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 was in Dawsey a few times, after the events recounted in this volume of my Memoirs, because it was something of an unlikely hotbed of rebellion.

  In 1880, on the last leg of his regional tour of rebel-sympathizing towns, Allen Jerome returned briefly and unexpectedly to Dawsey. Refugees from Sidonia wandered the streets, and a tent city flapped on the outskirts of town. The Sidonians wore the town colors, and they wore pins of the martyr Daryl Fawley on their lapels, or their inspiring Sidonian Princess, whose beauty and intensity drove the masses to conquer the continent. Some even still wore a pin depicting Lucy Billings, in spite of the murky circumstances of her demise. When they saw Allen Jerome pass, on this sunny day, the Sidonians bowed, and some of them touched their fingers to their lips, as though kissing a deity whom they could not really physically touch, but one whom they feared, not one whom they truly loved.

  Why did they follow Sidonia? Because they were evil? No; it was because they believed that there could be a better world, and they had seen it for a brief moment in the Montana sun, in that valley, they saw it in Cloud City, in the gold mines and the smiles of the townsfolk, and they saw it here, in Dawsey. They would follow it anywhere, that dream, a dream of a life in which everything happens for a reason, in which life is not pointless as it is for the rest of us.

  You see, in those days, there was a certain amount of anger and hatred in almost everyone’s soul, and you could see it on his face; and he who wasn’t angry had just passed the point of anger into utter hopelessness.

  But a Sidonian follower was not angry; and he was not hopeless. He was happy and hopeful, and deluded, and therefore he was dangerous, but neither bad nor evil.

  After some time, Allen Jerome passed the schoolhouse, where classes had just ended for the day. Dawsey kids from age five to thirteen or so ran shouting and laughing out the front door into the heavy mountain sunshine. As Allen Jerome passed, Mila Weatherford left the little brick building. Mila was the Dawsey schoolteacher, and the mayor’s daughter. She was pale but rosy-cheeked, with high cheek-bones, friendly but determined blue eyes, and light Germanic hair. She wore a simple ankle-length dress, probably made by her own hands, and her stride was confident and graceful. Allen Jerome tipped his hat as he walked by her, and Mila smiled and nodded, pleasant but wary.

  Allen Jerome invited Mayor Angus Weatherford for a day of hunting, and Angus suggested that they hunt coot down by the river, and so the two men stopped over at the Weatherford homestead, changed clothes, grabbed a couple of hunting rifles and a couple of horses, then trotted across the green treeless plains till they reached the badlands, and then they stopped a few yards from the edge of the tributary.

  Angus was an overweight man, with a pug nose and a white pasty face, a few wisps of hair that floated around on the top of his head. He didn’t look as though he were destined for greatness, he did not look like a leader of men, and indeed he was not, which was perhaps, he realized, why Sidonia had chosen him. He crouched down in the mud and trained his sights on a couple of coots on the opposite bank, waited for them to fly. Allen Jerome crouched down beside him in the mud and uninterestedly pretended to aim his rifle.

  The coots enjoyed themselves in the water, seemed disinclined to travel that day.

  Allen Jerome put his rifle down, and he sat up, in the mud.

  “First all,” he said, wrapping his long and wiry fingers about each other, “before I make my proposal — or rather, I suppose, before I notify you of my requirement — I should say that what I shall propose will involve no physical congress, and indeed no physical contact at all. No kissing, no hugging. Indeed, no touching. This is purely a political matter, a matter of expanding Sidonia’s influence in the northern Midwest region.”

  Weatherford put his gun down, and he sat up as well, in the mud.

  “We’ve been very grateful for everything that you and the Sidonian movement have done for us,” he said carefully. “The new train station. The grain elevator.”

  He tried to smile.

  “We’re very grateful to you, Mr. Jerome,” he said.

  Jerome nodded.

  “You see what I am saying?” he asked. “Am I making myself clear?”

  It was a chilly day, a bit of dampness in the sunny air.

  “I think perhaps I need more clarification,” Mayor Weatherford replied.

