Watt O'Hugh Underground: Being the Second Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh III Book 2)

by Steven S. Drachman

  “Astonishing,” Master Yu whispered.

  “Big problem,” Hsu said. “We don’t know what this is.”

  The sphere buzzed and quivered.

  “What do you think?” asked Master Hu.

  Master Yu said: “It appears to be some sort of sphere. One that can float a bit. And it appears to make some sort of indistinct noise.”

  Then he added: “Hmmm.”

  The old men looked at each other. Master Hsu seemed disappointed. Upon noting Master Hsu’s seeming disappointment, the other two men then appeared to be disappointed as well.

  “Well,” said Master Lu at last. “It is yours, whatever it is.”

  “And,” Master Hsu added, “we are at your disposal. Anything you need, just say the word. You are her Majesty’s emissary on an important mission, and we are here to help.”

  “And in the meantime,” Master Hu said, “we might as well eat.”

  The four men ate, and they drank wine, and the evening progressed. The sun descended outside the restaurant’s wide windows, and shadows crept across the ornate dining room. Somewhere outside, a dog barked.

  Anything you need, the man tells me. Anything you need. Just let us know. Anything at all.

  Master Yu sighed. He sat on the pavement, bouncing the sphere up and down on the palm of his left hand, watching it hover in the air then descend, listening to the queer noise that it made.

  He sighed again.

  “Anything you need,” he muttered aloud. “Could I have not said it? I could use more comfortable accommodations.”

  Then an odd thought popped into the poet’s mind. What if, he wondered, one were to bounce the sphere in one’s left hand three times in quick succession, then catch it in one’s right hand and hold it tight and let the vibration of the sphere rumble up one’s arm and through one’s body. What if one were to try that?

  He decided to try it.

  A young man walked by in the street, giving Master Yu a nervous look as he passed. His queue bobbed in the wind.

  Master Yu bounced the sphere in his left hand three times in quick succession. It felt cold against his skin. Each time he bounced it into the air, it descended yet more quickly. On the third bounce, he tossed it into his right hand and squeezed it tightly. He immediately felt peculiar; the sphere’s rumble rang like a bell inside his head. The night seemed to grow darker. Then there was nothing. Just darkness; no sound, no wind. Then he was someplace else entirely.

  Master Yu stood at the end of a dock, in the light of a night sky illuminated by two moons. The weather was refreshing, the ocean breezes caressed his lungs, and he breathed freely for the first time in months. He turned and looked behind, and he saw a spired, jigsaw city of tall, golden stone buildings. It looked like an ancient kingdom but whirred like a city of science, like something from the far future. A melody rose from one of the towers, a beautiful melody played on an organ and harpsichord and accompanied by a chorus whispering lovely words that he could not understand. Beyond the crazy city, Master Yu saw a vast forest of towering trees that seemed unbounded and infinite.

  He turned back to the bay, and there was Tang, sitting by the edge, right foot dangling in the water. He sat down at the edge of the dock as well. He took off his shoes and soaked his feet in the cool blue water. He looked at Tang. Same stony, stoic face, filled with sadness, same snow-white bald head.

  This was indisputably the same person, but Tang was different now.

  Tang was a woman! There was something slightly softer in her hard face; a plumpness to the lips and a roundness in the eyes.

  How had he not seen this before?

  Because when Tang had visited him in his room in the Chinatown basement, Tang had been a man! Or, perhaps, Tang had been a woman impersonating a man very convincingly. (Unless, now, Tang was a man impersonating a woman very convincingly….)

  Tang wore a rough gray robe, and her ankles and feet were bare. He could see that her left foot was carved of wood. An elegant wooden foot, Master Yu was surprised to note with admiration. Most men of the 19th century would not find her beautiful, but Master Yu found her beautiful, as had I, some years before, and as would you, my readers of the 20th century, if you could see her. Her strength and fierceness was beautiful and powerful, and Master Yu wished that she could see him, and that he could talk to her.

  She was talking to two dolphins. The dolphins jutted their heads above the crest of the water, and they were responding to the sound of Tang’s voice, to these dolphin inflections. Tang and the dolphins seemed to be having an interesting conversation.

