I swept vines from before me, my boots crushed a small seeding, just at the dawn of its life, and the jungle canopy very occasionally thinned to reveal a blue sky. I was somewhere else, and I wondered where.
A creature scurried into the underbrush, and then that creature laughed, and he called out my name — O’Hugh! — in a shrill voice, right into my mind, and his voice stung my brain like a little pinprick.
And the little demon emerged from the underbrush, and though I could not see him, I could sense that he was a little green four-eyed creature, round and joyful and threateningly mirthless all at once, and he called my name again, and this time his voice in my mind was like a steak knife, and I held my head, and he laughed again like sawdust.
I opened my eyes as wide as I could and I stared without fear straight into the creature’s four red eyes, but it didn’t work, Master Yu’s instructions for defeating a demon. Maybe I was a bit afraid. Maybe I felt a bit of doubt. I was all alone, after all.
The little demon reached out and grabbed my arm, and his claws dug into my arm, drawing blood, and I pulled away and ran, due south. Yet I knew that because I had shown and felt doubt, and that because I had run, afraid, all was now lost.
More demons now emerged from the forest, and even though they were behind me as I fled, I could see every one of them, they were all shapes, sizes and colors, some as small as mosquitoes, green and red and armored, buzzing ferociously by my ears; about a dozen lurched forward angrily, on two legs, like humans, pale-skinned, red-eyed and dirty; and one great lizard-skinned beast rose up to the tree-tops, stomping about behind me. Was he real? Could he have killed me? I believed that he could, which was why I had to disobey Master Yu and absquatulate, and which was furthermore why I was doomed. And as I ran, I felt certain that they were chasing me, but I saw only the rustling of the undergrowth and the canopy, which could have been the wind except that I knew it wasn’t the wind.
A haze descended from a mangrove tree, just before me to the south, and I dived in, momentarily blinded in a dense bluish-white mist. But then, in this nothingness, a small figure appeared, a few feet ahead of me, leaping over twisted jungle roots, swimming in the fog as though it were an ocean; this ageless, bare-footed child wore a grey-hooded robe and a crown of egret feathers. Her eyes were green and pure, like an emerald.
She darted to the left, and she vanished, and I followed, slid down an embankment into a runty cave bathed in moonlight, and the noise of the jungle was snuffed out in an instant, as though someone had tossed a blanket over my head.
The oracle was not physically here in the cave, but I could yet sense her presence, and I offered her whispered thanks.
The last resident of this grotto had left behind a small pile of kindling beside ashes from a long-dead campfire. The kindling was wet, and the sparks from my rock didn’t immediately catch. But I had set fires under more difficult circumstances, and within a half hour I had nurtured a campfire that, while not roaring, was at least sputtering along like a faithful old hunting dog. The grotto warmed, and the smoke blew up into the peaceful night sky.
I sat beside the fire and just watched. The fire danced and stretched its fingers upward, just as fire would anywhere in the world.
I realized, eventually, that the fire did not consume the kindling. The flames twirled and spun, but they were not real. They were fooling me, these flames. How long had I sat there in the grotto, watching my fire? I had not eaten, perhaps in days, according to the fiction that is Time. I was becoming different. Less myself. Less here. I existed less, and soon I would simply cease. The demons did not have to kill me. I was safe, but also trapped.
Be human, I told myself. I opened my bag, pulled out Kobrund’s dried meat and gnawed on it purposefully, even though I wasn’t hungry, even though I would never be hungry again unless I escaped from 枉死城.
After a while, I forced myself to sleep, even though I wasn’t sleepy, even though I would never be sleepy again unless I escaped from 枉死城.
I woke in the misty dawn, and Monsieur Rasháh stood over me, his hands clenched around my neck. Before he could speak, the oracle’s face emerged from the shadows, and Rasháh grew hazy and translucent, and the oracle brushed away his image as though it were a little smoke.
She smiled, toothlessly, endearingly.
I sat up, and I rubbed my eyes, and then I yawned, and this made me very proud, because this is exactly what a human being would do in this situation, and so I knew there was hope.
“What is seen, can be invisible,” she reminded me. “Piece of wisdom number one.”
It was the very first wise thing that she had ever said to me, all those years ago.
I told her that I remembered that piece of wisdom well, that she had made quite an impression on me when we’d first met on the Outlaw Trail beside the Dirty Devil River, but that even now, having witnessed the truth of her pithy epithet, I wasn’t sure how to put her pieces of wisdom to practical use, and she said that the meaning of the wisdom was something I must discover for myself.
“We’ll be waiting a long time for that,” I grunted. “Using the brain to figure things out has never been one of my strengths.”
She smiled sadly and asked what I thought my strength was, and before I could answer, she said, “Surviving, when surviving seems unlikely.”
I agreed.
“Absquatulating,” I added. “Running away.”
“And sometimes fighting,” she said, “most heroically. Sometimes you survive by fighting most heroically. And sometimes you save others, most heroically. It has been known to happen.”
I agreed.
“Sometimes,” I said.
“You are not a coward at heart,” she suggested.
