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

  Skinny shook with anger and fear; his whole body shook. This wasn’t about Lucy, I knew, except that Lucy’s death would win him an ally.

  “We want to defeat these bastards,” he said. “We want to destroy them, and to kill them. And we want to hurt them. We want this defeat to hurt. To hurt terribly. We do not want Allen Jerome and Daryl Fawley to have good deaths. We want them to have bad deaths.”

  Burly took my arm.

  “And you want the same thing,” he said, in that husky whisper. “You do not know what these men have done to us. But we know what they have done to you. They killed Lucy Billings, as thoughtlessly as a man catching a fish for dinner. As thoughtlessly as a man killing a mackerel.”

  Skinny raised a finger.

  “Not even a man killing a salmon,” he gasped. “Like a man killing a mackerel. A smelly, bony and cheap fish. That is how much thought they gave to killing the wondrous Lucy Billings.”

  “How does Master Yu figure into all this?” I asked.

  Burly said, “He is recruiting an army.”

  “From Hell,” Skinny added.

  “Yes,” Burly agreed. “An army from Hell. Master Yu is recruiting an army from Hell.”

  I thought they were engaging in a little dramatic hyperbole with their Hell-talk, the way someone in 1986 might say, for example, Boy, I’ve really got the boss from Hell. Unfortunately, I was wrong about that. The Hell-talk was worse than literal. Still, it sounded good, this idea of recruiting an army from Hell to fight the Sidonians and avenge Lucy’s death, and I was all for it.

  “I’ll show up that day,” I said, and my voice choked, which surprised me. I thought my mask was on. I thought the face I showed the world was calloused and tough. “Write it down. I will do this for you.”

  Back at the cabin, Burly wrote it down for me, and Skinny nailed it to the wall, and then, not particularly enjoying my company, they asked for their weapons back, and they excused themselves. They mounted their horses more-or-less in unison and began riding East at more-or-less the same trot, and about a quarter mile from my little shack, they disappeared. I wondered if they were from the past or from the future.

  I never saw them again. I suppose they died, somewhere, someplace between that time and this time, in some battle, maybe in a battle that I don’t remember because it never happened. Maybe their lives were erased, and now it is as though they never existed, because they didn’t. That’s like dying — existing, and then not existing, and then never existing.

  To tell you the truth, I never wondered, till now.

  In preparation for my journey, I sobered up for a day, which was dreary but necessary. In the morning I ate a few strips of salted rabbit and drank the last of my coffee. (The last of my coffee! Not the very saddest words in the English language, but nevertheless sad and nervous-making words.) I washed up in the lake, till I was suitably scrubbed. I was traveling to the 1970s, after all, when standards of hygiene would be different, to say the least. Odors of any sort are frowned upon in the late 20th century; remember, I was coming from an era in which a bath during the winter was likely to kill a body.

  I mounted my bay gelding and rode East, to the trivial mining settlement from which the trivial lakeside resort town of Conconully would one day arise.

  The settlement seemed to have fallen on a bit of hard times, and while there were cleared lots, there were scant buildings and no settlers to be seen. But there was a little caved-in barn with a door that flapped about in the unsteady wind. I needed to walk through a door to roam, you see. There is nothing scientific about it, just a psychological crutch that I had to use, a way of visualizing the journey.

  So my horse and I trotted at an even pace towards the barn, and then through the door, and then we were for a moment nowhere, and then we were back in Conconully, but in 1979, when it was a tidy little four-corners with a coffee shop, a record store, its windows filled with LPs and 8-tracks, a market, a place to buy worms and other fishing gear, a place by the water that rented boats. And at the outskirts of town, inland from the lake and at the foot of the mountain, unheralded to the townsfolk (who were not welcome), the mysterious one-night-only Roamers saloon.

  I stood beneath a birch tree, in the night shadows. From outside, the windowless building was still dark. There was no sign over the door. But it hummed, showed signs of life and excitement. A young woman stood out front, stationed beside the door. She held a gun in her left hand, and she was scanning the horizon and surrounding area. When she looked in my direction, she smiled, there in the dim moonlight in front of the building.

