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)

by Steven Drachman

  Aloud, I said that it had been a “long time no-see.” Shamefaced to blurt out a maudlin sentiment, a saphead cliché even back in 1877, I stammered, “Lotta water under the bridge and whatnot,” and then, realizing that I was too corned to be philosophical, I pulled her into my arms, and I kissed her, drunken breath and all. She pulled away after a spell, and she said, “I came here for a reason,” and I replied that I hoped I knew what the reason was, and she said that she was sure that I didn’t, and she said this, I thought, with a bit of regret, although maybe it was tinged with a little relief, which I chalked up to my drunkenness, because after all…. And I supposed my drunkenness would have been a bit of a disappointment to any beautiful woman knocking on my door expecting a Western paladin, but especially to this woman, the one I had loved and lost back in the Gilded ‘Sixties.

  But hark: if a body is hiding out from the law and the hunters, in a rotted shack that might be invisible and, if-albeit-not-invisible, shouldn’t even be there, in the middle of a rainforest, where no one can find him, he won’t stay sober on the off-chance that a beautiful crinoline-clad socialite from the Manhattan sky might happen upon the shack in the night and knock on his such-as-it-is door. If whiskey were at hand, anyone in my situation would get blue, three the afternoon notwithstanding, and risk losing a bit of spooning with a beautiful woman, should she happen to knock on the door hours later, which, of course, would be near-certain not to occur.

  Anyone else in my situation would just take his chances where spooning were concerned. Especially anyone else in my situation who happened to be an old soaker, like me.

  What else was there to do, anyway, but to hunt, gather, eat, sleep and liquor?

  “Time enough for half a game of checkers?” I asked, and she said that she thought there probably was just enough time for half a game of checkers. I said that I didn’t have a checkerboard, and she said that she had brought one with her, and she pulled one from the air, and she placed it gently on the rotted wood floor, and we sat down on the rotten timber, and her white and clean clothing stayed white and clean.

  “Why don’t you visit oftener?” I asked. “Why don’t you stay here for good?”

  I could see her thinking about this, a little whisper of concentration on her beautiful dead-alive white face, and a whisper of a smile touched her dead-alive lips, as she imagined some other world in which she was alive, and she could live with me here, in my magic cabin in the magic rainforest.

  A wren trilled, out in the night, perched in a cedar, and some critter scurried through the mossy underbrush.

  She said that Sidonian magic thrived where loyalty to the Falsturm was strongest.

  “Well,” I grumbled. “Ask a silly —”

  And, she went on, for the rest of the continent, it floated around a little bit, like cumulus clouds.

  “Right now it’s floating over this rainforest,” she said. “It mixes around with the jungle mist and sprinkles a bit of its corrupt trickery over the ferns and nettles.”

  But, she added, it would drift away in a few minutes, and then she would be gone, and I would have a brief reprieve from Sidonian Magic.

  “And that’s lucky for you,” she said. Pushed a checker forward, then thought again, and moved it back.

  She smiled. She still wanted to beat me at checkers; life-things still mattered to her.

  She looked up.

  “Isn’t it?” she said. “Lucky for you, that is?”

  I said that it was lucky indeed that there were still places on this continent where a body could hide out from the Sidonians, and it was lucky that this rainforest was one of those places.

  She nodded.

  “Not for long, though, Watt,” she said. “Where we are sitting — this will soon be Red Eyebrows country. Sidonian loyalty is squeezing you from all sides.” She met my eyes. “Go to Death Valley next. Almost no one around for a hundred miles. No place to raise an army. Not a region hospitable to hopefulness.”

  I agreed. Death Valley. Why not?

  She looked down at her checkers. She was thinking. I watched her thinking. Checkers isn’t all-fired challenging, not for a book-learned woman like Lucy Billings. I guessed she had something else on her mind, probably more than one thing, and I was correct.

  “When you were in the Union army,” she asked, “and things seemed desperate and you were alone, did you think of me?”

  She didn’t wait for an answer, and she changed the subject.

  “Two men will come visit you,” she said quietly, “in the very early morning. You should trust them.”

