A couple of kids, a boy and a girl of about ten years of age, now jumped from between two parked cars, laughing and pointing, smiles appropriately gap-toothed, not a bit skeary of the dangerous gang. Bathing-suited, shiny-greased with lotion and sloppily wet, holding their pudgy little stomachs with glee. Who could have believed such a thing in 1981 as a villain on horseback? I wished that those kids would run away, as sensible 1878 rapscallions would have done. I tried to think of a plan to pull them out of harm’s way that wouldn’t result in all of us dead as winter tore, but nothing came immediately to mind, and so I figured I would improvise, shoot a few bullets, maybe kill a couple of gunmen, and drag the kids to safety without incurring any mortal wounds myself. I opened the door a crack, prepared to dash into the thick of the chaos, when Rasháh pointed a finger at the children, then at his sickly white forehead. In a blur and a whoosh, the children swept through the dry air and vanished into the creature’s skull.
Pete cowered.
The sun beat down.
Monsieur Rasháh began calling out again, this time in a different, heavily accented language that I didn’t recognize, something that didn’t sound exactly human. His face changed; became old, wrinkled, and scheming; then became very young, childlike and impish; then re-settled into his inscrutable, waxy mold.
“At any rate,” I said. “He’s a really ghastly lout.”
“Should I just call the police?” Pete asked, I said that no matter what he did, he shouldn’t call the police, and then Hester exclaimed that calling an officer of the law was entirely unnecessary given that, as she put it, “Watt O’Hugh is one of the 19th century’s most acclaimed shootists!”
Pete wondered aloud who was Watt O’Hugh?; and, dodging the question, I said that one’s skill or lack of skill as a shootist wasn’t the issue, it was that only special extra-Magic bullets would do the trick with Monsieur Rasháh.
“And even the Magic bullets don’t actually do the trick,” I admitted. “He catches them in his left hand, and he eats them like peanuts. Exhibit A of his invincibility being, you see, the fact that he is alive out there in the parking lot. I emptied a few barrels worth of Magic bullets at that bastard back in ’75. And there he is, good as gold, in the parking lot.”
Pete glared.
“I give you five minutes to fix this, dude,” he whispered angrily. (That’s what men will call each other in the waning days of the 20th Century: dude. In the 19th century, this referred to a nattily attired dandy. In the 20th century, it means precisely nothing.) “Then I’m calling the police. And listen, Darcy – I like you. But fix this. Whatever you do fix this.” Then, expressing the 20th century’s overriding capitalist impulse, he added, “This will prove bad for business, and we cannot have this kind of thing here.”
He retreated to the front desk, where he sat, tapping his fingers, doing not much of anything else, waiting to call the police. His beard beamed.
“A plan?” Hester asked, and I said that I had not only a plan, but a plan that might work. The best kind, in my opinion, I noted, and Hester said she’d always had the notion that I was drawn to the absolutely just but hopeless cause, and she looked at me significantly and with some sadness, and looking into those dark, grum eyes, I thought I could understand why, but my introspection was cut short, because just then, in the parking lot, Rasháh screamed, a loud bloodcurdling scream, and an army of red-winged demons descended from the sky. They looked just as one might imagine demons would look: gaunt, hungry, small and menacing. They had pointed ears, slits for nostrils. They laughed and smirked.[7] The gang spread out, Rasháh remaining out front, and the other members of the posse taking up position at each exit, a demon or two buzzing protectively above each of them. The demons screamed along in unison with Rasháh (in that sing-song language with its sharp cutting-knife edges that wasn’t Chinese and wasn’t German) bouncing off his shoulder, rippling into the angry hot air, fluttering for a moment with little, high-speed hummingbird wings, then alighting again, a thousand on his left shoulder and ten thousand on his right.
Now that we were trapped, the gunmen started shooting out the windows. The lights in the game room exploded, spraying shards of broken glass down on a middle-aged man playing chess with his teen-aged son, the father of the two missing children, unaware of their fate. This nicely lightly tanned man, with “hair plugs” that looked almost-real and thousand-dollar tortoise shell spectacles, dived under a billiard table, dragging his son with him.