  “We will need a Queen, you see,” Allen Jerome explained. “And charm is required and … ‘likability.’ ” This word he said with great disgust. “I can convince and sometimes terrify, and those who see things the way I do, with logic and calculation, see the wisdom in an alliance.” He shrugged with his eyes. “But in some cases, charm is needed, and so I am looking for a charming wife to fulfill the requirements of the ruling Sidonian family, and your daughter will meet our requirements.”

  Your daughter…. Weatherford pretended that he had misheard this. He hoped that he had misheard this, but he knew that he had not.

  “I would do whatever I can to find a suitable —”

  “You see,” Jerome interrupted, “when I arrive in a town and make the rains pour from the Heavens and make the crops grow … people are relieved, they’re willing to accept Sidonia’s help, but they’re not … happy about it. It’s a … oh, what is it that I want to say?”

  “Unfortunate compromise?” Weatherford suggested. “Tradeoff?” He immediately regretted his words.

  “Yes!” Allen Jerome exclaimed, excited, not offended. “Or you know what I think one might say … Faustian bargain! If I come into town and put hands on a dying baby and cure her, if I make the hills bloom with wheat and tomatoes and carrots, the people whom I save and feed and enrich consider this a tradeoff, an unfortunate but necessary compromise, a Faustian bargain. But if a ‘likable’ person, a ‘pretty’ person comes to town and puts her hands on a dying baby and cures her, and this ‘likable’ and ‘pretty’ person makes the hills bloom with wheat and tomatoes and carrots, it’s a ‘miracle,’ and she is a ‘saint.’ We’re doing God’s work, they’ll say.” He snorted in amusement and coughed with angry almost-laughter as he snorted. “ ‘God’s work!’ ” he exclaimed, his eyes peeled on Weatherford. “All you need to turn a Faustian bargain into God’s work is to hide the ugly man away and show the world the pretty blonde Aryan woman with the caring blue eyes.”

  He nodded to Weatherford.

  “Am I right?”

  Weatherford shrugged.

  “I have always been more than grateful for your help,” he said. “As far as likability, you’re likeable enough. Perhaps that’s not your p’ticular sellin’ point.”

  “I would suggest that she bear a child, and that she bring the child along to the various political summits that will be required for her duties, which people will find ‘charming’ and ‘likable,’ and so on, and after establishing her maternal qualities — because if there’s one thing the hoi polloi love more than a saint, it’s a sainted mother — she will then make the landscape bloom and save lives and so on and so forth, and the people will dance in the streets, kiss the hem of her dress, prostrate themselves before the sainted woman, and all of that. We have our warrior” — of course, the mythic Sidonian Princess — “and now we need our sainted Madonna! I will be the baby’s legal father, though your girl will of course have to choose a gentleman to be the biological father. You know, to perform the actual….” He explained briefly that he was generally as uninterested in children as creatures as he was uninterested in women as creatures, and so the concept of creating a child — combining as it did two of his least favorite things — was also worse than tedious to him, and he’d given up on all of that business some time ago. “If she wishes to choose a boy whom she ‘loves,’ so to speak, then that will be acceptable to me. She may even marry him in a religious ceremony separate from the legal ceremony in which I will participate, and she may allow him to help raise the little scamp, so long as this is kept clandestine.”

  Weatherford thought for a moment of the man who ha
d served as mayor of Dawsey for much of the 1870s, who had met a sad end at about 10 a.m. on September 17, 1878, when a ferocious pond monster had consumed him while he yet lived; that ferocious pond monster, that exceptionally large and twisted coiled fish — snakelike but with gills, fishlike but with limbs, light green with a white underbelly — which some years ago burst out of the Dawsey pond water, opened its mighty jaw and clamped shut its terrific fangs on the prior Dawsey mayor. Before Angus Weatherford’s very eyes, the devouring went on for some while — the ferocious pond monster savored its meal, unfortunately — and it was very very painful. The prior mayor’s sad death happened to coincide with a visit by Allen Jerome, and it also happened to occur in Mr. Jerome’s presence, and the ferocious pond monster — who had never before been seen in the quiet North Dakota town — made its terrifying first and only appearance moments after the mayor of Dawsey expressed some misgivings about the notion of joining the Sidonian rebellion. I can only conclude that these various coincidences weighed strongly on the new mayor, Angus Weatherford, at a time like this.

