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 promised you an ice palace,” Allen Jerome told the mayor. “In the winter of 1895 to 1896. You remember? You’ve seen it!” He laughed. “What a party that will be. In the winter of 1895 to 1896, with a great statue of Mayor Dennis Dougan at the entrance, and a dance band in its icy halls.”

  He laughed again as he unrolled a map, which depicted a region with which the mayor was unfamiliar.

  “The line to the great palace and the ultimate triumph of our cause is not straight,” Jerome added. “It has ups and it has downs. The construction of the Montana Utopia, and its temporary destruction.”

  The mayor jumped in. “I was terribly sorry — we all were, all of us here —”

  “But with the destruction of Sidonia,” Jerome interrupted, “we have spread across America, and around the world.” He grinned. “Like dandelion seeds. Like a spore. Like the opposite of the Black Death — call us the Golden Life!”

  Now Allen Jerome extended the map across the table.

  The map was beautifully detailed, in the three dimensions, which rose from the map and hovered in the air, a sweeping and grey-green view from the Kólasivouná mountain range right near the Gates of Hell in the south, through the central grasslands.

  “Look at this,” the Fabricator, Wilfred Munsen, said. “The Underworld, you see?”

  Allen Jerome began excitedly describing the topography of Hell, when he sensed the mayor’s discomfort.

  Jerome looked up.

  “Well, rocks, dead trees, hilly areas,” he said. “And et cetera, et cetera.”

  “Turns out that it’s a continent like any other,” said the Fabricator, “with this and that and the other thing. You can see it all right here.”

  “This isn’t real,” Mayor Dougan said. “This is ridiculous.” Then, a little nervously, he added, “Isn’t it?”

  “This is hardly the most ‘ridiculous’ thing that you have seen since you and I met,” Allen Jerome pointed out. “To wit: Traveling through time, deadlings, dead mines spewing wealth. Et cet.”

  Mayor Dougan nodded, and he shrugged a little bit with his eyes. Point taken. He didn’t know why he had thought for a moment to apply regular-world reason and sense to an afternoon spent with Allen Jerome.

  “Down there in the Underworld,” Munsen said gently, “our Cause has a few enemies.”

  He held out his left hand: a fugitive cow-herder, he explained, tapping his pointer finger, referring to me, of course; a second-rate poet Chinaman, he added, tapping his middle finger, referring of course to Master Yu, who was, in my view, a first-rate warrior, and not really a poet at all anymore; and, with his ring finger, he then mentioned someone he thought was a “Jewess shape-shifter,” to round out his trio of adversaries.[* ]

  “But they know,” Munsen said, “how to hide from me.”

  Jerome pointed to some significant blanks on the map.

  “You see,” Allen Jerome said, “there are blanks here on the map. Significant blanks.”

  “Which means?”

  Here was a man, the mayor considered, who controlled the loyalty of vast swaths of the American West, and who was poised to take control of Manhattan, and he was worried about a motley trinity in a mythic realm.

  The mayor frowned.

  “I cannot find him anywhere,” Munsen said.

  He looked at the map, from the jungle in the West to the Bay in the East, floating above the wooden table.

  “You see?” he said. “Complete camouflage. Utterly undetectable.”

  The mayor asked how this was possible.

  “He’s part of the old order, whom the Red Eyebrows overthrew,” Jerome explained.

  “He’s got a bit of a hum to him,” Munsen added. “His armor — it’s a little difficult to penetrate.”

  “And we care about this,” the mayor said very slowly, “because…?”

  “We are toying with them!” Allen Jerome exclaimed. “You see?”

  He waved his hands around the three-dimensional map, pointing to the Bay in the east, ranting about the abandoned castle and the royalty who once lived there, and then grimacing at the blank pages of this floating world. “It is completely pointless — they hover there in some kind of shadow, thinking they will never be found. While they have literally universes of soldiers arrayed against them, and their shadow shrinks!”

  He laughed, shaking his head.

  “So why then,” the mayor said slowly, “are we thinking about them?”

