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 didn’t know what that meant either, but I grunted some sort of embarrassed affirmation.

  I had indeed hoped that I was special.

  “None of this was fated, O’Hugh. J.P. Morgan saw an opportunity to revive his first wife, his beloved Mimi, and rather than recruiting you, he captured you. If not for your allegedly heroic exploits in Little Mount — a lie cooked up by some ambitious eastern newspaperman — you’d still be a drag rider bringing up the rear of a cattle drive across the Western plains.” She sighed. “Your parents died for nothing, O’Hugh, and their murderers left a crying baby in his crib because it wasn’t worth their bother to kill you, and you are fighting these battles because some newspaperman on deadline made up a lie about you, when he could have chosen any other of a hundred Western gunmen to lie about. He happened to choose you, because why not? And so here you are.”

  “Why did the Princess ask me to form an alliance?” I asked.

  “I imagine,” she sighed, “that it had little to do with your strategic value.” She paused. “In spite of everything, ‘chicks’ seem to ‘dig’ you, O’Hugh … especially when they might die soon, and no other man is around.”

  “The Falsturm will meet me in a room of gold.”

  “That lazy newspaperman put you on a certain trajectory,” she replied, “which is nothing more than rotten luck.”

  She stood.

  “But you see … you have been brave, you have been righteous, you have put the good of the world above your own happiness, and as a result you have been ill-used by the counter-Revolution, which too has put the good of the world above your happiness. One day, you may wish to turn on us, to accept an offer in a room of gold. The Falsturm’s money will not lead to joy for you. Not even the joy of a dessert that leaves a bad aftertaste.”

  I stammered: “I would prefer some sort of nobility. Some sort of admirable, look-upable — ”

  “There is no point in talking,” she added. “Your parents were cogs, unimportant and unremembered. Not funny, not interesting, not brave and not smart. Just people who owned one necklace that was valuable enough for them to die. That’s who they were. You too are a cog. Should you wish to turn on us and accept the Falsturm’s offer, this evil creature will not keep his bargain with you, you will have betrayed the world to help the dybbuk who killed Lucy Billings. I know that you will not do such a thing. I will see you again in a few weeks’ time. You will see me again in twenty-four years. You do not have a choice. I do not have a choice.”

  I wondered to myself what I would do now.

  “Goodbye, then,” I said.

  “You are a fine soldier, O’Hugh,” she said. She pressed a stack of shinplasters into my hand, to tide me over till I could earn a decent living.

  As we passed through the Gates, out of the Underworld and into Malchut, the grey Hell deflated like a balloon, and its smudgy hues washed away in an instant, like a sidewalk chalk drawing in a thunderstorm, and then for just a moment I caught a glimpse of a different world, I saw the demons behind me, heading out across the countryside, settling into their old grand homes, as the dark sky cracked open, plants bloomed and sunlight poured across the land.

  But it was only a glimpse, because a great bubble then encased this beautiful and happy realm, and it sank behind us into the distance, and the Gates crumbled even as we passed.

  The portal to this Hell of Innocents was gone forever, and its grey stench dissipated in the cool air of the World, it mixed with blue sky and the ether, cast out to sea on a pleasantly scented breeze.

  My lungs cleared; the itch in my eyes began to heal.

  I drifted back a few rows to find my friend Master Yu and to say goodbye, for now. I said that I would see him in twenty-four years, and he said that he would be dead within the year. I didn’t bother explaining. I said that I would see him in the hereafter, and he said that he was not certain that there was indeed a hereafter. I wondered aloud how, if there were no hereafter, he could be the reincarnation of the son of Yang Hsiung, the great 1st Century poet to Wang Mang, the Emperor anointed by one thousand dragons? and he replied that perhaps he was not the reincarnation of anyone at all, perhaps he just wished for some sort of cosmic relevance and that perhaps his own id found it impossible to accept the evolutionary nature of consciousness.

  I wondered then how one might explain deadlings, and he said he was quite certain that as long as the last embers of the universe glowed, one might pluck the memory of the dead from cold oblivion for a moment or two, that we are humans after all, and we miss our dead loved ones, and we remember them.