I shot through the broken window at the henchman to Rasháh’s left – pretty much knowing it would do no good – and a red, blistery demon caught the bullets and tossed them to Rasháh, who swallowed them. Then they both laughed.
Hester and I dashed to the front desk; I told Pete that I needed the back door, and I assured him that the moment Hester and I abandoned the spa, the Rasháh gang would leave him alone. He should then feel free to call the constable, if he wished, but I imagined the police report would reflect rather poorly on his sanity. He took my elbow and drew me behind the desk, through a narrow doorway that led to a winding windowless hallway that smelled of mold and hummed and buzzed with fluorescence, a form of future-world lighting that seemed to discomfit Hester even more than the demons had. We passed a hunched old man, a rusty guts with pallid, puckered skin, who dragged a cleaning pail and gasped and groaned as he walked. We came to a hard metal door, which Pete unbolted with a large key before sprinting away to relative safety at the front desk.
I peered outside through the keyhole. A rangy, jittery young man stood a few feet away in the hot sun, a rifle in his hand, which was peeled on the door, a red demon cackling over his left shoulder and a black demon hollering over his right shoulder. The gunman was just waiting. He had a terrible purple scar, which began at the top of his forehead, drizzled over the front of his face and disappeared behind the collar of his blue shirt. Tortoise tracks ran behind him in the sand, and the sun vanished in a slow explosion back of the mountains on the horizon.
I smiled at Hester.
“You can swim?” I asked, and she said that she couldn’t, and so I asked whether she thought she could hold her breath and float for a spell if I held onto her tight, and she shrugged and nodded, though she wondered why it mattered.
“Our escape route,” I said. “Along the very bottom of the ocean. Quite an idea, if I do say so myself.”
Hester asked me where the ocean was, and I said, “Right on the other side of this door.
“On three,” I said. “Breathe in deeply, shut your eyes, hold your breath, please do not panic and breathe by accident (because then you will assuredly die in terrible pain) and do not let go of me.
“All right?”
She agreed. I took both her hands firmly in mine.
I counted to three.
I opened the door.
A moment that felt like millennia later, all went dark, and we stood on solid ground in an airless void, ears popping, lungs collapsing. I pushed up, kicking through the water and holding onto Hester with all my strength. I could see a light far above, flickering and floating in the haze. Seaweed drifted through my field of vision. Bony-armored, jawless fish eyed us quizzically as we passed. A creature like an octopus with a coiled shell flittered above us.
Hester seemed to go limp in my arms.
After some time, we crashed up into the air like rockets, gasping and coughing, and then a while later we washed up on a sandy beach like a couple of pieces of driftwood, still gasping and coughing, though less urgently. Glistening before us was an ocean like any other, and behind us, a gentle forest of giant ferns and conifers.
“Welcome to Pangaea,” I whispered wetly to Hester. “No one calls it that now, because there is no one here to call it that, but that’s what it is. Pangaea.”
Some kind of flying insect buzzed my ear, a prehistoric sort of gallnipper, and I swatted it away, being careful not to kill it.
“My little desert valley is a dead ocean floor,” I said. “It used to be an
inland sea.”
We lay down on the beach. The sand cradled the back of my head. Her hand still held mine tightly. Her hand was wet and sweaty. She was still out of breath. She squinted up at the sky. The sky was blue, a little cloudy. The sky looked like any sky, except that it was birdless. And because the sky was birdless, because this beach had no gulls, the ocean didn’t sound like an ocean. The clouds in the sky, like any clouds, looked like sheep, like cotton, things that didn’t exist yet, but there they were in the sky.
“A great inland sea,” I repeated. “This is the desert valley, which used to be a great inland sea.”
“A long time ago, I suppose,” she said quietly.
I agreed.
“A long time ago,” I said. “Or right now. Depending on your perspective.”
“What is ‘now’, anyway, to a Roamer?” she asked, with a laugh.