  “Because I cannot understand it!” he shouted, of a sudden perplexed to the point of rage. “Why not just give in? I can make no sense of it. Why? — you know,” he said now, grabbing the mayor by the lapel. “Why continue to fight, to trudge around through the mud of Hell? Of Hell, Dougan! Do you understand? The fugitive cow-herder was told that he would meet the Falsturm in a room of gold, and yet he continues to fight.”

  He sighed.

  A brief digression. One day, many years in the future, there will be something known as “television,” and some fifteen years after “television” becomes what will be known in the 21st century as a “thing,” a network called the “National Broadcasting Company” will briefly air a “television” program called something like Star Trek (a “trek” being a fancified word for a “trip”). A while before my consignment to Hell, I visited Detroit, which is a city in the middle of America, where, on April 5, 1968, I met a pretty girl named Dawne whose roommate was away at the lake with her fellow.

  Dawne and I went to Dawne’s apartment, which was on the fourteenth floor of a residential high rise, ostensibly to watch Star Trek, or whatever it was. For a while we sat on the couch and kissed with our lips and our tongues, and we watched Star Trek out of the corners of our eyes and listened half-interestedly. As you know, Roamers can visit the past and future but cannot change anything, cannot leave tracks, so this romantical business works out fine only so long as it doesn’t mean anything to the denizen of the era the Roamer is visiting. So this whole routine of kissing with our lips and our tongues and watching Star Trek on the “television” went on only until Dawne began to grow too fond of me, and then the world wobbled, and I was shot back to Michigan in the year 1878, from whence I traveled my meandering course back to my little cabin in Death Valley.[]

  But before Dawne began to fall a little bit in love in with me, which threatened to change the world of 1968 and thus would make my continued quasi-presence there impossible, I caught a bit of a glimpse of this “television” show — it was about a chubby guy who wears a girdle and an unflattering yellow shirt and who flits around in a clunky “spaceship,” and in this particular episode, he was trying to defeat a gaggle of lady robots whom you would call “really sexy.” Back then, in 1968, everyone thought robots would be very “logical,” rather than dangerous and emotional (as they will turn out to be, eventually, if the world as we know it survives the Coming Storm), and so, when the chunky captain had to defeat the sexy robots, he didn’t need to lift a finger to fight them, he just had to spew nonsense out of his mouth. The sexy robots grew confused, and then one of the man robots started blowing smoke out of his ass or ears or something. I think he might have exploded. I cannot remember exactly what happened on the “television,” because in Dawne’s apartment, alcohol was involved, and kissing, and tongues, and then a sudden blast through Time back to the 19th century.

  My point is that something similar happened to Allen Jerome, that afternoon in Cloud City. He wasn’t a robot, and his head didn’t smoke or explode, but he was an economist, and a mathematician, and so he could not understand the reasoning of a stupid person, like me, and it drove him to distraction and rage.

  “I AM A MATHEMATICIAN, you know,” he explained to the mayor. “And an economist. And by personal philosophy, an adherent of utilitarianism. And so I cannot understand the reasoning of a stupid person. Hark: one winter night, while joining me on a romantic midnight stroll across a bridge outside of Cambridge, my fiancée fell into … oh, I don’t know. A river. A stream
. Whitewater rapids. I don’t remember and I don’t know. But in the moment I calculated. The value of my happiness with her, the value of my suit….”

  And you didn’t jump into the water, Mayor Dougan almost said, but then didn’t. Didn’t want to ruin the courtship suit, he also almost said, but then didn’t. Mayor Dougan knew this story, which Allen Jerome told frequently, and which he seemed to believe cast him in a highly favorable light, as some sort admirably realistic chap, someone who had appropriately jettisoned pointless sentimentalism in favor of a reasonable cost-benefit analysis. Allen Jerome was very proud of this story.

  “You see?” Allen Jerome said. “It doesn’t add up.” With a sudden jolt: “You know Rasháh? My friend Rasháh?”

  The mayor turned a bit white, tried to control himself, tried to bring a little color back into his face.

  “I don’t think,” he said. “I don’t think … Is Rasháh coming here? Because I don’t think he’d especially fit in particularly well here….”

  Allen Jerome waved away the idea.