  “Watt O’Hugh!” she called. “I can see you there, you know.”

  Then a flash of concern crossed her face, she lifted her gun and shot, just to my left. In the woods, something went splat and then thud. Someone groaned, nearby; and then silence.

  Now she smiled again, and I walked across the road.

  She was somewhere in her late twenties, with long brown hair that blew freely in the night breeze, a strong jaw, and bright and excited black eyes, with flecks of silver. She wore blue jeans and a t-shirt in the style of the 1970s, but she wasn’t from these parts. She held her gun fondly, a gun of the decade, a semi-automatic “hardballer” pistol. She was fierce, and she was also adorable.

  “And what is your job here?” I asked her.

  “I’m despatching villains!” she boasted merrily, as though she were a child with a toy gun. “I have good night vision, so they like to have me out here to despatch the villains.”

  At that moment, a figure rose from the underbrush, and she raised her gun and shot, twice, once high and once low. Skull and bone shattered in the dim moonlight, and the figure flew backwards, into the dark bushes and beyond.

  “Sorry,” she muttered. “Have to stay on my toes.” She cast a sidelong glance at me. “I’m Theera.[*] By the way.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “From the future,” she said. “By way of the deep past. ‘Theera’ is a Paeonian name. It has something to do with thunder, but I am not sure, because Paeonian is an extinct language.”

  Now a figure appeared at the end of the road, a pale and gaunt figure with eyes the color of dull embers. He rode a raggedy grey horse; his white hair fluttered behind him, and his horse galloped forward. He dropped his reins, and he lifted his rifle and aimed. Theera raised her pistol and shot, pinning the assassin in the chest. The ghostly figure fell backwards off his horse and into the mud, and a moment later he was gone. Galloping hoof beats echoed from somewhere around us, but the horse was nowhere.

  “You see?” she said. “Sometimes they disappear when I shoot them. Where do they go? Dunno! Sometimes their bodies lie in the mud, and I’ve got to dispose of the bodies. That’s messy work.”

  She shuddered cheerfully.

  “Do the police ever hear the gunshots?” I asked. “Do they ever come to investigate all the killing that goes into a night of entertainment at Roamers?”

  She sneered cheerfully and charmingly at this idea, and I was indeed both cheered and charmed by her, glad to be under her wing. I knew next to nothing about the rules that governed the interlinear Maze, and I was glad she realized it.

  “We are Roamers, darling,” she explained. “We do not leave footprints.”

  Darling. She knew me. From sometime in the future. Or from a past that had changed beneath me, and which I no longer remembered. This is what I recognized when I first saw, standing so confidently beside the door, this unfamiliar face. She and I knew each other; some version of her knew some version of me.

  “We never leave footprints,” she repeated. “We pass like the wind.” She thought that this was very funny; we pass like the wind.

  “We are safe from the police,” I said.

  “We aren’t the droids they’re looking for,” Theera whispered, and she laughed again. “We can walk into the movies in Paris in 1954 without buying tickets. We do not need to pay for fruit in the market in Kashan in 1411. We can shoot Skimmies and L
ooees without fear of arrest.”

  “Because we aren’t the droids they’re looking for?”

  “Or at least that’s what they think.”

  I liked how it sounded. The droids they’re looking for. I think it means, We can get away with something that other people cannot get away with.

  One would-be assassin staggered about in the mud, on all fours, searching for his pistol, bleeding all over himself, grunting. Finally, impatient, he hauled himself to his feet and ran at us, screaming. Theera despatched him with a quick bullet in the head, and he staggered backwards.

  “FTW!” she said, but she sounded a little less joyful. Maybe this one was real.

  She and I dragged his body out of the street and deposited him into the shrubs in the shadows of the rumbling saloon.

  A tall and well-armed young man arrived to relieve Theera from guard duty.

  Theera brushed the mud from her hands and her knees, and she led me into Roamers.

