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

“You’re mad,” he told the two women. “Any good train robber needs to know these things are locked at the point of origination. The messenger isn’t privy to the combination.”

  Hester put one sawed-off double-barreled shotgun to his head, but this didn’t seem to frighten him very much, and I couldn’t blame him. Hester didn’t seem the sort of person who would blow out a fellow’s brains, mess up an express car, all for nothing. Brains on the ground wouldn’t be able to remember a safe combination any better than brains in a fellow’s head. So Anichka put a gun to his head, and while this scared him plenty, he still insisted he didn’t know the combination.

  “This being the point,” he said. “If Jay Gould gives the combination to a messenger, then train robbers can break in, put a gun to his head, get the combination, and abscond with Gould’s gold. Don’t give the combination to the messenger, then maybe the messenger dies, but Gould keeps his gold.”

  Sweat broke out on his forehead.

  “A good plan,” Anichka said, with a little angry smile, “if you’re Gould. If you’re the messenger, not such a good plan.” Her accent was thick as fish solyanko.

  What I didn’t know, Anichka didn’t know, and Hester didn’t know, was that there was a third guard who had held back when the first two attacked me, a fellow who looked like a combination between the others – pajama shirt with pantaloons, balding head and full gray beard – and he took that moment (our failure, our gloom) to attack, to swing into the room, where he fired point-blank at me, and then lifted his rifle to shoot at Hester, who stood by the safe.

  The bullet he shot at me zigged then zagged then changed direction and blasted a hole in the ceiling. Stars shined down on us, and a little sliver of moon, and the safe glowed.

  During the half second between the guard shooting at me and shooting at Hester, Anichka – the superfluous explosives-expert Anichka – stepped between them and charged. I imagine she figured that either she would die or we all would die, and why shouldn’t it just be her? She had become, after all, superfluous. The bullet meant for Hester tore out Anichka’s left lung as she flung herself at the guard. The two of them plunged off the train, skimmed along the dusty ground for a moment, then blasted skyward, exploding into the glowing noctilucent clouds like fireworks in the night, streaming and screaming red and blue flames that lit the world for a few moments, melted into the clouds and drifted away over the mountains, just smoke and sparks, and bits of hair and bone, floating on the breezes, as, I imagine, Anichka had always wanted to die, and though her ragged and scorched flesh thudded clumsily to earth in a thousand heaps that clung to the blood and corpuscles of a train guard whose name she didn’t even know, the high celestial wind currents mixed bits of her ashes in the empyrean sphere with the ashes of her husband, whom she once loved, whom she still loved, and whom she had killed, and together their ashes would orbit the earth, forever.

  Chapter 9

  This was a predicament, and I felt my dreams of riches melting away in the muggy night, even as I mourned Anichka, a woman I’d never liked – a woman no one had ever liked – but who had been filled with the sort of crazy anger that could become valiant selflessness at the very end.

  We were silent, just staring at the empty space where Anichka had stood just a moment ago.

  Then a voice, not my own, spoke to me, inside my head, and my hopes rose.

  It was a young woman’s voice, strong, affectionate, gently taunting. His brain needs some loosening, she said, in my mind, a little breathy.

  I recognized that voice well, even now, years later, years after she’d promised to forget me, to live thousands of years without me and to forget me forever. Such a voice, a memory from my last moments of optimism, back when happiness had still seemed a possibility. Emelina! my beloved sharp-shooter, the star of my short-lived (but, I must insist, magnificent) Wild West show, practitioner of the somewhat Dark Arts and apparently immortal revenant. My breath caught. My heart thumped, hopeful, happy. My world, as I like to say (and as I’ve said before), whirled.

  “Emelina,” I said, out-loud.

  And then she was there, strolling casually into the express car like a passenger looking for another cup of coffee. Emelina, with her blazing red hair, skin now freckled from years under the Western sun. She smiled. She radiated strength, more strength than most men.

