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

  In Hell, the Chinese Hell of the Innocent Dead is on the 6th level (out of a total of 18).

  If you die before your time, through some sort of cruel miscarriage of justice, or horrible crime, and you are unable to leave it behind you and ascend to your next life (or extinction, as the case may be), then you descend to the Hell of the Innocent Dead until your death is avenged. While theoretically temporary, the Hell of the Innocent Dead is a permanent prison for most of its inhabitants, because, as they say, Life is Unfair, and vengeance is usually not achieved. Of all the Hells, this one is the most filled with hatred. Filled with otherwise good people who cannot stop hating. This, Master Yu now realized, is where the Red Eyebrows were born, in all their incarnations. Otherwise not unkind creatures who were wronged, and who were eaten alive by it, till they were naught but rancor. This is a Hell that would corrupt the most noble of angels through its sheer unfairness.

  Chang Chihche smiled.

  “Not as bad as you would think. Not as bad as rumor.”

  The old man insisted that there were good pork buns in 枉死城, and even a passable dragon parade, a pretty maiden or two, but he seemed to be inventing these consolations as he went along, and so Yu Dai-Yung discounted them all.

  “And good bean cake at New Year,” Chang Chihche added finally. “Or so they say.”

  “Well then. I will look forward to New Year.”

  “Always watch out for the giant sand crabs,” the old man added. “Almost forgot to warn you about the giant sand crabs. Otherwise, 枉死城 is not as bad as you might fear. Giant sand crabs, though – they’re always hungry. Always keep one eye open. I have nothing good to say about the giant sand crabs.”

  Master Yu and Chang Chihche talked a bit. In English, we would say that they “made small talk.” We would also say that Master Yu was “procrastinating.” They debated their favorite teahouses in Peking, and Master Yu related a Chinese opera that he had once seen in Chang’an. They complained about America, about the dust and heat, and about the Americans. Every second that Master Yu could spend here in this dim basement was a second that he would not spend in 枉死城.

  “Do you have bullets?” Chang Chihche asked. Master Yu admitted that he had many bullets. And a sword that might be magical, but might not be magical. Chang Chihche nodded. He asked whether Master Yu had enough to eat. He thought that Master Yu should bring enough food for several days, until he could find his way to a friendly settlement, to which he could unfortunately provide neither a map nor directions. If his food ran out, Master Yu would need to hunt rabbits.

  “There are rabbits there,” Chang Chihche added. “Bring matches, to build a fire to roast the rabbits. Not the best rabbits. Bony.”

  Master Yu had matches and provisions for several days.

  “Where is the portal?” he asked.

  Chang Chihche pointed.

  “Over in the corner.”

  Something did seem to buzz and hum in the corner of the cellar, but it was too dark for Master Yu to see what it was.

  “Get on the horse first,” Chang Chihche added. “The horse will help. Very wise horse.”

  Master Yu mounted the horse, and his heart was full of woe and dread.

  The gaunt and gloomy Allen Jerome and the ordinarily gregarious Darryl Fawley had at one time met on a daily basis, but in recent months, with the final degeneration of their partnership, Mr. Jerome had been obliged to insist on a regular weekly meeting. The two men would meet in an elegant boardroom, spacious and empty, at a table of dark, polished wood. The boardroom was sequestered away in the furthest eastern corner of the Sidonia Palace. Jerome, in his elegant suits, seemed to belong in the boardroom; the lopsided Fawley, with his worn jacket and porridge stained trousers, did not. His sunburned scalp peeled, and he scratched it, and flecks of skin floated down to the boardroom table.

  These meetings, at one time, had covered issues of civic importance, public morale and military strategy. But the encounters had come to focus more and more on one topic: Darryl Fawley wanted out of the Revolution, he wished to leave the city limits, to ascend one side of the Montana mountains and to descend on the other side, and never to return.

  “And where would you go?” Jerome asked. “Back to work with the civil service?”

  “Someplace else. Someplace beyond these walls. That is all. What do I have here?”

