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

  I asked why he had taken the time to look at this, and he said he did it just to give himself hope and to try to feel human again.

  When we retrieved our horses from the tragic stable-boy, it was a bit past Hell-dawn, and as we galloped away from the fortress city, we left behind the smoldering embers of ten thousand giant sand crabs.

  Chapter 8

  We traveled a little over sixty miles to the northeast, and then as the murky sun settled down beneath the murky horizon, we pitched our tents beside the greenish-grey Maldensses swamp; the swamp gasses farted up into the air, brown and angry, and a tremor struck, the earth shook, and we sat, just rising and shaking with the earth, until it was all over. To the east, through the swamp gas, and in the far distance, we could see the Bay, and the dwindling lights of Rency, which lay west and a bit inland of our little hamlet of Hallitanud; about fifty miles from the western bank of the swamp lay Wemas, and in some little room, I believed, Ar Semel slept, guarding the emerald that might mean freedom for all the Hellers.

  A crumbling fortress wall jutted out of the earth just to the north, covered with dead vines, and half upended by dead roots. Tree stumps rotted in the dank air, and I wondered what trees had once stood here. A few miles to the northeast, a giant sand crab stood on a ruined sea wall and screamed into the night. Who built these walls?; what long-dead trees had destroyed these walls? Hell is cold at night.

  I opened the saddle bag and took out some jerky, which I gnawed apathetically.

  Master Yu squinted a bit, and he pointed to Rency, just as the last light went out in the open window of an oppressively squat brick home.

  “Not everyone wants to escape from 枉死城,” he said. “You need to remember that. Worst country in the world, always 10% of the people remain loyal. Not just pretend. Even deep in their heart, they remain loyal.” Then, exasperated: “Even in Hell!”

  All I could get from him was that he went to Rency, where he sought to recruit the most influential man in town in his struggle against the Falsturm, but instead of winning an adherent, he lost an eye, and it could have been worse. He was a man of few words where losing an eye was concerned, and also romance, an adventure in which I gather he lost more than an eye.

  I asked Master Yu what I was eating, and Master Yu said it was meat. I asked him what kind of meat it was, and he didn’t answer, didn’t even shrug, just stared into the fire.

  What does it matter, what kind of meat it is?

  Everything was bad in Hell. Everything smelled bad, tasted bad, hurt the ears, hurt the eyes. It was pointless to ask what exactly was the latest irritant to irritate a body; otherwise, one would be doing nothing but asking, What the hell was that? You are in Hell. It won’t be fun.

  I pulled the manila envelope out of my jacket pocket and tossed it to Master Yu. He asked what it was, and I told him the whole story, about how I met Burly and Skinny, how they gave me a ticket to Roamers if I would agree to meet the man with the monocle and silver-tipped cane and to deliver this manila envelope to Master Yu.

  Master Yu stared at the envelope, at the front and at the back. He seemed to weigh it with his hands.

  “They set up a nightclub?” he asked. “For Roamers?”

  “You weren’t paying attention,” I said. “I set it up. Some future me. Burly and Skinny wanted to give the young me a chance to enjoy it.”

  “Roamers can’t change the past or the future.”

  “Future Watt didn’t change anything meaningful by setting up the Roamers saloon,” I said. “A group of Roamers in a bar. Some drunks having a drink? Roamers are all drunks, you know. They show up, have some drinks. Not affecting the world as it is. An out-of-the-way building that is otherwise deserted will be, for one night, not deserted, and occupied only by men and women out of time, changing nothing around them. Some Simulacrums die who would not otherwise have lived. The Roamer ladies kiss the Roamer gentlemen. (You should come by, some night. Not a bad place.) Then a few weeks later, or the next day, or the next year, they come back to the same night, and everything is different. Other Roamers have a drink. Other Roamer ladies kiss other Roamer gentlemen. But the world around us never changes.”

  “What about the bartender?” he asked. “His life is impacted.”

  “Tending bar at Roamers,” I said. “One guy makes some shinplaster selling booze. Otherwise tending bar somewhere else. Or more likely sitting at home watching Laverne and Shirley.”

