“Especially if the war is down here in Hell,” he said. “You will see worse than this, O’Hugh. We cannot afford to be soft.”
“You’ve shot your granny[],” I said. “We can afford to be soft. We must be soft, Dai-Yung, my friend. I know this is a rough neighborhood, but we still have human hearts, you and I.”
Master Yu muttered, “The human heart is an organ that pumps blood, in Malchut. Down here, our hearts don’t pump anymore. Remember? Think with your brain, O’Hugh.”
“Her parents are up in Malchut, mourning her,” I replied, “and we could give them back their daughter, once we break out of here.”
“Daughters leave,” Master Yu said. “People vanish. Parents mend.”
“It isn’t much of a mission for me if there isn’t a damsel to rescue.”
“There are other damsels down here,” Master Yu said. “Many of them are sauceboxes. B’hoys tend to betray their sauceboxes, who populate the realm of the Innocent Dead at an alarming rate. And when they get down here, the trouble doesn’t end. Almost all of them need rescuing. How will you decide whom to rescue, O’Hugh? Will you rescue them all?”
I smiled.
“I rescue only the one who needs rescuing. And right now, she is the only one who needs rescuing.”
And off I went.
The closer I drew, the bigger her captor seemed to grow, the beefier he became. As I approached, he puffed up like a concupiscent pigeon. I didn’t know his name, didn’t ask his name, and never found out, and I don’t care to-day. I walked up to the bar and told him that I’d take the girl with me and set her free, and he said I wouldn’t, and I said again that I would (lacking the verbal dexterity to come up with anything cleverer to say), and he remarked that he’d always hoped to kill Watt O’Hugh down in Hell. “You won’t kill me!” I said. “None of your bullets will hit me! Do you want me to shoot you? Over this girl?” and Beefy laughed, a thick and taunting laugh. The bartender pulled a Winchester .44 from under the bar and told us to take our fight outside, and so we did.
“This is ridiculous,” I said to Beefy, on the way to the door. “We have no bullet factory down here. Bullets are precious. Why are you wasting bullets?”
“Why are you wasting bullets?” Beefy asked.
“I’m not wasting bullets, godammit!” I said. “I am saving a life.”
Beefy said, “After you,” and I said, “After you,” and he said “All right,” because, after all, only one of us led a criminal gang in Wemas, and it warn’t me, so no snipers and thugs waited out there to shoot him. He felt safe, though I knew he shouldn’t.
He stepped into the middle of the street, called out “Gunfight!” and the street cleared, leaving me and Beefy to fight it out beside an untended bonfire. The girl peered nervously and excitedly through the open dancehall door. One of Beefy’s confederates held her arm, to keep her from escaping in the ensuing chaos of death. He too was bearded and hefty.
I followed, but before I could reach the center of the street, I heard a blast to my left, from an open window on the second floor, above the barber shop, and a bullet whizzed by my ear, then zipped right through a man’s hat, leaving a singed hole, but not injuring the man. The bullet lodged in the water trough, which burst, and water exploded over the town.
Beefy laughed.
He stood in the middle of the dusty road, in the middle of the dusty town.
I looked up at the window on the second floor; a scarred face appeared, then vanished back into the shadows. Another bullet, this time from the right, tore through the grey-dusty air, whistled, slowed, zigged then zagged, and exploded in the middle of the street. Fragments of the bullet fell harmlessly to the ground.
My ghosts were here — down here in 枉死城.
My right arm rose, and my gun fired, and a bullet crashed into the town’s second saloon. I heard a loud thwack, a startled groan and a thunk as something heavy hit the wooden floor. (I knew what those noises meant.)
My left arm rose, a bullet flew, and a body plummeted from a window above the butcher. My body pivoted to the right, my .45 blasted again, and a dark figure in a doorway at the end of town collapsed into the street.
I’d killed all those bastards. I didn’t feel happy about it. But they were already in Hell. Maybe now they would go to the seventh level of Hell. That could be worse; probably no wine, not even pig-piss wine.
