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

  Chapter 3

  That first windy night, Master Yu and I trudged back from the Bay at my slow, injured-man pace. In Hell, the wind is filled with sand, and when the wind hits you, the sand burns your face. The wind blasts sand into your eyes. You pretty much get used to it, the sand in your eyes all the time.

  In the distance, that sand crab roared at the edge of the Bay. A young boy taunted her, throwing rocks, running away, running back. The sand crab screamed. The boy laughed joylessly, staying just out of reach. I asked Master Yu if we should do something to make sure the boy stayed safe, and he shook his head. “The boy has been here in Hell almost as long as always,” he said. “Terrible sad story, this boy’s tragedy. He heckles this particular sand crab every day. It is almost funny to watch.”

  This was, I think, like a Hell-version of a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

  When we were halfway between the Bay and the border of Hallitanud, the clouds cleared. Master Yu stopped walking, and I stopped walking as well.

  “A message from Yama, the king,” he said, and I asked which king, and he replied, “The King of Hell,” and he advised me not to be too concerned about what was to come, which could be off-putting at first. I pulled my coat around me, but I was still cold.

  Once the clouds had cleared sufficiently, a glowing face filled the entire sky, an old man’s face, imposing and confident, with busy and bushy white eyebrows that topped a pair of steely golden eyes, and a long beard that flapped across the land.

  “A message from the King of Hell,” he said, and his voice boomed out over the countryside, a voice that was old and shivery and rusty, and intimidating all the same. “Light rain expected from early morning till dusk. Foggy and chilly to-morrow.”

  Master Yu said, “Hmm. Weather report.”

  “Remember,” Yama implored, “that the soldiers of Hell cannot be defeated. Remember that there is no possible escape.”

  I did not say anything right then, but this message gave me a bit of hope. If the soldiers of Hell could not be defeated, and if there were no possible escape, then the King of Hell would not have felt the need to announce it so dramatically, and apparently at regular intervals.

  I surmised: the soldiers of Hell could indeed be defeated, and there was indeed some possible escape.

  THE NEXT DAY, Master Yu gave me an old banana to use as admission to the bathhouse just south of Hallitanud, where, with boar-fat soap in one hand, I submerged myself in water only slightly smelly; and, though I tried to scrub away the grime of the trip through Time and the crab drool, I believe that instead I emerged with a new layer of Hell-water grime. I walked back to the hut, stinking like a dead pig, but feeling yet human. On our way to the Hallitanud monthly social, Master Yu told me I would get used to all of this, or at least forget what Life was really like, up in Malchut. The tea was in a dingy social hall down the muddy main street, and there I recognized Milton and Minnie, but not Ch’ao-Hsing, who was absent, and who did not make an appearance at the tea.

  Thirty-odd denizens of Hallitanud chatted mildly and sipped something similar to tea by the light of the such-as-it-was sun, which oozed through glassless windows. With an emotion mimicking enthusiasm, Minnie introduced me to the Hallitanud mayor, a bespectacled young man, apparently a Hebrew, who seemed genuinely excited to be mayor, as though there could be such a thing as a political trajectory in Hell.

  Still I wondered: What would happen to his murderers? They would live out their lives; celebrate Christmas, christenings, anniversaries; conceive and produce children, watch them grow, and spoil a grand-child or two. Would guilt torment them? Alas, no. They had done what had needed to be done. And what of their victim? He would be a sad footnote; in his surviving photograph, his frightened eyes would seem to indicate that he was aware of his fate, although of course he was not. Eventually, the few who remembered would die off, and eventually his tragedy would fade, and no one would mourn his unborn generations. The descendants of his murderers would live on, happily, and blameless. And he would live on here….

  He told me that it was no easy task running a town, even a town in Hell, and even a relatively small town in Hell such as Hallitanud. Simply coordinating supplies, for example.

  Surprised, I wondered about the supply channels in a place like Hell.

  “Well,” said the mayor, “one must have deliveries, you know.”

  “Supplies arrive from … somewhere?”

  “Certainly. If one must repair the house. Restring a guitar.”

  “And where do you get your guitar strings?” I queried.