  “Welcome,” Tang said (implausibly, ridiculously), “to North Sadlareeyah.”

  Then, according to Master Yu, Madame Tang smiled. It was not a happy smile, but nevertheless it was a smile, according to Master Yu.

  I do not believe him. I never saw Madame Tang smile, and I wish I had. I had a bit of a relationship with Madame Tang. She had healed me in the prison back in Wyoming, a miraculous healing job, sealing bones and nerves that should have been permanently ruptured. I’d accompanied her to that range war in Lervine; and she had accompanied me to Weedville, Nebraska, in our quixotic effort to rescue Lucy Billings from a Sidonian jail, an ill-fated mission that saw Lucy rise as a deadling, and Madame Tang chase Monsieur Rasháh through a great Otherworldly hole that opened in the middle of town, from which she seemed unlikely ever to return. Indeed, to the extent that Madame Tang had any friends, I would count myself among them; she was loyal, and she was innocent of the betrayals committed by my other allies in the counter-Revolution; and I missed her. After all, during the adventures that I relate in the first volume of my Memoirs, which I do not wish to repeat here in their entirety, she saved my life, and I saved hers, and we had once even shared an embrace, with death over our heads. And so I wish I had seen her smile.

  “What is happening?” Master Yu asked.

  “I cannot hear you,” she said. “I do not even know if you have received this message. I don’t know whether you have received the gift that I sent. The sphere I sent you, made by a gentleman of Sadlareeyahian origins named Iggs.”

  The moons glowed in her sad eyes as she stared out to sea.

  “I have also sent a message to the dolphins here,” she said. “I do not know if they have received it. I do not know if they are here with this three-dimension mirage of what I once was. Dolphins can upon rare occasions be helpful. But for the most part, they are cheerful, and during my lifetime I enjoyed talking to them, when I found my way to the sea. And so I like the idea that my voice may still reach them after my death. If, in fact, I am dead.”

  She scratched her bald, pale white head, then she pulled up her hood.

  “Some people say that the spheres will protect you. Some people say that they are very powerful, that Mr. Iggs is a mighty wizard. He doesn’t look like a mighty wizard; he is a bald, pudgy, serious little man, who most days can be found adding up numbers and balancing his accounts at the warehouse in Xiorian’s southern district from whence he ships his spheres throughout Sadlo’reen. Still, not every mighty wizard must look like a mighty wizard. Where is it written that a wizard cannot know how to keep accurate books? I have not made up my mind about the spheres. Some people say they hover a bit, buzz a bit, put on a good show. These people would contend that Mr. Iggs is merely a mighty fraud and conman.” Then, apropos of nothing, but perhaps an interesting fact, Madame Tang added, “Iggs’ wife, by the way, Yu Dai-Yung, has the power to turn herself into a cloud of butterflies. This is an interesting and sometimes useful skill, although sometimes a bird will eat a few of the butterflies before she can recompose herself. This is not fatal, but it is disorienting.”

  “I wish I could talk to you,” Master Yu whispered. “I wish that I could make you smile again. I hope that you are alive, somewhere, and that in the years since you recorded this message, you have become happy. What is it that made you so unhappy, Madame Tang?”

  “Hold this sphere,” she said. “Hold this sphere
and let a veil descend over your eyes, and see the world that is invisible when your eyes are open. See the way the Red Eyebrows do. I cannot lead the way. All I can do is tell you that, if the sages have chosen you properly, you will be able to see these things.”

  Master Yu held the sphere; to you, it would look as though his pupils shrank away into nothing and his irises grew hazy and dim, but to him, it felt as though a strange set of translucent eyelids closed over his eyes without his willing it, and he could still see yet clearly; he was still looking out over the black ocean, but now, farther out to sea, he could spot an angry, cold fog that had not been there before, and which blocked out the moonlight. Where the fog touched the water, the ocean surface had begun to freeze over, and within this invisible icy world was a great dark ship, which seemed to be built of rock, and which bobbed impossibly on the ocean waves. Although it was very far in the distance, Master Yu could see every detail as though he were on the ship. He could even see the Captain, who stood at the bow, almost hidden in a black hooded robe. His skin was pale and scaly-rough; his blind eyes were mere slits, but they glowed red; his hands and bare feet were green claws.

