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

  “Watt O’Hugh,” he said, and he smiled thinly. “Your disguise is gone. Your beautiful new face has washed away. You are revealed to us, in all your imperfection.”

  I knew he was right. I could feel it. My face was once again my own. Battered and worn and rough.

  “Some people never give up,” he sighed. “Some people never forget.”

  His voice had a professor’s careful cadence.

  I didn’t move, and I didn’t speak. I rested my head on the stone wall and stared at him.

  He shook his head, and he met my gaze.

  His eyes were red and watery.

  “I loved her too, you know,” he said.

  I whispered: “You did not. I am the only one who ever knew her, and I am the only one who ever loved her.”

  “She was my queen, and I loved her.”

  His voice echoed in the empty prison. The words taunted me, again and again, then they faded away into the distance like mist.

  “Mr. Fawley,” I said. “You did not love her. You killed her.”

  “I didn’t kill her,” he replied firmly. “Sidonia killed her.”

  “And you ... you are the king of Sidonia.”

  “Sidonia,” he said, “is the king of us all.”

  “I will kill you, Fawley. And if you kill me first, I will come back as a deadling, and then I will kill you.”

  He smiled a restrained smile, one filled with sympathy.

  “You will not come back as a deadling, Mr. O’Hugh. Neither of us will come back as a deadling. One can return to Earth as a deadling only if someone alive loves him and yearns for him ceaselessly. You and I will never be so missed. No one alive will ever miss us the way we both miss our Lucy.”

  Our Lucy.

  He sighed, a forlorn, love-sick lament.

  “Although you have pledged to kill me, my dear Mr. O’Hugh, I will not kill you, even though this is a decision that might cost me my life” – this last clause he uttered with condescending irony, as he clearly did not believe that I might ever manage to kill him – “and I will not kill you because I know how our beloved deadling would feel about it. If you were to die at my hands, Lucy would not give me a moment’s peace. And so I must take my chances, knowing that you are in the world, sworn to my destruction.”

  Then, after another quiet little moment: “I loved her very much, Mr. O’Hugh. And she adored me intensely, in her way.”

  Oh, my readers, then he went on, in his quiet, calm voice, and it was terrible torment. He recalled for me his life with Lucy, the day they met, the day they married, tender moments that I knew were true. I tried to ignore him but could not, and after he finished his colloquy he left, and I heard that prison door clank shut, and I was alone again.

  On Tuesday, September 23, 1879, while I was stuck behind bars in the impromptu Sidonian prison, dreaming of bread and water, Mr. Sneed arrived unexpectedly in the offices of Drexel, Morgan & Company at 23 Wall Street. He told Morgan’s secretary – that pleasant and obliging young man – that he was from the American Cigar Distribution Company, and he swept down the aisle among the bookkeepers’ desks in the direction of Morgan’s office. You’ve seen this kind of thing in your “talking pictures” a hundred times, though rarely in real life: the secretary shouted Sir, sir, you can’t go in there as he tagged along impotently behind the brusque intruder, who ignored him and continued ceaselessly across the room. When he reached Morgan’s office, the great man calmed his secretary, and Sneed shut the door.

  There were no pleasantries.

  “The war will begin to-morrow,” Sneed said, his strong voice betraying a certain bit of dread. “What I’d expected to be a surgical strike will be a rather larger battle. The Sidonian army has swelled. This will be a bloodbath, Mr. Morgan. All around.”

  He leaned over Morgan’s desk, his face uncomfortably close. He would have preferred to let beautiful dreams wither on the vine of their own accord, as all aspirations of perfection and happiness inevitably do. It would be a terrible crime to allow American boys to die in a dirty battle merely to destroy an impossible and doomed yearning for happiness.

  Morgan nodded, a little too blithely for Sneed, who put two fingers on Morgan’s fat neck. Morgan tried to duck away, but Sneed held Morgan’s head in place with his left hand.

  “This is an outrage,” Morgan said. “Release me.”