  Not moving her eyes from the checkers.

  “And why,” I asked, “should I trust you?”

  She smiled, that small smile, which I remembered from long ago.

  “You know you can trust me,” she whispered.

  I reached out to kiss her, but she was gone before she could feel my touch.

  In my head, I told her that I thought of her when things seemed desperate and I was all alone. I thought of her all through that damned War, and every day during the years since.

  I figured I would step outside and enjoy the night while I waited for the two fellows headed my way.

  I didn’t have clean clothes or any place to wash, and my breath tasted of fish, hooch and wild snowshoe hare. Still, I figured they probably understood what they were getting. I guessed they knew they weren’t visiting Mr. J.P. Morgan’s mansion on Madison Avenue.

  I rested my rifle in my lap, and I waited.

  In a couple of hours, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck tingle a bit, and I stood and gazed through the thick brush, bathed now in the dull orange of the nascent sunrise. About a half mile to the south, a thrush and a wren rose from low branches to higher ones. Then more, startled. I heard a rustle.

  Then the two men appeared about a tenth of a mile away, little scuffy blotches against the orange-green of the jungle at early dawn, and a while after that they pulled up in front of my homestead. I trained the rifle on them as they neared.

  They were both youngish-seeming; one was burly and one was skinny. They eventually told me their names, but I don’t remember them now, and their names don’t really make a difference to my narrative.

  “Looks as though he’s been expecting us,” Burly said as his horse slowed down. He raised his hands over his head.

  “Looks as though he doesn’t much care for us,” said Skinny, who put his hands over his head as well.

  “That’s because he doesn’t know us yet,” Burly said.

  Burly had a .45 in a holster, which I took. He had a bandolier, which I let him keep. They dismounted. I patted them both down. They seemed amused by all this, which didn’t really bother me. Skinny was unarmed, which I found curious. I figure now that Skinny had other talents to protect him, but I don’t know what they were.

  “All right,” I said. “Come on inside, out of the sun. I can offer you whiskey, and water, though the water is warm. If you need food, I’ve got a little bit left over from last night. But I’d rather not.”

  Inside, Burly accepted a dirty glass of whiskey, and Skinny declined.

  “He gets off his chump,” Burly confided, “if he drinks even a drop.” He laughed. “I would not recommend getting him started in the morning.”

  Skinny was going a little pre-maturely bald, his grey eyes were hazy. Burly had a scar across his forehead. Their dungarees and white shirts were muddy and old. Old gallowses held up their muddy pants. They didn’t look like anyone special.

  I told them that a woman I knew and trusted said I could trust them as well, so they were welcome in my shack, and that I was pleased to have a bit of company.

  Skinny laughed, and his eyes grew a little sinister.

  “You can trust us to-day,” he said. “Generally speaking, we’re not gentlemen that you can trust. But to-day you can trust us. We have no ill motives, to-day.”

  Burly laughed too.

  “I guess that’s what she probably meant,” he said.<
br />
  I nodded, and I said I figured that was true.

  “Why are you interested in talking to me?” I wondered. “This cabin is a little off-the-beaten.”

  “Great Roamer,” Burley said. “Great shootist.”

  “My ghosts steady my hand and guide my aim,” I said. “Ghosts of children who died back in 1863. I’m no shootist. I have help.”

  “We know,” Skinny said. “Nevertheless, you get the job done. T’isn’t cheating.”

  By the lake, the giant mossy firs cast shade, shrubby scowler willows dotted the shore. Early afternoon light bounced off the gentle ripples of the water. Far off, on the opposite bank, embers glowed from the Indian camp, a little smoke drifted across the water.

  “Let’s get down to brass tacks,” Skinny said. “We have two bits of business, one of which is a mission.”

  “Not a very dangerous one,” Burly said.

  “Really not particularly dangerous at all,” Skinny said.

  “And the second bit of business is for us to impart some information that we think you will find enjoyable.”

  “Well,” I said. “Let’s start with the fun.”

  They nodded at that. A blue heron skimmed along the surface of the lake.

