He sighed again and stretched, his legs creaking as he moved. He wasn’t so young now, was Vincent Rankis–this was the oldest I’d ever seen him. “Come with me, Harry,” he said. “There’s something I need to show you.”
He stood up and headed into the apartment. I followed, our drinks left abandoned on the table. He padded through into his bedroom, opened the wardrobe and reached through a collection of coats and shirts. For a moment I thought he was getting a gun, for I had naturally searched this place while he was out and found two guns–one kept in a drawer by the bed, one at the back of the linen cupboard. He didn’t. Instead, a square metal box was pulled out, a padlock on the front. The box was new–at least new since the last time I’d searched the place–and at my expression of curiosity he smiled reassurance and took it through to the dining room. He had a long glass table, surrounded by eight uncomfortable glass chairs, and he gestured me to sit in one while he unlocked the box and pulled out its contents.
My stomach curled up in my belly, breath caught on the edge of my lips. At the sound, his eyes flickered to me, curious, and I had to disguise my indiscretion with, “You haven’t said how you know.”
He half-shook his head and put the contents of the box on the table.
It was a crown of wire and electrodes. Leads trailed down from the back, and connectors criss-crossed its surface like hairs on Medusa’s head. The technology was advanced–more advanced than I had ever seen–but the purpose was easy enough to deduce. It was a cortical trigger, a mental bomb–a very advanced device for the Forgetting.
“What is it?” I asked.
He carefully laid it down in front of me so I could look. “Do you trust me?” he asked.
“Yes, absolutely.”
A Forgetting–would he really do this? Would he dare?
“Harry,” he explained softly, “you asked me how I know about your… predicament. How I know about your past life, why I believe you when you say that you have died once before.”
“Tell me.”
“What if… what if,” he murmured, “you and I have met before? What if I knew, even when I first met you, that this was not your first life, that you are… special? What if I told you that we have been friends, not for ten, twenty or thirty years, but for centuries. What if I told you that I have been trying to protect you for a very, very long time. Would you believe me?”
“I… don’t know. I wouldn’t know what to say.”
“You trust me?” he repeated urgently.
“I… yes. Yes, I do, but listen, all this…”
“I need you to put this on.” His hand pressed gently against the crown of wires. “There is so much more to you, Harry, than you know, so much more. You think this is… your second? Maybe your second life? But it’s not. You’ve lived for hundreds of years. You have… so much experience, so much to offer. This will help you remember.”
What a look of doe-eyed sincerity, what an expression of passionate concern.
I looked from Vincent to the crown and back again.
Clearly it was not to help me remember.
Clearly he intended that I should forget.
All that time, all those years–and worse, a more troubling question. In 1966, using the technologies of the time, Vincent had forced me to go through the Forgetting, and I had remembered. But this–this technology was at least fifty years ahead of that and I had no idea, no idea at all, whether my consciousness could survive this process intact.
“You trust me, Harry?”
“This is a lot to take in.”
“If you need time to think…”
“What you’re saying…”
“I can explain everything, but this way you can remember it for yourself.”
Pride.
How dare he think I’m so stupid?
Rage.
How dare he do this to me again?
Terror.
Will I survive?
Can I remember?
Do I want to remember?
The world is ending.
Now it’s up to you.
Vengeance.
I am Harry August, born New Year’s Day 1919.
I am sixty-eight years old.
I am eight hundred and ninety-nine.
I have directly killed seventy-nine men, of whom fifty-three died in war of one kind or another, and indirectly murdered through my actions at least four hundred and seventy-one people who I know of. I have witnessed four suicides, one hundred and twelve arrests, three executions, one Forgetting. I have seen the Berlin Wall rise and fall, rise and fall, seen the twin towers collapse in flames and dust, talked with men who scrambled in the mud of the Somme, listened to tales of the Crimean War, heard whispers of the future, seen the tanks roll into Tiananmen Square, walked the course of the Long March, tasted madness in Nuremberg, watched Kennedy die and seen the flash of nuclear fire bursting apart across the ocean.
None of which now matters to me half as much as this.
“I trust you,” I said. “Show me how this thing works.”
Chapter 75