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

  OUTSIDE, IN THE STREET, Voltairine said, “I think you have something of mine,” and I asked if I could trust her, and she said probably not entirely, but that the pacquet belonged to her, and that we had a common enemy against which she intended to use this most fearsome of weapons, and this was a longer explanation than I thought was really necessary, and I took the pacquet out of my pocket and handed it to her with relief. She asked me, “Would you like to know what I intend to do with the pacquet?” and I said that I would like to know, and so she told me, and she laughed at a skepticism I could not disguise. “It’s really a ‘box,’ ” said the beautiful young anarchist, “but Old Voltairine prefers to call it a pacquet. Still, even though it is just a box, it contains a fearsome and ridiculous weapon.

  “I have something for you in return,” she said, and she handed me a letter, with Master Yu’s name written on it, along with his address in Hallitanud, and sealed with wax. I put the letter into my jacket pocket.

  Voltairine walked me to the border of anarchist New York, or rather its Hellish doppelgänger, and she took my arm as we bid our adieus and whispered, “You will take me with you? To 1905?”

  I said that I would.

  “I don't know what kind of curious constitution I am blessed with,” she whispered, her voice shaking a bit, “but some way I have settled down to the coldest kind of mental attitude in which the chief characteristic is an unshakable determination not to die.”

  I said that she was just being human, that humans spend our lives trying not to die. I promised her that we would leave Hell to its demons, and all the Innocent Dead could join us in the sunny land of 1905 (I imagined it as sunny, a land where the sun always shined), and when I saw her smile, I nearly believed it possible.

  From a room in the 7th floor of a tenement apartment, Master Yu, Althea and I looked out over the grimy Kelián-Verval skyline.

  Master Yu was reading Voltairine’s letter. Hope in his one eye. I held Silver’s letter in my pocket, where it would remain until 1923.

  “It wasn’t me, you know,” I said. “The spectral messenger.”

  “Could it have been you, sending a message from the future?” Althea asked. “A Roamer, and all. That’s why you wouldn’t remember it.”

  “I do not believe so,” Master Yu said, looking up briefly from the letter. “Tang knows how to send these messages, however.”

  “There a lot of things I will never learn,” I said. Then: “Why is he still here?” I asked Master Yu. “Silver. And how did he know the things he knows?”

  Master Yu said that Silver knew that John Rising Spirit had killed his murderer, because when Hellers have been avenged, they know. The message arrives in their brains, and they know that their reason for being in 枉死城　has ended.

  “He will be gone soon,” Master Yu continued. “Soon his anger will ebb, his resolve will fade, and his reason for existence in Hell will slowly vanish. And he will be gone. Where he will go, I do not know.”

  I mused. I had no time for mysteries. I scratched the side of my face.

  “Hearing about New York,” I said. “You know, listening to stories about the World Above in this way. It sounds like it’s just stories. Just a game. I don’t really feel as though it exists.”

  “I understand,” Althea said. “This is our life, isn’t it?”

  “Hmm.” I nodded.

  “It is almost as though….” Master Yu whispered, and then he stopped speaking, and he thought. We were all silent for a moment.

  “I suppose it doesn’t matter, does it?” I said. “What is real, what isn’t real? It doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “I don’t suppose it does,” he agreed. “No.”

  We stared at each other in silence, again.

  “Did this information help us?” I asked finally. “The letter from Voltairine de Cleyre?”

  Master Yu said it did.

  “New York is now in play,” he said. “There is hope for New York.”

  Chapter 14

  Muddy conditions dribbling and drooling down from Kelián-Verval delayed our return from the highlands, and we spent several more days leading our horses slowly down steep and muddy mountain trails that cut through sharp and slippery ravines.

  I scratched the lice in my hair, and I scratched the flees biting my stomach.

  Master Yu looked over at me.

