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 cannot say that one man is a tribe of the Dakotas,” John Dead-Man said. “Or any kind of a tribe at all.”

  “You could have married,” Master Yu said. “You could have married and raised your children in the old ways.”

  John Dead-Man smiled.

  “Too much responsibility for a man like me, a man not destined for greatness. If the fate of a people rests on the shoulders of such a man, it is a people doomed to die. Could I have found a woman, an outcast like myself, and raised a mutt of a child, or maybe two? Perhaps.” He took a slug from his bottle. “Where would be the glory in that? Enough is enough, Chinaman.”

  Master Yu sighed. He looked down at his fingers, at the grime underneath his finely polished fingernails.

  “Do you understand the greatness that you are allowing to slip from this Earth?” he asked. “Do you understand the greatness that once was the Peking Nation, eighteen-hundred years ago, and that still courses through your veins, diluted as it is?”

  Teary-eyed, John Dead-Man shook his head.

  “I do not, my friend,” he whispered. “For hundreds of years, we were an enslaved and weak people, a near-extinct people, and for hundreds of years before that, we were a scared people, shivering and hiding from the shadows of the tribes that were mighty.”

  “What about your legends? What about the stories you heard when you were little? Before you went to sleep?”

  The Indian laughed.

  “In our dreams, in our magical stories,” he said, “we were a great force for good. We ruled the land. A fierce dragon and a legion of unicorns came from across the ocean to join us in battle. Our only enemy, our only threat, was an army that attacked from the far Winter North, an army that grew from the bowels of the Earth.”

  He shook his head.

  “I can still just barely remember these silly stories,” he said. “Soon, no one will be alive to remember. And that will be better. A great veil of sadness and of defeat will pass from the Earth when I die, and the world will be a more joyful place. Who would not want that to happen?”

  “The Peking Indians were the greatest of all the native tribes in the land of the Dakotas,” Master Yu said, his voice trembling. “In my mind, I can still see them.” And his eyes grew foggy and dim, and he described it to the Indian as though the great Peking Indian nation were there before him, great cities of circular homes, armies of the strongest warriors on the continent, sweeping across the entire west, an empire that flowed over mountains and through valleys and plains.

  The Indian looked at the poet’s face, and he could see Master Yu’s pinprick pupils moving furiously within his cloudy corneas, watching a world that only he could see.

  The Indian touched Master Yu’s sleeve.

  “Hey now, Chinaman,” he said. “Hey now. You would not happen to be a little bit crazy now? Would you?”

  The terrible poet’s eyes cleared.

  “It is all true,” he whispered. “The great army, the enemy from the North. All of it.”

  The Indian smiled deeply.

  “Even the dragon?” John Dead-Man said with a laugh. “Even the unicorns?”

  Master Yu nodded forcefully, and the laugh caught in the Indian’s throat.

  “Especially the dragon and unicorns,” Master Yu said.

  His gaze was serious, piercing.

  “Look,” he said, and he pulled the rotting wooden box from his bag.

  The Indian leaned over on one arm. Master Yu continued.

  “This scroll transcribes an ancient prophecy first decreed by Huang-ti, the Yellow Emperor, who, in his lost book, White Pond, foresaw the battles to be waged against the Red Eyebrows in the Year One in China and among the Indian nations across many seas. Huang-ti was the only emperor of China with the power to command the dragons to perform his will, and to talk to the unicorns, and he was worshiped as a god through the period of the Warring States, although he was merely a great wizard. He lived in my golden homeland three thousand years ago, and he invented writing, mathematics and astronomy, and he sailed to the Far Eastern Sea, which doesn’t exist, where he wrote White Pond, which was dictated to him by a terrible sea beast that rose to the surface of the Far Eastern Sea. Most of White Pond is lost and only fragments survive to-day; this is one of the fragments which, up till now, had been lost – or, I should say more accurately, hidden for good reason.

  “This later transcription of Lord Huang-ti’s wisdom was written during the Hsia Dynasty of the golden age of my national past, a past of great poets and sages.

