Watt O'Hugh Underground: Being the Second Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh III Book 2)
Page 28
A figure appeared at the far horizon, a thin man on a lopsided horse. He meandered, lopsidedly and rather slowly, in my direction. At length he drew within a few yards of me. He was a Chinese man, not entirely young but not yet old, and a woman would have described him as handsome, even now, weathered and ragged.
“I saved your life,” he said, standing over my prone body.
Even though I didn’t understand Chinese, and he was speaking Chinese, I could understand him.
“It was a very difficult shot from such a distance,” he said, “but had I waited until I was closer, sand crab would have eaten your face.”
“Thank you,” I said, my speech slurred and drooly.
“I used four bullets,” he said. “I’m running short on bullets. None to spare. You have bullets? And you have guns?”
I nodded.
“A .45 and a rifle,” I gurgled, as spittle spilled down the side of my face, my own saliva mixing with sand crab drool. “And plenty of ammunition,” I added, failing to sound authoritative and in control.
“Good,” he said. “We will need guns. And we will need bullets. I have a sword. Not a very good one. But perhaps it is Magic.”
He knelt down and held out his hand. He grasped my shoulder, which was still numb.
“Yu Dai-Yung,” he said to me. “I am Yu Dai-Yung; this is my name,” he added, in case I might misunderstand what he meant.
“The acclaimed poet?” I said. “With the terrible name?”
“The terrible poet,” he admitted. “With a beautiful name that he does not deserve. But thank you.”
“Ah,” I said.
I had heard his story once, on a trek through the canyons of Utah, from an old friend of mine, I said. I was familiar with his story.
“And you are the reincarnation of a court poet of yore?” I added. “If I recall correctly?”
“You recall almost correctly,” he said, in Chinese. “Actually, his bastard son. But you were close.”
“I am Watt O’Hugh,” I said. “The Third.”
A dry little gasp of wind mixed a bit of sand and dirt into the air and blew the smell of Hate into my lungs.
Yu Dai-Yung turned and looked out at the landscape, and then my way.
Shaking his head, he said, “一 塌 糊涂,” and while this came out of his mouth sort of pitiably and hysterically as i-ha hu t’u, I understood his meaning perfectly. What he meant, with a terrible sigh, was this:
“Well. What a hell of an out-of-control mess.”
And so it was.
THE END
of
THE SECOND PART OF THE STRANGE AND ASTOUNDING MEMOIRS OF WATT O’HUGH the THIRD
Author’s Note
While I grounded this book in historical reality, I played with dates and places where necessary. For example, I have tried to describe with some accuracy the history and structure of the Bank of California, although the Bank was out of business for a relatively brief period of time, a few years earlier than the events of this story. Furthermore, there was no lawn, garden and iron fence in front of the Bank building. My fictitious J.P. Morgan continues to live in his Madison Avenue mansion a few years before the real one did. In Chapter 12, Master Yu expresses a rather modern skepticism towards ancient Chinese myths, the slave ship Africain sailed in the early 19th century, not the 18th century, the Second Grand Ball of the Knights of Robert Emmet was not a masked ball, and it was held in October 1879, not July, as were the other events described during that eventful week in Cloud City. I am aware of no evidence that the now-defunct town of Freda, North Dakota existed prior to its turn of the century establishment as Pearce, North Dakota, and while it was hit by a meteor around the end of World War I, the meteor didn’t destroy the entire town. There are no little isles in the North River. The details of William Frederick Slocum’s tale as related in this book are mostly true, although his family’s trial for witchcraft and wizardry is my own invention; why he fled is unknown. “Peking Indians” did not exist. Senator William Sharon probably never abused William C. Ralston’s wife and children, and I know absolutely nothing about Leadville’s Mayor Dougan, and I apologize to any of his descendants offended by this mildly negative portrayal. Scholars of Soviet history will recognize Anichka’s hometown of Khabnoye as modern day Poliske, a once-lovely city filled with historic architecture, which is now an abandoned ruin in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. I have scattered what I think are some particularly lovely bits of unattributed Midrash and other poetical snippets of Judaica throughout the text (which are generally my own re-translation), and the first sentence of the first and second paragraphs of chapter 15 each has an unattributed Cheever quote, which is, I think, definitive proof that on one of his jaunts to the late 1950s, Watt read The Wapshot Chronicles (as good use of anyone’s time-roaming skills as I can imagine).
Thanks to my wife, Lan, as always my first reader, to my kids, Liana and Julianne, for support you showed me as I finished this book during those terrible days of unemployment, Mark Matcho, for his great cover art and incredible enthusiasm for this project, Andrea Basora for an early read, David Groff for his insightful and essential final edit and Elena Stokes at Wunderkind PR for recognizing the potential in my little endeavor.