  “There is a cache of weapons for us,” he said, “in Sadlo’reen. This is one of the details in Miss de Cleyre’s letter.” He thought for a moment. “Not an entirely easy trip, you know. One of us will try first. If he does not return, the other will try. If the other also does not return, no cache of weapons, I suppose. Benefit to the trip is a few days in Sadlo’reen, outside the clutches of Hell.”

  I said I imagined that I would be willing to volunteer, in that case.

  Althea patted me on the shoulder. Commending me for my bravery.

  This felt good, Althea’s hand on my shoulder.

  We descended. Master Yu steered us southwest to a fresh spring, which widened to a mountain stream, which, when we reached flat ground, grew to a river, and which ultimately emptied into a lake, within spitting distance of the jungle in the west, which as a result of its source stank only moderately. Furthermore, because the lake, unlike most of our region, was thus not a cauldron of death, a small forest managed to cling to life on the lake’s bank.

  “I welcome the opportunity,” Master Yu declared, “to stink only moderately, rather than to stink terribly.”

  We drew straws on who might bathe first, Master Yu won, and he took his leave, and vanished quickly into the small forest.

  Althea’s tale was sad, as expected, as she explained to me while we waited for Master Yu to return. She left the tenement apartment she shared with her too-large family to meet her fiancé, Elias, at a deserted corner by the river, where their secret assignation could be observed by no one, but Elias did not arrive at the arranged time. She waited for fifteen minutes or so, and when she was ready to give up, a figure appeared behind her, pushed a handkerchief doused in some sort of narcotic chemical substance over her mouth (chloroform I imagine), until she was unconscious. She later awoke in captivity, blindfolded, in the back of a carriage, which was in motion. She heard the voices of other girls in the darkness, crying softly. She had been betrayed by her fiancé, this she knew, lured to a remote and deserted street corner and then abandoned to a life of ruin and despoilment. She did not live long enough to learn of her intended fate, but she assumed that it was forced marriage or prostitution. What else could it have been, really, other than forced marriage or prostitution? She died trying to escape, which came as a surprise to her.

  “I truly honestly did not believe that they would ever kill me,” she told me. “Where was the gain in that? If they had me in their possession, they could use me. If I were not in their possession, why would it hurt them if I were to continue to live in the World? But then I realized that this was a thing called deterrence. You see? For the others, if they were to see me escape, or even see me captured but otherwise suffer no punishment, they would try to escape too. If the worst thing that could happen to them is that they were recaptured, then why not try? Nothing to lose! But if the worst thing that could happen to them was.…” She held her thumb and pointer finger up to her forehead. “Dead, pow! Well then they would give it a second thought, I imagine. Deterrence, you see? This was popularized by Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham. I wish I had studied their theories before I tried to escape. But I had naught but a third-grade education, and thus I was ignorant of Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham treatises, and further thus I wound up with a bullet in my brain.” She sighed. “And the knowledge that the one I loved truly had sold me into slavery for a few rocks.”

  “How do you now know about the theories of…?”

  I could not recall the names of the scholars she had just cited, the ones who popularized the theory of deterrence.

  “In Hell,” she said, “we know the detai
ls of our deaths. I cannot explain how that happens. But we know things that we never knew in life. Things that will torment us.”

  Master Yu returned from the lake, looking tidy.

  “Master Yu,” she said. “Welcome back. You look tidy.”

  He nodded and bowed.

  “We’ve been talking,” she said. “You understand. We’ve been talking about what brought us all here. To Hell,” and she whispered when she said the word. “We all have a story, every one of us.”

  She continued to stare at Master Yu, and she waited.

  “I do not enjoy introspection,” he said finally. “Private matters are private.”

  He was stone-faced, not angry, just impassive.

  Althea continued to stare, thinking this over, pouting.