  “So do you see, John Dead-Man? Like the great Peking Indian empire, neither the Yellow Emperor nor the Hsia Dynasty nor the Far Eastern Sea ever existed …. Except that they all did.”

  Sitting on the floor of John Dead-Man’s mud hut as night fell, Master Yu drank John Dead-Man’s whiskey, and John Dead-Man drank Master Yu’s moutai, which he had saved from San Francisco for just this sort of occasion, and which had come in handy as expected. A bit of singing ensued, along with a pleasant but not untoward level of camaraderie.

  At length, when Master Yu was certain that he and the Peking Indian were truly friends, he unrolled the scroll to the map drawn in its center, which they both examined by torchlight.

  “Do you know this place?” he asked.

  John Dead-Man nodded.

  “It is a famous legendary place,” he said. “Every Peking Indian would know the legend.”

  He smiled sadly at that expression: every Peking Indian.

  “But it is real, John Dead-Man,” Master Yu said. “It is not a legend.”

  “Hmm.”

  “You see?” Master Yu said, showing him the topography on the map, which was carefully drawn, though not to scale. “These are real places. Look here” – pointing to the map – “see the Gulf, and the Bay? And see these mountains here? All where they should be, more or less. Drawn by someone who knew this country.”

  “Hmmph.” Not convinced. The Indian shrugged.

  “Can you find it?”

  He thought about this for a moment.

  “You say there is much money involved?” he asked.

  Master Yu nodded.

  “Of course,” he said. “Of course there is much money involved – this is a mission from the Empress. She has a bit of coin to her name, after all. And there will be perhaps a bit of treasure at the end. You can have any treasure, unless I need it for fighting evil. But yes, money for certain, and perhaps some treasure as well.”

  The Indian smiled now, a real smile for the first time.

  “Yes,” he said. “I cannot promise you that it is real. But if it is real, then yes, I can find it.”

  The second week of July 1879, Allen Jerome and Darryl Fawley arrived in the bulging metropolis known as Cloud City, Colorado, a Sidonian enclave ten-thousand feet high in the mountains overlooking Denver, bordered by mighty mountain ranges. Once it had been “Slabtown,” a failed gold mining village, but since its alliance with the Sidonian movement, it now flowed with silver, and the mayor, David Dougan, took spectacular credit. I had spent a particularly frightening evening there earlier in the decade, but that’s another story, and one that I am not inclined to dwell on once again. (Suffice it to say [and worth repeating]: it was a particularly frightening evening.) Cloud City had changed mightily since my visit. Its tents were now replaced with tidy rows of houses; pushing out beyond its former borders, Slabtown’s streets were lined with restaurants and great opera houses, and some of the columned architecture, bedecked with statues and ivory white balconies which lined the new primary thoroughfare of Harrison Avenue, could have been shipped from the Madison Avenue in New York City. The Tabor Hotel, in whose half-built frame I once saw two counter-Revolutionaries lynched, was now fully complete and elegant. Cloud City even had its own requisite seedy establishments along the Hell’s mailbox known as State Street.

  On the way up the mountain, the gentlemen stopped at Law’s Lakes for a swim and a rest in the oriental garden. When they finally r
eached Cloud City, they found that the week they had chosen was a particularly festive one even for this spectacularly festive burg. For one thing, there was the Apollo concert on Monday. Then there was Tabor Cavalry Ball on Tuesday evening, and the Altman-Schloss wedding commenced on Wednesday. The Second Grand Masked Ball of the Knights of Robert Emmet at Shoneberg’s Opera House would cap the week, but first Messieurs Jerome and Fawley would visit a number of afternoon lunches and teas, including a lavish event at the home of Roswell Eaton Goodell, one of the great whiskered old men of the city, and his wife, Mrs. Roswell Eaton Goodell, one of the great gray-haired matriarchs of the city. At this tea, Mrs. Roswell paired the two men with adequately attractive but not inappropriately showy young women – and indeed throughout the week the city’s aristocracy attempted a bit of tentative matchmaking, perhaps just out of politeness – but Darryl Fawley still mourned his fallen queen (and would to his dying day) and Allen Jerome recognized something lacking in his own character that would ever make him an insufficient match, no matter his wealth and power (as I noted in the first volume of my Memoirs, this was a man who did no more than watch as his fiancée – a brilliant East Coast mathematician – fell off a bridge outside Cambridge one icy night and drowned, because he didn’t want to ruin his best suit), and for many years he had preferred the company of a paid escort or, these days, an illusion summoned at his whim (who would never demand a raise with a grimace on her pretty face). So the gentlemen verified that week that they remained what one might call confirmed bachelors, but the obvious lack of affection between the two business partners banished any gossip. Still, the town was abuzz over the odd mismatch between the well-coiffed Wall Street culture of the handsomely frosty and intellectually precise Mr. Jerome, and the lazily rumpled and cheerful gawkiness of the uncomely Mr. Fawley. How had these two come to join forces, the chattering classes wondered, and how had they acquired the power they undoubtedly wielded?