  She held her fingers up to the messenger’s temples. He shut his eyes. She let her forehead touch his, and she shut her eyes too, in concentration. She let her lips touch his. He sighed, relaxed. He returned her kiss, emphatically, his eyes still shut.

  Emelina came up for air. She released him and turned to me, and she winked.

  I looked at her with disappointment.

  Was that really necessary? I wondered, without speaking.

  Emelina replied inside my head.

  It opened up his thoughts, she insisted, massaged his brain, got the neurons flowing, the synapses twanging. And wait’ll you see what I found.

  We followed Emelina. She sauntered between the train cars, aggressively, dramatically nonchalant, and she stopped in the second Pullman. She pulled the third curtain on the left. A man was sitting on the edge of his bed, reading the newspaper, a suspicious behavior, come to think of it, when the appropriate activity was to be screaming in panic. He was fully dressed and even wearing a big dipper hat, which he’d pulled down over his face.

  Emelina knocked off the big dipper hat, and she yanked him to his feet.

  He was a tall, strong man in his early forties, with a broad beard, angry dark eyes, and a wide forehead. He looked at me sternly, and I felt that I was about to receive a real grammar school dressing down, a strict talking-to, that this hijacking was a terrible waste of his time, and didn’t I know who he was? And so before he had a chance to say any of that, I stuck my .45 right in his nose and dared him.

  The man sighed, and he kept quiet.

  Emelina laughed.

  “May I introduce to you, Mr. Watt O’Hugh,” she said, “the esteemed banker and evil Sidonian sympathizer, Mr. Jay Gould.”

  Well, you might not be surprised to learn that Mr. Gould had access to the combination, and after that the operation was like melting butter in the desert sun. We opened the safe, and there was the gold, served up like a great refreshing bowl of delicious, shimmering custard, and sitting on top of the pile of gold was a scroll. I took the scroll, and I unrolled it, and at the very top of the scroll was this: 赤眉. I didn’t know what it meant, but I could guess. The scroll went on in that vein; a lot of other stuff I didn’t understand, and this time I couldn’t really guess.

  I looked up. Emelina smiled: a smile of farewell on that tough, beautiful face, once again.

  Did we really fly? I asked her, just thinking the words, knowing she would hear them. Did we really fly into the clouds, or was it a dream?

  She nodded, very lightly, so no one else could notice.

  We flew into the clouds, Watt O’Hugh the Third. We flew into the clouds and stayed there for a lifetime. Then we came back to Earth.

  It was real.

  And then she was gone, not even a shadow left, not even a whiff of her breath, as though she had been a fever vision.

  As I have mentioned to you, I am now an old man, and I know beyond any real dispute that I will die very soon, so I hope that you won’t mind if I wrap up this chapter of my adventures quickly, seeing as how I’ve given you the highlights in some detail. We retrieved the gold and even found other valuables – watches and diamond bracelets, pendants and whatnot. We put blindfolds on everyone aboard and tied them up. I was good with knots, and so was Hester.

  We divided up the spoils. Hester and I loaded up our wagon with gold and Jay Gould. And we all went in different directions.

  We rode for a while on the wagon, Jay Gould blindfolded. After a while, the robber baron skunk started offering us all kinds of things, riches and mansions and trips overseas, if we would just let him go, deliver him to his front doorstep. He’d give the order
s. With just a couple of words from him, anything we wanted would be ours. Hester and I would be treated as royalty wherever we went, if we would just show a touch of compassion this fine evening.

  “Gold worth more than the value of what you’ve taken tonight,” he said.

  I pointed out that upon obtaining his freedom, he’d have us arrested off-the-reel, and he swore that he wouldn’t.

  “A deal is a deal,” he said, and he gave me a weak and blind approximation of a smile. “I am a man of honor.”

  “A contract made under duress,” said Hester, “is unenforceable, even for a man of honor.”

