The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 18

Complexity should be your excuse for inaction.

I should have screamed it at Phearson, should have nailed his ears to the Clubhouse door and made him listen to the stories of disaster and mayhem unleashed down the generations recorded at the Cronus Club. As it was, I could not have known just how accurate my assessment of his tampering could be; nor predicted how far he would go to get more answers from me than I considered it safe to give.

When, in that fourth life, Phearson and his men finally tortured me for my knowledge of things to come, they began uncertainly. They were perfectly prepared to use extreme violence to obtain their results, but they were afraid of damaging the goods in question. I was unique, a once-in-a-lifetime catch, my potential still unknown and unexplored, and to inflict any permanent physical, or worse mental, damage would be an unforgivable sin. Realising this, I screamed the louder, and coughed and foamed and writhed in my own piss and blood. They were so alarmed by this that, briefly, they backed off until Phearson came close again and whispered, “We’re doing this for the world, Harry. We’re doing this for the future.”

Then they started again.

At the end of the second day, they dragged me into the shower and turned it on cold. I sat in the tray while they ran the water over me, and wondered if the glass shower screen could be broken with a punch, and how long it would take me to find a piece with which I could slit my wrists.

On the third day they were a little more confident. The willingness of one inspired the other, a team-player mentality settling in as they tried not to let each other down. Phearson was careful never to be in the room when they went about their work, but always left a few minutes before, and returned a few minutes after. There was a rose-red sunset playing across my ceiling that third night. The others went out and he sat down by my bed and held my hand and said, “Jesus, Harry, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry that you’re doing this. I wish I could make it stop.”

I hated him and started to cry, and pressed my face into his hand and knelt at his feet and wept.