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

  She shrugged that away. She noted that this was a world without a dictionary, without a thesaurus or library. Without even a pen or paper.

  “If one forgets a word,” she noted sadly, “it is just gone forever.”

  She would make do.

  And so she laid out for me a wonderful vision in which she and I would literally bring sunlight to this blighted land, in which we would teach the humanity of the World Below to stop hating. The clouds would clear. Whatever sort of sunlight might exist beyond that grey sky murk would shine through. Our child would be the first New Man of the World Below (or New Woman, perhaps).

  Well, there was the offer of a bit of pully-hawley, which ordinarily I might enjoy, except that in Hell, our skin would scrape like sandpaper, our red rashes would ooze, my lice and fleas would commingle with her lice and fleas, breeding and making more lice and fleas. Furthermore, Althea explicitly wanted to bring a screaming baby into Hell, which cast more of a shadow over the proposed escapade. Althea intended to put quite a weight on this unborn child’s shoulders, it seemed to me, which would inevitably lead to disappointment. And there was the guilt that would go along with it, the adultery part of the whole transaction. There was, I told Althea, the matter of Hester.

  Still, Althea said she had thought a lot about this, and so I pretended to listen attentive-like. She insisted that we could battle the hate with joy, we could fight the darkness with light, and in the end, the Grey City on the far horizon would burn, as though Hell were just a Heaven I hadn’t met yet.

  “Whatever and whomever you left behind,” she said, and now she was holding my hands, and I didn’t push her away, though I wanted to. “Whatever it was and whomever it was, don’t you see? The door is closed. This is our world now.”

  I shook my head.

  “Hopeful Messianism doesn’t work up there,” I said, “where no one’s been murdered yet. Why do you think it would do better down here?”

  Her soft face, her wide eyes, and her imploring gentle voice. Starving grey birds hopped about, pecked for food in the yellowing grass. Something howled in the distance. A wolf. Perhaps a person. Perhaps it was just a noise.

  I told her to listen to me. Staying human down here was a perpetual struggle; remember to eat, remember to sleep. Remember to smile, and to breathe. Eventually, we would all give up. We would give up eating. We would slip away. And we would stop. As a person, each of us would just stop, almost like an old clock, but more like a bubble. What happens to a bubble after it has popped, after all? Who stays behind to remember that bubble? For us, hope would be lost. I was not entirely sure that procreation was even possible down here. And so the only hope here was to escape, closed door or not.

  “If there is indeed a door that’s closed,” I added, “we’ll pry it open. I’m getting out of here, Althea. And I’m bringing you with me. Before the bitterness takes you.”

  “Me?” she asked. “Cold gruel for me. Why do I matter to you?”

  “If a fellow saves a single life,” I mused, “it is as though he saved an entire world.” I wondered whether I had just made that up, or if I had heard it somewhere, and if I had heard it somewhere, I wondered idly where I had heard it. “Maybe,” I said. I backtracked. “Maybe that is not exactly true after all. A whole world. Maybe if a fellow saves a single life, it is as though he saved one reading room at the library.”

  A scrubby little creature, rough and ignoble and clumsy, bounded across the fields and through the river, vanished momentarily, but then burst heartily out of the water on the opposite bank.

  “I broke out of prison once,” I said, almost to myself. “Madame Tang, Billy Golden and I blew out the walls of the Wyoming Territorial Prison and swam through the icy waters of the Laramie River. This little holding cell is nothing.” I smiled. “Really, Althea. It is no bother.”

  The creature gave itself a vigorous shake, water flew from its fur, and it stumbled across the yellow grasses and disappeared for good into the scrub brush at the foot of the northern mountains. I wondered if it had once been human. I wondered if it was a little bit human, still. I thought of the white wolf whom Ch’ao-Hsing loved, and the white eagle whom Ch’ao-Hsing loved.

  After a bit of thought, Althea said to me, “Whatever happened to Hester? Where is she now?” And so I suppose I was thinking of Hester when I willed myself to sleep that night, and I suppose that was how I first haunted Malchut in the Fall of 1880.