  “I believe that the struggle was worthwhile,” he said. “To venture out beyond myself. Even if the human soul is an illusion.”

  “But … my ghosts,” I protested.

  He smiled. He laughed.

  “There is that,” he said gently. “The ghosts.”

  He shook my hand and clapped me on the side of the head, and then the crowd of bedraggled but elated soldiers swarmed around us, thousands of bodies on horses and on foot, marching over the next hill. I thought that I had proved my point about the survival of the human soul, but I realize now, many decades later, that Master Yu did not believe. He just needed me to believe, because if I had lost my belief in those little wraiths who steadied my hand, then I would have been worth less than shit as a shootist. I believed in my ghosts; I did not believe in myself. Master Yu believed in me.

  A little beyond the gate, a young woman greeted her father, dead now, a murder, since she was just a girl, he had mutton-chop sideburns; a widower greeted his wife, who dismounted from a white carriage and stepped back into life, lily-white and rosy cheeked.

  Somewhere over the next hill, Master Yu looked for Li-Ling to embrace her, as the red sun blazed across the sky. She would be older now, decades older than she had been when he had last seen her, just days ago, and older now than Master Yu himself, but he wouldn’t notice.

  His two twin sons crowded around him, both strong soldiers, handsome like their father, grown adults, tall and wind-burnt. But Li-Ling was not there. This was how Tang knew that her deadling husband would not kill Master Yu; because Li-Ling would not survive to the year 1905. This was not the answer that Master Yu had expected. But at least she would not see him fall in battle.

  His sons smiled; they would have preferred to have known him when they were little, but their mother Li-Ling had brought him to life for them during the last three decades, and they had always known that they would meet him someday, just for a little while; and, anyway, life works out that way. Back then, in those days, we all knew much tragedy. None of us was whole.

  Somewhere in the waiting army, an older Watt — an older me — watched this reunion, glad to see Master Yu again, dreading what was to come. The Watt of 1905 was old. He missed Master Yu.

  And I also missed Master Yu, already.

  Chapter 39

  At last I came to that bend in the road, and I went to 1881, not 1905, my friends faded from view, and I was alone; I stood in the middle of Chatham Street, where I was born and raised, for a while, by my parents, before their early deaths. I was disappointed that I’d have to wait twenty-four years to fight the Falsturm, but I was happy that Hester and I would have the chance to grow older together.

  There was, however, the not-insignificant matter of the warrant for my arrest on murder charges, and I worried that I would not be able to take a ship from New York harbor to Z’vulun without getting nicked. I also felt a bit damp and chilled, and more than moderately shaky, and I didn’t know if I would survive a couple of months at sea even if I could manage to get myself on a voyage without arrest. So I figured I ought to take the cure and see if that might stave off my death for a couple of decades, and the closest place to take the cure was Sharon Springs, where I was relatively sure that I could bribe a boarding house owner to hide me.

  And there was another reason that I thought I would fit right in:

  One of the Village founders, a man by the name of Jacob Dievendor
ff, was scalped in 1781 and subsequently returned to Sharon Springs, where he lived a long life with a metal plate in his head, a guy who had lost his skull and part of his brain but just kept on ticking. Furthermore, his ghost had haunted the Village ever since. William Beekman, a Village elder who in 1881 had been absent from the land of Sharon Springs and the living for some decades, and who had lived in a massive Palladian style mansion in town, had watched eight out of his nine children die before him, seven in their early youth, and their ghosts also floated about town, mostly near the crypt on his property, an elaborate marble and chandeliered residence for the dead. I was sorry for their trauma, but I liked living someplace with a lot of ghosts, especially because I figured my own ghosts would appreciate the companionship and the sympathetic conversation. I imagined that Beekman had never been lonely.

  I was a little train-shy after my experience in Sadlo’reen, and so I traveled by water on the Erie Canal to the Palatine Bridge, where I bribed William Hutt’s U.S. mail stagecoach to haul me eleven arduous miles uphill. We crossed a forest bridge over the sulfur falls, which flowed over the rock face just north of the village and into a milky-white village creek. We shortly arrived at the lower village.