  Master Yu scratched his chin, tilted his head to one side.

  “Some Roamers can change things,” I said. “Billy Golden. Maybe one other. A girl I met. Pretty. Strong. We might hope.”

  “I wonder,” Master Yu said, “what would happen if you were to die in this realm.” He stared at me. “You see? If you were to die down here in Hell, before you set up the Roamers Bar?”

  I nodded. I said that I thought about that too, but I figured it would not meaningfully change the past or the future.

  “Were I not to set up the bar, those Roamers would drink somewhere else, or not drink. The deserted building would remain deserted. No impact on ‘reality,’ such as it is, either way.” I smiled. “Someone thought very hard about all of this. Someone didn’t want to be expelled from the interlinear Maze.”[*]

  “Someone,” Master Yu said, nodding. “You.” He opened up the envelope, squinting with his one good eye. “Ah. Explain?”

  “Battle plans,” I said. “Troop formations. For a little skirmish I fought a few weeks ago in Montana, which are of no use to you, and also more detailed strategies for the 1905 Battle of Sidonia, which I gather will be of some great help.”

  Master Yu raised an eyebrow as he reviewed the plans, not looking at me. Finally, he pushed the paper into his pocket, shut his eye and breathed in deeply, that stenchful air.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  I don’t know what it was about that particular spot, beside the swamp, in that particular moment, drinking again that terrible wine and eating that terrible food, scratching at the bugs in our clothes and the lice in our hair, but Master Yu and I stayed up half the night talking; I spilled a lot of beans, everything from Deadling Lucy to the mysterious tale of Rabbi Samuel Palache, the descendant of a famous pirate rabbi, and periodically Master Yu wrote some of it down. He was especially interested in the tale of Rabbi Samuel Palache, who lived on an island, and whom I had visited some years earlier, and who had taught me the rabbinic secret of magical disguises.

  It seemed to me at the time that Yu Dai-Yung spoke a great deal, but I realized later that his own discourse had been filled with ideas and philosophical citations, and things he had seen, poetic visions and geography, and questions for me.

  By the time I fell asleep, unexpectedly, in the middle of something Master Yu was saying, I understood his soul relatively well, but I didn’t know the poor man narratively, so to speak.

  What was it that had made him, first, vapid in youth, and then, later, grave and haunted in maturity? This knowledge would come later.

  After a while, I woke up in the night, the fire sputtering out, and some flecks of greyish snow drifted down from the skyish dome that covered us. I was alone. I stood and walked a few yards, sunk a bit into the marsh, hauled myself out and pushed my way through the hollow and dead husks of trees that surrounded the marsh. There I saw Master Yu sitting by torchlight beside a small hooded figure. I could hear them speaking, but I could not understand the words. Master Yu’s colleague sat with her back to me; she spoke in a childish voice, but with wisdom. The flames flickered on Master Yu’s face; he was entranced; encouraged; troubled. At length, the pair seemed to reach some sort of resolution. Master Yu nodded. He stood. The robed child stood as well. They shook hands. Then the child turned into something else, quite gradually — a snowy egret, a beautiful creature with a slight black bill, yellow feet supporting slim black legs, and gaudy feathered plumes rising from its back.

  “I will never get used that,” I muttered. For I thought that I knew this snowy egre
t. And I knew this child-oracle. I was sorry to see that she had wound up down here, a wronged and spurned victim, like all the rest.

  Master Yu watched the snowy egret ascend meanderingly into the air and vanish into the cold snowy-grey Hell-night sky.

  I rushed back to camp, and when Master Yu returned a few moments later, I pretended to be asleep. He poked at me. I told him that I had been sleeping, and that he had woken me. But he knew that I was not sleeping; because when Hellers sleep, they disappear. Sometimes to Malchut; perhaps sometimes to dark Sheol, straight into true oblivion. Either way, it was good news for me. Meant that while I slept, giant sand crab couldn’t eat me. Good good news.