I said that was subject to debate.
The oracle and I played checkers for a while, and I shared a little bit of the dried meat with her, which she sucked toothlessly and gummed, for a long time.
She beat me in every game of checkers.
Next she conjured a chessboard, and we played chess for a while. The chess pieces were white ivory, and they reminded me of the killer Princess and her chessboard. I wondered if this were the same chessboard, a chessboard magicked out of nothing.
The oracle won every chess game.
Soon enough, she conjured a game of Go, the Japanese game of war.
This time, the game lasted for days, and eventually I won.
“I am quite certain that you let me win,” I said, and she smiled, and she looked a bit older than she had at the beginning of the game.
“I wished, at one time, that the ideals of the Sidonian movement could succeed,” she mused. “And here we find ourselves.”
“A world based on good will and equality can never succeed,” I said.
“Why?”
She blinked in the dimness.
I shrugged.
“Because people are bad,” I said.
This seemed so self-evident that I didn’t know why an oracle would need me to explain it to her.
“They will always follow their worst instinct,” I added. “They will think only of themselves. There will be good here and there, but it smooths out over time into a big polished pearl of crap-filled horrible. The good gets ground away and swept out into the street. People, as a species, are bad.”
Her eyes widened.
“Not the firemen!” she exclaimed, and she was correct, I allowed. There could indeed be an egalitarian paradise on Earth if only everyone could be just exactly like the firemen, people who would run into burning buildings for no glory, no extra money, just because a building burned and there were lives to be saved.
And this idea gave her another idea. She stood and walked to the wall of the grotto and began to write with her finger, which left long chalky lines on the dusty-dark rock canvas; then in a sudden burst of energy, she ran from wall to wall, furiously scribbling. Images, words, numbers flew and flowed rapidly from her fingertips.
“There can be an Age of
Aquarius!” she shouted, and then — I know this is impossible, but bear with me, it really happened — she scurried up the wall and ran across the ceiling of the cave. A seven-pointed star grew out from the northern wall, with star beams spreading out and over the roof of the cave, drowning other multi-planed geometric shapes, and finally encircled by long, circling calculations.
She dropped to the floor.
“There is something you have not considered,” she said, out of breath. “A way out.”
I said I thought that I was pretty well surrounded. I had shown fear. The demons just outside the grotto had teeth and claws, after all, and I had shown fear, I had given them power over me.
“Do you remember my piece of wisdom number two?” she asked me.
“Always, oracle,” I said.
I had never stopped believing in her, not for even a moment, during all these years. I didn’t know why I believed, when so many others did not.
She smiled.
“Thank those who have wronged you,” I said, “before you drink from the waters of eternity.”
She nodded. This was it. I had remembered it to the word.
Master Yu had the gemstone, which would buy him an army; I was on my way to collect weapons to give to the army. Events were progressing as the Yellow Emperor had instructed and foreseen. A risk was worth taking.
“I have a terrible idea,” I told the oracle.
“Terrible ideas,” said the oracle, “are the best kind.”
I didn’t agree. In my view, good ideas are the best kind.
But perceived paradoxes sound wise. And I’m not an oracle. So what do I know?
She drew closer, and she patted me on the knee.
“We have a job to do,” she said. “We are here for a reason. You know what it is.”
Chapter 24
I put my hand on my pistol, just in case, I stepped out of the cave, and the world changed; suddenly I was back in that demon-infested jungle. The moon that I had watched from the grotto opening, and which had been my last sight before I slept — that moon was gone, replaced by the tightly laced jungle canopy. The silence of the grotto was gone, and the insect-sized demons buzzed in my ears. The little demon screamed from the shadows, and I heard him again, painfully, in my brain.
“OK,” I called. “Come out of the shadows.” I thought about mentioning that I had a gun, but then I didn’t mention it. “We want to thank you.”
The oracle crawled out of the grotto opening, and she stood beside me.
“We have a flask of wine,” she said. “Wine from grapes. It is our offering of thanks to you. When did you last have wine from grapes?”
The wind howled above us, and the jungle canopy shuddered.
“I give you my word!” she called out, toothlessly, “as an oracle. An oracle’s word is sacrosanct!”
I still do not know if an oracle’s word is really sacrosanct, but back then, in the jungle, surrounded by evil and death, I hoped that the little demon would believe it.
After his second gulp of wine, Plum really opened up about life as a demon, which was no bowl of cherries, as the fella said.
Plum sat by my fire, across from me, and he no longer looked as threatening as he had when he had emerged screaming from the underbrush. I could not see him exactly, of course, but I knew he was there and I knew what he would have looked like if I could have seen him. He was small and round, completely hairless, and he had a nice smile. His four red eyes never stopped moving. The oracle held his hand, in a way. That is, the oracle did not hold Plum’s hand, exactly, but for a demon — someone who cannot be seen, someone who is not even half in the world — this was as close as he could get.
Now that he’d stopped screaming, his voice was low-key and almost winsome. He told us some of his memories, of his parents, of his friends. Music that he could remember.
