She smiled.
At the bottom of a hill, near Hallitanud, while Master Yu haggled over a horse.
She was different then, but the same.
“Didn’t I?” I asked. “Didn’t I meet you once before?”
I was sure now that I recognized her: those eyes.
“Ah yes,” she said. “Old Voltairine. Still lurking in the shadows, still fighting the fight.”
“She called me Herr O’Hugh,” I said, and she laughed her wheezy laugh, and she replied, “I have heard tell. Am I perhaps doomed to become a poseur sometime in the next few decades? On the other hand, our movement began in Germany, you see, in the 1860s, and perhaps one cannot understand freiheit if one does not speak German? Your guess is as good as mine. I cannot justify or excuse that which has not yet happened.” She caught her breath, and she took my arm. “If you knew the power in your left breast pocket,” she whispered, “your heart would stop beating. That is: If indeed your heart down here in 枉死城 were to beat, then it would promptly stop for good.”
One might wonder why Voltairine de Cleyre’s heart still beat, while mine did not, and I believe I know. Her weak heart and weak lungs were a part of her torment.
I followed her down a steep flight of cellar stairs, and we reached a solid iron door.
“I was his comrade,” I said, “years ago. Mr. Silver. And look at where all of this idealism has taken him.”
She turned to me, and she looked sadly into my eyes. She did not consider the struggle pointless. I had said the wrong thing.
“Mr. O’Hugh,” she admonished me. “All these feelings, these intense sympathies with suffering, these cravings for something earnest, purposeful, these longings to break away from old standards, jumbled about in the ego, demand an answer that should co-ordinate them all, give them direction, be the silver cord running through this mass of disorderly, half-articulate contentions of the soul.” She asked me if I understood what she meant, and I said I didn’t, and then she replied, “A true anarchist cannot be content to regard the world as a mere jumble of happenings to wander her way through, as she would through the mazes of a department store, with no other thought than getting through it and getting out.”
I disagreed; life is indeed no more than a jumble of happenings. Life is pointless; a department store is not pointless. I wished, indeed, that life itself were more like a department store, something one could enter with a determined task and leave with his task accomplished.
But instead I said, “Yes, Miss de Cleyre. I see.”
Inside the cellar, it was dark as night, and Silver read by the light of a candle. When we entered, he looked up, and his face was white and bony, his eyes red. There was little of the handsome man who might have won Lucy away from me in an earlier decade. Was he an addict, a poppy-head wasting away in an urban jungle? I thought not; while his condition might be curable, he was already dead (and thus what was there to waste?), and furthermore, in a world without even a drop of decent grape wine, a body was unlikely to find any decent opium. Rather, I imagine this is how Silver might have wished us to see him: someone who had suffered for the masses, who had allowed his health to slip as he focused his intellect on global economic equality.
“O’Hugh.” Silver looked up from his notebook, his hands and face still smeared black with the ink of his Underworld printing press.
“Silver,” I said. “You have something to tell me?”
He agreed.
“But I need your help as well,” he said with a weak smile. “I must return to Malchut to witness the triumph of the revolution with my own eyes.”
He looked down at his notebook, admired something he had written, and he settled weakly back against a wall, and the shadows covered his ink-stained face. What a sorry end this was for him, being down here in Hell. Had his rainbow dreams evaporated during his life, he could have instead expected to return to his family’s estate, his codfish factories and whatnot, rather than ending up in Hell, still yearning for the Revolution.
I tried to explain that there would be no triumph.
“The world cannot be changed,” I said, “except for the worse. You thought Sidonia would save the world, but they betrayed you as they betrayed me and Lucy and Fawley. To-morrow someone else with great plans will betray you. Toss a coin in the collection plate, the minister will buy a whore and cocaine and opium, and the men who sell him the whore and the cocaine and the opium will use the shinplaster he pays them to buy guns and knives to kill women and children. Give a revolutionary a gun, he’ll turn it on you, eventually, and sooner than you think. Open the door to Heaven, and dybbuks will swarm in.”
Silver looked at Voltairine, who shrugged away my pessimism.
