"All right."

"My name... my name is Vincent Benton. The gardener's name is Rankis. I hid my true name because... I am twenty-five years old. I am seven hundred and ninety-four. My father is Howard Benton, my mother is Ursula. I never knew my mother. She dies when I am just a child. I am born at home, on 3 October 1925. Apparently the nanny fainted when I popped out. I've never told anyone this in my entire life. No one."

"I am who I am," I replied. "That's all."

"No," he answered, levering himself out of bed. "You're not."

So saying, he unlocked the box with its crown of wires and eased it on to my head.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"I cannot accept this life," he replied. "I cannot accept it. I cannot. I just wanted someone to understand."

"Vincent..."

I tried to struggle but had no strength and little inclination. He patted my hands away, pressed the electrodes into my skull. "I'm sorry, Harry." He was weeping. "If you knew what I have done to you, if you could only understand... I'll find you, do you understand? I'll find you and keep you safe, no matter what happens." The whirr of a machine charging, the fizzle of electricity.

"Vincent, wait, I'm not-"

Too late.

Chapter 82.

I was alone when I woke after the Forgetting and, as had been the case before and would be the case, I believe, no matter what was done to my mind, I was still myself.

Still in hospital.

Still dying.

My bed had been moved, or perhaps Vincent's had been moved. The crown of wires had been tidied away, and I floated now in a warm painkiller glow, my flesh bandaged up against its own gradual shedding.

I lay there a while, contemplating nothing at all. Still at last. A thoughtless, wordless silence. After a while I stood up. My legs gave way immediately. My feet were bandaged, as were my hands, and there was no strength in the swollen redness of my knees. I crawled to the door and managed to make my way out into the corridor. A nurse found me, crying out in shock to see me in such a state, and got a porter with a wheelchair, who helped me sit up.

"I'm discharging myself," I said firmly.

"Mr August, your condition-"

"I'm dying," I replied. "I only have a couple of days left to live. I am discharging myself and there's nothing you can do to prevent me. I will sign any document you like to rid of you liability in this regard, but you'd better get it fast because in the next five minutes I am gone."

"Mr August..."

"Four minutes fifty seconds!"

"You can't..."

"I can. And you will not stop me. Where's the nearest phone?"

They tried to stop meanot with force, but with words, wheedling, dire warnings as to the consequences. I resisted them all, and from the phone at the doctors' station called Akinleye. This done, I wheeled myself out of the hospital, still in my hospital gown, and into the warm summer's air of the street. The sun was setting, brilliant orange-red over the mountains, and the air smelled of cut grass. People lurched back from me in horror, at my skin, at my falling hair, at my bloody robe where the lesions were beginning to leak, at my expression of wonder and delight as I headed downhill, letting the brakes go flying off as I sped towards the horizon.

Akinleye met me on the edge of town, in a small red Volkswagen. I'd had her in the area of Vincent's facility for months, waiting for my call, and now as I rolled my way towards her she got out of the driver's seat and said, "You look awful."

"Dying!" I replied brightly, crawling into the passenger seat. "I need every painkiller you have."

"I have a lot."

"Good. Take me to a hotel."

She took me to a hotel.

Gave me every painkiller she had.

"Pen, paper."

"Harry, your hands..."

"Pen, paper!"

Pen and paper were provided.

I tried writing and got nowhere. My hands were, as Akinleye pointed out, not in a very useful state.

"All right, typewriter."

"Harry!"

"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 knowayou 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 puddingathe 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.

end.