  The bar was naught but a desolate store room, abandoned with the change in the economy, and not yet rescued by the tourists who would descend a few years henceforward. A few windows let in the air and the starlight. Someone had lugged a makeshift bar from town, and the music was lo-fi, a couple of acoustic guitars, a sax, a flute. A lot of Roamers cannot tolerate amplification. The party was crowded, but I realized quickly that the number of bodies grew and collapsed, like a human lung. The room, a blur — partyers shifted as I watched; the past and the future metamorphosed, smeared in space. How many Roamers would it take to change a light bulb? An infinite number, because the past and the future is always changing ‘round them.

  At the bar, we sat on two unstable fold-up stools.

  The bartender was in his twenties, a little unhealthily overweight from cheap food, his eyes a little bloodshot, his cheeks a little prematurely veiny. He was just a fellow from town, hired for one night, probably usually unemployed. He didn’t understand any of this, and he didn’t care. He didn’t ask. This was a cheap gig for one night. He didn’t know that he was trapped in an infinite loop from which he would never escape. He didn’t know that he would do this again and again, serve these drinks over and over again, this same endless night, until the end of Reality, and that he would never remember it. This man would live a whole life, an eternal life, of Tuesdays, and never remember yester-day’s Tuesday, or look forward to to-morrow’s Tuesday. And he would never enjoy any of it, this lifetime of Tuesdays.

  “A Monongahela,” I said, and Theera shook her head.

  “My friend will have the Conconully Canarino.” She smiled, and the bartender nodded dully. “Make it a double,” Theera added.

  She looked over at me, but she was still talking to the ‘tender.

  “You know the Conconully Canarino?” she asked. “It’s like Canarino, but with a dash of Conconully.”

  He said he did, and a moment later he brought me a tall glass filled with a clear drink, and three ice cubes. The ice cubes glittered and danced.

  “Usually,” she said, “a Canarino is nothing, but the way we make it in Conconully, it has a certain something.”

  I took a sip. The drink was refreshing and tasteless, and it stung slightly, pleasantly.

  “Does it bother you?” I asked her, and Theera looked blank and cheerful. She didn’t know what I meant, she couldn’t think of anything that should bother her to-night.

  I said that taking a life always bothered me, but it appeared that she despatched villains with some level of glee.

  “Oh brother,” she laughed. “Listen to me. As soon as anyone floats through this scenario again, these Skimmies will be alive again.”

  “Skimmy?” I asked. “Scenario?”

  “They’re Simulacrums. Skimmies — easier to say. You see, this is something like a moment in time, but since it is so well-traveled and so flexible, we call it a ‘scenario.’ If a Skimmy kills me here, he’s killed me for good.

  “If he’s a Skimmy, I shoot him, but the next time I’m here, he’s back again, and I shoot him all over again. The assassins who actually die and leave a body behind are Skimmies. But some of the assassins just pop in the air like soap bubbles. Those bums just came into being a moment before, maybe not even sentient, just almost nothing more than illusions — we call them Looees. You know what they say in the 1980s? Or, I guess, what they will say in the 1980s? The Looees are here to play with our minds. The Falsturm sends them here to make us feel outnumbered.”

  She laughed, an angry and joyous scoff of a laugh. Stupid Falsturm. Stupid Looees. This was scary, life and death, fate-of-the-universe business, but it was also fun.

  “Their tricks won’t work,” she said. “We like it here.”

  I stared at the musicians. A woman had joined the guitars and the horns, and she began to sing. This Roamer really looked like a Roamer. Not really present in 1979, not someone who had woken up this Tuesday morning in Conconully; the eyes in her face were watching other things, things that weren’t here in this room. She didn’t belong. Not here, not anywhere. We Roamers don’t belong anywhere.

  Theera asked if I understood what she was telling me.

  I said that I didn’t. I didn’t know what she meant at all. Now I do, but back then, I did not.

  She exclaimed, “You’re new at this Roamer business!” but I think it made her happy to say this. The more stupid I was, the more I needed her protection, and she liked protecting people. She liked protecting me.

  The woman singing was stalk-thin; her voice was strong and forceful, and the song she sang was filled with rhythms I didn’t understand, words and ideas I couldn’t follow. I yearned for Little Brown Jug on a tinny piano.