  “Caravans arrive with supplies and set up shop at the local markets.”

  “And who are the merchants who run these caravans?” I wondered aloud, and the mayor allowed that he hesitated to ask, “because if we interrogate them in too thoroughgoing a manner, they might skip Hallitanud on their route next time. And then our roofs would leak, for example. And we could not restring our guitars.”

  I could think of nothing to say, and the mayor added, “We are a deeply damaged community, Mr. O’Hugh. You see? This is all an illusion, I think; some sort of fever dream. Each one of us expects to awaken, gasping for breath, as his brain drains out of his left ear and into the sewer. But I am the mayor of this fever dream, and as such, I might keep the roofs paved, and the guitars stringed.”

  I nodded. “But if this is not some sort of mass hypnosis?”

  He shook his head and shrugged. “I find it hard to believe in the concept of Hell, Mr. O’Hugh, much less the idea of a Hell of the Innocent Dead. However, imagine that my agnosticism proves incorrect and this is in fact reality. Then I gather that if one is avenged, he might return to Malchut, if his body still exists.”

  “But what if he has died in the meantime? If the victim’s coma has terminated and he has expired?”

  “Some say the past changes if one is avenged. But I do not think so. Perhaps one moves on, straight to the Pearly Gates!”

  The mayor laughed at this.

  “Perhaps,” Master Yu surmised, “one might travel to a fabrication, a simulated world that is identical except that the victim is yet alive.”

  The mayor laughed again.

  “Mumbly jumbly,” he exclaimed. “Life is rather simple, I expect. I think if one manages to escape from 枉死城, one goes nowhere. The dream ends; the black curtain descends.”

  He tapped the side of his head nervously, and he adjusted his ill-fitting black glasses.

  “I wish that I am wrong, but I do not see much hope. Nevertheless, my job is not of the rabbinic variety. I am merely a mayor. I ensure that the stucco for the roofs arrives on time, and I invite everyone to the monthly social, where we consume such-as-it-is tea. Other than that, we can all hope for the best, I suppose.”

  A portly and elderly gentleman swept grandly into the room, dressed in a moth-eaten topcoat. Yet: while the topcoat was moth-eaten, it had certainly once been a fine top-coat, and all of 枉死城　was naught but once-beens, so this entrance by a man in a once-fine topcoat created more than a bit of a stir.

  “Excuse me,” the mayor whispered, “important people are arriving,” and he left us to attend to the important people.

  We stayed for a while, and I mingled a bit. I liked Hallitanud, I suppose. If one had to live in Hell, one could do worse than Hallitanud. As I will shortly relate, due to events beyond my control, I did not stay in Hallitanud for long, but it was not so bad, where versions of Hell are concerned. The town was like a little town in the popular American imagination, circa 1890 to 1956, except, of course, transplanted to Hell. There was a little soda shop which served a sort of rancid, sandy version of an egg cream. It had no eggs (egg creams have no eggs and no cream) but it smelled sulfuric. It was an egg scream. There was a barber shop. Hair didn’t really grow in Hell, but people would go in and get a trim to feel human and to have barber conversations. There was a veteran’s club. A Main Street. Maybe not exactly what you imagine when I say the words. It was something, though. A four
th- or fifth-generation mimeograph. A small town seen through a grimy and partly boarded-up store window. It was a ghost of itself.

  At midnight, Master Yu lay down and pulled his thin sheet up to his chin and shut his one eye, and I sat awake for a while listening to the unidentifiable noises of Hell right outside my window. Unable to sleep, I opened my eyes and looked over at Master Yu’s bed, and saw it empty. After a while I got up and grabbed a bottle of the so-to-speak wine and walked outside into the grim night to look for him. I headed toward the glow of the Bay.