  “And if we consider this honor, and decide that it is not….”

  He wondered from whence the attack would come. He looked across the river at the coots on the other bank.

  The coots stared back.

  Angus wondered what they had in mind, these staring coots.

  “You are of German origin, I believe?” Allen Jerome asked.

  “Yes sir. One-quarter German, only. On my grandmother’s side.”

  One of the coots stared right at Weatherford.

  “And you speak German?”

  “I do speak a bit of — ”

  The coot screamed and took two steps forward. The coot laughed angrily, manically.

  “And your daughter?” Jerome asked. “Marie?”

  “Mila.”

  The coot now screeched in fury, stared right at Weatherford.

  This is how I will die, Weatherford thought. I will be killed by a ferocious coot. My wife will be a widow; my daughter will be fatherless.

  Perhaps they were mere distractions, and perhaps some horrible monster would burst unexpectedly from the ground. Still, Angus Weatherford thought the ferocious coot was the most likely perpetrator of his own looming death.

  “Yes,” Allen Jerome replied, “my future wife, Mila.”

  The coot stopped making any noise, cocked its head to one side and stood on one leg, tauntingly.

  Anyone who hears of my death, Weatherford thought, will laugh. “Killed by an enraged coot?” he will say. “Ha ha ha!”

  Allen Jerome repeated, “Does Mila speak German?”

  “She does, just a bit,” Weatherford stammered. “She speaks a little German.”

  “Perfect. We need to begin to cultivate small-scale, person-to-person German alliances, in preparation for our global efforts.” He thought. “It’s almost a fairy tale, you know? German maiden, wandering through the meadows, casting spells.” He named a few German fairy tales.

  Weatherford had not heard of them, but he nodded.

  “Well,” Weatherford said, “if we consider this honor, and decide that it is not — ”

  “You promised,” Jerome replied, “in September 1878, upon my prior visit, that you would be a good and loyal soldier for Sidonia, even if it meant committing unspeakable crimes. Shooting babies. Burning families alive. And whatnot. Promising your daughter to a marriage of convenience with an unpleasant man is well within the parameters of our understanding.”

  The coot shrieked, opened its jaw wide, and projected a bit of greenish, blood-flecked bile from its throat, which splattered onto the river and floated toward the two men.

  Allen Jerome stood.

  “It’s agreed, then,” Jerome said.

  Mayor Weatherford also stood.

  “We need a Queen, as I have said,” Allen Jerome replied. “We have a Princess, but she is a … I think the word is Simulacrum, or Looee, or something. The Simulacrums are more real than the Looees, I think, but I am not sure which one she is. In either event, she is not precisely real. We will need someone flesh and blood up here in the Real World to continue our work. I think Mila fits the bill. I thank you as always for your devotion to our righteous cause.”

  He smiled his sour and dour smile, lifted his rifle, aimed across the river and shot.

  The coot on the opposite bank fell over, dead, and Weatherford breathed a heavy sigh of relief.

  Chapter 22

  On my steed, I left the beautiful clearing. My friends evaporated, and then the icosahedron wobbled and vanished.

  Nature fell away and dissolved, like a “tear in the rain,” as the fella said.

  The castle in the distance became again a crumbling and abandoned shell. We galloped by the ruins of stone homes that had cheerfully lined this route only moments ago. Overhead, a hole grew in the center of the black-green clouds, and Yama’s withered and weathered face peered through. “Remember,” the King of Hell implored, “that the soldiers of Hell cannot be defeated. Remember, Hellers: there is no possible escape.”

  I could feel the Fabricator’s soldiers growing closer, and I kicked the horse. A stone wall grew up before us, and we dodged it, and then a tree sprung into being, and we galloped around it. I shot a glance over my left shoulder; two new Skimmies had joined the party.

