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

  Milton and Minnie beamed. There could be joy here in Hell; indeed, moments of great joy, perhaps fleeting.

  “Finally,” Master Yu said, turning to the Oriental woman. “Ch’ao-Hsing. She will tell us nothing of her life in Malchut, the World Above. We each imagine a life for her. It gives us a chance to use our minds, which is a special gift. You see? There are not a lot of new things to think about down here, not a lot of ideas. So Ch’ao-Hsing gave us an opportunity to imagine, for which we are grateful. Her name means Morning Star. We like her here with us for many reasons, but one of them is that she reminds us of this, of this memory of the World.”

  He touched her hand gently with the tip of his pointer finger. Her face showed no emotion.

  “And you all know O’Hugh,” he said. “Just arrived from Sidonia. Fugitive from the law.”[*]

  Milton nodded.

  “You have really been to Sidonia?” he asked.

  I said that I had.

  “And you have seen the Sidonian Princess?” he asked.

  Again, I confirmed.

  He asked, “Is she as beautiful as they say?”

  I agreed.

  “Beautiful and terrifying,” I said. “A terrifying warrior with red hair, green eyes, long legs and a terrifying battle cry.”

  She was, of course, beautiful, this unholy illusion.

  “How could she be otherwise?” I asked.

  Milton fell silent, picturing the Princess in his mind.

  Master Yu said, “O’Hugh is new here. He is here for a very important purpose, an essential mission. But first, he has, I must assume, many questions to ask.”

  I had many questions, indeed, but I was uncertain how to ask them. If a sand crab didn’t eat me, and no villain shot my head off my shoulders, would I just live here forever? That was my understanding of Hell; that a body would live there forever. But I also thought Hell should be worse than this. This seemed a little worse than Blue Rock, and maybe even a little better than the Five Points. I wondered how people here in Hell spent their days. I wondered how this atrophied man and this atrophied woman spent their days. Were they in love? Might they one day fall in love? Was there booze in Hell? Coffee? Tobacco? Could tobacco frizz your lungs in Hell? Could booze cirosse your liver? Did people age in Hell? Did people age and age and age, and not die, shrivel up till they turned into grasshoppers? Or did they remain as they were when they first descended into the Abyss? I wanted to know what Milton and Minnie had done that had gotten them discarded into Hell. Or, in this case, what had been done to them, I supposed. That seemed the rudest question of all.

  So many questions, and all of them rude.

  “Your first question,” Master Yu said. “Where are you? Who are these people who surround you in Hell? Are they all evil?”

  They all shook their heads emphatically.

  “Common misperception,” said Minnie.

  “This level of Hell,” Ch’ao-Hsing said sadly, “is filled with not unkind creatures who were wronged, and who were eaten alive by it, till they were naught but rancor. This is a Hell that would corrupt the most noble of angels through its sheer unfairness.”[]

  “What do you do all day here?” I asked.

  “We mostly struggle,” said Milton.

  “We struggle to remain human,” said Minnie.

  “We struggle not to be consumed,” Milton added, “by the — oh, what the….”

  “By the whatever-it-is,” Minnie said. “By whatever it is inside of us, which would consume us and destroy us, make us not-human.”

  I wanted to try to understand this world. How it worked. You would say: what makes it tick?

  “Why is there a dock here?” I asked. “Why did someone build a dock?”

  “Hmm,” Master Yu said.

  “Ahah,” said Ch’ao-Hsing.

  I asked the location of the nearest forest, and Master Yu gestured behind him. “West,” he said. “A long way. Thirty miles. Or a hundred. We call it ‘West,’ ” he laughed. “Compass doesn’t work here. The Earth doesn’t spin. And the sun rises from a different direction every morning, and sets in an equally random direction. So who knows which direction the forest really is? It’s behind me, many miles.”

  “So someone chopped down trees in the forest, hauled them all the way over here, all those miles, and built a dock?”

  Ch’ao-Hsing shrugged.

  “In this place,” she said, “if there’s a Bay, there’s a dock.”

  Milton nodded.

