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

  “He is our phantom,” the beautiful old woman said. “The Falsturm. Our phantom dark energy. He can eat us alive, leave us ripped apart, and move on to his next meal.”

  She patted the pacquet in my hand sadly.

  “There is no escaping it, Herr O’Hugh,” she said. “But we shall nevertheless try together, shall we not?”

  Like a rat in a trap, whose back has been snapped in half, struggling to break free.

  Chapter 6

  We left before such-as-it-was dawn, so that no one would see us go, in the swirling morning dust.

  “We will need to take a somewhat roundabout route,” Master Yu said. “The Falsturm does not yet control Hell, or at least not all of it. Some of it is yet beyond his sight.” He smiled. “That’s where we will go. In the parts of Hell that he cannot yet see. And do not worry. I have a magical sword.”

  When I mounted my steed, the earth shook, and the sky opened up, and we had to push through a muddy rain that, combined with the tremors, made the way out of town almost impassable.

  We traveled for a couple of days along a ragged trail that veered back and forth between the south and the East, wound our way around Hallitanud proper, and then, on our third day, hit the base of the central mountains, a small range in the middle of Hell, a smaller cousin in the shadow of the more-imposing southern Kólasivouná mountain range, which stretched all the way to the Falsturm stronghold of Vializ, from which the Falsturm’s loyalists guarded the Gates of Hell.

  What are the Gates of Hell anyway? Let me expound for a moment.

  The so-called “Gates” of Hell are a mistranslation of an old expression from way back in the time of Job (whoever that poor fellow really was) and again Isaiah, and then Jesus himself, all of whom used the expression pulai hadou, which means the Realm of the Dead. It’s also the name of that valley in Montana, near the original site of the secessionist city of Sidonia, where my love, Lucy, contracted the illness that would kill her, and which I watched burn to the ground; and it is also the name of the body of water that separates the city of Queens, New York, from Randall’s Island, which housed the home for orphans in which I was educated, back when I was a young delinquent; and it is also the name bequeathed to the State Street neighborhood in Cloud City, Colorado, where I was almost killed by a mob of deadlings. So you can see that the Gates of Hell have been a theme in my life, from the very beginning.

  We reached the peak without much effort, but the subsequent decline was too steep for our horses, so we left them with a stable boy in a corral at the mountain peak. The boy was shabby and pale, and no more than twelve years old, and I was not yet too jaded to wonder who betrayed him, and if he would ever find justice, and if his “soul” would ever be free. The boy had wide saucer eyes and dusty grey hair, and he smiled wanly at my horse, and he patted my poor horse’s snout with needy affection, and my heart broke. Whenever I met anyone in those early days, I wondered who had betrayed him. Then I realized that soon I would stop wondering. Everyone here had been betrayed, just as everyone in Malchut, the World Above, had also been betrayed. It would no longer matter why, or by whom. Pain is pain.

  A quarter mile from the corral, we descended the Hunger-Fly trail, less a trail than a series of jags from which to dangle and fall, and halfway down, another tremor hit, and the earth shook, but we hung on and we didn’t die, and finally, upon reaching a deep pit, we ascended again to a broad dusty road carved and widened between two cliffs, which zagged some distance to a great stone gate. Master Yu approached, and the great gate creaked open.

  Beyond the threshold was a city, far larger than physical law would have allowed. Armed and armored soldiers led us down narrow stone streets jutted with shops and courtyards, all grey and thickly coated with rancid dust; grey-dusty crowds gathered to watch grey-dusty musicians, who sang and played off-key, for how could true beauty exist in Hell? Our own Hellish brains would allot us down here naught more than the shadow of beauty, a distant memory. Beauty’s disfigured twin.

  In the near distance, a moat the color of blood bubbled portentously, and just beyond loomed the fortress, a massive and precisely carved tetrahedron, which whirred and thrummed in the thin mountain air.

  A wooden drawbridge descended over the crimson moat in a great smelly gale of dust, and the guards escorted us to the doorway, where a pale-faced woman stood, an ageless pale-faced woman with unnaturally rosy cheeks and sad eyes.