  “I do have a right to an explanation by now,” he said. “I know how to do this. I can give you a quick stroke, or a heart attack, and leave no bruise. I will stay to provide assistance till the doctor arrives, and give my name as Timothy Brownley, along with an address that will yield nothing.”

  “I will scream for help. You will never get away.”

  “If you scream, the stroke will follow immediately. ‘He screamed,’ I will say, ‘and then he collapsed.’ After the doctor has arrived and I have helped to the extent of my limited abilities, I will walk out of this office in thirty seconds and disappear into the bureaucracy, never to be found again. The papers will report that J.P. Morgan has died, mysteriously, of a stroke while in the presence of an employee of the Cigar Distribution Company, who could not be reached for comment.”

  He slightly loosened his grip, and when he spoke again, Sneed’s voice was more gentle.

  “The awfulness of this operation has bothered even my own limited conscience, believe it or not. Let me know the reason behind this fight, which will kill so many men.”

  Sneed released him, and Morgan settled back in his desk chair.

  “First,” Morgan said, “let me assure you that the Sidonian movement is far more dangerous than you seem to believe. It will not die on its own, like other Utopian movements. It has the power to destroy us all. If we do not move against it, it will grow only more powerful.”

  Sneed nodded.

  “My own conscience is clear,” Morgan continued. “I do not desire the death of our young soldiers. But the job of a soldier is put his life at risk for the protection of the homeland, and the homeland needs protection. This is a justified military operation by any external criterion. I am not causing meaningless and unnecessary deaths. There is nothing here that should weigh on my conscience.”

  “I’m not unimpressed by these issues, but this is not the reason for your interest, is it? And you are not overly concerned about the money that Allen Jerome stole from you. I suspect that there is much more to this tortured tale.”

  So why did J.P. Morgan choose to tell the truth? It was, I think, more than simple: if he did not, Mr. Sneed would kill him. And in spite of all his sadness, J. Pierpont Morgan was not quite ready to die. He saw his goal in sight. He was not going to die with his goal in sight. Thus, he chose to tell the truth, and he admitted that his mad obsession with Sidonia had nothing to do with national security, or deterrence that would prevent future business partners from stealing from him, but was instead, as Mr. Filbank had once surmised (to the merriment of all present), entirely about love. He told Mr. Sneed about his first wife, the never-forgotten Mimi Sturges Morgan, who had died yet pure of a man’s touch in her honeymoon bed, in a suite with an impossible view of the Alps. He told Mr. Sneed how, immediately after her death, he had left the villa, at the top of a stone-walled street, and sat on the pebbled beach for hours. If money was good for anything – “And I am not sure, Mr. Sneed, that it is indeed good for anything” – then it should be able to undo such a blatant injustice.

  “This may seem ridiculous to you,” Morgan sighed.

  It did indeed seem ridiculous to Sneed, but he remained silent. He just stared at Morgan, not without reproach.

  “Again,” Morgan said, “the mission against Sidonia is indeed of essential national importance. I hope no brave soldier dies. But such a death would not be in vain. It must be done.”

  “But that is not why you care.”

  “Oh, if Sidonia is not defeated, my fortune would be destroyed, along with all of Wall Street. But no, I have long ceased to care about such things. The world of the de
ad is no longer closed to us.”

  “And you want its secrets.”

  “Anything to change this life,” Morgan said, and a great boulder of a tear lingered in the great man’s eye.

  Chapter 19

  Night fell, and I slept, and the sun rising over the grey city woke me, and at length night fell again, and my stomach ached with hunger. My metal dish and cup remained empty. I fell asleep, weak and losing hope.

  In the middle of the night, I woke, and I saw Slocum standing before me. The bars to my cage were gone. He handed me a flask filled with water, and a half-loaf of bread.

  “It is not an easy thing to be incognito in Sidonia,” he said, smiling.

  Slocum led me outside into the cool night, and we stood for a moment beneath the boughs of an elm tree. The graceful silhouette of the great Sidonian burg glowed in the moonlight on the far horizon. I could no longer see the dark and grey city that had lurked in the shadows of my prison cell. The night was quiet and peaceful.