That would indeed be a worse Hell.
Or maybe if you kill a rotten bastard in the sixth level of Hell, he goes nowhere.
Beefy stood still, frozen, his face white and flustered. His hands hung at his side. He didn’t seek to draw his gun.
I flipped both pistols back into my holsters, and I nodded to Beefy. He shrugged and put his hands up over his head.
I called out to him.
“That won’t do!” I shouted.
I pointed out that he was a threat to the health and safety of the young women of 枉死城, and something needed to be done about it.
I urged him to draw. I said I was waiting for him.
I wished him Good Luck.
Look, what could I do? He’d kidnapped a young woman and threatened to kill me; cowardice now shouldn’t save him.
I thanked my ghosts.
I stood in the center of the street, solid, my confidence growing.
Watt O’Hugh’s Maxim and First Corollary: there’s no reason to kill a man if there’s no reason to kill a man. But even though this particular bad fellow presented no particular threat to my body at the moment, there were countless reasons to kill him. Most importantly, if I were to take the girl with me and let this bad fellow go, he would find some other poor girl and kidnap her as soon as I trotted over the next barren hill. I could not turn this bad fellow over to a federal penitentiary, put him in front of a judge, because there was no judge or penitentiary in Hell. Absent a functioning penal system, death was really the only option.
Unfortunately, I would have to kill him.
Maybe my ghosts grew bored, but in the end, it wasn’t my decision to make. Just when Beefy seemed to think I might walk away from this fight, my ghosts gave me one last prod.
Both my hands rose as if by their own volition; my ghosts made my aim true, although in this case I do believe that I could have managed on my own. Which ghost was it? The littlest one — a girl. Both my hands grasped and lifted both my pistols and fired simultaneously.
Beefy drew and fired, and his bullet flew up and over my left shoulder. The wind ruffled my hair, dusted up a bit of dry sand from the middle of the town, and jangled a set of out-of-tune chimes hanging in the haberdashery window.
My two bullets sliced through Beefy’s beatless heart, throwing him left and right and backwards into the mud in the street. The town would be a little safer for a little while, and then it would get worse again.
I had killed before and I supposed that I would kill again, and it never made me happy before, didn’t make me happy this time, and wouldn’t make me happy in the future. But as I look back on this particular killing, I realize that it has never made me particularly regretful.
I whispered “thank you” to my ghosts. I always thank my ghosts.
I walked into the dancehall, where the crowd parted for me like the Red Sea or Sea of Reeds or whatever it was. Otherwise, the room was quiet and still; wide-eyed patrons stood behind their mugs of fermented grunter piss. They did not move; they did not want to attract my attention.
I asked the room where Beefy kept his horse, and the bartender told me.
“Her name is Bear,” he told me softly. “The horse’s name is Bear. Not a bad horse.”
I retrieved the girl, who seemed relieved to be free of Beefy but not entirely certain what to expect from me.
“Thank you for saving me,” she said. “I am Althea.”
I untied my horse, and Master Yu untied his horse. We went to the stable and asked for Beefy’s horse, Bear, and the stable boy brought her to me. He was a stallion, not entirely tamed, but a
good horse. I helped Althea mount Bear, and then I mounted my horse, and Master Yu mounted his horse, and we trotted out of muddy, fiery Wemas City, and I knew that Master Yu felt regretful that we’d made enemies here, and that he didn’t think it was worth it just to save Althea, the ragmop girl, because he’d had friends here and allies here, and I figured that he probably couldn’t come back here again, and that if he never escaped from Hell, if he were stuck down here for eternity, he would probably miss visiting Wemas City, and all of this was my fault.
Chapter 12
With Althea in tow, we traced the northern range for two days, rocky steep jags — one upon another, blasting off into an infinite distance, out beyond the horizon — which, in another setting, would have presented a tableau of epic beauty, of staggering peacefulness; but not here. The first night, we traveled through dawn without sleeping; we just forgot to sleep and didn’t think of it until we saw the sun rise, and by then it was too late. The second day, our path led straight to a great sand crab, far from her home on the Bay coastline, disoriented and (I thought) more-than-a-bit bitter, drooling, hissing, great pincers raised, a human forearm bleeding from her mouth. And so we chose an alternate route.
