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 shook my head.

  “My Lucy does not live here, in this city.”

  “She could, Watt,” the Princess replied. “She could live here, and so could you.”

  “Opinions are opinions,” I said, which didn’t sound as smart out in the air as it had in my head, a moment before.

  The Princess nodded.

  She looked down at the chessboard, and she made her first move.

  She moved a pawn.

  I gathered we were going to play chess after all.

  “I know that I will win,” she said. “And I have never played this before. I don’t even know what this is.”

  “This is chess,” I said.

  “All right,” she replied. “It doesn’t matter what it is called. I will win. I won’t even think about it while I am doing it. It will be like yawning, like blinking. It will just happen. And I will win.”

  I figured that I would test her hypothesis, so I played a game of chess against her, and she won. But I’m a fellow from the rough streets down in the Five Points. Chess isn’t really my game. This didn’t prove anything. A five-year-old child could beat me at chess.

  “I’m not real,” she sighed, when the game was won, when my queen and king were at last dead. “I was written by the mythmakers.”

  She paused.

  “But I certainly feel real. And I feel more real every day, every second.” She laughed, and it was almost a real laugh. “Perhaps the more that people believe in me, the more real I will become.”

  I said I didn’t know if that was the way it worked.

  “Join me,” she said. “Just join me. And you will see.”

  I said that I didn’t think I would.

  Aside from the Princess and me, the shop was empty. The street outside the shop was empty.

  She took my hand, and she moved closer to me. I thought her kiss would be empty, like death, like nothing. But she was growing alive inside, and it was the kiss of someone almost real.

  She broke away.

  “Did you know,” she asked, “that an octopus has three hearts, and that its blood is blue-green?” and I thought that this was indeed important to know. She was saying, Like an octopus, I am different, yet alive.

  All right, point taken. But still: if an octopus threatened to eat me alive, I would want to stop him.

  When I had fallen back into a sufficiently deep slumber that I gather I had ceased to endure at all, a tremendous explosion shook Hell, which blasted my colleague and me back into existence, I on the comfortable north side of our hole and he on the comfortable south side. We scurried up over the abutment and saw the swamp afire, flames bursting up and licking the brown-black sky.

  This was alarming enough, but our predicament grew worse; Master Yu pointed, and in the flat distance to the southeast of the swamp, the light of the fire illumined a band of warriors leaving Rency. The Fabricator and his soldiers, closer than we had estimated, about seven of them. We would have to travel by night, hit Wemas City a day early, and escape before the Fabricator could reach us. That was the plan, a plan which assumed that the Fabricator was the worst of our problems.

  Chapter 10

  In the evening, Wemas City had a certain muddy glamor, the splintered buildings covered with a veneer of brightly peeling paint, the bonfire in the middle of the street blazed to the foggy sky, and the out-of-tune music a bit more joyful than usual, with a perhaps twenty-percent quotient of joy to eighty-percent sorrow. Maybe even, at scattered moments, twenty-five-percent joy, which for Hell is pretty damned joyous. In the middle of the street, the bonfire burned with a quotient of twenty-percent cheeriness to eighty-percent malevolence, but it was enough for the Wemasans, who gathered around the fire and drank warm fermented pig piss and sang off-tune songs they remembered from their time in Malchut.

  At the edge of town, a movie projector cast a beam of light onto a bedsheet, which hung from a dead tree branch, and on that dirty bedsheet, a scratchy image of Billy Golden pranced through an audience of screaming young girls. Billy Golden sang some kind of nonsensical song, and the girls screamed and screamed, and then the film broke and caught on fire, and the movie projector exploded, and pretty sparks and flames danced in the air. A teenage girl in shorts and a t-shirt rode a pink Spacelander bicycle in circles around the town. The bicycle had thick metal rods that made wild spirals around the gears and the thick wheels. It looked like the future as I would have imagined it in 1882, had I never seen the real thing, the sort of bicycle that someone in 1882 might imagine that future children might ride on Mars. Fur stoles with mink heads hung from the handlebars, and the mink heads clenched their teeth and chortled through their clenched teeth. The girl breathed the sour air heavily, and she smiled. Her long brown hair drifted about her in the stale Hell breeze. On the front of her t-shirt: Don’t Panic, in large friendly letters.

