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

  Filbank pulled up a chair. He tapped Hester on the knee.

  “Mr. Morgan is not exclusively interested in his own death. There is someone else.”

  “There was a young woman,” Morgan said. “I was married once before. She was very ill when we wed, and she died not long after the wedding.”

  He stared at his fingers, at his walking stick. Not at Hester.

  “There is another way that one can be dead and not-dead at the same time,” she told him.

  His dead essence lay in a pool of blood in the jungle outside. Scavengers had begun to gather. He could hear shrieking and slurping as jungle rats fought over the body.

  “The Magic of Sidonia is growing stronger here,” she said. “I cannot remain, and in a week or so, it will kill you, Mr. Morgan. But right now, to-day, it’s at just the right temperature. Not boiling. Not tepid. You know? Just warm enough to make the dough rise.”

  They heard footsteps on the floor above, the light tapping footsteps of a young woman.

  Hester smiled. Why did she wish to help him? It was not just the financial gain for her and for her war, although that was most of it. But sometimes she wanted him to be happy, however briefly she could arrange it, in spite of everything.

  “She’s upstairs,” Hester whispered.

  She listened more closely.

  After only about a year in this house, she knew it well. A stranger in the house was like an itch on her body.

  “I’d say she’s waiting for you in the guest room,” she told him. “The third door on the left, after the staircase.”

  Well, I can speculate, but I cannot tell you for certain what went on in that room.

  As I mentioned in the first volume of my Memoirs, I was destined many years later to meet a woman named Georgina de Louvre, who, along with Louisa and Angela (she of the terrible coffee) filled in the gaps in Morgan’s life for me. But most of the more intimate scenes in Morgan’s life that are dramatized in these Memoirs come from good old Georgie and her uncanny (or imaginative) memory.

  But she was unable to give me any detail whatsoever as to the particulars of that reunion. So I cannot tell you for certain what went on in that room, although I can speculate, and here is what I think: by then, he was old, and she was ever young. He was used to overpowering women, and he knew nothing else. He did not want to overpower her. He did not want to send a timid and frail soul back into the underworld violated. And so he sat on the edge of the bed, and he told her about his life. He told her how much he missed her; he told her how much her brief life on Earth, and her briefer moments with him, had forever changed the heart of the most powerful man in the world. He held her in his arms, I think, and it is my supposition that he probably wept, and that she did as well. And then a moment or two later, she was gone.

  But I can only guess. On the other hand, the entire interlude could have been devoted to wild pully hawly. What do I know, after all, about the mind of a millionaire?

  Hester, Sneed and Filbank walked around the grounds of our home, waiting for Morgan to return from upstairs. The night was pleasant and cool.

  “How does this work?” Sneed asked. “You just told him what the future entails. You went into the future to change what – in the future – is the past. I mean to say that if you go to the future to find out how to fix the present, you’re changing the past. What does that do to the logic of the … the, oh, what you might call –”

  “I ran the risk of being expelled from the interlinear Maze,” Hester agreed, “before the first word left my mouth. Poor Mr. Morgan. I knew where he’d be, what he’d need. I didn’t change a thing. I just made his life a little more pleasant.”

  “But won’t it change his life, knowing the whole time where he’ll be?”

  “What will actually change? That man lost any power over his own life long ago.”

  Sneed nodded.

  “I am not a bad man,” Sneed said. “I keep doing bad things. But I am not a bad man, although I do bad things.”

  “That’s pretty much the definition of a bad man, nay? A man who does bad things?”

  Sneed shook his head.

  “A bad man is a man who enjoys doing such bad things. Yet I am not without a conscience. I was guilt stricken over the deaths that would result from Morgan’s misadventure, which I nevertheless planned and executed. I am not without human feeling and sympathy.”

  “Then you are not the worst man,” Hester said, “but still a bad man.”

  Sneed nodded. He supposed this was true. He had never thought about this before, and he wasn’t happy about it, but he didn’t see any need to argue the point.

  “Well,” she said, staring out at the little lagoon. “I’ll be leaving soon.” She turned to him. “And you must, too. And take Mr. Morgan.”

  She lowered her eyes, blinked back a tear, and took a deep breath.

  “I wish Watt were coming with me,” she said. “To raise his child. And maybe to make more children. To help repopulate the Z’vulun Kingdom with more pureblood Z’vulunites.”

  She said this to nobody, although Sneed stood beside her. Sneed seemed inclined to put a tentative, comforting hand on her arm, but then he reconsidered, and so he stood beside her silently, until J.P. Morgan returned, and then he and Sneed and Filbank left the grounds of the house, although it was yet deep night.

