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

  The armies are closing in from the North, and from the South, and quite probably from the East and the West, although I have not checked recently, and there is almost certainly nothing more that anyone can do about the “Coming Storm of 1937,” as Lum and Abner have dubbed our impending cataclysm.

  Here on the ranch, the children play outside in the sun, shouting and laughing and sometimes crying, as children do, and have always done. There is a skunk somewhere in the vicinity, probably dead, and a wasp on the windowsill. It is hot here on my ranch, sometimes even at night, but I do not mind, because sweating out my guts reminds me that I am yet alive. The air is dry, and dust rises into the white-hot cloudless sky. Still, for a while more, there is life out here.

  There is always more to tell, until there is not.

  THE END

  OF THE THIRD PART OF

  THE STRANGE AND ASTOUNDING MEMOIRS OF

  WATT O’HUGH THE THIRD

  Author’s Note

  OK, there it is, the end of the yarn that began when Watt traveled north with his Wild West Extravaganza, Emelina at his side, only to discover that neither the Extravaganza nor Emelina were what they seemed. This is, I hope, a fitting end to that chapter of the tale.

  But is this the end of Watt’s story? Well of course it isn’t. You know that he will die in 1937, but you do not yet know how. And you do not know how, or if, the Falsturm will be defeated. (A fellow like the Falsturm, I think, would be difficult to defeat.)

  Do I know how Watt will die, and how (or if) the Falsturm will be defeated? I do indeed! I have in fact written the last chapter of what could theoretically be the last book in Watt’s adventures. I am not making all of this up as I go along. There are in fact answers to all of the questions, and other adventures to tell. For example, I have a story to tell you about Watt O’Hugh the Fifth, and his adventures in Sidonian-occupied Gotham during the Jazz Age.

  If you want me to tell these stories, I would love to tell these stories.

  But this is up to you! You can make it happen if you spread the word, call your friends and email your neighbors. Visit your local bookstore or community center and tell them about Watt. I will go anywhere, any time, any place and read from these books.

  Thanks as always to Lan, who read this book first; to Mark Matcho, who, to no one’s surprise, illustrated the cover beautifully; Prof. Richard Strassberg for his help with the concept of the Hell of the Innocent Dead, and also Elena Lee and Wanli Kuang on the same topic; my dad, Dr. Richard Drachman, for answering my questions about science, and who bears no responsibility for the ridiculous result; Sharon R. Manko for her assistance with my research on Sharon Springs; Laurie Boone, Librarian at the Arizona Historical Society, for her assistance with my research on Yuma; Troy Larson (and his great website Ghosts of North Dakota), for information on Freda, North Dakota; Diana Bird of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture for help on the life of a native in 19th century New Mexico; my daughter, Liana, who suggested that Prometheus might play a role in this story, and who shared her knowledge of world mythology; my daughter Julianne, who dreamed up the Rainbearer when she was very little, and who pointed out to me that human civilization would be paradise if we could all be as selfless as the firemen; and Mark Laporta, that great science fiction writer, who gave this some last-minute line-editing.

  Watt is a Time Roamer, who has visited various centuries of the past and the future, and our own present. When the older “Watt” narrates, he writes with this understanding, and he likes to imagine that he is speaking to us in our own language, across the decades and from beyond the grave, although he does not always entirely understand what he is saying. When the younger “Watt” speaks, he uses the lingo of the 19th century, in which he lives. Some idioms are older than you might think. For example, “water under the bridge,” which Watt derides as a saphead cliché even in 1877, was indeed some decades old at the time. (It appeared in 1844, for example, in an English translation of The Betrothed by Alessandro Mansoni.) These things aren’t mistakes.

  A few notes on the historicity of this book:

  1) I’ve been informed since the publication of Book 2 that the Hang Far Low Restaurant that once thrived in San Francisco’s Chinatown was known in the 19th century (the time of our story) as the Hang Fer Low Restaurant, and that it changed its name later. For consistency, I have kept it as it was in Watt’s prior outing.

  2) Fort Yuma closed in 1883, not 1882.

