by Claire North
“The pre-birth murders,” I said at last. “If they’ve been going on since 1896 of this life, that gives you over fifty years to investigate them. Do you have any leads?”
“It’s been difficult,” she conceded, “our resources limited. Those who died–we did not know their points of origin and can only conclude that they have been murdered by the simple fact that they have not been born. However, we have made some progress and narrowed our list of suspects down. In its way–” a wry smile now, as humourless as a tomb “–the loss of life among our people makes it easier to predict who might be our villain. By focusing on a specific time, a specific place, there are only so many candidates for this deed.”
“Do you have names?” I asked.
“We do, but before I tell you all, I must ask you, Professor, what it is you intend to offer me.”
For a moment I nearly told her all.
Vincent Rankis, the quantum mirror, all our research together.
But no. Too much danger, for where could knowledge of this have come if not from me?
“How about a vast organised criminal network that spans the globe,” I said, “capable of finding anyone, anywhere, and buying anything, at any price. Will that do?”
She considered.
It would do.
She gave me a name.
Chapter 64
I met Akinleye several times after her Forgetting. Once, in the life that immediately followed, I went to the school where she was studying, shook her hand and asked her how she was doing. She was a bright teenage girl, full of prospects. She was going to move to the city, she said, and become a secretary. It was the greatest ambition a young girl could have, a towering pinnacle of hope, and I wished her luck with it.
In the life after that I visited her again, this time when she was a child of seven. She’d come to the attention of the Accra Cronus Club–who in any case were keeping an eye out in that general area–as a child her parents called mad. They’d tried everything, from the shrieks of witch doctors to the chanting of imams, and still, they cried, Akinleye, their beautiful daughter, was mad. Already, the Accra Club proclaimed, Akinleye was a suicide threat.
I went to visit her before that could happen and found she had been given over to the care of a doctor who kept his patients shackled to their beds. Epileptics, schizophrenics, mothers who’d seen their children die, men with limbs hacked off, driven mad by infection and sadness, children in the last throes of cerebral malaria, their bodies twitching, were all kept together in the same ward, to be treated with one spoonful of syrup and one spoonful of lemon juice every half-hour. My fury at the doctor was so great that, on leaving the place, I requested the Accra Club to have it torn down.
“It’s like this all over the country, Harry,” they complained. “It’s just the times!”
I wouldn’t take no for an answer, and so, reluctantly, and to get rid of me, they had the building knocked down and a neat, square hospital put up in its place, where one fully trained psychiatrist cared for thirty patients, whose numbers swelled to nearly four hundred in the first three months.
Akinleye, undersized and underfed, stared at me wildly when I came to visit.
“Help me,” she sobbed. “God help me, I am possessed by a demon!”
A seven-year-old girl, rocking in despair, possessed by a demon.
“You’re not, Akinleye,” I replied. “You are whole; you are yourself.”
I took her with me back to Accra that very night, to the Cronus Club, whose members greeted her as the old friend she was and gave her the greatest meal of her lives so far, and showed her luxury, and told her she was sane and well, and welcome among them.
Many years later I met Akinleye in a clinic in Sierra Leone. She was tall and beautiful, trained as a doctor and wearing a bright purple headscarf in her hair. She recognised me from our meeting in Accra and asked me to join her on the terrace for lemonade and memories.
“They tell me that I chose to forget my life before,” she explained as we sat and watched the sun set over the shrieking forest. “They tell me that I had grown tired of who I was. It is odd knowing all these people have known me for hundreds of years, yet they are still strangers. But I tell myself it is not me they have known–it is the last me, the old me, the me that I have forgotten. Did you know that me, Harry?”
“Yes,” I replied. “I did.”
“Were we… close?”
I thought about it. “No,” I replied at last. “Not really.”
“But… from your perspective, knowing me as you did, do you think I–she–made the right decision? Was she right to choose to forget?”
I looked over at her, young and bright and full of hope, and recalled the old Akinleye dying alone, laughing as a maid danced out into the waters off the bay of Hong Kong. “Yes,” I said at last. “I think you were.”
Chapter 65
My thirteenth life.
In Beijing I was given a name. A name whose owner was of the right age, right geographical base, right access to information, to have killed so many kalachakra before they could be born. There was no motive given, no understanding of what could have driven this name to do such acts, but looking at it hard and long, I began to fear that it might be right.
I sneaked out of China at the end of the week and was back in New Jersey three days later with my wife, her lover, thick carpets and solid brick walls.
I took my time. I investigated as only a criminal mastermind can investigate–slyly, cruelly, savagely and with a great deal of ruthless corruption. Dates and places, times and rumours, snatches of gossip and stamps pressed into a passport and yes, being the good historian I was, I could see the data begin to coalesce, detect the pattern of movements and say that perhaps this name was indeed responsible for bringing death.
It took a great deal of effort, time and money, but at last, having pressed every resource I had almost to breaking point, I found what I was looking for. I went to South Africa in February 1960 to confront a murderer.
We went to the farmstead as the dusk settled on the land.