  “I have no particular tragedy or betrayal,” Master Yu said at last. “I am on a mission from the Empress Dowager. A good citizen of the Chinese empire does not shirk his duty when his Empress Dowager calls. Suffered a year’s worth of brutal training of the mind and body in a little village just north of Taiyuan before the imperial court deemed me suitable to come to America for this mission. While on this mission, I found the scroll, which contained further instructions, and which led me to a cellar just off Baxter street in New York, where a portal led me here.” He smiled lightly. “I also met my horse in that cellar,” and he gestured to the magnificent stallion, who stood strong and ferociously loyal, and who seemed to know that we were talking about him. “In Malchut, he was a different sort of beast, weak and tired. Hell suits him.”

  “I do not think,” Althea said, “that you could have entered this realm if you had not been betrayed in some way.”

  “Believe what you will,” Master Yu said with dignity. Then he added: “I have a magical sword, bequeathed to me by a dying unicorn.”

  “Did the magical sword protect your right eye?” she asked.

  “Perhaps,” Master Yu said, “the magical sword protects my left eye.”

  She stayed silent.

  I pondered Master Yu’s stone face.

  In China, Master Yu had been a vapid and well-compensated poet, who frequently dined with the governor of the province and caroused with the loveliest dancing girls. He wrote vapid poems in Chinese, which were praised throughout provincial society because of his connection to the governor, and he translated great French poetry into Chinese, which miraculously became vapid in his hands, because of his seemingly incurably vapidity. One day, one of the Empress Dowager’s wise men foretold a great mission of a not-entirely-well-defined nature for the carousing poet, which great mission brought him to the American wilderness, where, I would later learn, he fell madly and ridiculously in love with a girl named Li-Ling, a peasant girl far beneath his class and rank — a girl who spoke a country dialect which Master Yu felt obligated to pretend not to understand.

  Not only had Master Yu fallen ridiculously in love beneath his class and rank, but this girl who by any objective measure was not worthy to clean his toenails declined his hasty and desperate marriage offer, for she was already promised to another, a gentleman who to her horror became a violent and vengeful deadling, bent on killing any man who might replace him in Li-Ling’s heart. Thus, she noted, when she submitted her rejection, that if not for Sidonian magic, she would be a free woman who might indeed thus love him in return.

  Master Yu set off immediately to free the world of Sidonian magic, a mission that led him across America, land of talking dogs and talking birds, of dragons and unicorns, and which of course ultimately led him to 枉死城, where he now pored over an ancient scroll as though it were an Esso map.

  “I envy you,” Althea said, “because your true love didn’t betray you.”

  Master Yu nodded, and, stoically, he said, “That is right. She did not betray me.”

  As Althea next noted, everyone already knew my story. “I suppose they don’t have dime novels in China, Master Yu,” she said. “Mr. O’Hugh is famous — or, well — ”

  “Infamous,” I volunteered. “I think that’s the word you’re looking for.”

  “I believe that I was thinking … ignominious,” she said. “Yes, that’s it. You sank into ignominy. Nay? Ignominy.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I was alleged to have killed someone, but I was framed. Framed so badly that no one bothered to figure out whom I was said to have killed.”

  “I gathered it was a passion crime.”

  I said that I knew that’s what one might gather, but that this didn’t make it any truer, and I think I sounded too defensive about the whole predicament, which might imply some sort of accuracy to the allegations, and Althea thought about that for a while, her weak, pretty eyes staring at the dim outline of the hazy half-moon hovering over the mountains.

  “What would happen if we climbed to the other side of the mountain?” she asked, not looking at me, and pointedly changing the subject from my alleged passion crime, which I gather she yet half-believed.

  “It is not relevant,” Master Yu said. “You cannot climb those mountains.”

  “But what would happen if we were to climb those mountains? I know that you say we cannot do it — but what if we could? What would we see? Where would we go?”

  “Why ask this question?” Master Yu said. “I have told you that it is impossible. You cannot climb those mountains. So why does it matter what would happen if you could? Nothing would happen, because you cannot climb those mountains.”