“People of the mentally satisfied order,” she said, “who are able to roost on one intellectual perch all their days, have never understood this characteristic of the mentally active. It was said of the Anarchists that they were peace-disturbers, wild, violent ignoramuses, who were jealous of the successful in life and fit only for prison or an asylum. With habitual mental phlegm they took cause for effect, and mistook Anarchists, Socialists and economic reformers in general for the creators of that by which they were created.”
Fifteen years ago, I would have followed her into the trenches, and I might have fallen in love with her. But by the time I met Miss de Cleyre in Mr. Silver’s tenement cellar, I had indeed become a man of habitual mental phlegm. But only on my better days.
“Noted,” I said. I turned to Silver, who then began to tell a tale of such repellent specificity that it seemed to rise up before me. The ragged dust-stained curtains seemed to exhale in the light breeze, piteously.
Silver and his crew would meet not infrequently in a room like this, on a tenement street just like this, a room coated with the city’s muddy runoff, whose dirty walls and floors sheltered the city’s most contagious diseases in its fractures and creases. They would pamphleteer, write treatises, gain an adherent or two on the street from time to time, occasionally an heir or heiress, sometimes driven by idealism, often driven by anger at Daddy, eager to spread the message and to overthrow the ruling order. After I had left their movement, as the 1870s dawned, and as Sidonism grew strong in Manhattan, they often transplanted their intrigues to Justus Schwab’s saloon on First Street (the “gathering-place for all bold, joyful, and freedom-loving spirits”), but that night — the fateful night in question — the cold was too bitter, and they remained huddled in their hovel. Rifles and pistols and explosives lined the walls, weapons the anarchists had purchased with Sidonian cash.
As Silver told it, a dark night fell, and a thin layer of snow coated the streets outside. Silver and two colleagues shivered in the cold, reading by a flickering candle, a young man named Fleeson and one named Koche. Fleeson was wiry and shaky and nervous, and he hadn’t slept for a while. Koche was solid and angry, a little bald, steely grey eyes beneath a wide and creased forehead.
The door opened.
Lucy walked in, my long-dead Lucy Billings, her white skin and snow-flecked blond hair glowing in the moonlight, her white gown blowing in the winter breeze.
She sat down on the dirty floor in her white gown, and the gown stayed white.
“You know me,” she whispered to Silver. “Sit with me a moment.”
Silver sat, and the others stayed behind.
“Lucy,” he said. He told her that she was beautiful, and she shrugged and laughed bitterly and said that she was naught but a memory.
“I rot,” she said. “In truth, I molder. The body that you once thought was beautiful, I think, molders.”
He reached out to her, and she let him take her hand.
“I cannot remain here long,” she said, “because the whiff of Sidonian magic has begun to overwhelm the usual stench of New York.” She added darkly, “The magic of Sidonia, which has killed me.”
Behind them, the candle sputtered out.
“Run as fast as you can,” she whispered, and she held Silver’s hand tightly. �
��You have chosen recklessly and wrongly.”
From the corner, Fleeson shrieked, “It is not our Lucy!” In desperation: “This is an apparition from the enemy camp, an infiltrator from the counter-revolution!”
To Silver, Lucy continued, “Allen Jerome is a financier and naught else,” and the outrage in her voice rose above Fleeson’s protests. “How could you have been so fooled, my old friend?” she whispered, to Silver alone, who loved her and missed her and had never gotten over her. Silver, his beloved Lucy said, had trusted the future of his movement to a Wall Street speculator and a crook. Did he truly believe that such a man cared about the child starving in the winter night? “He betrayed and killed Darryl Fawley, and he betrayed and killed me, and he will betray and kill you. He is naught but a trumpe[*].” She didn’t breathe, Silver could see, she just spoke and spoke and didn’t need to take a breath, and the wind outside howled, blew snow up from the street, a brown and white glittery mess, and a child cried from a tenement apartment. Lucy spoke more, and her skin grew translucent, and her bony fingers slipped weakly from his grip.