  Chapter 16

  Darkness fell over me, and then I felt myself float up, breathless, aiming for the surface of a dark lake. At last I burst up into a hot starlit early evening in Malchut. Where was I? Well, I was just outside Hester’s home, which was a mud hut, as tidy and gracious as a mud hut could possibly be. Something was growing on the top, grass or wheat, or something.

  Her mud hut was in Z’vulun, her ancient homeland, in a valley crisscrossed by a river that irrigated and flooded the valley, and equidistant between two seas on the east and the west — or rather, between a western ocean and an eastern lake that is so large that in ancient times it was mistaken for a sea. To the north, fifteen miles of thousand-foot mountains, and to the south, twenty miles of thousand-foot mountains. Across the valley, fields of grain in the moonlight.

  I stood outside Hester’s mud hut for a while, and then I grew weary of the heat and I walked inside, but that was little better, so I went back outside.

  At length, Hester arrived, sweat at her brow, dressed like a boy, short-sleeve shirt, short pants. Her arms and legs even stronger than I remembered. As strong and beautiful as ever. A three-year-old bounded along beside her, my son, presumably. They entered the hut together. I followed.

  She was older, tougher, more proud, entirely different and exactly the same. She looked darker than I remembered. Maybe the Mediterranean sun had darkened her. Maybe she looked darker because the world here was brighter, even at night. Or maybe here, surrounded by her fellow Z’vulunites — who poured in daily on J.P. Morgan-sponsored ships — maybe in the midst of these Z’vulunites, she had finally begun to look like her true self, dark as the African night. (That last one I don’t imagine to be correct.)

  She sat down at the splintery wooden table, ripped a piece of crusty bread, stale-looking, dunked it in the oil, and she and the boy hungrily devoured it.

  Then she looked up. Her eyes seemed to clear in the darkness. A dawning realization came over her. First fear. Then gradual, grateful tenderness.

  The boy glanced around the room, a little frightened. He had olive-brown skin and thick, wild hair.

  She reached out and took my hand, and I could very faintly feel her touch, across the ocean of eternity.

  “Watt,” she sighed, and she looked straight into my eyes. “You are haunting me?”

  I nodded, and I tried to speak, but I couldn’t.

  “Are you a deadling? Are you a ghost? Or are you even really dead at all?”

  I shrugged. Then I shook my head. I turned my hands upward, quizzically. I was ever dead-and-not-dead, a walking irony. My body did not any longer reside in the land of the living, and my spirit was in Hell, and since by definition everyone whose spirit is in Hell is dead, then I was by definition dead. But because death is by definition permanent, and my visit in Hell was one-might-hope temporary, then I was perhaps not dead.

  And so I shook my head and I mouthed, No. Not dead.

  She smiled her warm smile, and her eyes — had I fallen in love first with her eyes, with the mist that had settled glimmering on her eyelashes, like tiny diamonds, that night, camped out five miles north of the Mammoth City mining town?

  “Sometimes,” she said very gently, “it is not easy for ghosts to speak when they haunt. They leave their voices and their courage in the Underworld. You see.”

  She thought I was perhaps in denial about my death. I did not see any way to explain this to her, and so I did not try. Anyway, I might soon be really dead after all, so why bother?

  Hester squeezed my hand. Her fingers were ro
ugh and calloused from taming the land, but her touch was soft and filled with love.

  “Haunt me whenever you want to,” she whispered. “Every single day, if you can.”

  My lips moved but no sound came out.

  Do you in truth love me? I asked silently. Or was I your train robber?

  I thought perhaps I might set her free, to release her from memory.

  “Had I not loved you in truth,” she said, “I’d have tossed you your cut and said goodbye. Or shot you in the head and taken the cut for Liberation.” She smiled. “You cannot say that you have been of much value to Z’vulun lately!”

  She pointed.

  “Follow me,” she said.

  Outside, the boy hopped along merrily beside her.

  “Watt O’Hugh the Fourth,” she said. “Lest there yet be doubt.”

  She led me to a hill with a view of the entire valley. Water buffalo trudged through muddy bogs in the far distance. Overhead, on the horizon, a small flock of birds — or something — headed our way.