“We are not bad, you know, we demons.”
“Of course you are,” I laughed. “That’s what demons are. Bad. You’re you.”
“So I’m a demon,” Plum said.
“You attack us, you kill us,” I said. “You haunt us.”
“We sometimes rise to Malchut, the World Above,” Plum allowed. “Just to kill. Because why not?”
He didn’t really remember his early life — he didn’t know whether he had a “beginning,” so to speak, or if he had always been here, in this jungle — but he could remember a time before human beings roamed the land. He could remember when the human beings had first arrived.
“And not just any human beings,” he said. “The worst, bitterest human beings. Why unleash them on us?” He held out two of his four hands, palms up. “That was when everything changed.”
“What changed?” the oracle asked.
“Everything used to be jungle and forest,” Plum said. “All the way to the mountains, and all the way to Bay.” He sniffed. “Forests everywhere, with some pastures and meadows. Cleared a bit, for our homes, our little settlements, and for our farmland.” Plum mused, a bit dreamily, “Before Mount Charon rose with the southern-eastern range, there were lakes and rivers, across the land, interspersed with the forests.”
I tried to imagine that, these rivers and lakes, and I wondered why they had dried-up. (As it would turn out, this was an important question.)
The oracle, still holding the demon’s hand, said, “And it went away? The forest, the farmland? The rivers and lakes?”
The demon said, “We were different back then. We were not mere stories and curses.”
“You loved, and you dreamed, didn’t you?” the oracle said. She paused, and Plum said nothing, and then she added wistfully, “Long ago, I should think.”
I realized it too. “You were like us, weren’t you?” I asked.
I could see them, these creatures as they were — visible, unterrible — farming the land, building the stone homes and monuments that now lay in pieces on the dead-grey grasslands.
Unterrible.
It was their world.
“We did this to you,” I said, with sudden realization, “didn’t we? We made you this way!”
With our fears and our neuroses and our psychoses.
“You’re real,” I said. “This human world isn’t real, and yet it is displacing you.”
Plum asked what choice he had.
“I met a battalion of demons,” I said, “in Death Valley, and they all worked for Rasháh, a bodyguard for the Falsturm who put you here. An army of demons swarmed China two thousand years ago to help the Red Eyebrows take the throne. The Sidonians could not achieve all they have achieved without demonic assistance. Why work for the Falsturm and his minions? Why not resist?”
“It’s a living?” Plum muttered.
“What do you get out of this arrangement?” I asked. “Staying down here, doing his dirty work.”
He shrugged.
“It’s evolution,” the little demon said. He poked his spear painfully against my skin, just to emphasize his point. “Human men have evolved to chase women, run away from bears and to believe in God. Demons have evolved to kill humans.”
“But you see,” I said with difficulty. “The evolutionary process has run aground. What does it win you, after all? That’s not the survival mechanism. It’s an evolutionary branch that has gone astray. When that happens, Plum, the species goes extinct.”[* ]
I said that there was no reason for the demons to hide in the shadows when, with a little organizing, they could rule Hell.
“It’s people telling you what to do,” I explained. “What is the proper place for a demon? It’s not cowering in the shadows. Killing chumps who happen to wander into the woods. Scaring the scarred souls who find themselves down here. They’re not your enemies. They don’t want to be down here.”
“And?”
“Look,” I said. “We’re raising an army to bust out of this dump. I’m on my way to Sadlo’reen for weapons.”
Plum smiled and nodded.
“Salo’reen!” he said.
The demon asked how he could trust me.
“What’s there to trust?” I asked him. “You help us. Join our army. We blast our way out of here. You stay behind. We’re gone. There’s no possible ulterior motive that I can think of.”
“So what do we do? If we join you?”
“I’ll send someone,” I said. Perhaps Elias. Perhaps Warlord Hua. “He will arrive with a password. He will stand at the edge of the jungle, and he will shout the password.”
I came up with a password on the spot. I no longer remember what it was.
“If no one arrives to bring you to the battlefield, then stay where you are.”
“And when we arrive at the battlefield?” Plum asked.
“Defeat the Falsturm army,” the oracle said. “Help the humans escape from Hell?”
“And then?”
“Reclaim your destiny,” she said.
How nice this would be, if it were to happen.
Plum smiled his demonish smile, and she smiled her toothless smile. Turning demons into friends. What an oracle she was.
We could use more oracles like that one.
In the morning, after I awoke, Plum and the oracle walked with me for a few miles, till the path began to ascend and the jungle began to thin, and I could hear the roar of pounding water nearby. At last we emerged into the sunlight, at the very top of a mountain peak, and I could see the thundering waterfall, which smelled horrible, like really diseased shit from a half-digested meal of slightly-moldy pork bowels and rotten beans. On the other side of the canyon, a great mossy boulder stared back at me with its two dragonish eyes. The boulder also sported a pointed dragonish snout, and a toothy dragonish jaw. A rainbow bridged the two peaks.
Do not hesitate, Master Yu had told me.
Without saying goodbye, I shut my eyes, I leapt.
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 21