  “But surely,” she insisted, “there is something on the other side of those mountains.”

  “Why are you sure of such a thing?” Master Yu said. “It cannot be proven that anything exists on the other side of those mountains, because it is not possible to climb over those mountains.”

  She sighed, and her voice brightened, and for a moment we saw what she must have been like in the World, what must have made Elias love her.

  “I think that if we believe in ourselves,” she said, “then there is nothing we cannot do. Nothing is impossible, if we believe in ourselves.”

  Master Yu sat.

  “That is not true,” he muttered, “at all.”

  He blinked, and he thought for a moment.

  Finally, he added, “There is much that you cannot do, little flower, no matter whether you believe that you can. You cannot sprout wings and fly to the sun. You cannot sing a song with your eyeballs, except in the metaphorical sense, I suppose. Many things are impossible. Even things that seem within your grasp.” More quietly: “Write a poem worthy of being read a hundred years from now. Win the hand of the one whom you love. Delusions will gain you no accomplishment. Especially down here.”

  He flipped a stone, and it clattered down the rocky hillside.

  “But it was nice to hear you optimistic,” I said. “It was nice to hear you happy.”

  At that, I took my turn in the lake, and when I returned, Althea walked off without a word. Master Yu was silent.

  “A waste of effort and bullets,” he sighed. “At one time, in another life, I would have understood.”

  “I think you may change your mind.”

  Master Yu said he thought not.

  An hour later, Althea had not returned. I went looking for her, passed through the little forest and followed the lake edge to the southwest for about five minutes or so, descended a little hill and found Althea at the base, beside a gazebo, which was cloaked in shadow and hidden from the ridge above us. Her hair was still wet. She was cleanish, but she seemed dejected. The gazebo looked out on a grey field of wilted grassland, covered in mist. The gazebo was rusted and old, and the murk of the sky was visible through cracks and tears in the roof.

  An old garden surrounded the gazebo, filled with brown, dead anemone flowers. I thought for a moment that this gazebo must once have been beautiful, and that this field must once have been beautiful, but then I remembered where I was, and that nothing was beautiful down here. Perhaps the gazebo had once enchanted lovers in Malchut. Perhaps something had happened here
, in this gazebo. Someone had died here; been killed here. And the gazebo itself had gone to Hell. To rust down here, to mark a tragedy. To haunt those who had lost their lives in the gazebo.

  “Watt,” she said. “We are doomed; you see? And this has led me to certain inevitable conclusions.”

  She had something to tell me, evidently enough.

  Chapter 15

  “We are doomed,” Althea said again. She scratched the lice in her hair as she spoke, and I scratched too. “But you found me,” she continued. “You saved me. I feel….” Then, embarrassingly for us both, she declared some sort of love — she loved me for saving her, I gather, which was something less than a pounding passion — and she insisted that she could not help herself, which I imagine meant that she was very grateful and felt a bit guilty that she had nothing more valuable to offer as a reward.

  “Althea,” I stammered stupidly. “I…. Listen —”

  “No, don’t stop me. This place … it’s dark and it stinks, and that’s because it’s filled with people who cannot help but hate. We built it. Human beings built this world, and locked ourselves inside it. But you saved me. And so I’ve seen a little glimmer of … Oh, what is the word?”

  In the almost-air, bathed in almost-light, with the gazebo caked in real-enough rust, I felt almost-alive. This world was quite nearly real. A hare scampered through the brown grass, and then another, and then a third. I wondered if they had been hares up in Malchut. I wondered if they had been hares that something bad had happened to. I wondered if they had been humans up in Malchut, but had lost their humanness down here. I wondered if they were native to 枉死城, and perhaps didn’t even realize that they were in a human Hell.

  “What is the word?” Althea whispered again. “I cannot think of the word.”

  I said that I didn’t know the word that she was trying to think of. I said that I was never one for book learning. For “words,” and whatnot.