  I scratched at the lice in my hair.

  The girl rode up next to me and handed me a letter, sealed with wax.

  “A message from Tang,” she said, and she smiled sweetly.

  I ripped open the envelope while she waited, and I pulled out a piece of pink paper, nicely perfumed and monogrammed with the initials, J.A.D., which to this day I do not understand.

  On the paper, the following message:

  Remember that the soldiers of Hell cannot be defeated.

  Remember that there is no possible escape.

  I stared at the words for a brief moment.

  “You are not on our side?” I asked stupidly.

  “I am not real,” she replied. “No real girl rides a Spacelander bicycle.”

  She rode away, as merry as before.

  “You see this?” Master Yu said, cracking a smile. “Why should there be a town here? Who founded it? Where did all of this come from? From someone’s random musings, that’s where!”

  He swept one robed arm toward the crowd, men, women and children dancing in (and coated with) the Wemas mud, who all glistened in the leaping fire-light. Half the crowd sang gibberish words, pretending they were all citizens of a common era, creating a community out of a song in a world that didn’t exist.

  Master Yu drifted to a crowd gathered in front of a haberdashery, because if a town wished to replicate human existence back in the 19th century, it ought to have a haberdashery. He seemed to be looking for an acquaintance. I wandered to the toy store at the edge of town. A glassless window fronted the shop, filled with quite hideous toys, monkeys grinning mirthlessly, headless stuffed dolls, splintery battledores and rusty shuttlecocks, a bilbo catcher that bounced ceaselessly.[*] I wondered about the children who might frequent this shop. I didn’t have to wait long, because a boy soon enough entered and left with the bilbo catcher, which he tried to control, hopelessly. I watched him as he wandered down the street, the bilbo catcher cragging him, knocking him down. At length, he turned into a side alley, and I could no longer see him.

  I felt a tug on my jacket. A very little girl with big saucer-like eyes stepped in front of me. Beside her, a shaggy, muddy-white dog panted happily. “Mister,” she said, “I offer you a pocketful of rain,” and she looked up at me sincerely and plaintively.

  “A pocketful of rain,” the dog repeated, panting.

  I smiled in spite of my worries.

  “I think I might have use for a pocketful of rain,” I said, and I untied my pocket and pulled it open.

  The little girl smiled and dropped a handful of shredded blue paper into my pocket.

  “Only enough for one big storm,” she whispered.

  “One big storm,” the dog panted.

  I gave her a few pistachios, which I guessed I would probably miss later, but the joy on her face made the gift worthwhile.

  She skipped away cheerfully. The dog trotted by her side. The crowd gathered around the bonfire eventually enveloped the little girl and her dog. Periodically, through a gap in the crowd, I caught a glimpse of the little girl, laughing and dancing, and singing.

  A boy poked his head thr
ough the toy store window. He was hooded and in shadow.

  “Yu Dai-Yung!” the boy called. His voice was duckish and taunting. “You stupid bastard. I knew I smelled something ugly around here.”

  Now I saw that this was not a boy, but an angry dwarf, with red eyes and a broken nose.

  “Watt O’Hugh,” the dwarf said. Scars on his face danced in the firelight. “You know there is an Otherworld Fabricator on your trail?”

  I grunted, noncommittally.

  I realized now that his scars did not merely reflect the dancing flames, but they moved, waltzed and slithered across his face, words and images growing, shrinking and merging, one into another.

  “Whether you know it or not,” he said, “he is coming for you.”

  I wondered if these moving images on the dwarf’s face said something about him, or if they revealed something about me, the observer. On his forehead, this: પ્રારબ્ધ; on his left cheek, this: кек алу. Then, a moment later, the words changed; now, on his forehead, a dragon roared, and on his left cheek, a wolf growled.

  “His fabrications grow in number, the longer you outwit him,” the dwarf said. “Half-alive creatures from a world waiting to replace us.”

