of self-destruction, I knew a murder when I saw it.

  The police refused to investigate, so I took over. The evidence was sickeningly clear to find, once you looked. Fingerprints, one even in the blood itself, and the madame downstairs had a list of all Rosemary’s regulars and thought she had seen one Richard Lisle leaving as she had come home. Getting his address was a matter of a few polite phone calls, getting his fingerprints was a case of approaching him in a pub, buying him several pints and listening to his ramblings, which ranged from a discussion of fine art taken from a textbook to loud and raucously cheered remarks about the bloody Pakis and wogs. His voice was the overly slippery upper-class accent of a middle-class man with aspirations and elocution lessons. In thirty years it would be a parody accent, used by comics to expose the sad cliché of the lonely man who believed that Ascot was sacred and could never quite get a ticket. In a merciful mood I might have felt sorry for this little man, striving to be accepted by a portion of society that didn’t just ignore him, it didn’t even notice him knocking. Then I took his beer glass home and checked his prints, which matched the print in the blood on the side of the bath, and any sympathy I might have felt was gone.

  I sent my evidence–beer glass, analysis of the blood patterns, the fingerprint in the blood–to Scotland Yard, to a detective called Cutter who had a reputation for imagination and prudence. He interviewed Lisle two days later, and that, from what I could tell, was the end of it. Two days after that another prostitute hanged herself, and there were self-defence marks on her wrists and arms, chloral hydrate in her bloodstream. This time, though, warned by the visit from the police, Lisle had been careful and left not a fingerprint behind.

  I had not committed murder at the time, although I had killed. By this point I knew of seven men I had killed directly, six of them in the Second World War and one in self-defence. I also calculated that I had contributed to the deaths of many hundreds more, through acts as banal as fixing the wheel on a B-52 or proposing a more reliable timer which could later be used on a bomb. I considered whether I had the courage to commit actual, cold-blooded murder, and concluded with mild regret that I did. I informed myself that I had the decency to be ashamed, but what little comfort that was compared to the certainty that I would commit this act. I would kill Richard Lisle.

  I prepared carefully. I bought a boat under an assumed name for cash in hand, a crabby tin thing with a lower deck that stank of the slick white fungus which infested its walls. I bought petrol and food, hydrochloric acid and a hacksaw, careful to spread my purchases over as wide an area as possible. I bought gloves and rubber overalls, examined the tides on the Thames and observed the traffic in the night. I acquired several ccs of benzodiazepine and rented a room opposite the pub where I had first acquired Richard Lisle’s fingerprints. I waited until one night–a Tuesday, the smog thick green over the streets–when he came to have a drink, and went in. I joined him, remembering our old acquaintance and asking how he had been. He was gleeful, happy, a gleam of sweat about his face and a loudness in his speech that at once set alarm bells ringing in my mind. What had he done to induce such delight? I examined him, every part, for a sign of something amiss, and smelled the fresh soap in his hair, saw how scrubbed his nails were, how fresh and clean his clothes were despite the settling lateness of the hour, and knew with that irrational part of the mind that rationality always denies that I had come to him a few hours too late. Rage flared up inside me and briefly my plan was forgotten, my efficient, organised scheme. I still smiled, and smiled, and we staggered out together into the coal-hung air at closing time, hanging off each other, best of friends, our skin smeared black by the air we breathed. But as we staggered away up the street, one of those lingering terraced streets of tiny houses that still hid beneath the craters of the East End, he looked up at the sky and laughed, and I punched him and punched him again, and when he fell I straddled him, grabbing him by the throat and screamed, “Where is she? Who was it this time?” and punched him again.

  In the rush of adrenaline, in my rage, smothered by the smog and hidden by the dark, all my plans, my careful, reasoned plans were forgotten. I barely felt the shock against my knuckles as I drove my fists into his skull. Nor did I register the flick knife that he drove up through my abdomen and into the bottom of my left lung until, drawing breath for another strike, I realised I had no breath to draw. His face was jelly but I was dead. He pushed me off h
im and and I fell like soggy pudding into the gutter, the dirty water flecking my face. He crawled over to me, his breath wheezing, blood popping and bubbling out of the end of his shattered nose. Awareness of the knife in his hand gave me an awareness of what he did with it, so I felt the next three strokes as he drove it into my chest. Then I felt nothing at all.

  Chapter 31

  Many, many lives later, I sat down opposite Virginia in the lounge of the Cronus Club and said, “His name is Vincent.”

  “Darling, that’s hardly much to go by.”