  3) The town called Purley in the prologue is fictitious, and the community of pointless tribal outcasts that reside some miles from Purley is fictitious in its specifics, although all societies have their pointless tribal outcasts, so it is true in a broader sense.

  4) The Big Rip, the fate of the universe described in Chapter 5, is today considered one of the less-likely scenarios.

  5) The anarchist movement in New York did not really begin in earnest till the 1870s, and it didn’t really pop till the 1880s, but I have placed the origin of the movement a bit earlier, during the 1860s, when some of its progenitors were agitating, and the global movement was stronger elsewhere, especially in Germany, and so the description of the movement is not inaccurate.

  6) “Carbonated paper,” which Americans of a certain age remember as carbon paper or carbon copies (hence the ubiquitous use of “cc” on emails) was invented in the early 19th century and came into broad office use in the early 1880s, but the rise of the office “Flub,” which Theera describes in the prologue, was conditioned on the pervasiveness of carbon paper and flickering fluorescent lights.

  7) J.P. Morgan’s role in world history as depicted briefly in this book is entirely fictional (at least as far as we know).

  8) In Chapter 41, I have tried to describe the layout of the village of 1882 Yuma accurately, thanks mostly to the work of Rosalie Crowe and Sidney Brinkerhoff. However, the alleyway across which Watt and Oscar leap — from Martin’s Drugstore to Perry’s Saloon and Courthouse — was more like a vacant lot (it later housed a school), and it was too wide for anyone to jump across.

  9) There is almost nothing written in English about the Hell of the Innocent Dead. Also known as Wangsicheng, or City of Victims, it is a Chinese mythological Underworld for those who died as a result of circumstances beyond their control, and who are neither very good nor very evil. Although it does not sound very pleasant, it is not precisely analogous to a Christian “Hell” that seeks to punish the wicked. It is possible to escape from this City if the injustice is avenged, which is usually carried out by the innocent soul as a ghost. To this day, there is a “Festival of the Dead” that provides rituals through which we seek to rescue our loved ones who are citizens of the City of Victims. (I suspect that Wangsicheng may not be a real place.)

  10) The original, historical town of Petach Tikvah was in the Achor Valley, a few thousand years ago; in 1878, a doomed settlement also named Petach Tikvah was initiated near the village of Umlabes, which had been abandoned by its existing residents due to a malaria outbreak; the same fate befell Petach Tikvah, although there is today a city in that spot by the same name. Because the actual geographic location of 1878’s Petach Tikvah does not fall within the boundaries of the historical territory of Z’vulun (where Hester and her fellow Z’vulunites would have wanted to restore their kingdom), I have therefore instead set the very successful and imaginary Z’vulunite settlement of Petach Tikvah in what is commonly known as the Jezreel Valley, which we call Ha Emek in the book.

  11) The actual settlement of Petach Tikvah was of course not founded with the financial assistance of J.P. Morgan.

  12) As always, I am aware of no evidence that that the now-defunct town of Freda, North Dakota existed prior to its turn of the century establishment as Pearce (and thus Dawsey is fictitious), there is no pond in Freda (with or without a ferocious pond monster), and while it was hit by a meteor around the end of World War I, the meteor didn’t destroy the entire town.

  13) Although Oscar Wilde loved America and did visit the West in
1882, he did not visit Arizona. It is the burden of these books that a silly throwaway remark that I thought was funny a few books ago (“I bumped into him again in 1882 in Arizona, where I saw him take down four other men in a gunfight”) must somehow be incorporated into the narrative. Hence: 1882 finds Watt and Oscar Wilde in Arizona, and a gunfight occurs, and Oscar Wilde takes down four men.

  14) It is unlikely that Theera is a Paeonian name, although no one knows for sure, as the Paeonian language is lost and is a language isolate (as Tang correctly notes).

  15) The list in Chapter 6 of the various real places called “the Gates of Hell” is correct, as unlikely as it may seem.

  16) Finkelstein was a real historical figure who really did run the Bucket of Blood Tavern in Sharon Springs. He is not buried in Sharon Springs, and in researching this book, I could not find anyone who knows what his first name was, or anything about him. Thus, the depiction herein is fictitious. He might have been a really nice fellow, although in this book, of course, he is not. (He chose to name his saloon the “Bucket of Blood,” and so it is certainly possible that Finkelstein was just an awful guy.) Importantly, he is intended to bear no resemblance to any actual Finkelstein, living or dead.

