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.