The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

by Claire North

  All this I watched with an apparently disinterested awareness, even as the Cronus Club seethed and raged about me. The future was being destroyed before our very eyes, the effects of the twentieth century rippling forward through time. Billions of lives were going to be changed, and possibly billions of kalachakra no longer born or their worlds torn beyond all recognition. We, the children of the twentieth century, were doing this, as blithe and oblivious as a whale to the writhing of plankton in the sea.

  “Harry, we have to do something!”

  Akinleye.

  “Too late.”

  “How did this happen?”

  “Some letters were sent with some bright ideas in them. That’s all.”

  “There has to be something…”

  “Too late, Akinleye. Much, much too late.”

  Find Vincent.

  That was all there was.

  Forget consequences, forget time.

  Find Vincent.

  I scoured every technology company, every university, interrogated every contact, investigated every rumour and leak. I trawled through shipping manifests in search of the components which I knew would be on anyone’s shopping list for a quantum mirror, investigated every scientist and scholar who might be of service to Vincent, who had the appropriate knowledge, and all the time quietly wrote articles on the changing world and the prowess of American technological development.

  I was careful too. I operated behind a great range of guises, very rarely revealing my true identity when investigating a story. If I wrote an article on agricultural fertilisers in Arizona, then I would be Harry August–but if a man phoned a nuclear scientist in the night to ask about the latest developments in electron microscopes, he did so under any name, and with any voice, that was not mine. By Vincent’s reckoning, I should have forgotten all my past lives save the one immediately after my Forgetting, and this existence should only be my second on the earth. If I were to stumble on Vincent through my research, it had to appear by chance, not intent. My perceived ignorance and weakness were my greatest weapons, to be cherished for a final blow.

  And then, without warning, there he was.

  I was attending a talk on nuclear technology in the age of the extra-atmospheric long-range missile, which my editor hoped I’d write up under the tag line “Missiles in Space”. I found the idea rather unprofessional, as it implied a multiple exclamation mark at the end of the title and possibly an opening paragraph beginning, “There are some ideas too terrible…” before swelling to an oratorical climax. A card delivered to my hotel door invited me to discuss these issues further with the sponsor of this event, a Mrs Evelina Cynthia-Wright, who had added in a personal note at the end of the invite how terribly pleased she was to see the media taking an interest in these dire affairs.

  With a sense of disappointment already well settled in my bones, I drove out to her house, a great white-walled mansion some three miles from the Louisiana river. The evening was damp, hot and chittering. The vegetation around the sprawling, overgrown estate hung down like it too could no longer bear the heat, while an air-conditioning system straight off the manufacturing line was blasting out steamy clouds from a device the size of a small truck, wedged up against one side of the otherwise venerable property like a technological leech on a historical monument. By the cars lined up around an entirely algae-covered pond, it was clear I was not the only guest, and a maid answered the door even before I could knock, inviting me to take an iced julep, a business card and hand-made peppermint for my pains. The sound of polite conversation and less polite, child-made music drifted out of what I could only call the ballroom, a great high-ceilinged place with wide windows that opened on to the rear garden, an even more excessively drooping jungle than at the front of the house. The music was being produced by a would-be torturer aged seven and a half and her violin of pain. Proud family and polite friends were sat in a small circle before the child, admiring her stamina. As if to prove that this at least was inexhaustible, she began in on another medley. Over eight hundred years of reasonable living had rather dented my adoration for the works of the young. Surely I could not be the only creature on this earth who favoured prolonged incubation as a safer method of development than puberty?

  Mrs Evelina Cynthia-Wright was exactly what a grand dame of the Louisiana river should have been–extremely courteous, utterly welcoming and hard as the rusted nails which bound her great property together. Her research was clearly as up to date as her rather ineffective air-conditioning unit, for as I stood scanning the room, considering whether I had made enough of a necessary token appearance and wondering, not for the first time, if journalism was an appropriate response to the encroaching end of the world, she bore down on me like a melting glacier and cried out, “I say, Mr August!” I managed to suppress my flinch and crank up my smile, producing a half-bow to the hand offered to me by the wrist. Even fingers, it seemed, drooped in this weather. “Mr August, it’s so good of you to come. I’ve been such an avid follower of your work…”

  “Thank you for the invitation, Mrs Wright…”

  “Oh my, you’re British! Isn’t that charming? Darling!” A man three parts moustache to one part facial features responded to “Darling!” with the dutiful twitch of one who has chosen not to fight the inevitable. “Mr August is British, would you ever have guessed?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I’ve read so many of your articles, but then I imagine writing in the American way must just come naturally to you.”

  Had it? Was I permitted to say so? Was this a gathering where all modesty was false, all boasting insufferable? Where, I wondered, did speedy social victory and hasty escape lie?

  “You absolutely have to meet Simon. Simon is such a dear and has been dying to meet you. Oh Simon!”

  I fixed my smile in the locked position and, upon reflection, that was probably what saved the situation.