  “How did I survive so many days and nights without water?” I asked him, and he said that the days and nights in the prison had been very short. I said that I didn’t understand.

  “You lost all sense of time,” he explained. “The first day the sun rose and then set six hours later. Then the night lasted a few hours, the sun rose, and three hours later it set. You grew hungrier and thirstier with the rising and setting of the sun, but you only thought that you were about to die of thirst. Allen Jerome caused the sun to rise and fall relentlessly in the prison to torment you.”

  I thought this was rather clever, come to think of it.

  “Some time ago,” Slocum said, “the U.S. government planted a mole here, in Sidonia. That mole was discovered, and he was killed. The government then recruited you, not entirely voluntarily, if the stories I have heard are correct. The theory was that the Sidonian Revolution would quickly and gladly accept a hero gone bad. Not true, it turned out. The Sidonian forces quickly discovered you and killed you, in a manner of speaking. A third mole was recruited, a quiet man, a bland man even, if you will, whose sole distinction was an ability to blend in, to go unnoticed.”

  He stopped talking for a moment, to allow the obvious to sink into my brain.

  “Slocum is not actually my genuine family name, which I do not know,” he said.

  His great-grandmother Rachel James was engaged to be married before the War of 1812 to a man who called himself William Frederick Slocum, the captain of a merchant vessel, who as a boy had run away from his home, an inland parish in Devonshire, where his family was skilled in lace-making. He was born between 1780 and 1790, and he had two sisters, Alice and Jane, a brother Henry, and an uncle of the same name. He had been taken in by some kind Massachusetts people by the name of Slocum, who lived in or near New Bedford or Cuttyhunk, and by them educated. His own name he revealed to no one but his wife, who once told her own daughter, Slocum’s grandmother, who recalled to Slocum, when he was a boy, that her husband’s first name was David, and his surname was either Betts or Petts.

  As an adult, it took Slocum just a bit of investigation to discover the sad history of the Pettsley family, who hailed from the lace-making hamlet of Honiton in Devonshire, the entire family executed in 1803 for verified and witnessed feats of witchcraft and wizardry. Everyone, that is, but for one lad who escaped.

  “Hence,” Slocum concluded, “magic flows through my veins, although I know not how to direct it. Still, it has come in handy. I have avoided detection. My wizardry is more of an unconscious matter, as I lack the proper training. Still, I do not doubt that it has helped me.”

  We stood together in silence for a moment as he waited for me to take this all in. I did not believe a bit of it. Plenty of folk were killed for witchcraft or wizardry without actually being witches or wizards. True witches and wizards had means to escape. Fly in the air, make the noose disappear, make it rain and put out the fire that the church has set to burn you alive. It is not so easy to kill a true witch or wizard, but it is very easy to kill a family of Devonshire lace-makers whom the neighbors happen to dislike.

  “There will be a stealth attack in an hour or so,” he told me at length, after he imagined that I had integrated the truth of his magical powers. “In the ensuing chaos, you might have an opportunity to accomplish a bit of mischief, to inflict a useful death or two, something that might prove a temporary setback to the Sidonian cause. Just temporary, even if you are successful, but it will be the start of a journey.”

  He gave me a .45, a rifle and ammunition, shook my hand and turned his back, and in a moment he had descended into the woods and was gone.

  I wandered back to the city center, where the sun was setting, and a certain buzz had settled over the city. There was danger in the air, and excitement, and the people were happy that their first battle was finally at hand, and that they could prove their loyalty to Sidonia.

  Allen Jerome spoke first, standing in the town square, and his words boomed through the air, vibrating and thundering like a gathering storm. After a few bombastic words about the battle arising on their southern flank, he introduced a young woman whom the crowd seemed to know, as “your beloved Princess.” A hawk sat on her left shoulder. Her right eye was a piercing green, and she wore a patch over her left eye. Her features were strong and fierce, her long hair (and of course her eyebrows) a dark red. She wore a red robe and a red headdress; a sword was holstered on her left hip, and a pistol on her right.