  “Master O’Hugh,” she said. “And Master Yu. The Warlord will see you now.”

  She said it just that way, as though we were visiting a doctor or accountant. The Warlord will see you now.

  The entrance led into an enormous hall filled with tattered tapestries depicting depleted and hollow knights falling to their deaths in battle with giants and dragons. A dark chandelier groaned overhead. We climbed a curved stone staircase, which crumbled alarmingly beneath our feet, and three almost-lovely women stood in the shadows, watching our ascent with their sullen eyes. I smiled at them, and they all smiled back, with their sullen eyes.

  We followed the almost-lovely women, who wandered dusty narrow corridors, and small diamond-shaped windows spilled shafts of foggy-grey diamond-shaped light on the walls and floor, until at length, after we had become quite completely lost, the corridors and the almost-lovely women led us into a round throne room that glowed with something that, glimpsed from a certain angle, might almost have been gold. Weapons and boar-heads stared down from the walls.

  Hua Nau, the Warlord, leaped from one of the two thrones. He was stocky and sturdy and muscular and tough, his skin hard and thick. He wore a leather robe, and his hair was wild like a jungle. A ragged scar ran the length of his face, from his left eyebrow to the corner of his mouth, but it was not repulsive; it was a handsome scar, hard-won and striking. He ran to Master Yu. A skeptical but welcoming smile lit up Hua Nau’s broad face.

  “The man who would defeat Hell,” he said, clapping Yu Dai-Yung cheerfully on both shoulders. “You will restore me to my real-as-it-is throne in Malchut. You will expel the demon from my lungs.”

  He grabbed Master Yu by the arm, like an old friend.

  “Quite a man,” he said.

  Hua Nau looked at me, and at the almost-lovely women, and we all agreed that Master Yu indeed must be quite a fellow to be able to do all that he sought to do, to defeat the soldiers and beasts of Hell, to storm the Gates, and to return us all to our former lives.

  “Such-as-it-is food!” Hua Nau shouted. “You must be trying to remember to be quite hungry after your journey! And we must toast our coming victories, and so I will ask you share with me a draft of such-as-it-is spirits, so that we may become nearly-drunk, so that we might experience the shadow-memory of inebriation!”

  “This fortress must have taken years to build,” I said.

  We navigated circles through broader and broader corridors, which grew darker as they grew larger. Warlord Hua held a torch, and the flames flickered on his fortress walls. Someone had written something on the walls, long ago. The writing had faded, and I could not read it.

  “Years to build,” I said again.

  Hua Nau grunted.

  Master Yu ran up beside us.

  “I imagine,” he said, “that once Hua Nau established himself as a warlord, he came upon the fortress, and it belonged to him.”

  Hua Nau grunted again, this time in affirmation.

  We stumbled up a small set of stone steps.

  “My army and I,” he said. “We set out into the wilderness, and came upon the fortress.” He smiled sadly. “I allow that it was not entirely uninhabited when we reached it. But shortly thereafter….”

  “It became uninhabited,” Master Yu said, finishing the Warlord’s sentence.

  Warlord Hua agreed. He looked just like a warlord, exactly like a warlord, with the scar across his face, the golden arm ring on his muscular bicep, the authoritative glint in his eye. I wondered if he had looked this way in life, back in Malchut.

  “My for
tress is a perfect tetrahedron,” he said. “Did you notice?”

  We entered into the watch tower, a middle-sized stone room. A wooden table, six wooden chairs. Windows all around presented a panoramic vision of Hell, grey treacherous mountains towering over grey treacherous grasslands, which emptied in a forbiddingly grey forest in the far west. The Bay, many miles in the distance, glinted dimly through the grey fog. A small band of hunched figures crossed the grasslands, drifting in and out of the fog. I wondered where they were going.

  Master Yu peered out the window.

  “No matter how high I climb,” he said, “I cannot look out to sea. It is as if the Falsturm draws down a dark curtain at the near horizon.”