We were not insensitive to this sight — a human forearm dangling from a monstrous sand crab’s mouth — but we had places to go, and foremost on our mind was the most efficient alternate route, not the human who had once possessed the bloody forearm.[*] It was no use to him anymore, after all. Master Yu wished him the best, I am sure, as did I.
The second night, we took shelter in a cave in the foot of the northern mountain range while it rained filthy sludge, and wet greyish green muck piled up outside. On the third night, we stopped at a crumbled castle; in its day (if indeed it ever had a day, I wondered at the time; if it were not born into Hell as a ruin) it would have been a magnificent monument. The ruins themselves spread out over an expanse of thousands of feet, and just inside the wall was a garden of camellia-flower bushes, all dead and brown; just outside the castle was a ring of dead cherry trees, sporting dead-brown cherry blossoms.
We climbed a parapet, which reached a thousand feet in the air, and from there we could view this entire world of lost royalty, from the great hall to the royal apartments tucked near the eastern gate. “Hell castle,” Master Yu said. “For the King of Hell.” At the foot of the castle wall, great curved bones jutted from the hard earth, and the terrain was dotted with great round husks of old trees, rotting and calcified. “The swamp is still on fire,” I said, pointing into the distance. When the flames exploded to their greatest height, we caught flashes of shadows spreading across the plain to the north.
“A small force,” I said.
“They keep their distance,” Master Yu said. “Surrounding us? Or maybe watching to see where we are going. Discerning our plan. But if that were their game, why travel out in the open, with a posse?”
When we saw them leave the brick city of Rency, there were a dozen men, and now there were two dozen. I mentioned this, and Master Yu nodded. Their horses were strong and tall, he noted, and the posse themselves rode with a confident forthrightness atypical in 枉死城, which made it unlikely that they were men recruited along the way.
He thought.
“Groups of men,” he said, “do not multiple by binary fission.[*] But groups of Looees do indeed. Thus, the question: Real, not-real? What do you think, O’Hugh?”
I shrugged. We would know soon enough. Or we would never know.
He smiled lightly.
On the fourth day, we reached the pass that would take us through the otherwise impenetrable mountains into Kelián-Verval. After we’d trudged up the pass for a few days, a break in the mountains appeared, and we ascended a few miles, till the crevice widened, and we arrived in a forlorn and ragged mountain town, a secluded den of embittered, dirt-eating poets and vicious winged boars, who flew overhead even as we approached and shrieked in warning. We walked our horses through the open town gates, passed ragged, hollow-eyed men and hollow, ragged-eyed women, on our way to the town center.
“We do not want to stay here long,” Master Yu said. He took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his brow. “Tell us about this man named Mr. Silver.”
I knew these clever bastards well, back then, in New York during my younger years, but my interest in their Cause was only partly political, and wholly libidinous.
The love of my life, the subversive and now long-dead beauty named Lucy Billings, sought to upend New York’s codfish aristocracy and the whole existing societal order, and what could have been more seditious than Free Love? Lucy may not have realized that this was not a new idea, the whole Free Love movement, but one thing was new, which was shouting it from the roof-tops and defending it with a fancy name in pamphlets. This idea had plenty of names over the years, but one might generally mutter such a thing under one’s breath. I liked Free Love a little bit as a political concept and I liked it a whole lot as an activity, but I would have ditched the whole idea had Lucy settled down and married me.
These anarchists — I pretended to share their goals, I learned to talk a bit about freiheit and to nod smartly when someone else talked about freiheit, but mostly I wanted to punch them all in the nose when I imagined any one of them so much as daring to put a hand on the crook of Lucy’s arm.