  Chapter 22

  How long was I inside the portal? I don’t know. Maybe a half hour, maybe a day. That’s the perplexing characteristic of Time: when you unmoor it from the external units by which it is measured – the movement of the sun and the tides – it becomes unmeasurable and indefinable.

  All I know is that while I was inside the portal, I came more than a little bit haphazardly unstuck in Time, and that I stayed not long in each moment. Now I was holding Lucy’s hand at the opera – and each time, I wished to ask her to marry me, but somehow could not speak – and now I was battling the crowds on that fateful date in 1863, when my city went mad, with a little girl in my arms, a child I sought to save from the enraged mob. Every time I revisited that moment, I thought I might save her, so that she might not become one of my ghosts, but again and again, I felt her little hands being torn from mine, and the men dragged me away. I looked for Hester, but I didn’t see her.[22] Now I was a boy running along the streets of the Five Points with another boy, and we were laughing.

  And now, oddly, I found myself dropped into a large room that hummed and glowed with fluorescence, and which had a view of a city that glowed greenish-blue in a sooty, starless night.

  The room was filled with desks that were empty, other than one, at which a tired man sat. His skin was oily and blue in the artificial light. A clock on the wall showed that it was fifteen minutes before midnight.

  The man frowned.

  “You must be one of those time-traveling cowboys we used to hear so much about,” he said, not without some veiled amusement.

  “A time Roaming shootist, really,” I replied, “or gunman, if you will. My career on the cattle drives was limited, and we don’t really call ourselves time ‘travelers’. That implies fully occupying another time in a way that we really cannot do. We roam. We drift. We’re like a shadow.”

  He shrugged.

  “And what brings you to my cubicle?” he wondered.

  “I don’t know. I kissed my Lucy goodbye, and here I am. She is a deadling, and I’m never going to see her again.”

  “We don’t get deadlings around so much anymore,” he said. “Yer magic and what-not, basically a thing-of-the-past. That’s all right with most of us. It’s very sad, very heart-breaking, to meet someone as a deadling, whom you once loved.”

  I nodded.

  “Deadlings,” he went on, “are just something the Falsturm tossed our way to create a little loyalty. We don’t get them around anymore, hardly ever.”

  My life, I told him, had driven me to drown my sorrows in Monongahela.

  It had driven me to black unconsciousness.

  “Y
ou think I don’t drink?” the man said, those diabolical lights flickering and popping over his head. “You’re not the only one who drinks, my friend.”

  Then he told me a story out of nowhere, gritting his teeth. Back when he was a teenaged boy, in the middle years of the Struggle (or what some called the Conflict), he’d been engaged to the girl he still considered the love of his life, even all these years later, after two divorces that had drained him of his money and his strength. Her name was Laura, and she’d been a Loyalist, while he’d been a Skeptic – “in my heart, only,” he said, but still the Falsturm’s dark spies knew. “It’s how they make an example of you, if they know you’re a Skeptic,” he said. “They take someone you love, then someone else you love.” He and Laura were walking hand-in-hand along the little lane that ran in a circle around their cluster of tidy boxy homes with geraniums in the windows. Suddenly, a van careened around the corner, swept past him and pinned Laura to the wall of her house.

  “Look, I knew what would happen next, because I’d seen it in a thousand movies. I said a bunch of stuff about how much I was looking forward to celebrating Thanksgiving with her next week, and she told me to live my life and find another girl. I said we’d get married and raise beautiful children. Then she gasped a little and told me she loved me, and that was it. Darkness veiled her eyes, as the fella said.

  “She doesn’t come back as a deadling, I can tell you that.”

  So here it was: Billy’s future in which Sidonia wins. I was in the Grey City, in an office where a functionary worked on the City’s business underneath those lifeless lights, barely squeezing breath through his near-dead lungs. We looked out the windows together, at this joyless night City, at its glowing grey stone buildings.

  Then Something happened, there in his office. First a little buzz in the air, then a round spark that floated towards us.

  “Ball lightning,” the man said. “Many people see it and think they’re seeing angels.”

  “Angels don’t exist,” I said.

  “Tell me about it,” the man said. This means, in the language of the 21st century, I agree with you. It doesn’t literally mean Tell me about it.

  “And God doesn’t exist,” I added, gratuitously and blasphemously. Because why not? It seemed a logical conclusion at that moment, everything considered.

  “I hear you,” the man said. This is another thing that, in the 21st century, means I agree with you. It doesn’t just mean that he hears me, although that would of course be a necessary precondition.

  The spark stopped sparkling, darkened and grew larger, like a visual migraine made manifest.