  In the distance, a couple walked together by torchlight, hand-in-hand, not looking into each other’s eyes, not speaking. The woman wore a grey hooded robe, which flowed and billowed over a slight and slim figure. Long black hair spilled from the hood and floated gently about her in the slight night breeze. The man was young, with unnaturally snow-white hair that framed a moody white face. The sky cleared a bit, and they stopped walking and kissed sadly in the brief fleck of moonlight. I saw now that the woman was Ch’ao-Hsing. She broke their embrace, and she turned and walked away, toward the Bay. The man watched her go. Then — and I do not know how else to describe this — he fell on all fours, and at once he was a wolf, still white and sad. Yet at the same time that he turned into a white wolf, he also slowly grew feathers and wings, and he was a great white hawk. At once, the hawk who was a man flew into the murky night sky, and the wolf who was a man ran off into the murky night fog.

  I drank a bit more of the terrible wine, and I walked back to the shack. I decided that I would not mention this to Ch’ao-Hsing, and I would not mention this to Master Yu.

  When I returned, I looked at the door attached to this little shack, and I could not resist the urge to walk through that door into another Time, and so I did. I opened the door, and I leapt. And when I landed, nothing had changed. Everything was exactly the same. The shadow of a great sand crab reared up on the horizon and bellowed at the dark clouds of Hell.

  Why did I walk through that door, so filled with hope? Because I am a Roamer. But it didn’t work. Because, as Master Yu explained to me, there is no Time in Hell. Hell just is. Because it is a punishment that we invented for ourselves. It is like a five-year-old’s crayon drawing. It isn’t real. It is just living pain. And pain does not know Time.

  The next day I suffered the entire day with a hangover worse or near as bad as any hangover I’d ever had before, and something entirely undeserved given my very mild drunkenness the night before. I guess that’s one man’s definition of Hell — weak booze, followed by a really terrible hangover.

  But a really terrible hangover without the reward of any prior drunkenness was a relatively minor inconvenience. I didn’t know it yet, but a gentleman in Malchut was in the process of tying his bow-tie and preparing to descend to my level. He had a list in his left breast pocket, and I was on it.

  Chapter 4

  Up there in Malchut, there was a town known as Cloud City, Colorado, which I’ve told you about in Volume 1 and Volume 2 of my Memoirs. Once it was known as Slabtown; one day it would be Leadville; but as my yarn unfolds, it was beautiful Cloud City, a megalopolis in the clouds, ten-thousand feet in the sky at the apex of the Sawatch Range and the Mosquito Mountain Range, overlooking Denver, and one of the largest cities in America, way back then, back when it was something special.

  I visited Cloud City in 1875, with results that were unfortunate, though not as unfortunate as they could have been. That is, I was nearly murdered by a fat young police deputy with curly hair and a stubby nose, and also by a horde of confused but vicious deadlings. But I was not murdered, neither by a fat young police deputy with curly hair and a stubby nose nor by a horde of confused but vicious deadlings. Typical good-news / bad-news kind of thing. Also, my detour to Cloud City wasted valuable time that I could have used to save my beloved Lucy Billings from death, and hence I did not use that time to save my beloved Lucy Billings from death, and hence she died. So I have always held in my heart a special antipathy for Cloud City, although it was indeed a beautiful place, with lovely buildings and nice views.

  There was a reason for Cloud City’s spectacular financial success, and it’s the very same reason that I was almost-murdered there in 1875: this former failed mining village had formed an alliance in the early 1870s with the Sidonian separatist Utopian movement, and since then the mines flowed with silver.

  You have to understand the way things worked back then — in the 19th century, it was not the same as it is to-day. Around the world, most human beings really did face the risk of losing their money and starving to death, and on any given day, your spouse, your children, your friends, might complain of a stomach ache or a headache mid-morning and be dead by late afternoon. So imagine you’re living in a place called Slabtown, a dying gold town, during the beginning of what would become known as the “Long Depression of 1873 to 1896” (but all you know is that there’s no money around), and not only your business has died, but also a few of your children, and also your wife, come to think of it. Suddenly, not only is your mine ejaculating silver like there’s no to-morrow, but your deceased kids and your wife come back from time to time for a visit. The mayor and town council tell you to thank the Sidonian movement — and of course prayer — and why wouldn’t that make you a loyal Sidonian patriot and put your ass in a pew every Sunday morning over at West Third and Spruce, or East Seventh and Poplar? Certainly, some parishioners would see Satan’s work in all of this, but for others … well, life is a game of figuring out which compromises are acceptable, after all.