  “Here you have the adoration of the masses, Darryl Fawley, which counts for something. Out there you will have nothing.”

  It was true. The masses loved Darryl Fawley, and the masses loved Darryl Fawley more than they loved Allen Jerome, a fact that did not befuddle Allen Jerome and did not bother him. He did not want to be loved, by anyone.

  “I will go somewhere,” he said. “And be alone with my thoughts. Perhaps I will find a middle-aged spinster who will take a bit of pity on me.”

  Allen Jerome pulled his chair very close to his partner-in-crime. He tapped him gently on the forehead, and Darryl Fawley flinched.

  “Sidonia is in here,” he whispered. “When you uncovered the secrets of the Red Eyebrows in China, and when you pledged fealty, it became part of you, and you changed. All of this. It is a part of you, and you are a part of it. We all thrive in your light, my friend. There is no way that I can free you. Until the day you die, Sidonia needs you. Until its glory finds another resting place.”

  Fawley sighed sadly.

  “This is nothing less than what I promised, I suppose,” he said. “The vision – well, it made it clear that our struggle would not be easy. Lucy and I saw the ivory and marble palace, the white-robed figures singing out to us from tree-covered terraces, and the gardens of blooming flowers that changed color as the wind shifted. But we also saw an ocean that glowed blood-red. So we knew there would be struggles, terrible struggles. But we both believed that our struggles would be for the greater good. Or at least, enough semblance of the greater good that Lucy would happily rule beside me as my queen. As the queen of the downtrodden, lifting them up. I promised something … but did I truly promise this? Would I truly betray my word if I were to retire quietly, and to look for that spinster in a damp little cottage?”

  “The only way to free you is to kill you, Darryl,” Allen Jerome said. “And even if this were what you wished, the people would never forgive me. Our movement would crumble. The masses would suffer. Our world Revolution would never succeed.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “One day, Darryl Fawley, you will learn to love us the way we love you. And one day, you will learn to let us love you as we would wish.”

  At that moment, a soldier came into the boardroom bearing urgent news, the arrival of an Otherworld Fabricator, or so he thought. Allen Jerome’s brow creased. He seemed to doubt this news. And then he smiled. He winked at Darryl Fawley, and he told the soldier that he would meet the esteemed guest in Wednesday’s Sidonia Gardens.

  The Sidonia Gardens on this particular Wednesday bloomed purple and red; spots of purple, smears of red, rows of purple and splotches of red, all extending to what seemed a far horizon, visible to infinity in all directions. Allen Jerome sat in the garden, watching his flowers bloom, change color, fade away into nothing, and bloom again in the sunshine, like a glorious silent daytime fireworks show. From here, he could not even see the Palace; his world was a purple and red garden. A bar table grew from the ground, with a chilled glass of shambro on it. Jerome pushed back the rim of his hat, lifted the glass to his lips and sipped the shambro. It was perfect, as expected. The sun warmed him, and the shambro cooled him. He felt content, for a brief moment.

  After a while the soldiers came to visit. He smiled when he saw me. He greeted me with an unpronounceable – what was that? – salutation? Or my purported name? I don’t know. I couldn’t repeat it to you. Did I detect a bit of wryness on his face when he said it?; an ironic tone in his voice? I nodded noncommittally, but with a friendly manner, I thought. Allen Jerome smiled with thin bloodless lips, and he appraised me with eyes that were cold and gray. Did he
know all, had he surmised all, right from the start, perhaps before he had even seen me step across his fields of cinquefoil, and, if so, should I shoot him now? Could I shoot him now? And if I did, would I forfeit all hope of getting to Fawley, not to speak of my audience with the Falsturm? The time seemed premature, even if my life were coming to its end.

  Allen Jerome gestured to the soldiers to leave us, and they marched off through the beds of posies and hepaticas, cresses and foxgloves, which rolled and tumbled and bowed as they passed.

  A chair appeared, and I sat.