  “That’s him, Sadlo’reen’s mad sea captain, the Dark Thief,” said Tang. “He is blind, and he is also deaf, but his sense of smell is strong. He has been traveling Sadlo’reen’s oceans for a thousand years, and the world freezes with his touch.” She paused. “This is another world, Yu Dai-Yung, but like every orbit that exists anywhere in the Otherworld, it is at risk, and the risk is the same. Here in Sadlo’reen, the risk comes through the Dark Thief. In your orbit, it comes through the Sidonians and the Red Eyebrows. But the danger all originates from the same source, a single source.”

  Madame Tang looked out at the water. Her eyes seemed to settle where the dolphins played blissfully.

  “I cannot see these things, Yu Dai-Yung,” she whispered. “All I can do is tell you how to look.”

  Chapter 6

  After the snowy egret flew away, we left the meadow, and we traveled north into the woods. I followed the oracle’s instructions, and when it was yet dusk, we reached the cabin, which was old, sturdy and reassuring, just as she had described, and we tossed our bags inside and tied up our horses. It smelled like an old cabin, which made me as happy as I could be, considering everything. Hester made a fire in the fireplace, and I caught a rabbit in the woods and a fish in the stream, which we roasted over the fire; I ate the rabbit, and Hester ate the fish. When night had fallen, and we had settled in to eat, the storm of which the oracle had warned me finally arrived, a ferocious thunderstorm that shook the world outside, and when Hester remarked that it was lucky that we had found this cabin, I replied that it was lucky that we found the oracle who gave us instructions to the cabin, and Hester said that if she could learn to believe in my ghosts – who had done not a whit for us up till now – then she supposed she could learn to believe in my oracle, who, after all, had found us a warm dry cabin.

  One other thing about the cabin:

  It had a little glass window, miraculously still intact. When I looked out the window from inside the cabin, I could see, through the storm, a dark silhouette on the horizon, a great grey city of smokestacks and tall, soot-covered buildings. The city was surrounded by a bay, and on the other side of the bay, a green forest cut through by a tumbling river, which was whipped about now by the storm. But when I stepped outside, I could see the grey city no longer. I could see this grey city only from inside the cabin, looking out.

  I didn’t know how such a thing were possible, or what it meant, and I didn’t mention it to Hester, because, as with the oracle, I thought she either wouldn’t be able to see what I saw, or she would pretend that she couldn’t, and either way, it would result in nothing helpful being accomplished. So I stayed quiet, but I made a point to remember this, in case later it might make some sense.

  We lay side by side on the cabin floor, listening to the quiet murmur of the night forest.

  “O’Hugh,” Hester whispered. “I know how I wound up in this predicament. But how does a man like you end up in the middle of the desert, hiding from the law, without a friend? I thought you’d probably have a rich uncle or two who could find you a lawyer and sort all this out?”

  “A rich uncle?” I said. “Not me.”

  “No one to turn to?”

  “I was an orphan,” I said.

  “In an orphanage?” she asked

  “Just a lost, unwashed orphan in the middle of the Five Points slum,” I said.

  At that time, I told her, the very center of my childhood kingdom was at Worth Street and Park Street, where I lived as a squatter in a great dark and crumbling palace of sprawling squalor, which we nicknamed “the Old Brewery.” I never even knew why, or asked. It was as bad, I told her, as she might imagine. Wet and muddy pavement beneath my feet. Street and gutters piled high with garbage. Towering tenements that creaked and trembled as their inhabitants shifted in their filth. The stench of overflowing privies drifting from the interior yards into the street and settling in my pores, on my clothing, coating me like a second skin that I lived in every day.

  “But it was also better than you imagine,” I added. It was a teeming, ragged neighborhood, I told Hester, but I remember it mostly as teeming with ragged men who loved their wives, and ragged wives who loved their children, and ragged chums who looked out for each other when no one else would. Back then, I had nothing, and I envied everyone.