  “No, no,” he said. “I mention Rasháh, because Rasháh knows how to calculate probabilities and values. He knows how to decide what to do. He knows how to add things up.”

  “Come outside with us,” Allen Jerome said. “I would like to show you something even more ‘ridiculous.’ Perhaps the most ‘ridiculous’ thing that I have yet shown you.”

  Mayor Dougan was beginning to regret his choice of word.

  They rolled up the map and left Mr. Leonard’s study, walked quickly through a parlor filled with grey-haired matriarchs eager to pretend to pretend that they were eager to permit Allen Jerome to marry and impregnate their daughters, and the three gentlemen stepped quickly out the back door of the Leonard home into a forest that abutted a cliff that overlooked a valley bathed in the blue light of the shadowed moon and stars.

  The mayor asked what had just happened, for inside the study, it had just recently been midday, and now it seemed to be midnight, and Allen Jerome explained that they had hopped a bit forward in time, for the most ridiculous things of all happen at midnight, if one is alert and attentive.

  “So you have lost a half a day of your life,” he explained. “You will die a little bit sooner. I am sorry for that.”

  The ground shook, a little tremor, and Mayor Dougan grabbed hold of a bristlecone pine tree.

  “It’s shaking all the time,” the Fabricator said. “The ground. You just don’t notice it.”

  He smiled gently.

  The ground shook again, a little bit more forcefully.

  Then: Allen Jerome told Mayor David Dougan to look carefully, and he specified that if the mayor were to look carefully, he would see something that would amaze him.

  Mayor Dougan looked, and he did indeed see something that amazed him.

  Spirits burst up from the ground like a geyser to haunt the World Above, a magnificent and chilling blur of blue and white, which shook the trees and buffeted the two men back and forth in the wind, while the Fabricator stood still as a rock.

  After a while, the clouds parted and the moon came out, and the ghosts disappeared.

  “You see,” Jerome said, “these are the fellows we are up against. This is why we’re sending Munsen down there. He can grow an army, pluck them right from his own Otherworld, the best I’ve ever seen.”

  The Fabricator nodded and smiled. He said nothing.

  Jerome stared at the map.

  “Somewhere down there in the Underworld,” he said, “is a feeble Chinaman seeking to lead them, somehow surviving in a land of ghosts, and evading Hell’s army.”

  “Hell’s army — ?”

  “The key,” said Munsen, staring at the map, “is the fugitive cow-herder. The poet has books. The Jewess has strategy. The fugitive cow-herder has some sort of sixth sense.”

  He clucked.

  “He knows what he’s doing, this is what I’m saying,” the Fabricator marveled. “This fellow is some type of worthy adversary.”

  He smiled; he couldn’t help himself.

  “Is that a good thing?” the mayor asked.

  The Fabricator laughed, an open-hearted, friendly laugh.

  “It will be such a triumph to kill him,” he said.

  Chapter 5

  That night, down there in 枉死城, I could not sleep and so I took a little walk, and about a quarter of a mile from Master Yu’s hut, the clouds cleared, and a bright light shined out of a hole in the sky, like a window in some sky-scraper back in the New York of 1880, and I could see inside, through the window in the sky; people were happy, about thirty men and women in a wood-paneled room, all of them so beautiful and young, cheerfully nattering trifles and froth, drinking what I could only imagine must have been terribly expensive champagne, standing about a piano, eating — I don’t know, Greek olives stuffed with truffle-glazed shredded-minced garlic-wine mignon? — each of the women, with her glistening red lips and soft breasts pressing against her silk chemise, each of the men, with his furled dark brows and strong arms wrapped about the soft-breasted glistening-lipped women — I saw them all, and I heard the music they were listening to, and their jingling laughter, just a few seconds of piano glissando mixed with ice-clinked laughter, and then the fog and smoke covered up the sky and blocked out the window and muffled the beautiful music and the beautiful, bright-eyed and trivial young men and women, and their happy happy carefree laughter.