  He pointed; a crowd loomed on the horizon, dressed in black; staring at me, flickering.

  “They’re not real,” I said. “Looees, right?”

  Master Yu nodded.

  “Illusions,” he said. “Not up to your usual standards, Snuff.”

  The dwarf agreed. Not real.

  “An illustration,” he said. “Follow me.”

  He led us into the store, and he locked the door behind us, even though there was no glass in the windows, and so anyone could get in. We walked to the back and sat at little chairs around a little round wooden table, hidden from the street by shelves of toys.

  Master Yu began speaking actively in Chinese, and I could not understand him. I wondered idly if he had some ability to turn off the translate function, but I didn’t care, I had heard enough terrible things lately and I was grateful for an oblivious moment. I shut my eyes, and I was somewhere else, on a lawn in the sunshine, in front of a columned country manor, sitting in a chair, drinking some sort of iced tea, with some sort of leaf in the glass — sassafras or julip, or something else. Two young women tossed hoops to each other with a pair of sticks; the hoops were decorated with ribbons. The women wore white dresses and white hats. Suddenly, I knew the name of this game, even though I had never seen it before. It was the Game of Graces. The young women laughed, and their laughter was like a flute and a harp. A young man, around fourteen years of age, twirled his thaumatrope, and a young woman of the same age feigned interest in the thaumatrope, although her interest in the young man was genuine. Children nearby played battledore and shuttlecock with cheerful nonchalance, an almost careless lack of competition. One two three four / Mary at the cottage door / Eating cherries off a plate / Five, six, seven, eight —

  Snuff shook me, and the beautiful dream ended.

  I was back in the toy store, surrounded by tatty dolls and rusty hoops.

  “Don’t let them take you, the toys,” Snuff said. “They’re like opium.”

  Master Yu had stopped speaking.

  Toys are like opium.

  I sighed.

  The dwarf inclined his head quizzically.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “I’m all right, now.”

  “You are certain?” Master Yu asked.

  I said yes. I put my head in my hands and stared straight ahead.

  “I have two interesting things to tell,” Snuff said, in English now. “First, that the emerald is not here. It is in Albanadíqué.” He tipped his head to the left, a bit northwest. “Sold to a merchant in Albanadíqué.”

  “What will we need to do to get it?” Master Yu asked.

  Snuff pursed his lips.

  “The merchant is named Relver,” the dwarf said.

  “Does he know what he has?” Master Yu asked. “Will he listen to reason?”

  “Look,” Snuff said. “Why does anyone ‘want’ anything down here? They’re hanging on to the last threads of life. What possible value would a jewel merchant be to people in Hell? But Albanadíqué — they have society there of a certain sort. They seek to run the nation. They put on entertainments. They wear jewels. They make sure they have the best jewels, and others do not, that those they deem unworthy and beneath them are kept there, beneath them.”

  He scowled.

  “Heiresses killed in a fit of jealousy,” he continued. “Titans poisoned over a clever business maneuver. Such is the species of personage who moves to Albanadíqué. You see? They were better than you in Malchut, and they are better than you in 枉死城. This is how they stay human. This is what being human means to them. It is to them what eating and sleeping is to you.”

  “This means no?” I added. “This means Relver will not part with the gem?”

  “Will they willingly allow anything of value or beauty to leave their town with a Chinaman and a fugitive cow-herder?” Snuff asked. “You come into town intent on leaving with a gem — why, Relver will wonder, is that gem worth such a trip? The town Brahmins might suddenly see its value, because you see its value. How could they allow such a treasure to fall from Albanadíqué?”

  Master Yu said calmly, “If we must, we will fight for the gem.”

  I didn’t look forward to my visit, and I especially didn’t look forward to my upcoming attempt to pry the gem from a rapacious Albanadíquéur, which I now gathered would be by degrees more difficult than arranging a deal with a relatively rational Wemasite.