  17) In Chapter 28, Master Yu refers to the vacuum of space and the airless moon, which may seem anachronistic. Even in the 1870s, however, this was the governing scientific view, based on the 1) thinning of the atmosphere at high altitudes, and 2) the observation that stars would suddenly disappear behind the moon, which indicated that the Moon lacked atmosphere (which would have caused the star gradually to fade away).

  There are more than a few homages all through the book: for example, Master Yu unknowingly quotes Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth in Chapter 18; the reference to King John in the penultimate chapter is (obscurely) a tribute to the great Leonard Rossiter; the drink Watt enjoys at the “Roamers” bar in the prologue is a reference to the extravagantly devastating first novel written by the brilliant Kate Bucknell, who was my Freshman Comp teacher at Columbia; and Milton quotes (again, unknowingly) a line from The Rainbow Connection, by Paul Williams and Kenneth Ascher. (“Somebody thought of that and someone believed it” sounds very skeptical and cynical and un-Muppetlike, and I like it.) While we are at it, the reference to one “Linda Corey” in Chapter 18 of my first book was a tribute to Roe Richmond, a really good and underrated Western author. I am sure that I cannot remember all the homages that I stuck into the book during the absurd number of years it took me to write this slim novel, but they are all well-intentioned.

  The malevolent-sounding bits of mathematics recited by M. Rasháh throughout the book are from Johan Björklund (the punctured Riemann surface), Steven N. Evans, Terrence Tao, M. Kapranov, Bernd Sturmfels and Caroline Uhler (the birth and death process), and I think probably a few others, and are all quoted very briefly herein under the Fair Use doctrine.

  Some bits of Sadlo’reen travelogue are adapted from a series of kids’ books that I wrote years ago just for my daughters, and that are not intended to see print.

  The poem that Master Yu briefly quotes in chapter 6 is by the Victorian poet, Christina Rossetti. Voltairine de Cleyre’s idealistic speech in chapter 12 is by Voltairine de Cleyre. Much of Oscar Wilde’s dialogue comes from his own letters and other writings. Sir Arthur Eddington was the first person to say, “The stuff of the world is mind stuff.”

  This is of course not a work of history or science, but if any of this piqued your interest and you want to read more, some of the books that I relied on for research include Sharon and Sharon Springs, by Nancy DiPace Pfau, American Anarchism, by Steve J. Shone, Why Does the World Exist?, by Jim Holt, Beer and Revolution: Some Aspects of German Anarchist Culture in New York, 1880—1900, by Tom Goyens, Weather during the Civil War, by Kathryn Shively Meier, The First Transcontinental Railroad, by John Debo Galloway, C. E., A Victorian Flower Dictionary, by Mandy Kirby, Early Yuma, by Robert Nelson, Early Yuma by Rosalie Crowe and Sidney B. Brinkerhoff, Guide to the Hoh Rain Forest, by Mary Lou Hanify and Craig Blencowe, Toys and Games from Times Past, from Historical Folk Toys, A History of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, by William M. Sachar and The Battles of Armageddon: Megiddo and the Jezreel Valley from the Bronze Age to the Nuclear Age, by Eric H. Cline.

  Finally, if you enjoyed my story, remember that Chickadee Prince Books, the publisher who brought this to you, is a small independent author-run press devoted only to quality work, and it needs your word of mouth to survive. Please tell a friend and write a review on Amazon and Goodreads of this book or other CPB books.

  Steven S. Drachman

  January 2019

  Other books FROM CHICKADEE PRINCE THAT you will enjoy

  Justice Makes a Killing: A Bobby Earl Novel, by Ed Rucker –

  ISBN 978-1732913905

  “A thoroughly enjoyable page-turner…. The classic courtroom drama at the heart of this story is perfectly orchestrated, and the seemingly impossible odds make Earl’s masterful handling of evidence, witnesses, opposing counsel, the jury, and the judge wonderfully satisfying to read. Rucker has a knack for explaining the minutiae of legal procedure clearly as he weaves them into the story.” — Kirkus Reviews

  Probability Shadow, by Mark Laporta

  ISBN 978-0-9997569-2-8

  “This is a good series opener for speculative readers who like tangled story lines in which solved problems reveal even greater challenges.”

  — PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY

  “[A]n engrossing far-future reality of galaxy spanning civilizations, populated by multiple alien races ... [Laporta’s] imagination is impressive and establishes a delightful playground for the trilogy to explore.” — John Keogh, BOOKLIST

  * * *

  [*] Seemed to me at the time that they would make a shaky community at best. I didn’t see why cowards would make common cause with traitors or with tribadists. But I would soon learn otherwise, as you will see. Society’s winners are society’s winners, and its outcasts are its outcasts, and what defines us, mostly, is whom we hate, and who hates us.

  [] This was an expression of the time. Burly’s feet might not actually have been wet.

  [*] Theera is a “real” name, but I was hesitant to reveal it here. In the 19th century, when I came of age, we did not have “superheroes,” and to-day, in 1936, as I prepare to die, the advent of Superman is still a bare two years in the future, if the world as we know it survives. Yet Theera sounds like a superheroine’s name, like Jor-el’s twin sister, or Thor’s, and so I considered changing her name for my story. When something is true, but I fear my readers will not believe it, I am tempted to change it. But I have promised you the unvarnished truth, to the best of my memory and ability, and the truth is that her name, as she told it to me that night, was Theera. She was not precisely super. She was super-ish; and super-esq; but not entirely super.

  [*] I would see Ch’ao-Hsing again on a rainy day in France in 1918, in the dawn of the Great Sidonian Revolt; this woman, whom I met on a scratchy dock of a Bay in Hell when she was yet young, would be a hero of the resistance. Her heroism I will never forget, but it is a tale for another day. Another volume, I hope, if I have time.

  [*] When Master Yu explained that I had been a fugitive from the law, Minnie asked me why I didn’t hide out in the past or the future till the danger was past. If my pursuers were not themselves Roamers (and my pursuers were almost certainly not Roamers, who make up a tiny fraction of the population, less than either seers, or sufferers of either prosopagnosia or sarcoidosis), then wouldn’t the Future or the Past have been safe hiding places? This sounds perfectly sensible, except that when you return to the present, you’re right back where you started. And you cannot stay in another epoch forever; the longer you’re there, the greater the risk that you’ll change something and be shot back to your home era. So if someone were about to kill you in 1879, he’s still right there, about to kill you. Roaming is naught but a postponement. It seems “cool,” as y
ou might say (it is!) but it has no practical value.

  [] I wondered if Lucy Billings were here. She was not. I imagine that no level of wrong against her could turn Lucy into a victim. I wondered if my ghosts were here, but they also were not, because they were either heroes, or figments of my imagination. It is all very complicated, this narrative of mine, this life I led, but it all makes sense, in its own way, and it is all completely true.

  [* ]* In 1911, I met a woman who had once been Mayor Dougan’s mistress, and who had related this and other incidents in the mayor’s life, including the perplexing reference to a Jewess shape-shifter.

  [] I had traveled from my Death Valley cabin in 1878 to the one-street mining town of Lida, from which I traveled to a nearby Avis in 1968, and from there I rented a car to see a bit of future America. After my misadventure with Dawne, I traveled back to the future, gassed up my rental car, made my way across the country to Avis, where I returned my car, then returned to 1878, where I retrieved my horse-with-no-name and returned to my little cabin, in which I lived alone.

  [*] This is the Chinese word for dybbuk.

  [] I’m not sure what you get when you multiply 100 billion by 2 trillion — apparently, it’s two million quintillion or (in other words) two septillion (which is a two followed by twenty-four zeroes). Even if I got that wrong, it’s still really, you know, a big number.

  [] I now understand that “magicae incantatores” in Latin means nothing more than “magic spell!” But if one were truly determined to scream nonsense into the darkness of Hell, one might as well stick with nonsense that is clear and no-frills.