Watt O'Hugh and the Innocent Dead: Being the Third Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third Book 3)
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PRAISE FOR
The Strange and Astounding Memoirs
of Watt O’Hugh the Third
Winner, Best Fantasy Novel, Indie Excellence Book Awards 2012 (for Ghosts)
NAMED TO KIRKUS REVIEWS’ “BEST OF 2011”! (for Ghosts)
“Watt O’Hugh will stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page of Steven Drachman’s joyful, hilarious and smart tale. Much like the dizzy feeling I have when I get off the spinning teacup ride at an amusement park, my head happily spun through time and place. Drachman, or maybe it was Watt O’Hugh, made me an instant fan.” — Nicolle Wallace, New York Times best-selling author of Eighteen Acres, host of MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House”
“Touching tragedy, dead-pan comedy and a time-roaming cowboy? Part three of Drachman’s epic fantasy series is indeed fantastic!” — David David Katzman, award-winning author of A Greater Monster (Bedhead Books)
“Drachman’s time-traveling hero returns for retribution …. [This] exuberant novel is chock-full of fantastical elements; in addition to Watt’s time-roaming ability and spectral allies … there are demons, oracles, dragons and assorted monstrosities…. Watt shines!” — Kirkus Reviews
“Well-researched … amusingly discursive and rollickingly energetic. Watt evades fantastical monsters with the same self-reported aplomb he uses to confront demonic gunfighters, rob trains, and comfort distressed maidens (both living and otherwise). Four stars (out of five)!” — Bradley A. Scott, Foreword Reviews
“If you gave up on the feasibility of a Western/science fiction mash-up when ‘Cowboys vs Aliens’ tanked a few months back, give it another try. On the page, at any rate.… Drachman revives the nascent genre with his rip-snorting, mind boggling novel … [T]here’s a lot going on in this teeming tome!” — Peter Keough, The Boston Phoenix
“[Q]uick-reading, page-turning pulpy adventures!” — Revolution Science Fiction
“[I]ntriguing and entertaining novels … and the author has been at some pains to keep them historically accurate, at least as much as his plot allows. Not the kind of thing you find too often, and that in itself can be a virtue.” — Don D'Ammassa, author, Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Blood Beast
“Uproarious! He brings to his many adventures a sensibility like that of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman…. Drachman infuses this blending of Wild Western and time-travel science fiction with breakneck plotting, sharp dialogue, and some solid but well-camouflaged historical research; he neatly balances his hero’s romantic dalliances with his hairsbreadth adventures, and the momentum sustained through these two volumes is enjoyable enough to make the concluding volume of the trilogy eagerly anticipated.” — Historical Novel Society
“Quixote-esque …. With stories of Chinese emperors, legends of magical creatures, the streets of 1870s New York and time-roaming gunmen of the Wild West[.]” — The Bethesda Gazette
“If you enjoy Westerns, SF, or just want to read a few books that aren’t set in yet another dystopian landscape, give the Watt O’Hugh novels a try. You just may find a new favorite author, and Watt’s adventures aren’t over just yet. 4 Enormous and Threatening Sand Crabs out of 5!” — Jodi Scaife, Fanbase Press
“From deadlings and mystical power to a utopic society, this strange mix has a bit of everything, the surprise is that it actually does come together to create a rollicking tale with enough lose ends to fuel a sequel. Those who grew up with the serial productions of the 1950’s (think The Perils of Pauline) will see instant parallels between those cliff-hanger tales and this fun romp through the wild west.” — Sandy Amazeen, Monsters and Critics
“… a tale of yesteryear, evocative of Robber Barons and the old West, while ingeniously narrated from a modern perspective, courtesy of Magic and an ability to roam Time…. Watt O’Hugh is cowboy fantasy noir and worth a read.” — Mike Brotherton, author, Star Dragon and Spider Star (Tor)
“This book refuses to be labeled. It begins [as] a memoir, turns into a Western with some flashy fantasy heels, then becomes an action and adventure novel, followed closely by a time-traveling extravaganza. I knew I was going to like it from the first page.” Valentina Cano, author, The Rose Master
WATT O’HUGH
AND THE INNOCENT DEAD
BEING THE THIRD PART OF
THE STRANGE AND ASTOUNDING MEMOIRS
OF WATT O’HUGH THE THIRD
Steven S. Drachman
Copyright © 2019 by Steven S. Drachman
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places groups, organizations and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, groups, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN 978-1-7329139-3-6
Front cover illustration and book design by Mark Matcho
Chickadee Prince Logo by Garrett Gilchrist
Visit Chickadee Prince Books at https://chickadeeprince.com/
Visit Watt O’Hugh at http://watt-ohugh.com/
First Printing
STEVEN S. DRACHMAN
WATT O’HUGH AND THE INNOCENT DEAD
BEING THE THIRD PART OF THE STRANGE AND ASTOUNDING MEMOIRS OF WATT O’HUGH THE THIRD
STEVEN S. DRACHMAN is a writer and critic whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, The Village Voice and The Chicago Sun-Times. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters.