Thanks also to R. Michael Wilson, who corresponded with me on how to rob a 19th century train, Tzyann H. Berman, who helped me with Chinese idioms, the historian Leslie Harris for her knowledge of African-Americans in old New York, The New York Historical Society, Jack Hursh for information on Reno in 1878, Alison Moore at the California Historical Society, who provided essential information on 1878 San Francisco, Rand Richards, Lynn Coleman’s 19th century website, and Rabbis Matt Carl and Frank Tamburello for your help with chapter 15. Edward Blair, Christian J. Buys and Lawrence Von Bamford have written useful books on Leadville, Colorado (which was known in the past first as Slabtown and then as Cloud City), and my 30-year-old notes from Professor Hans Bielenstein’s amazing Ancient Chinese History class proved very useful. (Good old Prof Hans Bielenstein. What a great guy!)
Stay with me. Just one more to go ….
Steven S. Drachman
November 2013
Other books FROM CHICKADEE PRINCE THAT you will enjoy
Justice Makes a Killing: A Bobby Earle Novel, by Ed Rucker –
ISBN 978-1732913905
“A thoroughly enjoyable page-turner…. The classic courtroom drama at the heart of this story is perfectly orchestrated, and the seemingly impossible odds make Earl’s masterful handling of evidence, witnesses, opposing counsel, the jury, and the judge wonderfully satisfying to read. Rucker has a knack for explaining the minutiae of legal procedure clearly as he weaves them into the story.” — Kirkus Reviews
Probability Shadow, by Mark Laporta
ISBN 978-0-9997569-2-8
“This is a good series opener for speculative readers who like tangled story lines in which solved problems reveal even greater challenges.”
— PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY
“[A]n engrossing far-future reality of galaxy spanning civilizations, populated by multiple alien races ... [Laporta’s] imagination is impressive and establishes a delightful playground for the trilogy to explore.” — John Keogh, BOOKLIST
AND DO NOT MISS!
Watt O’Hugh and the Innocent Dead: Being the Third Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O’Hugh the Third
By Steven S. Drachman
ISBN 978-1-7329139-3-6
“Touching tragedy, dead-pan comedy and a time-roaming cowboy? Part three of Drachman’s epic fantasy series is indeed fantastic!” — David David Katzman, award-winning author of A Greater Monster (Bedhead Books)
On the morning of Wednesday, September 24, 1879, I awoke in a prison in Montana.
I did not imagine that evening might find me sprawled beneath a great and ferocious sand crab on a rancid beach, deep in the Hell of the Innocent Dead.
But that is indeed where I wound up.
The moral, if there is on
e: never plan your day too inflexibly.
THE WAIT IS OVER: THE CLASSIC ADVENTURE CONCLUDES
In the final book of the trilogy, Watt O'Hugh, the dead/not-dead, time Roaming Western gunman, travels the length and breadth of the sixth level of Hell, recruiting a shadowy army that might storm the borders of the Underworld, free humanity and the inscapes from the clutches of the Falsturm and his Sidonian hordes, and stave off the Coming Storm.
He’ll need a little luck.
* * *
[1] Or, anyway, it’s the name I chose for myself when I emerged from the slums. I did not know my real name, or even whether I’d ever had one.
[2] That’s what your 20th century Harvard professors would call an “awkward segue,” but as a little poetic turn of phrase it pleases me, an orphaned mudsill with only a little formal education at the Randall’s Island school, in the middle of the last century, and more than a few lifetimes ago.
[3] Of course, when I was using my assumed identity, I called it “Hugh Watt’s Maxim and First Corollary,” instead.
[4] He’d ridden with me, my horse, during that rollicking, bloody range war up in Lervine, along the Northern edge of Utah, among many other misadventures, and while some of them were successful, the most important ones were all failures, and of even the successful ones I am frequently ashamed and seldom proud.
[5] This was really the name of the saloon in the little shit-nothing town of Lida, not a ham-handed tribute to the author of The Great Gatsby, a book I have not read (and I don’t expect to find the time to read before I surely die on January 1, 1937), although I understand that it will go through a critical reappraisal in the years following my death.
[6] It was August 15, 1981, to be precise, four days after August 11, 1981, which was a rather pleasant day in the life of Watt O’Hugh, and which I had continued to visit again and again, whenever I grew thirsty, broke, over-sweaty, or lonely, and which played a role in my aforementioned racket, which I’ll talk about more later.
[7] I’d rather not be “pedantic,” but I think it’s important to note that these creatures sitting on M. Rasháh’s shoulders inspired more curiosity in me than they did in the other guests – who, after all, were of the Star Wars generation – and so I would spend some time researching them in the decades to come. The pixies on M. Rasháh’s right shoulder were 妖精, or yaoching, which are the nastiest Chinese demons that you might ever have the misfortune to meet, and those on his left shoulder preferred to go by their proper names and were demons of an origin that in the 1870s we would have described politely in a hushed voice as the Eastern European persuasion. Of this latter group one might identify Ornias, Bultala, Thallal, Melchal, and even the comparatively noteworthy Beelzeboul, who my 21st century readers would consider the Chief Executive Officer of the demons, and who popped in for only a little while for a bit of very effective and threatening shrieking.