  “You have been underground,” Jerome smiled. “Moving about incognito to examine the fate of our little social experiment. You have seen how the movement has grown?”

  Jerome went into a lengthy tirade – or perhaps it was a social disquisition – filled with philosophical asides and mathematical theorems, and I really couldn’t repeat it to you verbatim because after a while I stopped listening, but the general underpinnings of his screed were that a greater world would come about through humanity’s loss of its freedom.

  “We do not wish to be free,” he said. “And I include myself in this generalization. We wish to be protected, guided, blanketed, smothered. We do not wish to be free. We wish to be slaves.”

  I nodded sagely at this nonsense.

  “Hmmm,” I said, nodding a bit more. Perhaps Allen Jerome was trying to impress me with his erudition. I started to feel more confident.

  “What does freedom mean to most people?” he asked. “To be paid enough coin to eat cabbage and rice? To scrounge about on a farm on the prairie? Is that freedom? What does it mean?”

  Allen Jerome then went on at great vicious length on the subject of J.P. Morgan, a constant obsession for him, I learned for the first time, but again I stopped listening after a while.

  Still, something happened then, which caught my attention. A little man marched into the garden, a go-by-the-ground in a topcoat, with a proud, pompous look on his little round face, and he was arm-in-arm with a sad, mute clown.

  Gesturing at me, Jerome muttered that unpronounceable name again.

  He then gestured to the two uninvited guests.

  “Leopold Kronecker,” he said, pointing to the tiny little man. “Dr. Kronecker is a renowned colleague of mine from the world of mathematical academia, whom you might know as the originator of quadratic reciprocity.” He eyed me seriously. “Hmm?”

  “Ah,” I said. “Hmmph.”

  Now Allen Jerome eyed his colleague’s unexpected companion.

  “And Prof. Kronecker is joined by some sort of a clown.”

  Kronecker, that dastardly ne’er-do-well, glared at me.

  What did his beady eyes see?

  He was no more than five feet tall, balding and imperious. He held a rat in his left hand, which he had brought into the garden. Or perhaps the rat had just materialized. (I cannot really speculate on the origins of the rat.)

  Kronecker tossed the rat to Jerome who, without blinking, bit off the rat’s head, swirled it around in his mouth and spat it across the field.

  I ducked, and the rat’s head rolled away between the flowers behind me. It sprouted a new body and ran screaming into the golden sunshine.

  The sad clown watched all this impassively.

  What’s your angle, sad clown? I wondered, turning away from Kronecker and Jerome to stare into the sad clown’s tearful eyes.

  He smiled a sad little smile with his ruined jaw, and I heard his voice in my head: Watt O’Hugh the Third, come here to destroy Sidonia.

  It was a childish little voice, taunting and sing-song.

  I asked him, without moving my lips: Are you my friend?

  He slowly shook his head, a glint of real hatred in his eyes.

  And all of a sudden, I could not move. I couldn’t move my arms or my legs, and I couldn’t swallow, I discovered with some concern.

  The clown and Kronecker exchanged glances, as I struggled against my paralysis, frozen and helpless.

  “Watt O’Hugh,” Kronecker whispered, turning to me, and his whisper echoed in the wind that whistled through the flowers.

  Being unable to swallow was the most uncomfortable part of my paralysis. One doesn’t realize how important swallowing is to a man’s equilibrium until it is taken away.

  Kronecker took my gun, and he tossed it back and forth between his left hand and his right hand, over and over. A little prayer rattled its way into my head, a little entreaty to my ostensible maker, just in case, just to cover my bases.

  Kronecker heard the quiet prayer inside my head, and he laughed at my late-breaking religiosity.

  “God made the integers,” he whispered. “All else is the work of Man.”

  My legs were not my own.

