“Akinleye,” I said firmly, “in less than a week I will be dead, and it’s a chemical cocktail miracle that I have any conscious faculties as it is. Get me a typewriter.”
She got me a typewriter and pumped me full of every chemical our combined medical knowledge could think of, to keep me both lucid and sane.
“Thank you,” I said. “Now if you’d be so kind as to leave me enough morphine to fell an elephant and to wait outside, that would be appreciated.”
“Harry…”
“Thank you,” I repeated. “I’ll visit in the next life.”
When she was gone, I sat down before the machine and considered carefully my words.
In time, as the sun finally vanished beneath the horizon, I wrote: I am writing this for you.
My enemy.
My friend.
You know, already, you must know.
You have lost.
Vincent.
This is my will and testament. My confession, if you will. My victory, my apology. These are the last words I will write in this life, for already I can feel the end coming to this body, as the end always comes. Soon I will lay all this aside, take the syringe Akinleye has left behind, and stop the pain from carrying on any more. I have told you all this, the passage of my life, as much to force myself to action as for your enlightenment. I know that in this I put myself entirely in your power, reveal every aspect of my being, of the many beings I have pretended to be in the course of this, and of whatever being it is I have become. To protect myself after this confession, I now have no choice but to destroy you utterly and the knowledge you have possessed of me. I force myself to action.
By now, you will have discovered I am missing from the hospital.
Fear will have gripped your belly, a fear that the Forgetting did not work, that I am fled.
And perhaps a deeper fear, for you are into the art of deducing all things. Perhaps you have deduced from my absence that more than just a fear of dying has caused my departure. Perhaps you have realised from my sanity after you attached your little machine that the last machine you attached did not work, nor the machine before that. Perhaps you see unfolding before you, as neutrons spreading in a chain reaction, the whole course of these events, every lie, every deceit, every cruelty, every betrayal, unravelling like an atom before the eye of God. Perhaps you know already what it is I have to say to you, though I do not yet think you can believe it.
You will send men to find me, and with little difficulty they will indeed stumble on my corpse. Akinleye will be gone, her work done for this day. As well as the empty needle, they will find these words and bring them to you, I trust, in the hospital. Your eye will scan this page and with my very first words you will know–you will know as you already must know, as you can no longer deny in the pit of your belly, that you have lost.
You have lost.
And in another life, a life yet to come, a seven-year-old boy will walk down a lane beyond south London with a cardboard box in his hand. He will stop before a house whose gardens smell of rhododendrons and hear the whistle of a passing train. A father and a mother will be in that place. His name is Howard, hers is Ursula. Their gardener, who keeps the flowers so fragrant, goes by the name of Rankis.
This seven-year-old child will approach these strangers and, with the innocence of youth, offer them something from his cardboard box. An apple, maybe, or an orange. A caramel sweet, a piece of sticky toffee pudding–the detail is not important, for who would refuse a gift from such an innocent child? The father, the mother, maybe even the gardener too, for caution is not for such events, each will take something from the boy, and thank him, and eat it as he turns and walks away up the lane.
I promise the poison will be quick.
And Vincent Rankis will never be born.
And all will be as it should.
Time will continue.
The Clubs will spread their fingers across the aeons, and nothing will change.
We will not be gods, you or I.
We will not look into that mirror.
Instead, for those few days you have left, you are mortal at last.