  “Hell was invented by the humans to keep us in line,” he grunted. “Somebody thought of that and someone believed it. And here it is. And why are there so many Hells? Why did the Chinese think of so many Hells? A surfeit of guilt, and a surfeit of idle poets.”

  Master Yu poked me in the chest.

  “You understand, O’Hugh?” he said. “Anyone can be disabused of any belief, if we work hard enough at it. So there is hope.”

  “Who thought of it?” I wondered aloud. “And who believed it?”

  “We have food here,” Minnie laughed. “Not very good.”

  “You don’t need to eat food down here, by the way,” Master Yu added. “And you do not need to sleep. You do it if you miss your humanhood; if you feel it slipping away and you want to grab it back. The longer you are here, the less you will want to eat. And the less you will want to sleep.”

  Lightning lit the grey-foggish sky an angry purplish-orange, which spread across the grey-foggish sky and lit the entire world, just for thirty microseconds, although it seemed longer, because it was frightening. In 枉死城, lightning looks a bit like fireworks, if fireworks were angry, not celebratory, and made one afraid. Four seconds later, an angry thunder roll shook the entire world.

  “In Albanadíqué, there is a lady who makes soap,” said Milton, “out of pig fat. Or anyway, out of the fat of the animal down here that is something like a pig. Piggish. Such-as-it-is-pig-like creature. She drains out the poison and heats the pig-like fat in a big caldron, and she makes soap. You don’t need to wash with soap, but if you wash with soap you will feel human, and if you stop washing with soap, you will feel less human.”

  “The less you eat,” said Master Yu, “and the less you wash with soap, and the less you sleep, the less person you will be, and the more you will hate. The Red Eyebrows had stopped being human at all by the time they went up to Malchut in the first century and overthrew the Emperor.” He thought sadly. “A good Emperor, come to think of it. He didn’t deserve to be overthrown by the Red Eyebrows, and killed.”

  “Sometimes,” Ch’ao-Hsing said, “when we choose to sleep, to demand to be human and to sleep and to dream, we go up to Malchut, and we are ghosts. We walk in the streets at night, and we haunt the World.” She paused for a moment, and she absently worried the tie on her robe. “Usually no one can see us, but sometimes.…”

  Her voice drifted off.

  Master Yu looked over at Minnie, who ducked her head shyly.

  “Sometimes they can see us,” she smiled. “And it frightens them a lot.”

  Ch’ao-Hsing said, “The one who has wronged us sees us most easily. We appear in the shadows of his bedroom, and he wonders for a moment — is this real? — and then the moon shines through his curtains and he can see our face clearly and he knows that his perfidy is not forgotten. Sometimes he leaves the theater in the evening, and we await him in an alleyway, and he can see our face as he passes. But others can see us as well. When we sleep and dream, we pass them in the night street of Malchut, and they know that we are dead and gone and risen from the grave, and we frighten them. We warn them of the suffering of the ages.” She smiled sadly. “The pain of eternity. We ghosts who haunt the World….”

  I wondered aloud how it was that walking illusions could haunt the real world, and Milton wondered aloud about the nature of reality, and Master Yu touched Ch’ao-Hsing comfortingly on the arm.

  I cleared my throat. There was one other question that had to be asked.

  �
�Do you have booze here?” I asked. Then I added, “I mean to say, do we have booze here? In Hell.” I didn’t mean to suggest that there was some difference between them and me; we were all residents of Hell, Hellers, as we called ourselves, as I was soon to learn. Then, by way of probably unnecessary explanation, I added, “I’m a soaker. An incorrigible — that-is-to-say incurable — soaker. So I would like assurance that I will not have to give up my soaking, that you have a bit of grog here in Hell.”

  “Such-as-it-is,” Yu Dai-Yung said.

  He looked up, and then to each of us.

  “We have booze,” Milton explained. “But it is not very good.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, and my heart melted with relief.

  “I think you should know,” Milton said.

  “I agree,” Minnie added, “that he has a right to know. He will find out eventually.”

  Master Yu sighed.

  “The pigs here,” Master Yu said gently. “The ones I mentioned?”

  I nodded.

  “Their piss,” Master Yu explained, “when fermented, is like bad wine.”