  “What is on the other side?” I asked.

  “Possibility, maybe?” Master Yu suggested, and Hua Nau guessed, “Hope? Hopelessness? No one knows.”

  “Hope,” Master Yu remarked, “is like a harebell, trembling from its birth.”

  Everyone stared at him, and he changed the subject.

  “A few skilled sailors,” Master Yu added, “from Sadlo’reen might find their way through in one spot, when the darkness breaks for a moment.”

  At the center of the table, a vase held a clump of flowers, wilted and brown, with a pointed double lip that resembled a serpent.

  “The fortress was held, in the old days,” Hua Nau said, “by peuples de la mer. You know them? Anatolians?” He fell into the largest chair, which held him sturdily. “They were Eyebrows before there was such a thing. But by the time I’d found them, the peuples were confused, weak. Just little bubbles of anger, unchanneled, waiting to be popped.”

  I sat, and Master Yu sat.

  Hua Nau looked at his big hands.

  “It was merciful, I suppose,” he said. “What we did to them.”

  “You are a man of mercy,” Master Yu agreed.

  The Warlord snorted.

  “Well,” Master Yu said, “one does what must be done.”

  Women served us food, appetizers, I suppose, that smelled near-tolerable, greasy bits of near-vegetables, served over some type of grain.

  An unwashed young man played the guitar, out of tune, without the B string.

  Hua Nau turned to me. “I will tell you the story,” he said, “since you seem to be interested. To remember my life in Malchut, and especially to remember what love was in Malchut and what love could be … all this keeps me human.”

  Hua Nau told me that he had ruled a state called P’iu, back in the Days of Spring and Autumn, in China. P’iu was just a little speck at the edge of what is to-day the boundless territory known as Kuang-Chou.

  Warlord Hua loved a woman, in the little state of P’iu. His Beloved was beautiful, her voice was like a clear bell, her smile was like honey.

  He put her on the throne, right next to him.

  Did he think he would rule forever, or that he would found a dynasty blessed by the Mandate of Heaven, which would succeed him forever, or for a thousand years?

  He did not think about such things.

  He expected that he and his Beloved would rule their little sliver of land for their natural lives, and that he would do his very best to feed the people who lived on the land of P’iu with him, to levy as few taxes as possible, to let them farm on his land, to store grain during fat years and to distribute food during lean years, and thus to avoid a peasant revolt.

  He thought that perhaps his Beloved and his children and even some of his subjects might shed some tears at his funeral, that his eldest son would serve in the castle after him, and that his Beloved would keep his memory alive until she too succumbed.

  Would there be a paragraph or two in the written history?

  People did not think about the vast sweep of history, back in the Days that Were the Days. He had aspired and expected to rule a little bit of land as well as he could, to avoid much trouble, and for his family and his subjects to mourn him with at least a bit of sincerity.

  But then his Beloved allowed the enemy into the land, a usurper Warlord named Eng Fu, and this Warlord Eng conjured a demon in the courtyard of the Castle of the State of P’iu, which ascended from the courtyard into the open window of Warlord Hua Nau’s bedroom, and the demon flew like a swarm of bees into every orifice in Hua Nau’s body as he washed in the basin beside his bedroom window: into his ears where the demon filled his brain, so that Hua Nau’s thoughts were not his own; up his robe and into his ass, where the demon filled his colon, so that Hua Nau could not eat; into his nose and down his windpipe and into his stomach, and from his stomach the demon entered his blood stream, and then flooded his heart, in which Hua Nau still loved his Beloved, even in the depths of her betrayal.

  Hua Nau was no more. P’iu was no more. A nation, gone.

  And the woman he once loved — whom he still loved, even now, if one wished to be honest about it — then sat upon another throne, a new one, in the small protectorate of a larger nation known as Yan, the nation known as Yan that history records was subsequently defeated by the Ch’in, who executed the woman Hua Nau once loved, “and,” Hua Nau added again, “whom I still love, although I do not think I would forgive her. I must love her from the other side of the mountain, forever.”

  “You were a king,” I said.