A sign by the gate proclaimed that this was MERRYDEW FARM, a place of tough brown soil and tougher orange trees. Summer was at its scorching height, and the truck bounced and rattled over a dust track turned to stone as we clattered towards the glowing lights of the farm. It was the only spot of illumination in this otherwise empty place, tiny windows of tungsten yellow beneath a vast star-spanned sky. In another place, another time, it might have been beautiful, but I was here with seven paid mercenaries and an engineer, rattling beneath an infinite universe towards an encounter with some very finite possibilities. My mercenaries wore balaclavas; so did I. As we arrived at the farm a dog started barking, bouncing round the yard furiously on a length of chain. The door opened, and a man with a shotgun obscured the light, calling dire warnings in Afrikaans. My men bundled out of the truck, weapons raised, and shouted back, telling him he was surrounded. By the time he realised that this was the case, three more men had lobbed gas into the house from the back, blinding its occupants–a black maid and a white wife. Seeing these two subdued, the farmer lowered his gun, begged for mercy, and as his hands were tied together and he was dragged upstairs, swore that he would get us, some day.
The farmer we locked in the upstairs bathroom, the maid handcuffed to the sink beside him, the windows of the house thrown wide open to let the last of the gas clear.
The farmer’s wife we kept downstairs. She was old, seventy at least, but I had seen her older in my time. The heat and dryness of this place had hardened her to rock, and she had none of the usual pudginess I associated with her old age. The mercenaries kept her sitting on a tatty sofa in the parlour of the farm, hands cuffed together behind her back, blindfold over her eyes, as I prowled the house, looking for anything amiss. Family photos–the happy farmer and his wife, here on their first tractor, there on a holiday by the sea. Memorabilia of times past and places seen, gifts hand-sewn by a neighbour proclaiming, “Fr
iendship and love”. Bills suggesting that the orange trade was not necessarily booming at this time. Postcards from a distant cousin, politely informing them that she was well and wishing them the best. Painkillers under the kitchen sink, recently purchased and being rapidly consumed. The farmer–or his wife–was dying, and I could guess who. I looked at the label. They were prescribed to Mrs G. Lill, Merrydew Farm. I wondered what the G stood for, as in another life I’d only ever known her by one name–Virginia. Virginia who’d saved me from Franklin Phearson, Virginia who’d introduced me to the Cronus Club, and now Virginia who’d betrayed us all, murdering us in our mothers’ wombs. If I’d given Vincent one drop of information more than I had, she’d have killed me before I was born too.
I went back to the parlour, where my technician was already halfway through setting up the equipment we’d dragged all this way. My mercenaries were under orders not to speak, but at my entry Virginia looked up anyway, head straining round as if through her blindfold, in the direction of the creaky floorboard beneath my boot.
“You don’t want money?” she said at last, in Afrikaans.
I squatted in front of her and replied, very softly, “No.”
Her eyebrows twitched beneath the blindfold, trying to place my voice. Then her shoulders sagged forward a little, her head bowed. “You must be retribution,” she said at last. “I wondered how long you’d take.”
“Long enough,” I replied, and rattling the little tub of painkillers for her to hear, added, “We nearly missed you this time.”
“It’s my nerves,” she replied. “Quite literally. They’re shutting down from the periphery in. I’ll suffocate to death or my heart will stop just after I become paralysed from the neck down.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“I assume you want my birthday?” she added quickly. “It won’t be hard to find now you know it’s me. If you wouldn’t mind not torturing me for it; my heart really will give out very fast.”
I smiled despite myself, and said, “It’s all right. I don’t want your birthday.”
“I can’t give you any information,” she added firmly. “I’m very sorry, dear, but I really can’t. Not that I know very much worth knowing.”
“You must know why you did it, why you killed so many of us.”
A hesitation. Then, “We’re making something bigger. We’re making something better. We’re making… a kind of god, I suppose. Yes, I think that’s what we are doing, in fact. A kind of deity.”
The quantum mirror. Just enough technology, Harry, just enough lives, and we’ll build a machine that can solve the mysteries of the universe. Look at all things, with the eyes of God. How easily the idea seduced.
My technician was ready. He looked at me for approval, and I nodded, stepping back. Virginia flinched as the first electrode was placed against her skull. “W-what are you doing?” she stammered, unable to fully bite back on her fear.
I didn’t answer. As the next electrode was settled above her right eye she blurted, “Tell me. I’ve paid my dues, I’ve done my bit–always. I always helped the young, got the children away, served the Cronus Club. You can’t… Tell me.”
She was beginning to cry, the tears driving little pink rivers through the thick make-up on her skin. “You can’t… You can’t make me… forget everything. I’m… I’m not ready. I’m… I want to see the… see the… You can’t do this.”
I nodded at a couple of my men, who held her steady as the last few nodes were attached. She gasped as a needle was pushed under her skin, a chemical cocktail to soften up the receptors. “If I’m to for-forget,” she gasped, “you can tell me your name! Show me your face!”
I didn’t.