WATT O’HUGH
AND THE INNOCENT DEAD
Being the Third Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of
Watt O’Hugh the Third
Chickadee Prince Books
New York
To Fred Tippens, Raymond Kennedy, Mark Grinker and Hans Bielenstein
Thank you for everything, gentlemen,
Wherever you are
THE STORY BEGINS
At about 5:43 the early evening, on a Tuesday in 1877 — a year before the events related in the second volume of my Memoirs — I enjoyed a moment of serenity.
I sat on a rocky beach a few miles south of Purley, a region uninhabited but for some fugitive natives — natives hated by their tribes for one reason or another (pederasty of an excessive nature, tribadism, cowardice, treason[*]), and whose tribes had cast them out to the rocky cusp of the near-inland bog, and whose distant campfires flickered and popped in the swamp-gas air — and I gnawed a slab of dried beef, listened to the almost-waves trickle gently onto the shore.
I squinted into the fire.
The silence grew very silent, and I felt a chill.
I ducked, and a moment later the report of a single-shot hammerless falling-block action rifle cracked the silence.
The bullet rattled into the surf like a skipping stone.
I wish that this had come as a terrible surprise, but I knew all too well why someone hidden in the woods might shoot at me.
I should never have relaxed, undefended, to bask in the wet dusk, breathe the humer of the mist that rolled in from the lake; but the inexperienced bounty hunter who had risked a shot at me from so far a distance, from out of the forest shad
ows — one of a band who’d tracked me from Scoville — was more stupid by degrees. This was naught but a flare, and in a moment, I was a blur, a moving target, and a moment later, I was gone; I jumped on my horse, a bay gelding who had been my only friend for years, and we made haste into the forest. Anyone will tell you that it is impossible to give chase in the forest, especially this one, an indisputable American coniferous rainforest dense as the darkness between galaxies, but my nameless horse had something of the devil in him. I heard the hunters off in the distance, the clubmoss that hung from hemlock trees thwacked them, slowed them down, I heard their curses, while my horse rose up and into the firmaments, and I with him.
I didn’t know who shot at me so inadvisably, and I don’t know his name to-day, or what he looked like, other than a few blurry backward glances through the spruce branches — he was about six-foot-tall, blank-faced, pale and youngish — which means that now I’ll never know who he was, this man who tried to kill me. I think it doesn’t really matter. I know why he did it; he tried to kill me because he needed money and he wanted the reward that would follow my killing. I don’t blame him, I’m not angry at him, and I have never sought nor desired revenge.
I kept my head down, and the branches crashed above me.
My adversaries fell farther behind; their sloshing and muffled hoof-beats grew fainter and fainter, and then one final and particularly indecorous blasphemy split the mesosphere in two, and I knew I was safe for the moment.
We slowed, my bay gelding and I. Shrouded in the darkness of the American jungle, we slid into a narrow creek, which we followed for a few miles (the harder to track us next morning), trotted and clomped uphill for another five miles, till a shelter rose out of the twilit blur, and my horse slowed. Just a little leaky cabin, stuck in the sheltered and camouflaged overgrowth. By the sight of it, no one had lived here for years, since the first settlers had arrived to farm the valley, decades ago.
It looked familiar, but I could not place it. I thought it might offer a bit of comfort and shelter in a rainy forest.
There was something else, too, in my addled brain. Perhaps the cabin had a moment earlier hidden itself from my view behind a dim-lit jumble of winding trees and hanging webs of moss, where it was near-impossible for a body to see his nose.
Perhaps that were the rationalistic explanation for its sudden and unlikely appearance.
But it had been a long time since I had experience with the straightforwardly rational, and so it also occurred to me that the cabin warn’t simply hidden by trees and vines, but that, perhaps, I had not seen it a moment earlier because it had not been there at all. According to this fleeting and tantalizing whim, the cabin had one great benefit. It was invisible. It was Magic.
I might once have been suspicious of such a thing (and I should have been suspicious and wary, knowing what I knew even then about Sidonians and the false allure of apparent-Magic), but what concerned me at that moment was not the risk of succumbing to the temptations of Magic, but rather the importance of escaping from the bounty hunters and their dead-or-alive warrant. Thus I felt that concerns about my immortal such-as-it-was soul could wait till after dinner, and after the bounty hunters had faded into the Eastern vista.
I opened up the door and curled up on the floor, and for a while I slept, heavily but fretful.
Later, after the sun had decidedly set, I crawled out of my hut and sat in the darkness on the cliff. My tired legs dangled over the ledge, and I surveyed the vista of giant cottonwood trees, lit up by a blazing and endless universe. Over my left shoulder, Mars came to a perihelic opposition in the constellation Aquarius for the first time since 1860, although I knew it not.
Some miles inland of the lake, the calm and flickering lights of the refugee Indian village. Across the river, a bevy of black-tail deer ran across the mossy shore.