  “You’re a Roamer,” Burly said. “We’re Roamers. A lonely occupation. A little bit addictive.”

  “More than a little bit addictive,” Skinny added. “Crazy addictive.”

  Skinny shivered. His hands shook. A little green-blue vein stretched from the middle of his left hand and up his arm; the vein trembled and bulged. More addictive for some lushingtons than others.

  “Again,” Burly said, “it’s lonely. Well, in the late 1970s, exhausted from having fought the Battle of Sidonia in 1905, a middle-aged Roamer showed up at a renters’ office in a little town called Conconully with a bag of kelter. (I use the past tense here for obvious reasons — the event is temporally in the future, but experientially in the past for me.) The middle-aged Roamer used modern dollars, absolutely crisp and inarguable, up-to-the minute dollars, which he had purchased with a bag of antique dollars, which he jokingly explained he’d earned from the ‘Lervine job.’ ”

  I grunted. I remembered the Lervine job. Not my finest moment. But financially agreeable.

  “This middle-aged mamzer used the cash to rent the space for a one-night-only party, a ‘pop up’ nightclub, as they would call it in the late 1970s. He called the nightclub ‘Roamers.’ No explanation. Just a name. He paid for all the booze, this middle-aged man, and he showed up alone, and he drank Monongahela, which seemed to be his favorite drink.”

  “Sounds like bad business,” I said. “Who is this stupid old fool?”

  “It was just one night,” Burly said, “but I cannot count the number of times I’ve been there, Third. It’s different every time I go, even though it’s the same night every time, September 4, 1979. Just one night, a project, an experiment of sorts, but something that we Roamers can return to again and again. Conconully is near here — that is to say it will be near here, although separated by more than a hundred years. At ‘first,’ so to speak, that night was poorly unattended. But then word spread among the Roamer non-community. Eventually, that night began to draw a crowd. Some ‘times’ you are there; some ‘times’ you are not, but you are ‘always’ there in spirit. I’ve shared a drink with you many times.”

  He went on for a while, reminiscing about things that had happened at this crazy doggery, an open smile on his round face.

  It sounded dangerous to me: I can’t change the past when I’m roaming. I cannot go to my future to find out how to fix my present, because then I will be changing the past.

  If I even think about doing those things, I will be expelled from the interlinear Maze.

  I didn’t know much about the Maze, but I knew enough to be frightened. This Roamers bar seemed to tempt fate for nothing more than a night on the town.

  After a while, Skinny elbowed Burly.

  “How’s your wet feet?” he asked him, and Burly snapped out of his reverie.[]

  “I think you deserve to know about it and to enjoy it as a young man,” Burly said, and then, after appraising me a bit, added, “Or, anyway, as a youngish man. Because after all, you were — or will be — the fellow who will come up with the whole notion, some decades in the future. You chose the date carefully, I can say. Far enough in the future to ensure a good standard of food and good technology to make an event of such complexity run smooth, but not too far in the future, so no crazy weather yet. Really the perfect moment for the Roamer Bar. September 4, 1979.”

  He handed me a pre-printed card, with the name, date and location of O’Hugh’s doggery.

  “One night. Infinite possibilities and probabilities.”

  I put the card into my pack. I promised I would visit soon. Perhaps to-night.

  “And the mission?” I asked. “The price for this party?”

  Skinny smiled.

  “Let us take a walk,” he said, and he said this in a deceptively reassuring voice.

  The morning light wafted through the lake mist and the hanging moss. We whispered in the silence of the forest.

  “One day,” Skinny said, “you will meet a man named Master Yu. Master Yu Dai-Yung.”

  Skinny paused. He laughed at the name. Yu Dai-Yung.

  Burly tapped him.

  “You’re going to upset Mr. O’Hugh,” he muttered. “As a matter of fact, while in English the name may seem quite unfortunate, in Chinese it is a wonderful, auspicious name, summoning to one’s mind both the elegance of a jade soldier and the simple wisdom of the countryside.”

  “Yes,” said Skinny. “It’s just a Chinese name. Nothing to worry about.”