Mr. Silver, the zounderkite of whom Snuff brought news, was the one fellow who particularly galled me. He ran the team; he fancied himself a leading light of New York’s “Hobohemia” counter-cultural community (he used that expression a lot, Hobohemia, which was bothersome); he penned their pamphlets and tracts; and Lucy was infatuated with him, in her way. How could she not feel a bit of a tug for a man who might help bring about an egalitarian revolution? How could she not save a slice of her soul for a man who might give us all an Earthly Swarga Loka, a place with no poverty, no hatred? I could understand it, but I wouldn’t accept it, even years after my beloved Lucy’s death.
Now, more than a decade since I had last seen them, they were older, and I could imagine only that they’d been sorely disappointed, but they could feel the wind in their sails, and that optimism had a name, which was Sidonia. A dime to the Cause of New York social justice unfortunately equaled a dime to Sidonia and the armies of the Falsturm.
But all I said to Master Yu was, “Silver was the gang leader. Very smart. Not my best friend.”
Master Yu nodded.
“And here comes your ride,” he said, as a young woman approached, sheathed in a black cloak, her face half-hidden by a broad-brimmed black hat.
“O’Hugh,” she whispered as she passed us, and I said I was, and she said that I should follow her, without Master Yu or Althea, and as I followed her at a discreet distance into the side alley, I said that I didn’t follow unknown women into parts unknown, and without turning her head she asked what I thought she would do to me, send me down in the seventh level of Hell?, and I figured she had a good point, but then (a little bit too late) I also recalled that the seventh level of Hell was probably worse than the sixth.
The alley widened into a crumbling city street, which resembled those I had known back home in Manhattan, in the ‘fifties and ‘sixties, swampy cobblestones fronting crowded tenements, but this tableau lasted for only a single block. Did I know the place? Surely. I’d been here, many times, in another age. On the walls, painted obscenities, political slogans. The angry face of a candidate for political office on a poster boosting an election that would never happen.
The young woman stopped walking, and she turned and smiled and caught her breath. She held out one black-gloved hand, which I held for a moment.
“I am Voltairine de Cleyre,” she said, preposterously, and her voice wheezed, and she touched her heart, just for a moment. An injury had sent her here, I surmised; a serious one, which had left her with a weak heart and weak lungs. Still, her blue eyes were round and free, her hair long and brown, which flowed in rivulets from her black hat, and her face, while composed of unli
kely angles, was friendly and lovely. She looked no more than twenty-five or so, although I now understand she had been thirty-six when her lover shot her, and then shot her again. And then shot her again.
Miss de Cleyre — which, indeed, sounds absurdly close to “I Must Declare” — had a mind for the ages. But, as with too many women, a man whom she did not love (but who loved her) had done her in. The young man whom she did not love, whose name was Herman, was small and ill. He pulled her from a streetcar one cold December morning, shot her once in the chest, and then, after the first bullet had twirled her about like a ballerina, he shot her twice in the back. She wished to join us to storm the Gates of Hell and ascend to the Malchut of 1905, not least of all because she wished formally to forgive Herman, who in her view could not after all have prevented his actions, which were merely the schemes of a diseased brain.
I said that I was surprised to see this street, here, at the edge of a primitive mountain village.
“They need the city,” she whispered, “so they invent it. I don’t think it really exists. I don’t think any of this exists.” She pointed. “The leaders of the Haymarket revolt live two doors down.”
Then she stopped, and a flickering figure careened across the alleyway, now here, now gone, now buffeting her against the wall, now letting her fall to the swampy pavement. I ran to her side, but the phantom was gone, and here, and untouchable. She pushed me back, dived into emptiness, returned from the void, drew a derringer pocket pistol, shot at the figure who flickered like a broken strobe-light from some disco in 1974; she vanished, re-appeared on the second-floor fire escape across the street, reloaded, vanished again, then re-appeared behind me with a satisfied frown.
“Coast is clear,” she said, as she drew up beside me.
“I’ve seen you before,” I whispered.
“When?”
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) Page 13