  It was a spring day. The entire hillside was white with sulfur. It was the day of the flower parade, which began at the Pavilion Hotel and ran south along Main Street. Wealthy girls in white carriages sported white camellias pinned to their white dresses, held white parasols and wore white flowered hats, while a brass band played “Captain Shepherd's Quickstep” in a gazebo in the center of town. The white camellias reminded me of Hell, and the gazebo reminded me of Althea. And then I thought of Theera, out there in Time, training my child to kill, and I realized that Althea was gone, and that Theera likely harbored no lingering nostalgia for gazebos. She’d left the cocoon, left the rest of us behind her.

  I followed the parade for a while, marveled at the wide smiles of the young women. At length, I descended on foot to one of the commoner boarding houses on Division Street, to the south of town near the hops fields. It was close enough to the sulfurous springs to give me plenty of opportunity to cure every last ailment, yet far enough from the town’s social center that I could avoid unwanted attention. I wanted to settle for a boardinghouse that would take my money and ask no questions, and this is what Mr. Felson’s boardinghouse seemed to offer, a half mile south of Union Street.

  I was not entirely surprised to see my bay gelding, my horse with no name, standing out front, and he seemed glad to see me as well.

  The woman at the front desk was elderly but unnaturally healthy and energetic, and when I jovially queried the effectiveness of the springs, she said, “The waters cure dyspepsia; constipation; chronic diarrhea; hemorrhoids; jaundice; skin lesions; arthritis; intestinal disorders; bilary calculi and other bilary derangements; palsy; hysteria; psychondriasis; neuralgia; nerve-ache of the stomach, liver and bowels; chronic catarrh; enlargement of the liver; diabetes; dropsy; enlargement of the spleen; incontinence; gravel; leucorrhea; cutaneous eruptions; rheumatism; malaria; asthma; vertigo; headaches; and stricture of the rectum.”

  She stopped speaking, and she looked at me quizzically.

  “Fine, then,” I said.

  Seemed to fit the bill, in other words.

  I’d been in Hell for a while, after all. I didn’t recognize all of the ailments that she’d listed, but I probably had a lot of whatever-it-was to cure, Hell-things that maybe 19th century medicine hadn’t discovered yet, but which could kill a body nonetheless. (I was pretty sure that I had stricture of the rectum and chronic catarrh, for example, even though I didn’t really know what they were; they just sounded like ailments that would ail me. Especially catarrh.)

  “Will it help drunken wastrelness?” I asked, and she said, “Certainly,” and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be cured of drunken wastrelness, now that I’d finally landed back in Malchut with a few rocks in my pocket to buy Monongahela. The view from the Village, looking out at the Mohawk Valley, included a thirst-inducing vista of rolling hills filled with hops, not the sort of thing to encourage teetotaling, and thus I was inclined to tipple and disinclined to teetle. (Luckily for me, I would shortly find the “Bucket of Blood” Tavern.)

  She said that the convivial society in Sharon Springs was also exemplary, and that she could make arrangements if I so wished, but I replied, “I just want to be bored.” She said that could be arranged as well, so I signed the registry, and for the next several months I lived in Sharon Springs under the name of Sanders.

  Every morning, I walked across town to the lower sulfur bathhouse, a humble and less expensive wooden pagoda-style structure, where I plunged into sulfur water pleasantly scented with pine needles. Neither the people nor the surroundings were too fancy, and Mr. Sanders did not attract attention.

  Some afternoons, if I were feeling meditative, I would venture from Main Street and ride my horse through the woods to the Magnesia Temple, an arched, cast-iron structure with Corinthian columns, draped with statues of grapevines; mineral water flowed from the mouths of two stone lions, from which I could drink the cure. Sometimes my horse and I galloped through the woods and the surrounding countryside. In the afternoon, when necessary, I shopped at Hyney’s store, in the early evening, I bet on billiards at Lane’s Billiard Hall, across Main Street from the U.S. Hotel, and two or three evenings a week, I drank with the hop pickers and the hard cider quartet at Finkelstein’s aforementioned “Bucket of Blood” Tavern, in the southernmost point of the Village, which used locally grown hops, and which was every bit as unseemly as you might imagine.