  “My children,” she cried, “Sidonia’s strength is not in the fog. Its strength is in our people. The fog derives its strength from our bravery. We cannot cower behind it. I must ask you to show yourselves to these soldiers, to our enemy. To go into battle, and to kill them. The voice of Sidonia is upon the waters, the voice of Sidonia is powerful, the voice of Sidonia is majestic, it crushes the wilderness, it roars, it razes the forests, it burns the cedars.”

  The government soldiers now appeared, small specks, over the tops of the southern peaks.

  “The Sidonian fog can destroy them!” the Princess called. “It can disembowel them and leave them dead on the battlefield. But, my children … I must ask some of you to die for the Cause. Serve Sidonia with fear; rejoice with trembling.” And here she stopped and paused and took a deep breath, and she cast a great and sorrowful stare at the crowd, and when she spoke again her voice was as though she would cry.

  “I weep for my children; I refuse to be consoled for my children,” she sobbed, a cry of lament that was strong and angry and powerful. Then she turned her face to the heavens and called out, “In the name of your Sidonian Princess, Time stops!”

  And there was silence, true silence, which most of us had never heard before. I’d seen this enough times to recognize what it felt like when Time stopped. The wind stopped, the trees stopped rustling, the dust stopped floating about. The world was still white with sunshine, but the sun itself did not glow, the explosions at its center stopped exploding, and the great star just sat in the sky, lifeless and motionless as a smooth marble. The citizens ran to their homes and retrieved their pistols and rifles; militias formed throughout the streets. Where before I had stood in the middle of a friendly town, now I was in a war zone, waiting for the battle to begin.

  Now she turned to the armies that were poised on the mountaintop, ready to descend into war, men and boys, their face frozen in anger and fear and bravery, their uniforms crisp and clean. Boys and men waiting to tear and bleed.

  “Khatoo aloo pashoo!” she screamed at them, although they could not hear her.[19] “We are the nation that rises against you from the dark North of the earth, and we will swoop down like an eagle, a nation whose language you don’t understand, a pitiless nation that will show the old no respect and the young no mercy.” She gasped an anguished breath. “We did not seek this war, but now that you have brought it to our doorstep, we shall lock you up in your cities until every strong, trusted and towering wall has crumbled to dust. And when you are locked in the cities th
roughout your world, you will eat the meat of your sons and daughters, because of the desperation to which we will reduce you.” Her voice shook at the terrible evil of this unnecessary war that had been forced upon her. “If only you had joined us on our quest for peace and justice, instead of trying to kill us…. If only these boys had put down their weapons and simply embraced us, and joined us.”

  She stared up at them, frozen-still at the very edge of the cliff, a real look of sad affection on her beautiful face. Eric Anthony, 21-years-of-age, dirty blond hair, lean but strong, a clean, innocent white face, who had kissed only two girls in his entire life, and soon to die; Phil Simmons, burly and dark, rough-talking but good hearted, with a fat nose, thick neck, and a pregnant wife back at home, 19-years-old and soon to die. And so many others, frozen in the stillness of a world in which Time had stopped and given them a brief reprieve from death. All of them, statues in the air, and soon to die. The Princess wept for the youth of her enemy’s army, she brushed a tear from her eye, and she turned back to her followers.

  “You are all beloved,” she called out to the crowd, her smile crooked and angry and loving. “You are all flawless; you are all mighty. You are all my babies, as though born of my own womb.”

  A tremendous cheer erupted from the crowd. They would die willingly for her, their Princess, whom they loved. I wondered now what portion of the crowd preparing to sacrifice themselves for the Cause had come into being moments earlier, just for this moment.

  I don’t know how long we stood there in the middle of that breezeless valley – Time, after all, was immeasurable – but when the Princess spoke once more, it was as though worlds had been born and died in the meantime. Her voice was very quiet, but it roared through the city square.

  “See them up there, on the mountain edge, poised to destroy us. Let us meet them with passion and with justice. I love you all, my golden, Sidonian children.”