  Oh, I almost forgot: Thursday brought a wildflower picking excursion in Highland Fields.

  All of this revelry might have under any circumstances been lumped together during that lovely July week – the weather was clearing up nicely, the mines were spurting silver, and society money had been pouring in for years from the very proper type of society folk who expect to be entertained properly – but it did not hurt the festive mood of the city that Allen Jerome and Darryl Fawley had arrived, leaders of the secessionist social movement that had brought the city not only great riches but also brief, terribly precious visits from departed loved ones, something no political party could ever hope to offer.

  As the wedding festivities wound down very late on Wednesday night, Allen Jerome found Mayor Dougan installed behind the Hotel Windsor, a cigar in his left hand, and a glass of champagne in his right. A young man, his beard tufts of blond fuzz, Dougan held himself with the confidence he knew he had cannily earned. He had been installed a few years earlier from the county seat in Granite, pending Cloud City’s first election. His first official visit had been to the rulers of Sidonia, and since then, he sprinkled riches like fairy dust. Once Cloud City had been a sparsely populated counter-Revolutionary settlement, but Dougan had stamped out the counter-Revolution and all who called themselves counter-Revolutionaries with brutal efficiency and many yards of hangman’s rope, eventually establishing his city as one of the first true and strong pillars of the Revolution. Now there was a chicken in every pot.

  Allen Jerome put a hand on the mayor’s shoulder.

  “Would you like to see the future of Cloud City?” he asked.

  The mayor smiled. Cigar smoke drifted through the starlit night, floating on the breezes out toward the Sawatch mountains.

  “Is it a good future?” he asked.

  “It can be,” Allen Jerome said. “It can be very good for all of us.”

  The mayor turned to the two men and smiled soullessly.

  “Then let’s take a look.”

  Allen Jerome clapped his hands in the darkness and called out, “Siggy!” Immediately, a little man appeared from nowhere. He was no more than five feet tall. The mayor, startled, took a step back.

  “Our Roamer,” Darryl Fawley said. “He has found something interesting to show you from the Winter of 1895 to 1896. Something that I believe will seal your alliance with Sidonia.”

  “I have never been much of a Roamer,” the mayor said, which would be a bit like my saying that I have never been much of a Latin scholar, except that I believe in the existence of Latin, and the mayor of Cloud City had always considered Roaming to be a myth from the Godless dime novelists out East.

  Allen Jerome told the mayor to keep his eyes on Sigmund, who turned and seemed to descend down a dark tunnel, from which the three emerged in exactly the same location, although the temperature had dropped precipitously, and their wedding attire would not keep them warm for long.

  “We cannot do much. Just observe. But you can see what we offer. A kingdom.”

  And indeed, a beautiful palace of ice sat on the vista before Mayor Dougan. Heroic statues of Greek gods (and of Mayor Dougan) greeted them along the entranceway, and the Sidonian flag waved from every icy turret. An orchestra performed in the ballroom, and the Cloud City’s subjects danced, bedecked in tuxedoes and evening gowns. At the end of a frigid hallway was a great skating rink, filled with the children of the town, ruddy-cheeked, joyful from skull to foot, spinning, sweating in the cold cold air, their laughter echoing off the icy walls of the immense hall.