  I suppose I didn’t really mind that he was a ruthless millionaire with his sights set on world domination who had cast his lot with a demonic fascist Utopian movement that sought to enslave our universe and maybe others as well with the assistance of a two-thousand-year-old deck of trick cards. After all, that was his job. Just as, at one time, it had been my job as a Union soldier to kill Confederate soldiers, young men who were probably very nice, if one got to know them. So we all had our jobs. But it vexed me that he thought me so stupid that I’d trust his promises at a time like this, and so I told him to shut up or I’d shoot him.

  “Listen, listen,” he said. “Why can’t I at least take off my blindfold?” and I said because we didn’t want him to see where we were going or who we were, and if he bothered me any more I’d shoot him. He muttered harrumphingly that this was “an affront to common decency,” and a few other such pompous, upper-classy type sentiments, just to show he wasn’t afraid of me, I suppose, but subsequently he stayed mostly quiet.

  After a while, he seemed to sleep, or to pass out.

  “He knows Allen Jerome from Black Friday, back in ‘69,” Hester whispered to me. “The two of them made a killing on the gold market when the rest of America imploded more than a little bit, before America imploded for good and forever in 1873. But not Mr. Gould. Now he and Allen Jerome are trying to convince the common man to support the Sidonians, and the common man wants someplace to channel his anger.”

  “What will we do with him?” I asked.

  “Drop him off with a couple of settlers,” she whispered. “We’ve got a lead. I’ll explain later. But the short story is that settlers around here love train robbers. Their lives have been so destroyed by the power of the railroads that they’ll do anything to hurt the robber barons.”

  When the sun looked about ready to rise, we pulled up to a little settler cabin, where a cheerful, bone-thin couple in their mid-forties were ready to hide us for the day. There was a thin soup cooking. The cabin was clean and spare. The man swept the floor and opened up a cellar door, and he tossed Gould in. The railroad baron rolled down the cellar stairs with several terrible thunks.

  “In a few days, or maybe a few weeks, when the trail goes completely cold,” Hester said, “some men will come to get the gold. They will have a password. They will also collect Jay Gould at that time.”

  Hester gave the man two gold pieces, and she gave the woman two gold pieces.

  “I know we can trust you,” she added, “but I have to note that if you try to abscond with the gold, you won’t get away. But you will be richly rewarded for your small role in this little adventure. Of course, keep Mr. Gould healthy.”

  “I don’t think we’ll kill him,” the man said. “We’ll torture him a little. Maybe cut off a finger. Then let him go.”

  “No finger chopping,” Hester said very quietly, making sure Gould, down in the cellar, could not hear her. She wanted Gould frightened that he might lose a finger. She wanted him so frightened that he would leave the Sidonian movement forever. She wanted him good and frightened, but she didn’t approve of finger-chopping, just out of principle, no matter the choppee.

  Around this time, the engineer and the two surviving train guards wriggled out of their ropes, took off their blindfolds and followed the train tracks to the Pyeton station, where they expected to wire for help, but instead found the cables cut, and the station agent sleeping on the floor, still bound and gagged. So they woke him up, unbound him and ungagged him, and together they all walked into town and, as the sun rose, they summoned the sheriff. Sheriff Wesley dutifully got out of bed, where he was just finishing up what he called “a good, full night of shut-eye, out cold since 10 p.m. last night,” rode into town and listened to their story as he drank his terrible coffee in his favorite slop-house. He mused that it would take some time to gather a posse, what with the holiday just ending a day ago, and most citizens still nursing a hangover from the festivities.

  “These ruffians,” he said. “It sounds like they knew what they were doing. Sounds like a smart bunch, and a dangerous one. It’ll be hard to find men willing to go up against a crew such as that one, even without our great celebration just ending – ” and here he went on at some length about this tremendous, strenuous holiday that the town had declared this year, for the very first time – “so you almost have to admire them.” This last bit he said with a little foolish pride evident in his voice, were one to listen for it. Still, he dutifully and carefully raised a posse willing to assist in the righting of such a terrible wrong. A few hours later, the sheriff and the posse all rode out to the scene of the crime, where they freed the remaining passengers, and where the sheriff claimed to find some tracks, that, as it happened, went in exactly the wrong direction. He then led the whole gang off on a merry adventure.