  “This hasn’t been easy,” she said, staring out over the land. “There are no roads down here. No one wants us here; the Z’vulunites are unloved in the world, it turns out! We drained many of the swamps, but still the river overflows. We cleared the land, which makes the flooding worse. Some homes have been flooded and destroyed. Sometimes, the entire plain has become a muddied mess. Some of us have died of malaria. Died, Watt! And buried here in this valley, unmarked. It would have been easier had you been with us.”

  She pointed at the sky, at the flock of birds.

  “Wait until they near,” she said. “They are dragons, O’Hugh. You will see.”

  I tried to speak, again without success.

  “With you dead and gone,” she continued, “and I with child, I accepted Mr. Morgan’s offer of assistance, in spite of what he had done to you, or perhaps because of it, as recompense for his crimes.” She smiled. She said she knew that his crimes were unforgivable, but this week, and every week, ships arrived in Akko from Ghana and New York, bringing new Z’vulunite soldiers to populate the land, to restore the Kingdom.

  Now the sky darkened with the flock of dragons, probably about a dozen, each with the head of a camel, a demon’s eyes, a cow’s ears, antlers like a deer, the neck of a snake, a clam’s belly, a tiger’s paws and an eagle’s claws. I even spotted a few babies.

  “You see?” she asked me. “Dragons.”

  She could sense my presence weakening, and she turned to the boy.

  “Say goodbye to your father,” she said. She shut her eyes and took a deep breath. “And come home soon.”

  She blew me a kiss, and then my son blew me a kiss. My three-year-old son.

  With that, I was back on the yellow grass beside the rusted gazebo. Monsieur Rasháh held my throat in his strong and bony fingers, and I felt certain that I would shortly die, permanent-like, and this time for good.

  Chapter 17

  I could not move. Rasháh dug his fingernails into my throat, crushing out the air. I would never become easily accustomed to this, and I understood why Hellers wished to avoid sleep.[] Rasháh moved very close to me, and he whispered something in my ear about an “operadic version of the sheaf of linear differential operators on a (super)manifold M,” which does not sound very frightening, come to think of it, but it was frightening the way he said it, and his breath was acidic, like a dog preserved in formaldehyde.

  His long and sharp fingernails drew blood, and burrowed deeper into my neck, past my ligaments and tendons, and it hurt. “Let A,B be two commutative rings,” he said. “If their respective categories of modules are equivalent, then A and B are isomorphic.” I opened my eyes wide to see his red red lips proclaim, with a terrific and terrible hiss, something about a “multilinear weighted convolution of L2 functions”; his green and red eyes burrowed into my brain just as his blade-like talons burrowed into my neck; and then, when I fully woke, I was alone in the dim and foggy dawn.

  At length we reached Albanadíqué, the tidiest town we had yet seen in Hell, with columned homes that were only slightly grey and grubby at each end of a Main Street of paved brick. In the far north, the city was ringed by the smoky image of vast ruins, English towers and spires, a vast, wavering illusion that stretched to the foot of the mountains. At the end of the town, in the farthest West, the buildings dissolved away into an expanse of yellow grasslands and shrubs, which ran for a few miles, then emptied into a thick and block-like jungle, a sudden dark burst of lush and sick-green flora. The jungle screamed faintly.

  Two inns just inside the village gate on opposite sides of the street looked habitable, two stories, peeling red paint, corroding brick, likely to last the night; one leaned genially against the English Tearoom and Aperitif, which seemed particularly welcoming to me.

  “Aperitif” is a fancy-person word for booze.

  Master Yu shook his head. He didn’t want any of us to get caught with his back to the wall during a stay in Albanadíqué that he hoped would be brief. Albanadíqué seemed more congenial than Kelián-Verval, that forlorn mountain town, or the muddy, bonfire-lit Wemas City, but appearances could deceive, and Master Yu assured me that regardless of how congenial the inns might look, inside they would smell musty, and there would be mold in the air that would get caught in my left lung and make it bleed. “And while the sky above is only faintly cloudy,” Master Yu said, “the ceilings will drip inky rain, though outside it be not raining,” and so we moved on.