The laugh sounded nice here, in this peaceful world, and I was glad that Hester had given mother Earth her very first laugh.
Behind us, a roar, a great earth-rattling din, then silence.
“Dinosauria?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Dinosauria haven’t evolved yet, Hester. It’s a peaceful planet. Plant life, bugs. Some small animal life. Maybe that noise was the earth moving. Or a bit of thunder, quite a distance away.”
“Good,” she said, and she laughed again. The Earth’s second laugh.
I propped myself up on my elbows, scanned the horizon and sighed. This land would see so much in the thousands of millennia to come, very little of it good. But right now, on this shore, it was possible to believe in a God who would know better than to create fearsome giant lizards, and then malevolent humanity.
Walking together down the beach, our feet just bouncing on the sand. Hester pointed out that we were not making any footprints, and I said that Time Roamers can change nothing, not even the sand on a beach.
“If a Roamer tries to change the Past,” I said, “and there’s any chance he’ll get away with it, he’s removed from something called the interlinear Maze, which is something you don’t want to try.”
“Could you always roam? Were you born with it?”
“No. Someone showed me how to do it.”
This brought back a memory that I wanted to forget. Hester didn’t ask me anything else about it. The sun was starting to set behind me, my third sunset of the last couple of hours.
Ahead of us was a bend in the coast and a little inlet, a pretty, picturesque thing, shining red in the sunset and descending into an inland lagoon. We zagged from the shoreline, plunged into the primitive forest, and then we climbed a small, scrubby hill that overlooked the sea and the lagoon, and we sat in the sand and small tufts of rough grass. I kicked off my boots and let my feet dry out in the arid Triassic air.
There was no sign of M. Rasháh, and I wondered what that meant. I kept looking out to sea, expecting to see him rise from the depths, laughing.
“So where is he?” Hester asked me. “When does he fly back here with his gang and kill us?”
“Watch the ocean,” I said. “I assume they followed us and perhaps, not knowing exactly where they were going, they failed to grab for themselves a lungful of air. So maybe they’ll come floating to the top, drowned. But is it possible to die when a body’s roaming? If a Roamer cannot change the past, can he leave a corpse? I’m not so sure. When they ran out of breath, maybe they shot back to Pete’s spa. Or maybe right back to Lida. Or, again, maybe they will float to the top of the ocean.”
I thought.
“Maybe they’ll just disappear under the depths, the moment they drown, and float off into some dark cloud, somewhere in a dream.” I smiled. “Leave the interlinear Maze forever.”
“And the children?” she asked. “What of the little boy and girl?”
“I am hoping,” I mused, “that if Rasháh and his gang die in a prehistoric sea, their actions in 1981 will be undone, because they will have died long before they are ever born, or, in Rashah’s case, created. (I cannot imagine such a creature having been born of a woman.) My other thought is that if they leave the interlinear Maze, perhaps they will cease to exist. It also occurs to me that if they followed me into the future – roaming into 1981 using Watt O’Hugh’s frequent flyer miles, so to speak (and forgive the futuristic slang, Hester, I can no longer help myself) – then they’d be entirely unable to inflict any permanent damage.”
Hester explained, quite succinctly I thought, why none of these theories held water. I nodded, but she had no better ideas, so we were stuck with mine.
I didn’t really know how that worked, the Maze, but it was something a friend had said to me in Weedville, moments before vanishing into a gaping hole in space and time, perhaps forever, and so those words had taken on more than a little profundity. I thought about it a lot, that Maze.
“I wish you could have shot them, Watt,” she said. “I traveled through the desert to find the world’s greatest shootist in his hideout, and you haven’t shot anyone.”
She sighed.
“Are you a fraud? Can you shoot people at all?”
I fished into my pocket and pulled out the bottle, offered it to Hester.
“Bourbon whiskey from the future?” I asked.
She sat up, took the bottle, lifted it to her lips, took a slug.
“I can shoot people,” I said, while she drank. “I’m even good at it. I’m just not particularly enamored of it.”
