The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North Read Free Book Online Page A

dying. I remember the moment when it stops.”
    “What’s it like?” asked Phearson, eyes gleaming with a personal enthusiasm I hadn’t yet seen in his work.
    “The stopping is fine. Nothing. A stop. The getting there is difficult.”
    “Did you see anything?”
    “No.”
    “Nothing?”
    “Nothing more or less than the natural function of a decaying mind.”
    “Maybe it doesn’t count for you.”
    “ ‘Doesn’t count’? You think that my death isn’t…” I checked myself, looked away. “I suppose I haven’t got anything to compare it with, have I?” I didn’t add that neither had he.
    I told no lies but couldn’t quite satisfy him.
    “But how does the invasion of Afghanistan happen? There’s no one there to fight!”
    His ignorance of the past was almost as profound as his ignorance of the future but at least had the advantage of beingindependently corroborated. I told him to study the Great Game, to research the Pashtun, look at a map. I could give him dates and places, I explained, but the understanding–that’d have to be his own.
    And in my spare time I studied. Phearson was, it seemed, as good as his word. I read about the Cronus Club.
    There was very little indeed. If it hadn’t tallied so closely with my experience, I would have considered the entire thing a hoax. A reference to a society in Athens in AD 56, renowned for their learned discourse and exclusivity, the mystery surrounding their nature leading to their expulsion four years later, which, the recorder noted, they took with remarkable good grace and careless ease, unbothered by the events of the time. A diarist noting two years before the sack of Rome that a building on the corner of his street dedicated to the cult of Cronus had emptied, the very finely dressed ladies and gentlemen who went there moving on with a warning that soon things would not be worth their staying, and lo, the barbarians came. In India a man accused of murder denying the crime and slitting his own throat in his cell, saying before he died that it was a tedious shame but that like the snake he would swallow his own tail and be born again. A group renowned for their secretive ways leaving Nanjing in 1935 and one, a lady known for her wealth–no one knew how she had acquired it–warning her favourite maid to leave the city and remove her family far afield, giving her coin to do it and prophesying a war in which everything would burn. Some called them prophets; the more superstitious named them demons. Whatever the truth, wherever they went, the Cronus Club seemed to have a twin knack for avoiding trouble and staying out of sight.
    In a sense, Phearson’s file on the Cronus Club was his own undoing. For, reading it, for the very first time I began to consider the question of time.

Chapter 12
    I have already mentioned some of the stages which we go through when attempting to understand what we are. In my second life I, in a rather clichéd display, killed myself to make it cease, and in my third life I sought an answer from God.
    I have said that I went to some pains to find very dull, safe positions during the Second World War. What I have not stated is that the war also offered an opportunity to learn some more about the limits of my present learning. Thus, from a Jamaican engineer by the questionable name of Friday Boy, I heard about the souls of the dead and the angry ghosts that stay behind when they are not honoured. From a very earnest American officer called Walter S. Brody came the mysteries of Baptism, Anabaptism, Mormonism and Lutheranism laid out with the conclusion, “My ma was all of them at some time, and what she learned is that the best way to talk to God is by yourself.”
    A Sudanese soldier who had hauled baggage for Rommel’s retreating tanks in Tunisia before escaping–or perhaps being captured, the rumour was never clarified–showed me the way to Mecca. He told me how to recite the words, “I bear witness that there is no God but