  At the gate to the city, a small group of dignitaries awaited us — such as they were, dignitaries in Hell — two men with muttony-white sideburns and frayed top-hats, who linked elbows with middle-aged ladies with blue hair, droopy upper arms and blood-shot eyes, cushioned by the mists of Europe, and the fogs of London. They gathered around as soon as we were fully within Albanadíqué and had entered their field of vision and revealed ourselves to be what we were, and not gassy illusions from the jungle beyond.

  The dignitaries all introduced themselves; I don’t remember their names, and their names don’t matter. One of the gents might have been named Sir Alastair, and the other one was possibly named Sir Radcliffe; the women were entirely likely the Ladies Octavia and Cordelia. Beyond them, a crowd of lesser dignitaries, all of them Horaces or Evelyns, I suppose.

  Or something else.

  I nervously eyed the old men as they nervously pawed Althea with their eyes.

  At length, the ladies said something about being simply mortified but utterly enchanted to welcome the Chinaman, the cowpoke hero turned convicted murderer and the escaped whore to their burg, and they wondered if we would not be willing to disgust, nauseate and delight their guests at a soiree that very evening; and, sensing an opportunity for some jewel-thievery, we tapped the rims of our hats and accepted as graciously as we could.

  The Sirs and Madams led us across town, through a broad side street, across a field of dry and grey dandelions and poppies in the shadow of a hulking row of English towers, and down a pebbled path straight into an imposingly ramshackle mansion — stately though rickety and termite-infested — where they bequeathed us a couple of rancid rooms in which Master Yu and I might change into tuxedoes, and Althea might don an evening gown.

  WHEN WE WERE PROPERLY ATTIRED, and once the such-as-it-was “night” had fallen, a vacant-eyed butler escorted us to a crowded and tumbledown ballroom, filled with boxes of planted flowers, dead-brown orchids and dead-brown chrysanthemums, and a few dead camellias — because what is a ball or a cotillion without a few camellias? — where the wives tapped rusted silver spoons on chipped glassware, and a crowd of fallen angels gathered ‘round, and an Evelyn called out, “Welcome, friends, to this evening’s Freak Show!”

  Acapella singers belted out a dramatic leitmotif, and white gloved pinkies gave us muffled applause.

  In the moldy ballroom, the walls were coated with Hell-dust, inky brownish rain dripped from the ceiling, plaster cracked. The crowed cooed, and I noticed now their he
terogeneity, nobs and fops from numerous millennia, aristocrats in moth-munched tuxedoes stood next to aristocrats in moth-munched tunics next to aristocrats in moth-munched pallia. The aristocrats from the eras in the most distant past stood apart from the liveliest Hellers in the crowd, fading a bit from the scene, a little less human than the others, tired, perhaps, of holding on to Life, and tourists in their own Hell; what has happened to the neighborhood? where have all the fellas gone? they must have wondered, these remnants of ancient Greece, these lingering conquerors, the last of their kind.

  Even the loveliest ladies peppered me with questions about my checkered and disgraceful past, and I began to see through their eyes my career of sustained cowardice with occasional flashes of heroism— it was quite fascinating! come to think of it! — and, in fact, I felt like rather the hit of the evening, but so did the Chinaman and the escaped whore. This crumbling cotillion ball in this crumbling ballroom in this crumbling mansion was a parody of wealth and glamor. Scratchy voiced acapella singers mimicked cellos and harps, bubbled pig piss mimicked champagne, and something small, round and salty mimicked caviar. (Maybe it was just bad caviar. Hell might have bad caviar.)

  At the bar, I asked tentatively for a Monongahela, and the customers close enough to hear laughed at me.

  The bartender was a defrocked valieu, banished from the tribe of Jarleau, and subsequently murdered when he sought shelter in the very north of the nearby Kingdom of Stylet, some number of centuries or millennia ago, or perhaps centuries or millennia in the future. What is a valieu? Who were the tribe of Jarleau? I don’t know and it is most likely that now I never will. I am nevertheless quite sure that being a valieu mattered quite a bit to my bartender, exactly the way that most things you don’t care about at all — first communion, the true meaning of Tractate Megillah 21b, a fabulous duvet sale at Garfinkels, the identity of the one-armed man, and who shot J.R.? — tend to matter a great deal to others.