  The man called Simon turned. He too was sporting a moustache that rolled out from his top lip like a crashing brown wave, and a smaller goatee, which ever so slightly mis-directed the user’s eye to his left collarbone. He held an icy glass in one hand and a rolled-up copy of the magazine I worked for in the other, as if about to swat a fly with it, and there were plenty of candidates for the honour. Seeing me, he opened his mouth in an expansive “O” of surprise, for this was a gathering where nothing short of expansive would do, tucked the magazine under his arm, wiped his hand off on his shirt, perhaps to remove the detritus of perished flying adversaries, and exclaimed, “Mr August! I’ve been waiting so long to meet you!”

  His name was Simon.

  His name was Vincent Rankis.

  Chapter 69

  I was not without my allies.

  Charity Hazelmere was not dead.

  It had taken me a while to find her, and not until the middle of my fourteenth life did I stumble on her, almost by chance, in the Library of Congress while trawling through a report on developments in modern science. I looked up from a particularly boring passage which had nothing to do with my perpetual investigation into Vincent and his activities, and there was Charity, old–inside, as well as out, leaning on a walking stick for the first time I’d ever known–staring at me from across the other side of the table, not sure if I was enemy or friend.

  I looked from her to the rest of the library and, seeing no direct threat, closed my book, returned it carefully to its tray, pointed at the SILENCE PLEASE sign, smiled and walked towards the door. I didn’t know if she’d follow or not. I don’t think she knew either. But follow she did.

  “Hello, Harry.”

  “Hello, Charity.”

  A little grimace. Her ancient body was in pain, and I recognised the signs of more than just old age about her. The hair on her head was thinning, but there was a slouch to the left side of her mouth and a weight to her left leg which spoke of more than simple generic decay. “So you remember,” she muttered. “Not many do, these days.”

  “I remember,” I
replied gently. “What are you doing here?”

  “Same as you, I think. I don’t usually like to live this long, but even I can see that something’s gone wrong with time. All this… change…” The word dripped like acid from her lips. “All this… development. Can’t be having that at all.” Then, sharper, “I see you’ve become a journalist now. Read some of your articles. What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing, drawing attention to yourself like that? Don’t you know there’s a war on, them against us?”

  “Them” had to be Vincent, “us” the Cronus Club. I felt a momentary flicker of shame that I was still included in the “us”. After all, I had spent more than a decade working with Vincent, and my collaboration and subsequent defection were arguably the trigger for the attacks on the Cronus Club. Whether anyone knew this, I doubted, and nor was I in a hurry to tell.

  “If the enemy knows your name, they can pursue you! A low profile, Harry, is vital–unless, that is, you’re deliberately inviting trouble?”

  To her surprise, and perhaps mine, I smiled. “Yes,” I replied softly. “In point of fact, that’s exactly what I’m doing. It will make things easier in the long run.”

  Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What are you playing at, Harry August?”

  I told her.

  Everyone needs an ally.

  Particularly one born before 1900.

  Chapter 70

  Two things I learned during my career in espionage. The first is that a dull listener is, nine times out of ten, a vastly more effective spy than a charming conversationalist. The second is that the best way to approach a contact blind is not for you to directly engage with them, but to convince them that they want to engage with you.

  “Mr August, such a pleasure.”

  Vincent Rankis stood before me, smiling, offering me his hand, and all those years of preparation, all that planning, all the thought I had dedicated to what I would do if this moment ever came, and for a moment, just a moment, it was all I could do not to plunge the rim of my julep glass into the pulsing softness of his pink throat.

  Vincent Rankis, smiling at me like a stranger, inviting my friendship.

  He knew everything he had done to me, remembered it with the perfect detail of a mnemonic.

  What he did not know–could not know–was that I remembered it all as well.

  “A pleasure, Mr…?”

  “Ransome,” he replied brightly, clasping my hand in his and shaking it warmly. His fingers were cold from where he’d held his drink, passing it from hand to hand, and damp with still-clinging condensation from the outside of the glass. “I’ve read so much of your work, followed your career, you might say.”

  “That’s very considerate of you, Mr… Ransome?” I nearly stumbled on the enquiry, important to make it clear I didn’t know him, but push any lie too far and it begins to totter. “Are you in the trade?”

  The trade, to any large profession on the planet, is always whatever craft the speaker happens to practise.

  “Good God, no!” He chuckled. “I’m something of a layabout really, terrible thing, but I do admire you journalist chaps, striding about places, putting wrongs to right and that.”

  Vincent Rankis and his bare, sweaty throat.

  “I hardly do that, Mr Ransome. Just earn those dimes, as they say.”

  “Not at all. Your commentary is engaging–some might even say incisive.”

  Vincent Rankis sat by my bedside as the rat poison flooded through my veins.

  Walking away as the torturer began to pull the nails out of my toes.

  Riding a boat down the river Cam.

  Hopping with excitement at another experiment. We can push the boundaries, Harry. We can find the answers, all things, everywhere. We can see with the eyes of God.