  “Carbon copies,” Theera said. “These Skimmy assassins are not precisely real is what I mean. They’re mostly from the Otherworld. Some are from other Otherworlds. Born and bred, and not strictly authentical. I’m just slowing the bastards down. Not killing them for good. Game Over, and they come back, like in a video game. You ever play a video game?”

  This was a pointless question, and she knew the answer. She was just trying to prove herself worldly. Or perhaps timely. To impress me; or take me down a notch? I answered the question anyway. I allowed Theera her superiority. I said I hadn’t ever played a video game, although I had seen one or two in passing, on my way here and there in the future. She said that in that case I wouldn’t understand the analogy, and so she wouldn’t bother.

  “Fair enough,” I said, and I shrugged.

  “But to make a long story short,” she went on, “you’ve got all the Roamers together here at one time. And so the Skimmies come back again and again. And try and try and try.…”

  A couple danced to the music, just to the left of the singer. The man wore a suit from the 1700s, and the woman wore a brzinet from the 22nd century, a century that may never happen. The woman was pretty in her brzinet, all purple and blue, with sparkles and stars, and the man was handsome in his cravat, waistcoat and breeches, and he held her tightly, because this was all. After this, they would both be lost to Time, and lost in Time. From different eras, one long dead, one not yet born. Maybe never to be born. They stared at each other with undiluted longing and swayed to the unlistenable music as though it were the Moonlight Sonata.

  “Look at the gift you have given all of us, O’Hugh,” Theera whispered, her gaze on the dancing couple. “Look at their great love, a love across Ages.” She smiled, and I saw that her eyes were a little foggy. “This happens to all of us here. Every one of us has a story.” Still not looking at me. “We are all so grateful. You’ve let all of us be human.”

  The Conconully Canarino in the Roamer bar was making me more alert, heightening my senses. Making me think. This is not what I expect when I partake. It is not why I enjoy partaking. It is not always so entirely pleasant, this thinking business. Once you start thinking about things, you start understanding them, and no happiness ever came from understanding things.

  After I had my third double Conconully Can
arino, Theera took my arm and led me out back, behind the bar, to a great open wooded paradise. The bar was perched on a hill and beneath us was a dip of a valley, so that the towering spruce trees rose up to meet us. A horse was tied to a tree, a stallion, black with a grey mane, a little wild-eyed. As we approached, the horse recognized Theera. He was happy to see her.

  Theera reached over and squeezed my hand.

  “I’ve been practicing something,” she breathed, nervously. “Something of a … well, a stunt I guess. Something near-worthy of Watt O’Hugh’s Wild West Extravaganza, performed with such gusto at the Great Roman Hippodrome in July of 1874.” She shot me a glance, and another hesitant smile.

  “Near-worthy,” she said again, for emphasis.

  She had done her research, this Theera.

  Theera turned her back to me, untied her horse.

  She mounted.

  “I’m going to show you this only once,” she said, with a bit of bravado but, it seemed to me, more than a bit of trepidation. “So watch close and do not blink.”

  There was some hidden reason why she wanted me to see this stunt, and an obvious reason why she would have preferred not to show me this stunt, and why she was going to show it to me only once.

  She kicked the stallion, but not very hard, because he knew what to do, and he broke into a frenzied gallop, spinning off around the outside of the bar and into the dark-distance, and then roared and thundered back from out of the black void, the Skimmies and Looees dived for cover, the Looees popped in the air; he grew from a tiny starlit dot into a great snarling beast in a few moments, until, quite unexpectedly, at the lip of the valley, the horse skidded to a halt, and Theera flew from her saddle, catapulted into the air like one of those Barnum cannon women from the 1940s, blasting past and above the closest trees and descending into the moonish-glowing boughs of a spruce, which towered over the forest floor a few yards into the distance. Theera caught hold of a branch, flipped up 180 degrees until her feet were in the stars, and then she flipped forward, fluttered slightly in the air, and settled with some relief on another branch. She crouched; the branch wobbled, almost cracked; did not crack.