The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 29

“I hate to be the one to ask this,” she said. “But if the world is ending, what are we really expected to do about it?”

Twelfth life.

Aged six, I wrote a letter to the London branch of the Cronus Club, requesting enough money to get me to London and a standard Club letter inviting me to join a prestigious school. The money was left in a dead letter drop, at my request, in a village called Hoxley, where some many lives ago I had fled from Phearson by the light of the moon.

I wrote a letter to Patrick and the dying Harriet, wishing them the best and thanking them for their time, and set out. In Hoxley I collected the money from its stash in a tin box beneath a hazel tree, and bought myself a fare to London. The baker smiled at me as he passed by in the street, and I felt Phearson in my belly, heard his footstep in my ear, and held on to the wall, wondering why my body refused to forget a thing which my mind had long since passed on by.

I took a cart to Newcastle, and when the ticket inspector on the train asked me if I was accompanied, I showed him the letter inviting me to attend a school and told him my aunty was waiting at London.

My aunty for the purposes of this life’s adventure was Charity Hazelmere.

“There’s the boy!” she hollered brightly as the conductor escorted me carefully from the train. “Harry, come along at once!”

There are many ways a child may be lifted from his linear parents. The dead letter drop I have referred to, along with the payment of suitable monies and provision of suitable documents, is a generally accepted and popular one. It provides enough resources for the kalachakra to make his own way to the nearest Cronus Club without necessarily exposing vital information such as where the kalachakra lives and is raised. It does, however, provide a degree of exposure in that it can narrow a search to an area. A generally more established rule is for a dead letter drop to be placed in a region where the recipient knows his parents are likely to take him at some point in the early years of his life, thus securing supplies and discretion in one swoop. The only danger of such an arrangement of course being the unlikely event that the family does not conform to expectations.

If discretion is not a concern–and arguably why should it be for the most affable and innocent of our kin–then direct intervention is also sanctioned, and no one did direct intervention quite like Charity Hazelmere. With her patrician nose, operatic voice and collection of stiff black bodices, which I have never seen her vary in all her lives, she is every adult’s nightmare of a fiend headmistress, her merest glance over the half-moon spectacles slung by a chain and balanced on the end of her nose enough to reduce mere mortals to quivering doubts and fear. She has cajoled, bullied, badgered, hounded and occasionally plain kidnapped kalachakra children from their trembling parents, all in the name of a quieter life for her charges and with the express hope that in years to come other kalachakra will have the good sense to do the same for future members of our kin.

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?”