  Not turning back at the sound of my screams.

  Take him, he said, and they took me, a bullet to the brain, and here I am, and I will never forget.

  He was looking.

  God but he was looking, above that brilliant smile and behind those empty, charming lies, he was studying every feature of my face, looking for the lie in my eye, looking for recognition, revulsion, rebellion, some hint that I was still who I had been, that I knew what he had done. I smiled and turned back to our host, heart beating too fast, no longer confident I could stop my body from revealing what my mind would not.

  “You clearly have excellent taste in both friends and reading material, ma’am,” I explained, “but I trust my invitation here wasn’t merely to discuss the incisiveness of my text?”

  Mrs Evelina Cynthia-Wright, God bless her, God praise her, had an agenda to push, and in that moment of crisis, that moment when I might have turned and lost my control altogether, she exclaimed, “Mr August, you’ve got such a journalist’s mind! As a matter of fact, there are a few people I’d like you to meet…”

  And she put an arm around my shoulder and I could have kissed that arm, could have wept into its clean white sleeve, as she led me away from Vincent Rankis and back into the crowd. And as Vincent had not looked back, neither did I.

  Chapter 71

  I had him.

  I had him.

  I had him.

  And best of all, I had him without having to expose myself.

  He had sought out me.

  He had come to me.

  And I had him.

  I had him.

  At last.

  Utterly cool, as the Americans would say.

  Time to play it utterly cool.

  I listened to Mrs Cynthia-Wright’s friends discuss in earnest, occasionally frantic tones the threats of nuclear war, the dangers of ideological stand-off, the invasion of technology into conflict, and knew that Vincent was only a few paces from my back, and I didn’t look once. Not too cold, not arctic and distant: on my way out of the house I smiled at him and complimented him once more on his excellent literary taste, expressing the hope that he was a regular subscriber to the magazine. He was. What a good man, what a fine bastion of learning in this ever-changing time.

  Not too hot either.

  I did not shake his hand on the way out, and as I walked back down the drive beneath the now star-studded sky, I did not turn my head to see if he stood in the door.

  I had him.

  I made it back to my hotel, a second-floor room that stank of the damp mould creeping into every corner of this soggy town, and locked the door, sat down on my bed and shook for nearly fifteen minutes. I couldn’t stop, and for a while, as I watched my hands tremble across my lap, wondered what kind of twisted conscious reaction of my mind this was, what manifestation of the many emotions I knew I should feel to see this man who I had hunted for over a century, this man who had come so close to destroying me. But if it was so, still I could not control it, and as I went mechanically through the motions of going to bed, my hands shook, and I smeared toothpaste down my chin.

  Had I thought it would work, I would have called the Club at once. I would have summoned up mercenaries, I would have taken up arms myself, and we would have administered the Forgetting to Vincent, right then and there. No question, no trial, no fruitless interrogation for his point of origin, which information, I felt sure, he would not easily give. He was a mnemonic, and if my experiences were anything to judge by, such action could only result in failure, and every chance we had of stopping Vincent could be lost for good.

  Having found him, this was a time now to walk away.

  He knew where to find me, if that was his inclination.

  Three months.

  Worse than any torture.

  I went about my job, and this time I was scrupulous, I was rigorous, I played the part of a journalist to the full and took no action that could be even considered as remotely researching Vincent. Further, I stepped up other activities that might be considered symptomatic of a ouroboran only two lives on from a Forgetting. I attended churches of various denominations; made and then broke various appointments with counsellors, maintained firm isolati
on from my peers, and in every way, shape and form lived the life of Harry August, innocent kalachakra slogging through a confusing world. I even took private classes in Spanish, which language I spoke fluently, masking my easy progress by paying my downstairs neighbour’s child to do my homework, and that badly, and embarking on a brief and fairly enjoyable affair with my teacher, before guilt at her betrayal of a very absent Mexican boyfriend caused her to break off both relationship and lessons.

  Whether I needed to have gone to the lengths I did to maintain this illusion, I do not know. If Vincent was investigating my present conditions closely, he hid it brilliantly. For certain he was investigating my past, looking no doubt for my point of origin. But my allies were in place, Charity and Akinleye, and every document left in the system proclaimed that I, Harry August, had come into the understanding of the British as an orphan abandoned in Leeds, and there remained until my adoption by a local couple by the name of Mr and Mrs August. I knew Vincent would investigate these facts and indeed find a Mr and Mrs August of Leeds who had adopted a boy of roughly suitable age, whose life I had always quietly marked as being a useful alibi for mine and who died in a car crash in 1938, in time for me to claim his paperwork as my own. His accidental death was, in many ways, a great fortune to me as, if it had not occurred, I may well have been forced to kill him in order to safely maintain my disguise.

  Whatever the course of Vincent’s investigations into these carefully woven lies, he did not approach me for another three months, and I did not seek him out. Then, when he finally did reappear, he did so at two in the morning, on a land line to my apartment in Washington DC.