  My legs-that-were-not-my-own marched along beside Allen Jerome without my guiding them. I still could not swallow, and drool dribbled from the left side of my mouth. I could not blink, and my eyes were growing dry. On the other side of me was a soldier, a stout and sturdy man with a rough, scarred face and particularly sadistic smile. “Did you think that you would fool Sidonia for even a minute?” Allen Jerome asked me, and he seemed more amused than angry. Had I truly thought, he wondered aloud, that I might be able to defeat the Falsturm with a word or two? “Picture a mirror store,” he said. “Mirrors on two walls, facing each other, reflecting each other, back and forth, deeper and deeper – the Falsturm resides on the farthest level. He's always with us – the shadow you barely notice, or the breeze that lifts a tuft of hair. He is here now, O’Hugh.”

  I said nothing, because I could not move my tongue.

  “You will be tortured,” he said. “You will be tortured for whatever information you may be able to provide to us. And then you will be killed, and killed again, and killed and killed and killed.”

  He laughed. Somehow, he thought that some part of this was funny.

  “As many times as it takes,” Allen Jerome said.

  As Allen Jerome led me to the prison, it struck me that Billy Golden would be terribly disappointed and even penitent over the predicament into which he’d dropped me. How terrible he would feel if he were to learn that in a brief moment the Sidonians had seen through the disguise that Rabbi Palache had fashioned for me, that Sidonia was more powerful, more perceptive than he had realized, and that he had endangered me for no purpose, and that now I would be tortured, and I would die, and his friend Hester would be alone.

  It was only much later, sometime in 1928, when I awoke in the middle of the night, that it all made sense, and I realized that the abject failure of what had seemed to be Billy Golden’s plan was in fact the Plan itself.

  The jail was antiseptic, clean and empty. The walls of my cell were white stone, and the light that lit the cell from far above my head was bright and sunny. I was the fourth cell in the row, the only one occupied. It occurred to me that this prison had likely been constructed in the moment just for my use.

  The soldier tossed me like a ball into cell number 17, where I lay helpless and prone on the floor, still unable to move. Allen Jerome left us, whistling, and his tuneless whistle echoed through the long corridors. It was almost beautiful, the whispery, empty echo. The soldier kicked me a few times in the ribs. The first time he kicked me, his boots were soft leather, and it didn’t hurt very badly, but the second time he kicked me, his boots were steel, and he sent me barreling across the cell and against the back wall. He followed me to the corner of the cell and kicked me one more time. Then he laughed, and then he snarled like a tiger, then he trumpeted like an elephant, and at last he turned and left, and I lay on the floor, drool leaking out of my useless mouth onto the stone floor.

  A day went by, night crawled into the cell, and movement returned to my limbs, then my arms. After a while, I could swallow again. I rolled out of the little puddle of spit that had pooled under me.

  I tapped on the metal bar with my tin cup, just to hear that endless echo, to hear something, to feel a little bit alive.

  I
stood on the room’s one wooden chair and I hoisted myself up to the small barred window at the top of the cell. I didn’t see the lemniscate beauty of graceful Sidonia, as I had expected, but instead that smoky-grey city that I had seen once before, from the deserted cabin that Hester and I had shared in the woods, and which had sheltered us from the rain. The grey city spread out before me like a vast cancer, and it seemed to grow larger as I stared, to crowd its way into the bay and forest that it abutted. At last my arm muscles tired, and I lowered myself to the cold floor. I leaned back against the wall, and I shut my eyes.

  An hour or more must have passed before I heard the sound of the prison door opening and clanking shut. (Really, it was a small town variety theater sound effect of a prison door, I realized with a start – it was nothing from the real world. It was not a door – it was just the sound of a door.) I opened my eyes wearily, and I was surprised to see a man I recognized immediately as Darryl Fawley walking slowly and, I thought, forlornly from the front entrance towards my cell. By now he was fifty-years-old, and his unevenly balding head had lost the last scrap of hair. He wore a spotless white suit. He had long skinny legs and a squat frame, and as he walked down the hallway towards me, he looked like a great insect, or an oversized wind-up toy.

  A chair materialized just outside the cell, but far enough away that it was just out of my reach.

  Darryl Fawley, my terrible enemy, sat. He had not shaken his veneer of failure, even now that he was an emperor.