  We passed a cluster of tumbledown homes. In one of the stone shells, hunched and singed figures crouched. One watched me impassively, clothes in shreds, face dirty. In the next home, a woman twitched ceaselessly, as though she had the ague. Hooves pounded the earth, scrubby grey little creatures escaped from their burrows by the dozen, and my horse crushed them underfoot. A stone wall rose up three feet in front of us, and my horse leaped over it, whinnying with what seemed like joy and a bit of bravado. Closer to the jungle, another jumble of broken houses, and the people within them were yet more broken, just torsos and heads and tufts of hair, trembling, weeping, barely moving.

  The Fabricator and his crew were now just a few hundred yards from me, and I feared we would not make it to the jungle. I shouted in the horse’s ear, “If ever you ran, if ever in your life you ran with freedom, as a young colt, in the wind … please run now. Else we will both die.” Perhaps jolted by the frightened desperation in my voice, he tore into the distance like a rocket, spinning around the rock walls and trees that rose out of the ground before us, and then roaring and thundering back from out of the black void, he grew into a great snarling beast in a few moments.

  Now, as we neared the border together, I discovered that a great hilly decline preceded the jungle, and the vine-covered jungle trees were actually towering giants that grew from a crater about a thousand feet deep.

  This looked very familiar.

  It was time to do something monumentally stupid; I had seen it before, and I knew what it was.

  At the lip of the valley, I shouted, “Stop, my friend!”; I pulled on the reins suddenly, the horse skidded to a halt, and I flew from the saddle, catapulted into the air like someone blasted out of one of those early 20th century circus cannons, blasted past and above the closest trees, into a new world of shrouded moonlight, descended into the glowing boughs of a spruce, which towered over the foliage a few yards into the distance, caught hold of a branch, flipped up 180 degrees until my feet were in the stars, and then I flipped forward, fluttered slightly in the air, and settled with some relief on another branch. I crouched; the branch wobbled, almost cracked; did not crack.

  I fled deeper into the forest, from branch to branch, vine to vine, like Viscount Greystoke, until I was sure I had lost them, but then I realized that they had not even tried to follow me. These hefty, robust and strapping men on horseback, with their guns and their knives, didn’t even so much as consider stepping over the boundary into the jungle. The words of the oracle came back to me then: It is better to be lost in a forest when riding on a horse than lost in a forest when walking on foot. I was all alone in a place too terrifying for my worst, most powerful
enemies, lost in a forest, on foot, without a horse.

  Perhaps I had made a terrible mistake.

  Chapter 23

  I flipped from the branch and landed on a higher branch, from which I should have been able to see all of the surrounding countryside, but instead all I could see was an infinite loop of green forest, the same trees stretching eastward, on and on, as far as the location where the Bay should have been, and farther still. It was as though an embryo lining had closed around me.

  I sat on that branch for what seemed like hours, or weeks, or no time at all — what is Time, after all? what does it mean? why does it run in four directions, instead of just one or two? — and at length I dropped to the jungle floor, which seemed soft when I first landed, a comforting nustle of leaves and needles on which a man could lie down and sleep, for a night or forever.

  I crouched on the jungle floor for another eternity, resisting the urge to sleep forever.

  This was Hell within Hell, but also a candy-coated child’s dream, all the smells I had loved, back then: the scent of roasted meat drifted down from an open window in a neighborhood in which I longed to live; the clean and sweet bouquet of O’Dell’s Candyland, right across the street, which I yearned to burgle. The sticky dank of 枉死城　was gone, and an ocean crashed nearby on a clean, rocky shore. I could hear it; I could smell it; I could almost see it, but not quite. It was so absolutely real, so utterly believable that I knew it was an illusion.

  I pulled the compass from my bag and I marched south, deeper now into the forest, but if Master Yu’s directions were correct — and how could they not be correct, uttered as they were with such Oriental certitude? — I would emerge after a time (a day, or two days, or some sort of approximation of measurement of time) into a cavern that dropped to a waterfall from which no one could possibly survive, but into which I would plunge, and possibly survive.