“Please! Hear me out! He can help you! We’re doing this for everyone, for all the kalachakra! We’re going to make it better!”
I nodded at the technician. The fat machine, all electric parts and stolen technologies, which we had lumbered down the tracks of South Africa, whirred into life, building up the charge that would be blasted into Virginia’s brain. She was shaking now with the tears, and as the charge built she opened her mouth to say something more. The machine triggered, and Virginia collapsed forward–a shell, the mind burned away.
In the years to come the Cronus Club was to debate extensively what to do with Virginia, but in the end they made no radical decisions. The Virginia who had murdered so many of our kind had been destroyed, her mind wiped blank. I had made the decision for them, and that was all there was to say.
Chapter 66
I spent the rest of my thirteenth life quietly hunting Vincent, and failing.
It is my suspicion that, in the aftermath of his attack on the Cronus Club, he was very deliberately keeping his head down, avoiding the attention of his now roused, if weakened, enemies. Nevertheless, I continued my search, as I have no doubt he searched for me, and occasionally followed the odd lead to unlikely places, always a little too late, a little too far behind. If my security measures were paranoid, I suspect Vincent Rankis in that life was operating on a whole other level. I can only speculate as to whether he was as lonely as I.
I lived far longer than I usually do, pushing both my body and the limits of medical science. No one seemed surprised that a money launderer wanted access to advanced technical equipment, nor did my doctors, after suitable bribes were administered, question why I might so firmly dictate the course of my treatment when the inevitable diseases struck. I had been surprised at how easy it is to corrupt men. Even good men, it seemed, could be swayed once you had them used to the notion that it was acceptable to give them a gift of a bottle of wine, then a gift of a new toy for their kid, then a gift of a day out for the family, then a weekend away, then membership of a golf club, then a new car… by which point the great mass of gifts already accepted made the rejection of this latest present hard even for the best of men and their status as morally compromised assets complete in both the eyes of criminals and the view of the law. Mei was patiently loyal to the last. Her lover ran away in 1976 and she never sought another, spending her time instead writing furious letters to disreputable companies and campaigning vigorously for the Democrats. We saw in the year 2000 in New York, neither of us strong enough to travel further afield at our time of life, and Mei wept like a true native as George W. Bush won the election.
“It’s all gone to hell!” she exclaimed. “There’s no talking to people any more!”
We sat in silence watching the twin towers fall in 2001, over and over again, a loop on every screen across the country. Mei said, “I’m thinking of buying a flag to put out in our garden,” and was dead three months later. I had never seen the twenty-first century before. I wasn’t particularly impressed by the medicine, even less so by the politics, and in 2003, having decided at the ripe old age of eighty-five that another round of chemotherapy wouldn’t do any good and that the painkillers I was now physiologically and psychologically dependent on were weakening my mind to the point of no return, I bequeathed half of my fortune to Mei’s favourite charity and half to any kalachakra who could find it, and took an overdose one cool October night.
I think there is a study of the effects of narcotic addiction over multiple lifespans. I died in my thirteenth life utterly dependent on medications of a wide and occasionally interacting kind, and to this day I cannot help but wonder whether their effects on both my body and mind do not linger. I know it is absurd to suggest that any event in 2003 can have implications for those of 1919, but one day, with the subject’s permission, I think I would enjoy studying the physiology of an infant kalachakra, who died of drug dependency in their last life, to observe whether there are any marked effects on the child.
Whether there were on me in my fourteenth life I cannot tell, as, following the usual course, I did not begin to recover full faculties for the normal passage of years. I made no attempt to contact the Club during this childhood, limiting myself instead to the essential tricks of a youthful ouroboran: theft, manipulation,
exploiting sports results and gambling outfits to acquire any money I might need. In truth, I was also still determined to keep my head down, and made no attempts to run away or find Vincent but worked as Patrick August’s apprentice in the grounds of the house, as I had done so many lives ago, before the Cronus Club entered my existence. In 1937 I applied for a scholarship at Cambridge to study history, considering that, with so many ouroborans forced to forget and the Cronus Club in such a poor state of affairs, a knowledge of the past and, more importantly, of the means to study it, might allow me to detect patterns in events which I could usefully connect to Vincent in years to come. When I was offered the place, the Hulnes were gobsmacked, not least because Clement, my pasty cousin, had actually been turned down–a thing almost unimaginable for one of his wealth and background at the time. My grandmother Constance, for almost the first time in that life, summoned me to her study.
I had noticed something of a pattern in the Hulnes’ relationships with me. For most of my lives my biological father, Rory, ignored me as one might ignore a somewhat embarrassing disease, a thing that is part of yourself but best not discussed with others. My aunt Alexandra showed cautious interest, hidden behind a mask of respectability; Victoria ignored everyone who wasn’t of use to her, and I was no different; and my grandmother Constance actively shunned me and yet was also the regular bearer of bad news. If my actions were somehow disreputable–and at that time it took very little for a bastard son’s deeds to be considered disreputable–it was Constance more than Rory who did what she doubtless considered to be necessary but dirty work.