  Two days after my arrival in Hell, I awoke to a sudden noise outside — a blast of some sort, and a scream — and as I opened my gluey eyes, Monsieur Rasháh stood over me, his hands on my throat, and he whispered something in a language I didn’t understand, blustering alarmingly about “finite time behavior of a birth-and-death process,” and “the probability of going from state i to state j in one step,” and, for some reason, most troubling to me, “straightforward spectral decomposition.” (Might specters decompose? I did not want to imagine it.) “Li,j + Ri,j + Di,j + Ui,j [less than/equal to] 1.”

  His face was grey in Hell’s shadows, and his eyes were filled with joy, like a kid playing with a new toy.

  I lost consciousness, then I jolted suddenly awake.

  It was yet the absolute dark of what they call “night” in Hell, distinguished from the mere gloom that they call “day.” The stench of dawn drifted through my open window, the grey turd-green mist rolled in off the dead Bay just east of Master Yu’s little abode. I dreamt terrible things, dreams filled with horrible smells; I opened my eyes, chagrined to discover that the smell wouldn’t go away; then yet more chagrined to remember where I was. And there was Master Yu, waiting for me.

  “A change in plan,” he said. I squinted, my eyes focused, and his face filled my vision, a great worried face, almost frantic. “We need to leave the spectacular luxury of lovely rural Hallitanud,” he continued. “I am sorry, but there is no time to spare.”

  He tossed my grime-crusted clothes to me and then threw supplies into his grey pack. With terrible weariness and fear, he added, “An Otherworld Fabricator is here. He is here in 枉死城.”

  I hauled my weary body out of bed and grabbed for my sit-upons.

  “Otherworld Fabricators,” I grunted.

  I knew those guys, a lifetime ago, in the World Above.

  Didn’t care for them.

  Outside the door, I knew that it was nearly sunrise, but sunrise here in the Underworld was not the same. The world grew a bit less murky green, a bit more opaque green, and that was all. It was a foggy morning.

  Master Yu was completely silent and still. I began to speak, and he put a finger to his lips. He pulled from his pocket a small shining metal sphere. He bounced the sphere up and down on the palm of his left hand; it hovered in the air, buzzed a bit, descended. Then he closed his fingers around the sphere. His face changed. The pupil in his good eye shrank away into nothing and his iris grew hazy and dim, and then his one good eye grew a translucent eyelid. He stared, although I felt certain he could not see. His breathing grew p
itched and tight.

  At length he sighed, his eye cleared, and he turned to me.

  “I saw him, crossing over, through the southern gates.”

  “Now?” I asked.

  “He is yet across the land. He will arrive here no later than to-morrow.”

  I nodded skeptically. In response to my unasked question, he said, “I learned how to do this during a brief sojourn in Sadlo’reen.”

  He seemed to consider that an acceptable explanation.

  We went into Hallitanud proper to see a man about a horse, an egg who ran a stable on the outskirts of town, in an area of rocky terrain that was once a forest; many rotting half-trees still stood, some dead trees, countless rotting stumps. Master Yu left me outside and told me to wait, and while he haggled in the stable, I kicked around outside. I climbed over a small hill, then down the other side, and when I reached the bottom, an old woman seemed to rise up out of the fog. She wore a French black mourning dress with a matching black jacket, and a rigid black hat with a narrow brim, and her face was covered in black lace. She looked like someone I might have expected to meet out on the moor, if I knew what a “moor” is.

  If you are a reader of the 1980s, you would say that she had beautiful, sexy eyes.

  She handed me a small box, wrapped in brown paper.

  “Hide this pacquet,” she said. “I will return for it soon.”

  “Why should I do this for you?” I asked, and she ignored my question.

  I asked her what was inside the packet, and she told me, and I laughed at her answer, and she shrugged. “Believe it or not, as you choose,” she said, and I said that I didn’t believe her, but what the hell, I’d keep her little French box for her.

  “Let me show you something you will always regret seeing,” she said.

  And here is what I saw, all of a sudden: I plunged through a vacuum of empty space, as some sort of dark energy circled our galaxy and ripped it in shreds; stars broke away from the galaxies and hurtled like billiard balls in all directions; the Earth exploded, shards of meteors that were once our homes blasted across the darkness; then, with a great mind-deafening shriek, a hole ripped in space, and a kaleidoscope of colors poured through, before everything went dark.