  “He’s one of us. Ouroboran. I asked him about the Cronus Club, and he attacked me and walked away.”

  “How immature of him.”

  “He has ambitions.”

  Virginia was more than capable of being uninterested when she wanted to be. She wanted to be now. She stared at the ceiling as if it was the most fascinating thing in the world and waited for the rest.

  “The message keeps coming down to us from the future generations–the world is ending, the world is ending. Nothing changes about the established course of linear events–nothing–except us.”

  “You suggest this… Vincent… may be the ‘who’ which leads to the ‘what’?”

  “I… no. I don’t know. I’m suggesting that one of his character, someone who is one of us but not one of us, is someone seeking an answer… mindless of the consequences… that’s what I suggest.”

  “And Harry,” she murmured, “you appear to have an idea of what you desire to do next.”

  “We look for anomalies,” I explained firmly. “The Cronus Club looks for events which should not be happening in their time periods, changes to the normal course of things. I think I’ve found one.”

  “Where?”

  “Russia.”

  She sucked in her teeth thoughtfully. “Have you spoken to the Club? To Moscow, St Petersburg–Leningrad, I suppose we must call it, ghastly though it is?”

  “I sent them a message via Helsinki. I’m going to Finland tomorrow morning.”

  “If you’re already pursuing this, why do you tell me?”

  I hesitated, then, “Should something unfortunate happen, I’d ask that you pass my suspicions on to others. But…”

  “You’re concerned that if one of our kind is altering established events, they may have informants within the Club.” She sighed. I wondered how long she’d held on to this thought, and how many of our peers considered it too. Were we, all of us, so used to apathy and deceit that not one had bothered to raise the question of it? Did we all take betrayal so much for granted? Then, what good could be achieved, other than to spread suspicion without a cure? “But,” she went on, brightening a little, “you, dear boy, clearly trust me enough to inform me of your concerns. But not Moscow or St Petersburg. Oh, Harry, your time as an intelligence agent has done nothing for your socialite reputation.”

  “I wasn’t aware I had a socialite reputation.”

  “Quite. Harry.” A note of what, I imagined, passed for genuine concern slipped into her voice. “I understand how exciting it must be to be informed that the world is ending, what a marvellous adventure this must present for you. Repetition is dull; stimulation is vital to stave off the decline of faculties and will. But the simple, mathematical truth is that, between us and the events unfolding of the future, there is an almost infinite range of possibilities and permutations, and to think that we can, in any meaningful way, affect this, now, is not merely ludicrous, it’s really rather childish. I have no objection to you doing whatever it is you wish to do, Harry–it is, after all, your life, and I know that you won’t cause any especial embarrassment for the Club while doing it–but I just don’t want to see you get too emotionally involved.”

  I considered Virginia’s words. She was, physically, older than me, but after a few deaths such things rarely counted. It was more than likely that she had been through more lives than me, but again, after the first few centuries, most kalachakra reached a plateau where time hardly mattered and the soul barely changed. Yet Virginia had always been a figure of seniority to me, the woman who had saved me from Phearson, introduced me to the Club; for her these memories would fade, and with the passing of experience perhaps our relationship would change, but for me the recollection was as strong as ever.

  I remembered Christa standing by my bedside in Berlin.

  In 1924 I had travelled to Liverpool to perform a similar service. The man dying had gone by the name of Joseph Kirkbriar Shotbolt, born 1851, dies, on average, 1917–27. Statistically, Spanish flu was his most common killer, along with three members of his near family, twelve cousins and roughly a quarter of the waterside community where he sometimes retired. “Can’t shake the bugger!” I’d heard him exclaim on those few occasions he’d outlived it. “Damn plague just follows me anywhere!”

  This time he’d missed Spanish flu by the rather sensible precaution of spending the last years of the war on an island in Micronesia which hadn’t yet been marked on the atlas, but whose name in the tongue of its native people translated as Teardrop Blessing. The rather less fortunate outcome of his escaping the flu was the acquisition of of a parasite which caused his feet to swell to quite appalling size, bursting out of his socks in their disfigured redness, and which, more crucially, created a series of cysts on his kidneys and liver which induced the septicaemia from which he was dying when I finally met him.

  A kalachakra tends to recognise another when he sees him–not necessarily through any instinct, as my relationship with Vincent was to testify, but through the incongruity of circumstance and a certain bearing. A six-year-old boy visiting the bedside of a man dying in a whitewashed infirmary in Liverpool from a parasitical infection that the doctors were at a loss to cure tends to induce a certain circumstantial recognition that needs no greater introduction.