  Indeed, Cloud City had grown from a dusty settlement of flapping tents to a genuine world capital and center of the nascent rebellion, packed with restaurants, hotels, opera houses, treachery, musical comedy, subversion and celebrities.

  And from the late 1870s to the early 1880s, Mr. Allen Jerome could often be seen visiting the churches, and even tossing off a sermon or two from time to time, although he remained officially a fugitive from justice.

  One spring day in 1880, after an especially vigorous Sunday morning church stem-winder intended to rally the Christian faithful and the Sidonian sympathizer alike, Allen Jerome caught his breath and then proceeded to afternoon tea at the Leonards’, a home which was across town.

  A few things to note about Allen Jerome: he was a brilliant mathematician; he courted a fellow student at Harvard, who, in the midst of a romantic midnight stroll, lost her footing on an unsteady bridge and drowned because Jerome didn’t want to ruin his best courtship suit, there was ice in the river, and he disliked swimming; in late 1869, he stole money from J.P. Morgan, for whom he worked, and absconded to South America; and he later turned up in a remote valley in Montana, leading a Utopian secessionist movement. Lucy joined the movement. You know the rest.

  Allen Jerome cut a strange figure anywhere he went, and he must have looked particularly strange at the Leonards’ afternoon tea. Still in his mid-forties, gaunt, lanky and perpetually gloomy, with thinning brown hair and piercing blue eyes, he was not ugly (in fact, as women were known to note, he was even theoretically handsome), but he was off-putting; everyone who met him knew immediately that there was something wrong, a little inaudible whirr about him.

  The Leonards’ afternoon tea, by contrast, was a study in elegance. The teas served were a rainbow — lavender, pink, yellow, green and rose — and the Leonards’ parlors were decorated in every nook and cranny with wildflowers from the surrounding countryside. It must have reminded Allen Jerome for a moment — perhaps for a near-emotional moment — of the ever-changing Sidonia Gardens, in the palace that he built for himself, in the kingdom that he had briefly ruled in a valley in Montana. He must have regretted — again for a brief near-emotional moment — that he had allowed the destruction of his experiment in Utopianism, but again, he would have recognized the greater goal.

  For a few minutes of his time, a grey-haired matriarch with a 21-year-old daughter engaged him with some brief and half-hearted matchmaking, which Allen Jerome
dodged — the Cloud City big bugs pretended to pretend to offer their daughters to their benefactor; though they knew he would refuse and were glad of it, they nevertheless sought to flatter him, or at least not insult him, by pretending to pretend that they considered him a suitable match — and then Jerome spotted the mayor, David Dougan, across the parlor. Allen Jerome soon cornered the young politician, who was in the center of a small group, laughing and enjoying a very light aperitif. Dougan quickly removed himself and devoted his attention to Allen Jerome. He brushed a well-manicured hand through his blond beard. Dougan himself had personally brought Sidonism to Cloud City a few years back, shortly after the county seat in Granite installed him as Cloud City’s interim mayor, pending Cloud City’s first election. The alliance with Sidonism had been a good decision, to say the least: riches followed.

  “I need,” Allen Jerome said, “a moment of your time, alone.”

  Mr. Leonard’s study was perched on the edge of a cliff, a jutting rock that looked out over miles of valley. A wooden writing desk sat by the window. In the middle of the room, a Neo-Classical mahogany and ormolu center table.

  Allen Jerome and Mayor David Dougan entered the room, where a third man stood waiting, beside the writing table.

  He was a surprise guest, a bow-tied and bespectacled man, apparently unassuming, with a round and flabby face, small nose and friendly blue eyes.

  This apparently unassuming man had sparse and baby-like tufts of whitish hair on the top of his dome of a head.

  His name was Wilfred Munsen, and he was an Otherworld Fabricator, but otherwise a nice enough fellow.

  He wore a light blue suit, which was slightly and unassumingly wrinkled.

  Still, Mayor Dougan knew enough to fear Wilfred Munsen, and he trembled when they shook hands.

  Feeling the mayor’s hand tremble, Wilfred Munsen smiled.