  Milton added, “To be honest, the pig-piss, when fermented, is bad wine.”

  I said that I understood.

  Was this better than no wine at all?

  After a moment, I decided that it was, indeed, better than no wine at all. I am, after all, an incorrigible and incurable soaker.

  Still, I was not exactly happy about this news.

  Master Yu changed the subject.

  “Most of the people here died and came here,” Master Yu said, and he said it in Chinese, and we all understood it. It was strange to realize, but in the Hell of the Innocent Dead, I could understand Master Yu when he spoke Chinese, if he wished me to understand him. “There is nothing to do but to haunt the world of the living and to nurse their grievances. But a small few of us were sucked down here. Why? To find an army, to storm the world of light and fight the Falsturm.” He paused. “This is why I am here. This is why you are here, O’Hugh. We have an important matter to attend to.”

  Ch’ao-Hsing told him to proceed, and Minnie added, “Proceed,” and then Milton nodded and said that Master Yu should proceed, that he would not mind if Master Yu were to proceed.

  Master Yu dragged a rotting wooden box out of his bag.

  “Look,” he said.

  Minnie groaned.

  Master Yu pulled an old dusty scroll from the box.

  “I didn’t think you meant this stupid scroll,” she muttered. “When you said we had an important matter to attend to, I thought you meant reality-important. Not phony-scroll-important.”

  Master Yu responded.

  “This scroll transcribes an ancient prophecy first decreed by Huang-ti, the Yellow Emperor, who, in his lost book, White Pond, foresaw the battles to be waged against the Red Eyebrows in the Year One in China and among the Indian nations across many seas. Huang-ti was the only emperor of China with the power to command the dragons to perform his will, and to talk to the unicorns, and he was worshiped as a god through the period of the Warring States, although he was merely a great wizard. He lived in my homeland three thousand years ago, and he invented writing, mathematics and astronomy, and he sailed to the Far Eastern Sea, which doesn’t exist, where he wrote White Pond, which was dictated to him by a terrible sea beast that rose to the surface of the Far Eastern Sea. Most of White Pond is lost and only fragments survive to-day; this is one of the fragments which, up till now, had been lost — or, I should say more accurately, hidden for good reason.

  “This later transcription of Lord Huang-ti’s wisdom was written during the Hsia Dynasty of the golden age of my national past, a past of great poets and sages.

  “The scroll is everything,” he continued. “It tells us how to defeat the Falsturm. It relates the history of our lives, of the battles that await us and how we might prevail. The scroll led me here, after all. It lit a pathway to the portal, which brought me to all of you. So here I am. Thanks to the scroll.”

  This was not a basis upon which to recommend the scroll, it seemed to me, although I remembered Burly and Skinny, who had quoted the scroll in the rainforest and predicted Master Yu’s appearance. So I was less doubtful than I might otherwise have been, and I listened attentively.

  Master Yu carefully unrolled the scroll, scrutinizing it as he did so.

  “They feel that relying on the prophesies in an ancient scroll written by Huang-ti, the Yellow Emperor, is ridiculous mumbo jumbo,” he muttered. He looked around at them. “Mumbo jumbo. Is that right?”

  Minnie and Milton nodded.

  “Yes,” Milton said. “Mumbo jumbo. Bunk. Nonsense.”

  “But what my friend does not realize,” Master Yu replied, “is that once you are trapped in the sixth level of Hell, out of a total of eighteen, nothing else could possibly be more ridiculous. We’ve sort of hit the cap on ridiculousness. And the Yellow Emperor, he had important things to say. Truths, not nonsenses.” He squinted with his good eye, and he pointed to a few words in the scroll.

  “You see,” Master Yu noted, “it says right here that you would arrive in the seventh month to fight alongside us. The Yellow Emperor has predicted O’Hugh’s appearance in this world of shadows! From his throne in China, in the year 3000 B.C., he predicted that O’Hugh would fall from his portal into the clutches of a great ferocious sand crab and nearly die. He tells us where to go to raise troops. He tells us whom to trust, and whom not to trust. He tells us the month and the day to storm the Gates.”

  “With a bit of interpretation,” Milton said.

  “If you read between the lines,” Ch’ao-Hsing added.

