The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 26

Victor Hoeness, when told of these events by his kin, did not believe.

When they insisted that this was the word being whispered down the Cronus Club, he merely demanded better notes so that he could attempt to fix the problems at inception.

But there was, for the Cronus Club, a far bigger problem to fix. Victor Hoeness had, to their mind, committed mass murder. Not exactly of the human race–that was merely one temporal outcome, one life in which all had withered and all had died and that was that. His sin was far greater for, by his deeds, whole generations of kalachakra had simply not been born.

“Not so much a rule, Harry darling,” Virginia had explained, “as good advice. Don’t tell anyone where or when you’re from.”

I watched her, that night in London, rolling the brandy glass between her fingers, her gaze fixed on nothing much as the sun faded and the city turned black. “Death,” she explained, “can be achieved in one of two ways. I don’t mean the rather tedious death that our bodies force us to endure every life; not at all. I mean a death that remains, a death that matters. The first death is the Forgetting. The Forgetting can be chemical, or surgical, or electrical, and is used to achieve a complete wipe of the mind. Not name, nor place of birth, nor the first boy you ever kissed will remain after the Forgetting, and for us what is this if not a true death? A clean slate, a chance to be pure and innocent again. Naturally we kill everyone who’s been through a Forgetting as soon as we can perceive that their minds are gone, so that they don’t start their next childhood with even the slightest hint of what they are. And when they die and begin again, we can be immediately there in their second life to help and assist them, teach them to grow accustomed to what they are without any of that tedious madness-suicide-rejection business. A lot of us have done at least one Forgetting, although, given the difficulty of the task, it doesn’t always take. They tell me–” brandy ran up the side of the glass, then slowly seeped back down “–that I have Forgotten before. Though everyone seems embarrassed to say so.”

A moment, a second when the ripples went out of the drink in her hand, perfect stillness as Virginia tried to remember a thing she had chosen to forget.

“There is no loss, if you cannot remember what you have lost,” she explained at last. “Personally, I feel a great sense of relief. You wipe away the scars of your former life as well as the memories. You wipe away the guilt. I do not say that I have lived a guilty life, of course; merely that the silence of my peers when I ask about the subject does not bode well for the things I cannot remember.”

A tick tick tick of the grandfather clock in the hall. Soon sirens would sound, and stop, and the city would listen for the low drone of the bombers, the deep clearing of death’s throat as he prepared to sing.

“The second death,” she went on, “is the death of not being born. It is really rather controversial among us, for it throws into doubt all the scientific theories currently extant about our very natures. It has been observed that if a kalachakra is aborted before consciousness in one life, then in the next the child will not be born at all. It is the true death, the destruction of both mind and body, and, unlike the Forgetting, there is no coming back from it, no healing of mental pathways. It is simply the end. So you see, dearest Harry, there is nothing so prized by our kind as this–who you truly are, who your parents were, and your place and time of birth. This information can destroy you utterly. And one day you might want to be destroyed, of course. Or to forget. The mind struggles to re-create the joy of a first kiss, but somehow manages to recall the terror of pain, the flush of humiliation and the burden of guilt with a startling clarity.”

Franklin Phearson.

I’m a good guy, Harry. I’m a fucking good guy.

My skin was white above the bone where it gripped the brandy glass.

Looking back, I ask myself who precisely knows the circumstances of my birth. Even in terms of those who live purely linear lives, the numbers are very few: my father, my adopted parents, my aunts, my grandmother Constance and perhaps some relatives on my mother’s side who suspected but could not precisely name my origins. These were unavoidable weaknesses, established before I was born, but my bastardy afforded me great protection. No official records exist of my birth or origin until I am at least seven or eight, when an overzealous school monitor notes a gap in her records, and by then I am in a position to expunge the record as soon as it is made. The shame of being illegitimate in the 1920s, especially to a family whose values lingered from an earlier age, kept discussion of my parentage limited to a tight circle and, once the key players were dead, there was no reason for my origins to be advertised at all unless I chose to. In childhood I am blessed by being rather stunted until I am a teen, and then experiencing a rapid growth spurt rather late–it confuses any guesses as to the precise date of my birth. In adulthood my father’s overbred features seem to grow confused as they mingle with my mother’s genes, so I can appear to be convincingly twenty-two or thirty-nine at any given moment, as long as I choose my clothes carefully. My hair turns white almost overnight, but stress can alter my physiology, so again the exact date of my birth is hard to guess in later years; and extensive travel has so corrupted my accent that now I find I have almost none of my own, but rather adapt at once to whatever the local requirements appear to be with an ease that borders on the sycophantic. In short, the disadvantages of my normal life, if we are to call it that, are blessings for my secret being, and even as Virginia recounted the final days of Victor Hoeness, I sat back in my chair and considered all this with a growing sense of security.

“Now Victor,” she explained, “really rather buggered things up for the future generations. Whole generations of kalachakra simply were not born, and being not born kalachakra once, they were not born again. The world continued as it always had been, Victor’s experiment having been terminally ended by death, but the cries for vengeance came whispering down from those few lucky ones who had survived the future apocalypse, telling of whole Clubs wiped out, thousands of years of history and culture which must now be rebuilt from the ground upwards. Not to mention, of course, the rather premature destruction of the world for everyone else on it, but they really didn’t count in the scheme of things.”

I didn’t question this world view, nor why should I? Victor Hoeness had unleashed four hundred years of war and suffering on the world and then he’d died, and none of it had mattered, for when he was born again, things were as they had always been. I was in the Cronus Club now, the past and the future a few whispers away, the secrets of my very existence, I felt, within my grasp. These words were merely stories.

“Those were cruder times,” Virginia explained. “There wasn’t any room for niceties.”

And it was in this spirit that Victor Hoeness was tracked down in the city of Linz, aged eleven years old, where he was already preparing for another stab at changing the nature of the universe. He was taken from his home and tortured for eleven days. On the twelfth he broke and confessed to his true place of birth, parents, home, point of origin. He was kept captive while painstaking research was made into the veracity of his story and, when it was found to be true, the Cronus Club assembled to decide what to do with him.

“Cruder times, cruder times!” exclaimed Virginia.

What they decided was that merely killing Victor outright was not enough. Death, as has been established, holds little fear–it is but the flesh. The mind is the source of what we are, and it was the mind that they were determined to destroy.

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.’

“And perhaps the other kalachakra were a little afraid when they heard all this. Or perhaps, as I personally feel is more likely, they regarded it as rather self-important grandstanding from a less than civilised member of their clique. Either way, the decision had been made and the blind, dumb, deaf, crippled child who was Hoeness had a sword driven though his tiny heart in the night. His executioner then proceeded to live until he died, and at his death was reborn again, some fifteen years before Hoeness’s birth. At the age of fourteen years old, this executioner journeyed to Linz, where Hoeness was to be born. He found himself a place as a domestic servant in the house of the Hoeness family itself, and observed both mother and father, noting in full detail the days up to the nine months before Hoeness was to be born. As soon as the mother began to show signs of pregnancy, the executioner carefully fed her yew bark tea. Regrettably the taste was so repugnant that Hoeness’s mother barely swallowed a few gulps before spitting the rest out, and so, falling back on something of an ugly back-up plan, Victor Hoeness’s executioner drew his blade, pinned his mother to the floor and cut her throat. He remained long enough to ensure that his victim was dead, then cleaned himself up, laid her out for burial, left a few coins for the father, and went on his way.

“And so it was that Victor Hoeness came never to be born.”