I knew my adversaries would come back again, and that they would keep coming back. But the forest was a great tangled wildness, and I was one small man. And maybe my cabin was invisible, and invincible, and maybe it was Magic.
The Forces had brought me low — Forces of American capitalism and of my own personal failures and horrible judgment — and I’d like to think and to say that everyone suffers like this from time to time, but it warn’t true then, it ain’t true as I write this, and I imagine it won’t be true in the future, when you read this. Some of us live a fortunate life; some of us sink into the shit, and then sink some more. Every one of us faces mortality, which is the great equalizer, but even that is only temporary-like. If the world as we know it survives the Falsturm and the Coming Storm, then one day the Rich will pay to live forever, and the rest of us will die.
I lived in my little magic-like cabin in the heart of the American rainforest for a little while, maybe a few days, or maybe a few more, under a canopy of interlocking maple and hemlock branches. Sometimes, to pass the time, I read my dime novels, which included a few that claimed to relate the “Absolutely True Life” adventures of a fearless hero whose name matched mine, but whose adventures, while ridiculous, were far more plausible than my truth.
In 1877, I was not exactly a shadow of my former self, the fearless western paladin, widely celebrated for his allegedly heroic exploits in Little Mount. I had a ragged scar on the left side of my face from that time I crashed through the front window of a Manhattan faro bank, a bullet wound in my side, one on my leg and another near my heart, and a scar where a bullet had grazed my forehead, all of them from a run-in with Morgan henchmen on the rooftops; my nose was broken in a few places, my arms and my left foot as well; a bayonet scar from my stint in the army during the War Between the States; a few knife scars just from having lived a certain kind of life; and the scowl lines that scarred my face; but I was indeed yet only thirty-five years old, still six-foot-three inches tall, not yet suffering from the shrinkage and sinkage of age, and I could still wallop most men in a brawl — a testament, still, to my youth downtown — and I could generally take two men, although I relied by necessity on the element of surprise more than I once had. I fought best if I’d run out of whiskey two days before; I fought worst if I’d run out of whiskey nine days before. I was still-solid but a touch rattly.
While somewhat rotted, as expected for a deserted cabin in a rainforest, my home was otherwise clean and hospitable, and its roof was mostly intact, all of which added to its charmed allure. Sometimes I walked out the front door and into another time, sometimes in the past, before the cabin even existed, and sometimes into the deep future, where I could gaze at a valley bathed in the electric light of shiny metallic structures; a floating saloon bobbed in the lake, under the moonlight, and music thrummed through the valley and into the mountain air.
There was no point to it, this compulsive Time roaming, but I kept doing it anyway. Addicted to it more than a little bit, like other things, I suppose. I like roaming Time.
I gathered oxalis and puffballs and salmonberry and whatnot in the morning, and in the early afternoon I fished in a mountain pool that fed the great lake below. I munched on dried fruit and meat, and I chewed and spat my chaw in the corner of the cabin and dyed the floor and wall brown, till I ran out of chaw, then I smoked my pipe and dumped the ashes in the corner of the cabin till I ran out of pipe tobacco. Once or twice I hunted elk and deer, which was more difficult and tiring than fishing, and I was never one for tiring myself out if I didn’t have to. At dusk, I roasted the food over a spit out back of the cabin, then ate as the sun set. More often than not I drank till I couldn’t even drink.
My ultimate destination remained Walpi, a desolate cliff world in Arizona territory and a true ancient city in the sky, where I could live unobserved, and from which I could spot any adversary for miles in any direction, allowing me either to make a clean getaway and hide in the caves and crevices for weeks, or, if that option seemed suspect, to despatch them with neither effort nor risk. But Walpi was without joy, a bleak land; and this mountain forest was not. This was an Eden, missing only Ev
e.
Fate would soon rectify this omission, twice over.
One night, I found myself lushy beyond fuddled. I had begun liquoring at three the afternoon, and I was half seas over, shot in the neck by halves, when I heard a knock on the door.
And there she was before me, the beauteous Lucy Billings, ablaze in the froth-night. She was ever-young, as ever-are the dead, lovely and smooth and alive in memory, as I had known her twenty years since, when New York had held us in her arms; back when we knew we would never age, and never die, and never frown or shed a tear. The starlight in her hair, and her eyes, dared me not to believe; she was clad in a summer gown of gossamer satin, a gold ferronniere decked with pearls adorned her forehead, and she wore the white glowing midnight mist as a shawl, which settled gently on her white shoulders.
I had ever loved her, since I was fire-new, before I could think or talk, since before I knew what love is, and even before then; before I existed, before I was born.
Her lips parted, her beautiful, plump-red lips. Those lips had seduced the disreputable New York dailies, the dime novels, the theatricals, which had condemned her, but not without fascination and attraction and even more ambiguous admiration for this criminal-harlot-free thinker, during that one frozen instant, when we had lost her to the wilds of a new criminal underworld, and before she was forgotten by all others, but not me.
She whispered my name, and her whisper filled my head and echoed into the valley and across the lake.
Lucy, my love, I whispered back, in my head.