  He shrugged, considering this.

  “I was a warlord,” he said. “I had a castle.”

  Then, after another moment’s consideration:

  “Yes, I was a king. My successor, the man who killed me, was a regional governor. He turned my kingdom into a protectorate. So yes, I suppose I was a king.”

  He sighed.

  “A little king,” he said at last. “Just a little king, with a little kingdom, and a woman whom this little king loved, who sat beside the little king on a throne that he built for her.”

  “You have been here in Hell for hundreds of years,” I said. “Thousands of years.”

  “No,” he replied. “I just arrived here. Time exists only in Malchut. There is no Time in this place.”

  He shrugged.

  “I had always heard that if a man were unlucky enough to land in 枉死城, he would stay only until he reached the age of his natural death, and then he would attain reincarnation. But in a land with no time, we do not age, and we wait forever … you see this? What would you call this kind of paradox?”

  If this were the 20th century, if we were talking in the Roamers bar in the town of Conconully in 1979, we would call this kind of paradox a Catch-22. But what would we call it here? I didn’t know, and I didn’t know what to say to this man, separated from me by thousands of years of custom and etiquette, and by half the world’s circumference.

  “They killed my concubines,” Warlord Hua continued. “Girls who had never hurt anyone.”

  These girls, his concubines, filled several apartments in his fortress, and they did not smile very often.

  “I am happy that they are here with me, as happy as one can be in 枉死城,because I would have missed them and yearned for them otherwise, but why did he have to kill the girls? What harm could have befallen the state of Yan had Eng Fu allowed the girls to live, to return to their mothers’ homes with a few teals of silver? On the other hand, of course, his crime against them means that they might spend eternity comforting me. Yet it was a terrible thing, and they were afraid, and they suffered pain. They died in pain and fear.”

  He stopped speaking and stared at me intently.

  Should I pat him consolingly on the back?

  What words of support might temper his pain?

  I didn’t know. So I stayed silent, and he broke the silence.

  “One must keep hurting,” he said, “in order to remain human. But one must not feel too much pain. I think you would say that this is” — he thought for a moment, then said — “you would say that this is ‘a balancing act.’ If you are filled with rage for a thousand years, you will become a fu kuei[*]. You will rise to the surface of the Earth with the Eyebrows, just a fu kuei in human form,
and even your own mother would not recognize you. But if you stop hurting, then next you will stop eating, stop sleeping, stop farting, and then you are not human, and you disappear into the darkness, never seen again. You need to keep feeling like a human man.”

  Everybody here in 枉死城, trying so hard to maintain his humanness, clinging to his stubborn, stupid human nature.

  It made me sad to think that what makes us all human is eating, sleeping and nursing grudges.

  And farting.

  Hua Nau smiled.

  “They make soap in Albanadíqué out of boar fat,” he told me. “You’ll want to remember to wash occasionally.”

  I said that I was familiar with this boar-fat soap, as indeed I was.

  After a little while, Master Yu said something gently encouraging, and we all pretended to forget the sadness of Hua Nau’s demise, and then Master Yu said something stirring about the victories and glory to come.

  “You truly believe you shall defeat the Falsturm?” Hua Nau asked Master Yu. His eyes twinkled. He loved a good victory. “You have my support, of course,” he said, “but I fear that you and I will both find ourselves in the seventh level of Hell — or worse! — before this is over.”

  “It says here in White Pond,” Master Yu said, rolling and unrolling the Yellow Emperor’s scroll. “You see? Right here. Victory is not preordained, but it is not impossible.”

  Reading, the old Warlord asked, “Doesn’t the Falsturm know about this? Why doesn’t he kill you?”

  “He will, I assume,” Master Yu said. “When he can. When the time is right. When the calculations have been completed. But I am not necessary to the plan. You may achieve victory without me, if the Falsturm finds me, and if I am lost.”

  Hua Nau focused on a particular line in the parchment. The Warlord squinted. He tapped a word, a Chinese character, which I could not read. He flicked a piece of dust off the scroll, and he squinted again.