  “You need to know how to read the scroll,” Master Yu acknowledged. “This is the goal we have set for ourselves, in a fairly short order. Convince Hellers that there is cause to hope. Raise an army. Capture the city of Vializ, where the Falsturm loyalists congregate. Storm the Gates of Hell. And burst through into Malchut, the World Above, in time to join the Battle of Sidonia.”

  He was met by awkward silence, and Master Yu sighed, and he re-rolled his precious treasure. “I also have a magical sword,” he said. “A camel-headed dragon gave me the sword. A camel-headed dragon who stood tender and loving guard over a dying Chinese unicorn. A talking dog showed me how to find the Yellow Emperor’s scroll. After all this, might yet my treasures be meaningless? They must guide us all to victory; to redemption.” He looked at around at all of us. “Yes?” There was dead silence, and Master Yu crossed his arms and pursed his lips. “This scroll,” he said decisively, “will lead us to victory. And the dragon’s sword will slay thousands, and it shall sing. There are miracles in the world. And these miracles are not empty.”

  Ch’ao-Hsing said, “I also do not believe in the Yellow Emperor, or in the importance of this scroll. I believe that it really is just an old scroll. But this land is a prison of the mind, and what is important to Master Yu becomes important in this illusory life. And so the scroll, even if fiction in Malchut, becomes eventually truth down here. Because down here, all we have are the lies we tell ourselves.”

  Master Yu grunted.

  “That is all we have ever had,” he said. “The lies we tell ourselves.”

  “Why does any of this matter?” I asked. “Who are we trying to defeat?”

  No one replied; everyone just pondered this.

  “Who thought of it and who believed it?” I asked again.

  Master Yu peered out over the Bay

  “They thought of it,” Master Yu said. “And we believed it.”

  I nodded, and I waited for him to explain.

  The wind in the night groaned softly.

  He pointed to a spot farther in the distance, across the Bay.

  “There to the far Northeast, you can see the Grey City, and its Flubs, all hope lost.”

  I saw a place I remembered, a place I had seen before, through the storm, a dark shadow against the horizon, surrounded by Hell’s Bay on all sides, a great sooty gre
y city of vents and pipes, and grimy, glowing grey-stone sky-scrapers rose to the smoggy sky.

  I could see the “Flubs,” sad and waxy grey-skinned functionaries in the windows of the ‘scrapers, under their fluorescent lights, staring dully out at the Hell-storm that whipped up the Bay’s waves. Outside, the hulking stone buildings blocked out the sky, and more stooped, hopeless Flubs wandered the streets of the Grey City, sometimes vanishing into doorways, sometimes hiding within side alleys, gaunt and pale in the popping and hissing lamplight, and the scattered lights from windows up above.

  The Grey City spread out before me like a vast cancer, and it seemed to grow larger as I stared, to crowd its way into the Bay and forest that it abutted.

  “It’s from the future,” said Ch’ao-Hsing, “I think.”

  “Maybe,” Master Yu replied. “Now, though, it’s just an idea.”

  “So it isn’t real,” I said.

  “Just because it is bullshit,” Master Yu said, “doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Many nonsenses are absolute fact.”

  The Grey City was growing closer and more real the more I watched it, until I thought I could almost wander those lonely, ashen streets myself, and then Ch’ao-Hsing spoke, and the City dissolved into the night, and I was back on the dock.

  “What?” I asked, once I was fully awake again.

  “They haunt us,” she said softly. “They haunt us with their ideas for what the world might become. When they are asleep. Just as we haunt Malchut, when we dream.”

  Something howled in the darkness, and overhead, great dark wings fluttered within great dark thunderclouds, and for a moment, the ground shook. I thought that this was either a very meaningful sign, or not a sign at all and utterly meaningless. A monstrous sand crab roared at the sky. This miraculous or not-miraculous hubbub ended very quickly, the sand crab returned to her drooling and scavenging, and I imagine we all wondered whether anything at all had just happened. Perhaps the howling was only the wind. Perhaps the great dark wings were naught but ripples in the clouds.

  But maybe not. Perhaps it was a dragon in the sky, in Hell.