  “Think of this,” Darryl Fawley said, smiling. “A continent bursting with food, and gold and diamonds, and a nation of independent kingdoms, ruled by the wisest among us. Love will reign supreme. Once Sidonia triumphs, there will be no reason for any child to go to bed hungry, anywhere in the land.”

  “Hmm?” Mayor Dougan said. “Love will reign supreme?” He seemed befuddled by this idea. And Fawley could see Allen Jerome averting his eyes, smiling into the snow and ice, but Fawley was not yet willing to give up Lucy’s dream. He still hoped against all available evidence that some sort of just result could be redeemed from all the bloodshed.

  “A palace of snow and ice,” the mayor marveled. “And a beautiful queen.”

  “Yes,” said Darryl Fawley. “An end to hunger, a complete cessation of hostility between the races and the classes, social equality, and a king chosen from amongst the wisest and fairest amongst us … And, if the king so wishes, a palace of snow and ice.”

  The mayor stared adoringly at the frozen white palace, thinking, no doubt, of the queen who would one day live with him in his Camelot. A couple of boys swept past them on toboggans. Children’s laughter echoed in the hallways of ice.

  In fact, only one bit of true nastiness marred the week of celebrations, nastiness of the sort that Darryl Fawley despised and Allen Jerome seemed to adore. Well, two bits of nastiness, perhaps, depending upon how one counts a “bit” of nastiness.[16]

  Shoneberg’s Opera House hosted The Second Grand Masked Ball, with music planned and in some cases orchestrated and conducted by Professor G. A. Godat. A menu of oysters on the half shell, salmon from Alaska, and smoked buffalo tongue au beurre Montelier, among some forty other dishes. Darryl Fawley’s evening suit was too short, and showed a healthy glimpse of sock, and his jacket was too tight, and he could not button it around his paunch. He drank a bit too much and told a few stories to Mrs. Roswell Eaton Goodell that were a bit too bawdy, perhaps, but just a bit; no real complaint could honestly be pursued. Allen Jerome looked handsome and terrifying and perfect, and he even danced a bit with a young woman, coldly and dispassionately, with mathematical precision; indeed, he danced perfectly, and the young woman left him in terror and distinct admiration. Women held feather masks over their eyes that made them look as peacocks, doves and swans, and one little girl was a snowy egret, perhaps a coincidence, perhaps not, so tiny under the three great domed and painted interlocking ceilings of the Opera House, a little showy snowy egret spinning beneath glittering chandeliers.


  At the bar, a sturdy man in a weathered topcoat cornered Darryl Fawley, introduced himself as Thomas Bridges, from New Jersey originally, but an early and enthusiastic Cloud City settler, even long before its Slabtown days. He’d been away on business and had thus been unable to introduce himself until now, but he desired an audience with the esteemed visitors before their departure in the morning.

  “I know that now is not a very convenient moment,” he said apologetically, “but I will require only fifteen minutes of your time, and then you may return to the Ball.”

  In the back room, Bridges unrolled his map on the floor. The three men got down on their hands and knees. Bridges’ wife, Holly, stood nervously in the corner.

  “You see?” he said. “A ring of silver mines, all the way around the Cloud City peak. Half of them flowing already.”

  Crawling about like children, they all examined the map.

  “It sounds as though you have a happy little enterprise,” Allen Jerome said. “What do you need us for?”

  Bridges laughed hesitantly. It was a false laugh.

  “Friendship,” he said. “Solidarity. Sidonia protects my business. All my employees become soldiers in the Sidonian army.”

  He pointed to the map, sweeping his pointer finger around and around the mountain peak.

  “Look,” he said. “When the cavalry comes up the mountain, my land will be the first tier of defense.”

  Jerome looked over the map. He traced his finger along the route of Bridges’ land.

  “You could be an important man, you are saying,” he said. “Your land is strategically located. You could lead the counter-rebellion, or you could join us to repel the government attack, depending on whose bid is higher?”

  Bridges shook his head.

  “No, I’m as loyal to Sidonia as any true believer,” he said casually, unworried.