  “You will meet this man, and we’d like you to bring him a message.”

  Burly added, “You will shortly leave this lovely Eden, by necessity, to preserve your life and your freedom, and you will take up residence in Death Valley. From this residence, we would ask you to travel to the Death Valley of August 15, 1981, where a man with a monocle and a silver-tipped cane will hand you a manila envelope. Some years later, you will meet Master Yu, under unexpected circumstances, and we would ask you to give him the envelope.”

  “I have heard of Master Yu. How do you know I will meet him?”

  “It says so in an ancient prophecy in the Yellow Emperor’s scroll,” Burly said. “The Yellow Emperor, Huang-ti,” he added.

  “Does everything in the Yellow Emperor’s scroll come true?”

  “This might,” Skinny said. “If we’re lucky.”

  I asked why I should help them.

  Burly said that our interests were aligned.

  He sat, he leaned back against an alder tree, and he sighed.

  “We understand you loved a girl named Lucy, back in the ‘sixties,” Burly said. “Would have married her, I suppose, when the money added up, lived with her in a furnished flat in the Fifth Avenue Hotel in Manhattan, bought a summer place up in Sharon Springs, perhaps. Oh, you had times, Watt and Lucy. Drinking champagne on a rowboat on the North River; watching the walking races at Gilmore Garden on a Sunday afternoon; a performance at the Grand Opera House; a horse-drawn sleigh in Central Park on a snowy January day!”

  He knew a lot about me; I will grant him that, old Burly. As he spoke, these memories, these images of my life in the gilded ‘sixties flew about in the air and smacked me violently in the face.

  Happy memories are the worst sort.

  “Lucy was a woman with a ‘social conscious,’ so-called,” Burly continued, “and a gentleman named Allen Jerome, a financier turned ‘real’ revolutionary, I suppose, recruited her. She left you to follow him to a subversive stronghold in Montana — Sidonia, isn’t it? There she married a fellow subversive named Darryl Fawley, did she not? People talk about Sidonia everywhere these days, don’t they? They talk about Sidonian magic. It enriches the poor, it’s a threat to the ruling order. Ah, Sidonian magic! But behind Sidonian magic and the Sid
onian enterprise is someone named the Falsturm.” He paused. “No one talks much about him. They all pretend he sort-of doesn’t exist. But he exists. He’s the force behind all of these kinds of things. The Red Eyebrows, those killers in China, two thousand years ago, who murdered the Emperor. The enemy from the far Winter North in the Americas, who wiped out the Peking Indians at around the same time. And now the Sidonians.”

  I didn’t need the ancient history lesson, I suppose. Ancient wrongs didn’t mean much to me, especially in 1877, given my lowly circumstances; if the Falsturm sent the Red Eyebrow army to plunder China back in the Year One, I supposed it didn’t matter much, in the scheme of things. On the other hand, talk about what the Falsturm had done to Watt O’Hugh the Third in recent decades … well, that was downright unforgivable!

  “We want to defeat the Sidonians,” Skinny said. “We want to destroy Allen Jerome, the leader of the Sidonian phony revolution. And especially Darryl Fawley, the man responsible for the death of the beautiful Lucy Billings.”

  This would happen to me periodically, back then. People would find me, usually in the past or the future, and insist that they shared my quixotic goal to bring down the unbringdownable Sidonian project. If I could analogize to an experience I think my 21st century readers, if you exist, would recognize, it is as though you one day “clicked” on a “link” for, let’s say, hair replacement surgery, and for decades afterward, you receive “spam email” on that topic. Mysterious visitors asking for my help in exchange for the defeat of Sidonia was, in a way, my own 19th century spam email.

  Nevertheless, just as you, my 21st century readers, if you exist, never know when someone will really discover a cure for baldness that doesn’t cause impotence or cancer, I could not know which of these mysterious travelers really did hold the key to the destruction of my enemies, and so that day, as always, I said that I would help if I could.

  “The beautiful Lucy Billings,” Burly said. “Who exists to-day only as a deadling, if at all. Alive, if at all, only for scattered moments, as a dim hint of all she had once been.”