  “Sometimes, in the morning, when I was hungriest, a kindly middle-aged whorehouse Madam named Mrs. Welch would give me a bit of food or a coin or two, if I rapped on the back door. She ran the White Squall Inn (which you may have heard of), and I wished that she could be my mother. How I loved her, because she was a woman of a certain motherly age, and because she smiled at me.

  “My old home has since been torn down, and a mission now stands in its place. This, I suppose, is a development for the better. Still, I sometimes wonder where my twelve-hundred-odd neighbors have gone. I haven’t seen them since the police nicked me for stealing an apple and sent me away to be rehabilitated through the alleged Grace of our hypothetical Lord. So I got reeducated on Randall’s Island, learned to read and write and be a useful member of society.”

  “You haven’t seen or talked to anyone from the old neighborhood?” Hester said. “Not once, in all these years?”

  In the 1860s, I told her, back when I was employed as a clerk for New York City, I took a walk south, down to the old neighborhood, thinking everyone would be glad to see me. Just on a sudden whim, and I didn’t even bother or think to take off my good tie first. As soon as I set foot on Elm Street, a couple of b’hoys climbed up to the street from a cellar distillery, puffing with the effort. They were thick and tired, staggering, it seemed to me, from the accumulated weight of a day spent drinking rum that wasn’t rum, not exactly, and gin that wasn’t precisely gin, but which had suitably cracked their skulls open and pummeled their minds pleasantly and painfully.

  They blocked my way, and they both made a commendable effort at forming an identically threatening sneer. The fellow on the left was the elder of the two, probably about thirty, though he looked a tired forty. The one on the right was a hobbadehoy not more than fifteen, and he wore a rat-eaten cap too big for his narrow, shrunken head. I could smell it on them, that rum that wasn’t rum, and gin that wasn’t gin.

  “What did they want?” Hester asked me.

  “Money, of course, so they could return to the cellar and drink more, or flop for the night on the floor of the cellar next door. It was not impossible that they wanted to steal my money to buy a paltry dinner for their families. They made a couple of mumbled threats that I could not really hear, but the younger of the two held out a knife, so there wasn’t much ambiguity in this particular situation. The knife trembled in his left hand, from the so-called booze, I thought, rather than from nervousness.”

  “Did you fight? Did you run? Or did you tell them who you were?”


  “Well, I looked like the man I yearned to become, but not the person I really was, the boy who’d grown up in those very streets and who knew how to respond to a couple of hoods who wished to jump him for money. So who could blame me?”

  I didn’t even really think about it, I admitted to Hester. I punched the young one in the center of his hungry face, his nose flattened at my touch and burst like an over-ripe tomato; cartilage cracked, and he staggered backwards, howling. I spun about, and I bounced the other guy off a brick tenement wall. Less than a minute after they’d first threatened me, they both lay gasping and bleeding in the street. I ran north, and I figured that I wouldn’t visit Elm Street again, at least not if my luck held out.

  “And then, after the big stand I took during the Draft Riots, I wasn’t the darling of New York’s white working class, to say the least, so I didn’t ever go back.”

  “How did you get to the Five Points?” Hester asked me. “Where did you come from?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t know.

  “It was as though I had always been there,” I said. “No parents. Not even any name. ‘Watt O’Hugh’ is a name I made up on Randall’s Island when they asked me what my name was. Before that, I didn’t even have a name.”

  I smiled.

  “And you, Hester?” I asked.

  “And me, what?” she asked.

  “Is there nothing interesting to tell about you?”

  “Here is my story, then,” she said.

  Hester was born to two free parents in 1848, in New York city, a family of Knickerbockers since the slave ship Africain brought her earliest ancestors from Ghana in 1739, or thereabouts. Her grandparents were indentured, and her parents were free. All four of her grandparents came from the same village back in Africa, and as little children, her parents grew up side by side. When it was time for them to marry, they just married each other, and they loved each other as they were meant to. They bought land in Seneca Village, up in the North of Manhattan, shortly after Hester was born, and she went to the Colored school in the basement of the Village church.