  In the night I woke, and it was snowing, a black turdy snow, already filthy and stinking before it even hit the ground. We were lightly dusted, with this black turdy snow. I realized then what had woken me: a man’s screams. To the east, maybe two miles away, by the edge of the Bay, a man screamed. “沙蟹,” Master Yu said, and it came out of his mouth as sha hsieh, and I understood that one of the great sand crabs was eating a man alive. I asked if he were real or if he were a Looee sent here to die and terrify us, and Master Yu said, “I don’t know,” and so I asked if we could help him, and Master Yu said, “We cannot.” If indeed this man were a true sentient creature, then he was near-dead already, whatever that meant down here in 枉死城.

  “Poor fellow,” Master Yu whispered. He certainly seemed real, this poor fellow who was lost in 枉死城　and devoured by a sand crab. The screams drifted away in the dark wind over the hollow Bay, and the beast burrowed into the sand, satisfied, crunching on bones as though they were peanuts.

  Chapter 9

  The following night, we sojourned in a crevice that marked a point almost halfway between the Maldensses swamp and the edge of Wemas City, a moist hole large enough for three men — that is, large enough for me on the north side of the hole and Yu Dai-Yung on the south side of the hole, with an appropriate grateful gap between us — beneath a slab of brownish-grey stone that jutted out of the earth and blocked the turdy wind that blew in from the Bay to the east. I did not want to sleep, exactly, what with my eagerness to progress to Wemas City, as well as my waning humanness, but Master Yu insisted, and so I slept.

  I’m not sure what woke me up, but I awoke and couldn’t fall back asleep, and so I stood and climbed out of the crevice and began to walk.

  After I had traveled not a tenth-of-a-mile, I almost-heard something move in the still and quiet Hell-night.

  Listen: you remember how you feel when everything is quiet, but you nevertheless know that something very not-quiet is going to happen. You remember what it is like when you have just awoken, and you cannot recall why, because whatever it was that woke you quieted down as soon as you awoke, but still waits in the quiet room.

  You remember how you feel when something is going to happen any moment, but you do not know exactly when, and you do not know exactly what.

  This is how I felt then, standing in the darkness of Innocents. Shadows swirled around me, some of them clouds against the moon, drifting in the night sky.

  Then the clouds parted and the moon shined down on the land for a moment, and She was there before me.

  The Sidonian Princess, in all her fictional glory, stood just yards from me, across the swampy ground, lit up by the foggy full-moon, which now filled the sky, as though by her command. The very Princess whose image Allen Jerome had dreamed some years past to inspire the masses. Her right eye was a piercing green, and she wore a patch over her left eye. Her features were strong and savage, her long hair (and of course her eyebrows) a dark red. She wore a red robe and a red headdress, and the hawk on her shoulder cocked its head, looked at me quizzically.

  Then she was gone, and then she was in my head, just inside my head, smiling in there, and then she stood before me, too close, a spear in her left hand.

  We were alone, and she was smiling. Perhaps I would die.

  There was something human about her now, not just the machine I had seen in Sidonia, the pre-programmed demagogue urging her legions to kill and to die. It was something in her one eye, some indication that there was something there, behind the eye.

  “You cannot know,” she said to me, “what it was like for me to awaken one day, filled with a personality that someone else had created for me, but no memory. No memory, just someone else’s purpose.”

  This was, on its face, a very sympathetic predicament.

  “You can choose to be whomever you want to be,” I said.

  “I can tell you that my memories of the day we last met — when the utopian community of Sidonia was destroyed in the Montana valley — are like the memories of a different woman.”

  “These are memories of the things that you did, Princess,” I said.

  “At times I do not even see the world before me, I do not even hear the words I speak or the things I do. I am like a moth that follows the moon but does not know that she is following the moon.”[]

  The Princess knew many things, just because she knew them.

  She sighed, and she touched my arm.

  “When do I become me?” she asked.

  I asked her name, and she said no one had ever given her a name, she was just the Princess of Sidonia, or the Sidonian Princess, or “our Princess,” if a Sidonian were speaking.