  Finkelstein was a stocky and gangsterish proprietor, vaguely European, threatening and curt, and every week or two, a fistfight or razor fight left blood on the floor, which Finkelstein personally mopped up with more than a touch of enthusiasm and even glee and squeezed into a bucket. He then dumped a great splash of thick, red-stained water out the front door. (Hence the establishment’s name.)

  I spent the money that Madame Tang had given me on billiards and drink and the cure, till it was gone, then I wired Sheriff Wesley[*] to send me the rest of my savings from the Lervine job, and within a few days, I was back in the black.

  Sometimes I walked out of the Magnesia Temple and into another era, just to see what it felt like to roam Time again, to see if I could still do it. But here in Sharon Springs, the best Time of all was 1881. When I traveled back in time, I saw nothing, just trees and thick overgrowth. When I traveled into the future, Sharon Springs crumbled. The Springs themselves were deserted, the buildings on Main Street boarded up, the hotels torn down, replaced by weed-strewn lots; hobos muttered to themselves in the alleys and in the middle of the empty road. I didn’t spend much time in the future Sharon Springs. In 1881, this was the height of elegance, and it felt as though it always would be.

  Who wouldn’t love Sharon Springs?

  Things change, I guess. It’s too bad.

  I stayed there a long time, through the winter, till spring dawned, then early summer. The crowds were back, the rich bastards.

  One Thursday night, about one the morning, Finkelstein sat next to me at the bar. The place was near closing. He slapped me on the back, all friendly.

  “Sanders,” he laughed. “Give me a hundred dollars.”

  I asked why he thought I ought to give him a hundred dollars. He said that it would be greatly in my interest to give him a hundred dollars, and he supposed that if I didn’t give him a hundred dollars, I would find out later why that was a mistake. I’m paraphrasing this; Finkelstein’s threat came with a lot of starts and stops, mispronounced words and drooling, which puddled on the bar.

  I suggested fifty dollars, and he shook his head and said, “No, a hundred dollars.”

  He patted me on the back and he called me, “My friend,” and he laughed and poured me another drink and toasted our new friendship. I was in no state to figure out a plan, other than punching Finkelstein in the nose. Very close to me, his terrible
breath in my face, he muttered, “You need to treat me with more respect. We live here in the same town, and you need to treat me with more respect.” This was unpleasant, and I wanted him to stop breathing on me with his terrible breath, so I gave him twenty-five out of my pocket and promised him the rest the next time I visited, and he asked me when that would be, and I said “prolly Saturday night,” but when Saturday night came, I fell asleep early, and Sunday was the Lord’s Day, which meant the tavern was closed by Village decree, and so I planned either to skip town on Monday or come up with the bribe to keep Finkelstein quiet about whatever he knew and give it to him Monday night.

  As it turned out, that would be too late.

  Chapter 40

  I spent all Monday morning meditating at the Magnesia Temple, drinking sulfur water from the lion’s mouth — as a matter of habit, I always chose the lion on the left — and watching the clouds drift peacefully over the valley and the farmland. At about eleven-thirty the morning, two local policemen entered the Temple, and they sat down on a wooden bench, facing me. They were both no more than twenty. They sported .44-40’s. They looked nervous. To me, they looked identical — lawmen, young, nervous, maybe trigger-happy.

  The one on the left smiled.

  “Now,” he said, with careful calmness, “I don’t want you to worry about a thing.”

  The other added, “Everything is going to be fine.”

  “I’m just meditating,” I said, “and taking the cure. I wouldn’t have worried about a thing, and everything would be fine, if two young and nervous-looking booly-dogs weren’t staring at me with their hands on their pistols.”

  They didn’t seem to mind being called booly-dogs.

  “You are Watt O’Hugh?” one asked. “The Third?”

  “I live,” I said, “under the name of ‘Sanders.’ ”

  What I meant to say, of course, was that my name was Sanders, but what I actually said came out cagy and evasive. While I had intended to lie, the way I expressed my lie wasn’t really even a lie at all. I was indeed living under the name of Sanders!