“Do you not see what you have all become?” she said, and lightning crackled over the city and lit the cellar apartment in a brief blaze, and for that moment, Lucy was a talking skull, her jaw bone rattled, her eye sockets blank and empty, yet ever she stared at Silver, who still loved her and couldn’t help it.
When the room plunged back into darkness, she was gone.
Silver re-lit the candle.
“What will you do?” Koche said, and he stood, and he towered over Silver.
Fleeson said, “You cannot believe —” and Silver interrupted him and said that when someone he loved, and whom we all loved, actually returns from the depths of Sheol, staggering in pain, just to warn us, “then,” he concluded, “I must believe.”
“It was the last thing that I ever said,” Silver told me, “in my life Above.”
WITHOUT MUCH HESITATION, Koche pulled a rifle from the stash and crushed Silver’s skull. Together, Koche and Fleeson dug a hole right there in the cellar, tossed Silver’s body into the hole, covered his body in dirt, then lay down in opposite corners and at least tried to sleep.
“And Koche?” I asked. “Whatever happened to that bastard?”
I remembered him, you see, and I wouldn’t have turned my back on him in a dark cellar, after a visit from a beautiful deadling or otherwise.
Silver smiled now.
“No more,” he said. “Kaput. Dead as Albrecht Graf von Roon! And he is not here in this relatively pleasant sixth level of Hell. So I like to imagine he has gone someplace worse. Although religions tend to reward the worst impulses of Man, so perhaps he has gone to Heaven for murdering me.”
Now Voltairine smiled, and she added, “It was John Rising Spirit, a friend of Master Yu, who did the deed. And in a way, Watt O’Hugh, you killed him as well.”
Chapter 13
John Rising Spirit, the last heir to the great tradition of the Peking Indians, whose legacy Master Yu restored! No longer the overweight and alcoholic figure whom Master Yu met outside a little cow-town in northwestern Texas in 1879, John Rising Spirit had extended his expected lifespan by twenty or thirty years, and expanded his net worth exponentially (courtesy of the Chinese Empress Dowager). He’d by now married a young woman of the Mandan tribe, into which the Peking Indians had dissolved, and out of which they would rise again.
John Rising Spirit now lived in considerably improved conditions in New Mexico territory, breeding a new brood of warriors with his young wife and plotting far-future anti-Sidonian insurrection in a big pink house on the very edge of the Santa Clara pueblo, which looked out over cliffs and canyons and dead-ancient cities under the blue cloudless Anasazi sky.
Newly ambitious — what could be worthier, after all, than saving the world from utter evil? — he looked a different man: John Rising Spirit was now muscled and leanly sturdy, with a strikingly almost-handsome face, now more chiseled than flabby and framed by a waterfall of shining black young-man’s-hair. This new man had indeed erased all memory and record of his previous incarnation (the aptly named John Deadman), but for the scar on his neck that he still wore, a little proudly, from his adventure in the demon cavern.
He gave money away to send the pueblo children to school, and he gave their fathers jobs. He ran a trading post in the pueblo, so that he could pretend that his money didn’t come in every month, like clockwork, from China’s Empress Dowager, which would have been difficult to explain.
One night in 1880, John Rising Spirit settled into his comfortable bed, next to the beautiful and pregnant wife who was to bear and raise his new tribe of powerful Peking Indian warriors, but he could not sleep, and he wandered from his bedroom into the sitting room, where he lit a candle, and a specter stepped out of the shadows.
John Rising Spirit was unafraid; he was, after all, a man who had ridden his wild pinder on a perilous mission across the land, stolen gold from a dragon, and had even survived supernatural decapitation, all without fear; or anyway, without much of it. A ghost in the sitting room was not entirely unexpected and, in fact, was a bit overdue. Furthermore, this particular shadowy specter closely resembled the strapping hero who smiled out from the cover of the dime novel he had been reading earlier that afternoon, on the recommendation of his friend, Master Yu. (At the time of this event, I had not yet met John Rising-Spirit, although we would become close at the time of the Battle of Sidonia, in 1905.)