[8] This morning, I woke up thinking that to-day was March 15, and that I had only 293 days to live, but a young boy from the town – a young boy named Peregrine who hangs on my every word and seems to believe my stories – this young boy has educated me as to the leap-year nature of 1936, and his facts seem to bear themselves out. So it turns out that to-day is March 14, and in fact, if you allow me to include in my calculations both the day of my death and to-day, I still have 294 days to live after all (which isn’t that long, but is still better than 293 days), owing to the fact that at the end of last month, whoever created the calendar saw fit to grant me one extra day of life. So: thank you, whoever you are.
[9] How did I (a fellow who was not there) know what happened on Master Yu’s journey, and what he was thinking? I would later meet Master Yu, who would entrust to me his journal, from which I would retrieve information used in this volume, and friends of his would also tell me much about Master Yu. Everything in this book is true.
[10] This glorious, seemingly immortal citadel was to stand till 1906, not even a mere 30 years into the future. Who would have thought that I, Watt O’Hugh, would live longer than the Bank of California building?
[11] Is it possible to flop gracefully to the floor, I hear you ask? Indeed it is. Catching one’s balance upon losing one’s equilibrium, and landing with a gentle flutter. This was beyond our sad Mr. Filbank’s capabilities.
[12] This is not my poor attempt at a dirty joke. Hang Far Low was the Delmonico’s of San Francisco’s Chinatown, it was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, rebuilt, and survived for many esteemed decades, even though its name sounds funny to American ears. This is a two-way street, my friends: try saying “Ronald Reagan” with an Alabama accent to a man from Fujian. He’ll find it hilarious, laugh rudely and won’t stop for many minutes. (If you say it to a woman from Fujian, on the other hand, she may blush, or she may just slap your face and run screaming.)
[13] In those troubled days of 1878, Masters Lu, Hu and Hsu were emperors of Little China, and they frequented the Hang Far Low Restaurant for dinner. Master Lu was the whoremonger. Master Hu was the slave-trader. And Master Hsu – the leader of them all – was the drug-dealer.
[14] For reasons that should be obvious from this anecdote, Louisa would prove a great help to me and the counter-Revolution during the Battle of Sidonia, around the turn of the 20th Century, and she periodically told me stories about her father meant to soften my generally negative impression of the Great Man. His not-entirely-beastly conduct as a parent was one point she tended to emphasize, which I duly note in these Memoirs.
[15] If you have come across the first volume of my Memoirs, you recall mention of my reputedly “heroic” actions in Little Mount, trumped up tales published by credulous yellow journalists, which had the happy effect of making me a minor but noted Western icon and dime novel hero, before my undeserved fall from grace.
[16] Are two interrelated and concurrent cold-blooded and heartless murders committed by the same perpetrator considered to be one bit of nastiness or two?
[17] I was to run into Arthur again during the Battle of Sidonia at the turn of the following century, when he had become a well-known author. As an older man, he would believe in fairies and wizards and ghosts, and, most of all, perhaps, the magical power of the world’s rabbis – with a particular obsession with the secrets secreted within the wizardly brain of the great Houdini’s rabbi – which view I suppose he acquired during that timeless month in the mountains.
[18] The Nephilim – the offspring of angels and human women – are generally viewed with suspicion and fear. I am not one hundred percent certain that Nephilim exist (or ever existed), but if they do, I am rather certain they are not all bad.
[19] I didn’t know what that meant, but even then, I had to admire the poetry in it.
[20] What did he know? Was he working for Jerome? Was it even really Rasháh, or were there more than one of them? Was this Rasháh before he fell off the Maze, before he vanished into Time? Or is there a way to come back from off-Maze? Or was this a feat unique to the Dark One? Facing this militia once again, I wondered why Allen Jerome had not just killed me. But now, all these years later, I can understand: because only Rasháh was fated to kill me. Just as the Falsturm may be killed only by the hand of the daughter of a Queen, who was born Nephila (whatever that means, exactly), only Rasháh might kill Watt O’Hugh. That was why Allen Jerome and his guard had not killed me in the prison; and that was why Allen Jerome did not kill me as Sidonia burned.
[21] Actually, a midget in drag.
[22] At that moment, I wondered if she had been lying to me all along about her presence on that day, but some years later, I realized the truth, in the middle of the night, waking from a dream, as these things usually come to me. Hester had not lied to me, but she had come to me from a different past, a past that no longer existed, and that a Roamer could no longer visit.
[23] And, while I cannot prove it, I believe this is why he could do naught but send his Otherworldly assassins to hit Master Yu, an Old Soul from the Old War whom Rasháh – a me
re half-soul from the Next War – would be powerless to stop by himself.