  “I have one other piece of information,” Snuff added. “In the 1860s, sometime before the Riots, when you resided in New York city, you met periodically with a group known as anarchists, a gang of gangly armed, weak-ankled Ivy-League intellectuals who imagined themselves soldiers in the impending government overthrow, who wished someday to share the wealth and usher in a new egalitarian free-love paradise.”

  I shrugged. Then I nodded. I was in Hell, so there was no point in lying, I supposed. One really can’t get in much worse trouble then going to Hell.

  “Self-styled subversives,” he added, squinting his eyes, “who allied themselves with Sidonia.”

  I grunted.

  “You know,” he said, “what I mean,” and I nodded; I knew these people well.

  “There is a man,” Snuff added, “named Silver. An intellectual leader of the group. Wrote most of their pamphlets. He was the handsome one, the silver-tonged devil, appropriately.”

  Then Snuff dropped his bombshell.

  “Silver is in Kelián-Verval,” he said.

  “I don’t know it,” Master Yu said.

  Snuff tipped his head to the left, a bit northwest, and he sneered to show his disgust for Kelián-Verval.

  “Piece of crap locale,” Snuff said. “If Time existed here in Hell, we would say that the town is a new settlement. But as Time does not exist here, the town is not new. It is an always-town, as are we all.”

  Then he described Kelián-Verval, which did indeed sound like a bad place, bad even for a town in Hell. (More on that later.)

  Snuff leaned closer.

  “Your Mr. Silver,” he muttered. “Betrayed, hornswoggled, honey-fuggled and killed.” He paused for effect, but I had already intuited that Silver had come to a bad end. “In our battle with Sidonia, it might help us to make the acquaintance of a man who hates Sidonia even more than we do.”

  I could see Silver now, so clearly I could nearly reach out and touch (or punch) him. But I didn’t have time to think long about my past — about my sad past, lost love, dashed dreams. A woman’s clutched sob caught my attention, and I turned; a beefy man, bearded and muscled and threatening, dragged a young woman across the muddy street (and even seeing a beefy man now made me hungry for a bloody steak). She had gone limp, she’d given up, but she was not about to walk willingly to whatever fate awaited her. She had a dead and brown fl
ower in her hair, a Canterbury bell. I imagined that, in life, before someone betrayed her, she had worn a blue Canterbury bell in her hair, and that she had looked beautiful. She sobbed again, the sob caught in her throat, and she shut her eyes. Beefy hauled her like a burlap sack, like a ragmop, into the dancehall at the end of the street.

  Chapter 11

  I followed them into the dancehall, Beefy and his captive, the ragdoll girl, and Master Yu reluctantly trailed behind me. The dancehall was dim and windowless and crusted floor-to-roof in the sort of fine Hell-dust that coats the lungs. The dancehall smelled of sweat; inside, sweaty men danced with sweaty women. The men smiled joylessly, and the women frowned joylessly, and also helplessly.

  I scratched nervously at the fleas in my clothing, which were burrowing into my skin.

  The ragdoll girl sat on a stool, she stared blankly ahead, her tears spilled on the splintery bar. Her captor sat beside her, his fat fingers curled around her wrist. A crowd of slobs gathered around him, fingers wagged, tongues jabbered. They seemed to be negotiating.

  I tapped Master Yu and pointed.

  “You are a sympathetic person,” Master Yu said. “You would like to rescue a damsel, and you are trying to convince yourself of a good reason to do so, against all evidence. Look at her! What can explain your weakness, O’Hugh?”

  “She is strong and angry and also smart. But plummeting into Hell, and then this captivity, has led her to hopelessness.”

  “Unlikely,” Master Yu said. “I suspect that you’ve noticed … with some food in her, she might be a saucebox.” He said this in English. “Am I right? A saucebox?”

  I disagreed.

  “Maybe we could save someone,” I said. I pointed out that I hadn’t saved anyone in a while. I used to do my fair share of saving. It was one of the things that I used to do, when I had the chance, back when I was human. Like eating and sleeping. I liked to save people. Especially womenfolk.

  Master Yu pointed out that we were saving civilization and all humanity. He said that a lot of people die in times of struggle. One must prioritize. One cannot save every individual. Many people suffer in wartime.