  Once a giant of a man, the onset of death had wrinkled Shotbolt up like a burned chip. Every joint seemed bent a little beyond comfort, the tendons seizing up, and the heavy pain medication he was on had only accelerated the liver failure which was turning his skin a very noticeable and rather pungent yellow. His hair had fallen out, including eyebrows and eyelashes, and as he lay alone, dying his last, the swollen knuckles on his hand stood out bulbously above the bed sheets where he clutched them to him against a deep-seated ache that no doctor could cure.

  I had met Shotbolt only a few times before, though he did not remember me, but recognition of what I was was there immediately.

  “From the Club, are you?” he grumbled, his voice surprisingly heavy for a man so close to the end. “Tell ’em if it’s a cure, I don’t bloody want it. Laudanum, thanking you kindly, that’d be what I need.”

  I flicked through the chart at the end of his bed. The drips fed into his body were mostly saline, a half-hearted attempt at liquid sustenance after his digestive system had packed up. The bottles were glass drums, heavy, a leak in one where the rubber had cracked around the nipple of the jar. “Oh God,” he groaned, seeing me read. “You’ve trained as a doctor, haven’t you? Can’t stand bloody doctors, especially when they’re five years old.”

  “Six,” I corrected. “And don’t worry; you’ll be dead within a week.”

  “A week! I can’t be sitting around here for a bloody week! You know those bastards won’t even give me something good to read? ‘Mustn’t get excited, Mr Shotbolt,’ they say. ‘Now, Mr Shotbolt, can you make it to the potty?’ The potty! Do you know that’s what they actually call it? I’ve never been so humiliated in all my life.”

  The way he spoke implied that here was a man for whom once-in-a-lifetime outrages had been a fairly common occurrence in times past, and would probably be again. I chose not to debate the point and, satisfied that for all his medication Shotbolt still had some semblance of coherence, I sat down on the edge of his bed and said, “I’ve got a message.”

  “It had better not be a question about Queen bloody Victoria,” he growled. “Can’t stand all these academics wanting to know about
her stocking size.”

  “It’s not a question,” I repeated patiently. “More of a warning. It’s been passed down from generation to generation, trickled down from the future.”

  “What’ve we done this time?” he grunted. “Too much ice and not enough fire?”

  “Something like that. Apparently–and I feel a little embarrassed telling you this–but apparently the world is ending. Which is, in and of itself, no great surprise. But the end of the world is getting faster. And that’s something of a stumper.”

  Shotbolt considered this a while, fingers still tight around the edge of his sheets. Then, “At last,” he exclaimed. “Something new to talk about!”

  Almost exactly thirty years later I boarded a flight from Heathrow Airport to Berlin Templehof, changing passports on my way through customs, heading east in search of something new.

  Chapter 32

  There are certain rules to a successful deception, of which my personal favourite is–stick with what you know. That is not to say that truth should ever be incorporated into your lies, but rather that good research is the key to a consistent lie. It was in 1956 by no means impossible for a citizen of the West to enter the East–far easier, in fact, than for a citizen of the East to head to the West–but to declare yourself as such was to invite immediate attention and scrutiny, and this was, I felt, something I could not necessarily afford.

  I had, in my twelfth life, after receiving Christa’s message, embarked on what I believe would come to be known, in the 1990s, as a portfolio existence. I travelled extensively under the flimsy cover of “executive businessman” and dabbled with whichever intelligence services I felt might be of most use to me in order to keep as broad an eye as possible on global events. In 1929, aged eleven, I bought up stocks as the markets collapsed, and by 1933 I was the sole shareholder in one of the fastest-growing investment brokerages in the northern hemisphere. An actor by the name of Cyril Handly was paid a very reasonable wage to impersonate me, it being unwise for a fifteen-year-old boy to be caught as CEO of a large investment company. He was precisely what a chairman should have been–dignified, well built, with a carefully cultivated accent, refined tastes and a reasonable but not unhealthy belly on him, and his combination of judicious silence and fiery retribution worked well in the office until in 1936 his enjoyment of the role became a little too much to tolerate when he began sacking reliable members of staff during board meetings. I relocated the company to Switzerland, paid Cyril off with a retirement home in Bali, and employed a rather younger actor to impersonate my son, newly risen to become head of the company, buying his complicity with a mixture of reasonable fees and, in a twist that surprised me more than anyone else, regular lessons in economics, finance and accountancy which led to, by 1938, my having complete confidence in his ability to run the company with the barest interference from me.