The sea stayed placid calm. No corpses bobbing, no guns blazing.
Stars began to flicker, the night descended, the world turned a dark friendly blue, a cool wind blew off the water, and Hester and I were getting warm and tippled from my bottle of corn juice. It was nighttime, and still no one had come to kill us, and no one had washed up on the shore drowned. We were starting to get hungry, but our nerves had stilled, and we were enjoying the respite from fear.
“Look,” Hester said suddenly, staring me straight in the eye. “If you want to go underground, Hugh Watt isn’t the alias to choose.”
I shrugged and took another slug.
“I never said I was creative,” I muttered. “I’m just a cow herder, gone into retiracy. And you know, part-time ….”
“Outlaw.”
“If I was framed, am I still an outlaw?” I asked. “If I am utterly, completely innocent, am I still an outlaw?”
She nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “If the jury finds you guilty, you’re guilty, whether you did it or not.”
I shrugged. I’d heard this before.
“Anyway,” she said, “you’re living off the spoils of the Lervine job, if I’m not mistaken, which was not entirely legal.”
“Sure,” I agreed. “But that’s not what I’m wanted for. I’m a wanted man for a crime I didn’t commit. No one cares about those things I really did.”
I paused.
“The coast is clear,” I said. “You understand, Hester? Come clean.”
She had interrupted what should have been a perfectly peaceful, more than slightly fuddled afternoon, and in my view it was long-past time for her to give me some sort of an explanation.
To begin with, I wondered aloud how’d she’d located me, and Hester replied ambiguously that she’d always been good at finding treasures hidden in the sand; when I asked why Rasháh was after her, Hester surmised that it probably had more to do with me than with her, though it might have something to do with J.P. Morgan, come to think of it, as a matter of fact. (This was a name that I knew, but which I had hoped not to hear again.)
“The root of this is your skill at being simultaneously alive and not-alive,” she said. “This is a supernatural wile that J.P. Morgan wants and will pay for. Quite a story,” she laughed, “that one.”
She lay back on the hilltop, swimming in the stars.
“You know how to do this,” she said flatly, staring at this long-ago sky, not at me. “You know how to be alive and not-alive.”
I grunted in affirmation. I said
that there were a few different ways, and that I thought I could demonstrate all of them, if I wished it. Witnesses would swear they’d seen my dead body in the Wyoming mountain snow, and yet here I was, so the fallacious case could be made convincingly that I was now something of a ghost. (In truth, I was alive as could be, and not even a little bit dead; my death was nothing but a very good parlor trick – but more on that later.)
Still, J.P. Morgan and I had something of an unpleasant history, and I thought it unwise to help him. He had at one time promised me a fortune to run a Wild West show into New York city, but he had instead framed me for murder, shot me off the top of a tenement building (which had really hurt like a sonofabitch) and incarcerated me in a Wyoming prison, which was, to say the least, something of a breach of contract.
Hester said she understood, but in spite of all that had happened between J.P. Morgan and me in the past, he was an enemy of the Sidonians, and our enemy’s enemy was our friend, and we could not afford to spit on a friend like this.
There was also the matter of a rather urgent train robbery to reckon with, she added, which she had neglected to mention earlier, and with which she needed my help, and, more to the point, the help of my ghosts, and, further to the point, the help of Mr. Morgan, but it again all came back to me. I wondered how she’d gotten herself wrapped up in train robberies and resurrection of the dead, and that crazy millionaire robber baron, and she said it was a rather long story and asked me how much time I had, and, though I no longer owned a pocket watch, I pretended to look at one, and I said that if my watch were correct, we had a few hundred million years till the dinosauria would evolve on this particular stretch of land and eat us, and she laughed again, but this time it sounded a little false, as though she were trying to flatter me.
“People die,” I said, “when you rob a train.”
Hester nodded in the starlight. She rolled over on her side.
“Many people will certainly die if you don’t rob this particular train,” she said. “And everyone aboard is a Sidonian.”
Watt O'Hugh Underground: Being the Second Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh III Book 2) Page 3