  “A name was never necessary,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Me, as well,” I told her. “I was a nameless orphan, stealing and surviving in the Five Points till I was ten, or such. I didn’t even know that people needed to have names. I thought some people did, and some people didn’t.”

  “So who named you Watt O’Hugh?” she asked. “Was there a Watt O’Hugh Junior? Or a Watt O’Hugh Senior?”

  “Very unlikely,” I replied. “I had parents, at one time, whom I do not remember, but I know that they were not O’Hughs. I named myself, and my name expresses how anonymous I was. ‘Watt’ came from What? ‘Hugh’ — as in Who? And ‘the Third.’ Well, I’d heard it one time, attached to a most impressive gentleman, and I just thought it sounded good. I didn’t know exactly what it meant, except that it told the world that there were others like me.”

  She nodded, and she thought about that.

  “Which there are,” I added. “Many, many forgotten children, just as I was.”

  She asked me what I thought her name should be, and I said that depended upon who she decided she wanted to be.

  “I bring people joy,” she said. “And so I think my name will be Princess Joy.”

  I shrugged.

  “You bring people death as well,” I said.

  I saw a theme here, and I wondered for a moment if this Princess had been designed especially for me. I’ve always preferred women who are smarter and richer than me, and who can shoot and even punch better than me.

  “My followers,” the Princess said, “will die happy, believing in something. They will live in a beautiful city.”

  “But the universe,” I whispered. “I worry about the universe.”

  An old woman with beautiful eyes had shown me what the Falsturm would do to the universe. I tried to remember what it was.

  “The universe will.…” I said. “I don’t know, get raggedy? Won’t a big hole explode in the middle of the universe?”

  The Princess shrugged.

  “A long time from now,” she said. “After you are dead. It won’t bother you.”

  “But the people,” I whispered, “who will not be born. Because of the hole in the universe.”

  “What about them?” she wondered, and I didn’t know. “There are plenty of people,” she added, “who won’t be born, no matter what either of us does. An infinite number of people will never be born in this universe, no matter whether you fight the Falsturm or join us. I suppose it won’t matter to you, the ultimate fate of the universe. And if you join us, your life will be better. Filled with love and joy.”

  “I was rather certain that you had
come here to kill me.”

  She shook her head, and she laughed. She had an unexpectedly nice laugh.

  “I don’t want to kill you,” she said, “but even if I wished for you to die, I could not kill you now. It’s not your time.”

  “You know when I will die?” I asked, and she said, “I know when you might die. I know when you will probably die. There are many possibilities. This isn’t one of them.” She smiled. “But as I said, I do not wish you to die, not now, not ever. I wish to recruit you to the Cause.” She saw my face deepen with skepticism, and she said quickly, “Not the Sidonian Cause, of which I imagine you have had your fill, with its false promise of social justice. I wish to recruit you to the Cause of Watt O’Hugh. Seduce you to the Cause, so to speak, with beautiful promises. My city — the city of your Sidonian Princess — sits alone on a hill, like a spinster; waiting; to be embraced by someone who will love her.”

  And then we were elsewhere, a white city in a star-lit night, a city that shifted with the wind — now a metropolis of broad thoroughfares and sky-scrapers, now a small and charming hamlet with rows of 18th century stone townhouses, lit by fire — a burg that shifted to meet the whims of its residents. This was something that I had experienced only once before, in Sidonia, and you and I know how that little holiday had turned out. And thus I was skeptical.

  I followed the Princess across the street, and into a small chess shop. She sat down at a table of finely polished cherrywood, lined with hand-carved ivory chess pieces.

  “Care for a game?” she said, with a pretense of nonchalance.

  Through the window, I saw a woman walking up the Avenue, with a handbag hanging loosely from her left hand. I knew who she was even before she turned and looked at me: this was Lucy, living an ordinary life, alive, in a beautiful city that she might share with me. In a moment she was gone.

  “Do you wish to chase after her?” the Princess asked.