“Are you a ghost?” he asked. “Are you the ghost of Watt O’Hugh? Is the famous Watt O’Hugh no-more?”
He quickly realized that I could not hear what he was saying, that I was a message from an earlier time (or a later time), taken human form, if a bit unfocused and translucent.[]
I smiled a bit at him, uncomfortably.
“I bring to you alarming news,” I said.
I told him all about the anarchists, the powerful scroll of which they had taken possession, and the urgency of killing them. Then I described how to begin our spree of assassinations.
“You will kill them,” I said, “without killing them. Let their fate meet them.”
John Rising Spirit woke his wife, packed a small bag; they boarded a stagecoach north to Laramie, where they boarded the next train to New Jersey, which arrived precisely four days later, at which point they boarded a ferry that swept them to the isle of Manhattan, and which docked at six the morning.
It angers me to imagine that, while John Rising Spirit could easily afford to stay with his beautiful bride in the best hotel in the city, the best hotel would not have them; nor would the second best, nor the third best, and so on. No decent hotel would house these brave guardians of humanity’s future, so they headed east and checked into a flophouse for pennies.
When morning brightened into afternoon, John Rising Spirit appeared at the window of Koche’s cellar. He crouched and whispered through the bars, “Allen Jerome sent me,” and thus gained entry to this filthy yet exclusive club. He took Koche to a tavern and kept him drinking and talking revolution till just the moment, just the very very moment, and then he had to keep him there a few seconds longer before he left.
It happened like this:
“You’re an Indian?” Koche asked, and John Rising Spirit said he was, and he said that he was a Peking Indian, of the Dakotas, but he’d been raised by the Mandan tribe, and Koche nodded sagely, although not without some confusion, and he said, “In Sidonia, we will all be brothers,” and at precisely that moment a horse whinnied very nearby, and a second later, a deep-voiced man cursed, and then John Rising Spirit counted slowly to four, and then he said, “Did it ever occur to you that we don’t want to be your brothers?” Koche seemed perplexed by this, and so John Rising Spirit accused Koche of betraying the revolution, told him that Sidonia had no further use for him, and told him to “get the hell out of here, you stupid bastard.” He walked Koche to the door, grasping his elbow in his strong fist, held him back for a moment a few inches fr
om the door until a dog barked outside, and John Rising Spirit then let Koche leave the bar. Koche stepped outside into the cold night, whereupon a brick from the tenement roof fell on his head, and he collapsed to the ground, dead. A mournful John Rising Spirit returned to the cellar to tell Fleeson the terrible news. Thunder rumbled in the far distance. Then thunder crackled much closer. John Rising Spirit counted to ten.
“Let us go to claim the body,” he said, and together they left the cellar and climbed the stairs. A man coughed from a tenement window three floors up, John Rising Spirit counted to three, and then the two men turned left into the street, Fleeson standing to the right of John Rising Spirit, whereupon a mad horse careened most unexpectedly out of a dark side alley and flattened Fleeson where he stood.
John Rising Spirit mournfully returned to the cellar, where he retrieved a Chinese scroll for safekeeping.
“Then,” Silver said, “he retrieved a picture of you from his pocket, something he had ripped from a dime novel entitled, Watt O’Hugh and the Invasion of the Savages.”
“A poor likeness,” I said, “and not my favorite dime novel.”
“Anyway,” Silver continued with a small laugh (his first of the day). “Yes, John Rising Spirit turned to this poor likeness, and he said, The deed is done, O’Hugh.”
“How would you know that?” I asked. “You know that the boys betrayed you and Koche killed you, but how do you know what happened to them after that?”
“I can’t figure that out,” he said. “I just know.”
I nodded.
There was one other thing that Silver wanted to give me: a letter, sealed and unopened, with a date on the front, January 15, 1923, which Silver specified was the date that it was to be read, and not before. When I wondered why, he smiled, and he replied, “Well, it was written on January 15, 1923, and so if you were to read it now, way back in the 19th century, you’d be expelled from the interlinear Maze,” and I agreed that we wouldn’t want to try that. I placed the envelope gently into my bag.
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) Page 14