  “What do you know?” he marveled, as they stood at the foot of a scrubby and lost Joshua tree. “The trail ends. Just like that. As though they ascended to heaven. Or,” he added ominously, “descended into Hell, more like it.” He shook his head with surprise and awe. Still, he said, the train robbers probably had some help, and it would make sense to ask around, maybe search a few local homesteads. He promised a thorough search, although Sheriff Wesley knew which one to skip.

  And by then, we were well on our way to South America, Hester and I.

  We rode west and stopped a few miles inland, a hundred miles south of Pomo, where towering redwoods shrouded a narrow, secluded inlet that glittered green in the moonlight. Some forty-five minutes later, a small boat appeared, helmed by a serious and sturdy young man, who bid us embark without pleasantries. We three rowed together till we rendezvoused with an 18th century brigantine just off the coast, hidden from easy view of the central mainland by the cliff hindering the shoreline. It was a two-masted sailing ship, with holes for cannons, and a wooden carving of a naked woman’s torso at the bow for inspiration, a pirate ship (and a naked torso) genuine enough to thrill any eight-year-old boy you’d ever happen to meet.

  I pointed out to Hester that the golden era of piracy ended in the early 19th century, but she explained that they were small-time maritime smugglers and petty outlaws who had somehow acquired an indisputably fizzing ship, and who liked to play pirate. It gave their endeavor a romantic flair and a certain nostalgic aesthetic. Without the pirate angle they were just a gang of wanted crooks, but with it they were artists.

  There’s not much more to tell about our trip south, except to note that the pirates were highly disreputable characters, murderers, thieves and rapists and that, to my chagrin, they seemed to have a great admiration for Hester and me.

  I will relate another thing about the pirates that you may find hard to believe: one of the pirates had a wooden leg; one of them had a black patch over a dead eye; and one of them had a parrot on his shoulder.

  When we were finally alone, standing on the deck of the brig and watching the forested coast recede into memory, Hester turned to me, took my arm in hers.

  “The ghosts approved of our endeavor, I note. They found our cause just, and they saved our lives.”

  I said they had.

  “Did you doubt me?” she asked. “Did you doubt the justice of our cause?”

  I admitted that I had, from time to time.

  “You mostly doubted me, or mostly trusted me?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t know. Once
she’d led Rasháh to my doorstep and wrecked my cabin, I’d really had no choice but to rob a train with her. At the time, my decision had not really rested on whether or not I thought I would survive it, though in retrospect I was glad that I had, and even gladder that I was now rich.

  The ocean was dark black. The sky overhead was thick with angry clouds.

  “That Emelina,” she said with a nonjudgmental smile. “Quite the kusit. She’s one of yours, I gather.”

  I nodded.

  “She just vanished,” Hester said, nonchalantly. “She was there one moment on the train, and then she wasn’t. She didn’t disembark. She just wasn’t on the train anymore.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “One doesn’t see that every day,” Hester remarked.

  I disagreed.

  “I do see that kind of thing every day,” I said, as the water swelled up around the stern side, and the ship slipped a bit under our feet.

  A hawk cried out in the dark sky.

  “Every single day. Women vanishing into thin air. The dead rising from the ground. I would that it warn’t so. But it is. If you want to tarry with me, Hester my darling, you’ll have to get used to it.”

  Chapter 10

  I know very little about the next month of Master Yu’s life in San Francisco, just that he practiced seeing the world without looking at the world, as Madame Tang had advised, and that he did not move out of his hovel in the Chinatown cellar. He bought a pair of dark tinted glasses and walked through the city during the day, looking out through the second set of eyes in his head, his physical pupils veiled from the living world. Sometimes he would see things that the rest of us would have missed – for example, one day he passed a butcher in his store at noon, and Master Yu could see the butcher’s entire day, carving up a steak in the back of the store, appeasing a hostile customer, leaving for the evening, unlocking the front door of his little home. Sometimes the city seemed unchanged as Master Yu walked through it blindly.