  “Ah,” said the man. “Not just ball lightning. A dark hole to another world. A weir to a new realm, as it were. These things were more common in the early years of the Falsturm’s reign.” Confidentially: “The Battle of Sidonia opened the way for the Falsturm’s coup. That was an ugly one.” He shook his head, regretfully. “If I could, I would jump, you know.”

  I said that I heard him.

  “I think this one is for me,” I said, and in I went. “Not so bad, once you get used to it,” I called back to my friend, whose name I didn’t know, before the hole snapped shut.

  Inside this hole, the air was moist and chewy. Funny, I thought. Different holes, different climates.

  Bemusing.

  I don’t know how long I churned around in the moist noiselessness of the hole, but before long, I dropped with a gentle, scratchy thud on cold sand, in the dark of night. The air smelled a little bit like old fish, although there was no water nearby that I could see or hear. I stood. And after I stood, something immediately knocked me to the ground. I tried to reach for my .45, but a giant sand crab had pinned my arms to the dusty sand.

  Where was I?

  I didn’t know it, but I was underground, in the Chinese Hell of the Innocent Dead. Sand crabs in the Chinese Hell of the Innocent Dead are entirely different animals from those we know now in the world of the Sun. Most sand crabs are very small – in fact, in the world that you know and in which I grew up, all sand crabs are very small and present no danger to human beings at all. To my knowledge, none are even poisonous. They might pinch you. I am not sure if they might even draw blood. I don’t know what they ordinarily eat. They are silly little creatures, and they are not even delicious. I do not know what purpose sand crabs serve in the world.

  But the large, Chinese Hell sand crabs live anywhere that there is sand, so they might suddenly surprise you many miles from the nearest ocean. They are nimble and can pin a body quickly to the ground, with their unusually large and long pincers (which, by the way, are also known in the scientific crab community as “chelipeds.”) They eat people. They pin us with their pincers, then they make us numb with their saliva, and then they eat us alive. They are bright blue in color with pretty white spots all over their bodies, which is apparently attractive to the opposite sex. Some giant sand crabs are nine feet long and weigh up to three hundred pounds.

  The giant blue sand crab’s drool dripped into my face and flowed down my body, and my skin grew cold, numb and dead.

  Now, when things seem blackest – completely poleaxed by a giant sand crab and covered in anesthetic crab drool on the cold dry sand of the Chinese Hell of the Innocent Dead, and so on (not a good scenario by any stretch of the imagination) – it might make a bit of sense to pause for a moment to catch our collective breaths and try to make some sense of all of this. I am an old man, and just thinking of that sand crab makes my heart flutter and creak and puts me at risk of stroke. Not death, I suppose, as I understand that I am to die on January 1, 1937, but it is entirely possible that some of these memories could induce a stroke and prevent my finishing my tale.

  I told you that all of this story is 100% true, and I do believe that to be the case, but perhaps I should amend that a bit to say that most of this story is 100% verifiably true, and a few bits are reliable hearsay, and a very small bit of it is speculative but probably correct. For example, who is M. Rasháh? I have heard that Mr. Bridges and his wife died, both mysteriously, of a double suicide in the bedroom of the home they shared just below Cloud City, on the same night, during the week that Allen Jerome and Darryl Fawley visited. I believe that M. Rasháh was Sidonia’s primary assassin of probable trouble-makers – that is, those who have not yet made any trouble but who are likely to make trouble in the future – which is why he tried to kill me in the Great Roman Hippodrome in 1874, in Weedville later that same year, and in Sidonia.[23] And, sadly, it must be said, upon my birth, killing my parents instead, as the young Lucy Billings, then known by her true name, swept me from the building to hide me in the Old Brewery, watching over me with a heavenly heart, and mostly in the shadows (for example, paying Mrs. Welch to give me food in the morning and, when danger lurked, a warm bed at night), until I was old enough to care for myself.

  So I believe M. Rasháh was a sort of statistical arbitrage quantitative analyst of the Otherworld, examining probabilities and possibilities and shooting when probably profitable for the Sidonian movement and the Falsturm. I don’t know it for sure, but while not entirely perfect, I think he was significantly more skilled than the 20th century quant analysts of Level-Global or Jemmco Capital, who were mere con artists. Anyway, I can imagine Allen Jerome boasting about his human abacus before M. Rasháh shot Mrs. Bridges. Why not, after all? She would soon be dead and unable to tell the tale, Allen Jerome was a boastful man, and secrecy prevented him from boasting about M. Rasháh to anyone who might possibly live for more than a few minutes. So I think he spilled the beans. Much of what I know about the private conversations between Allen Jerome and Darryl Fawley I know from Frederick Slocum, who became a bit of a confident of Mr. Fawley, but of the death of the Bridges couple, I know very little. It is something Darryl Fawley did not wish to discuss in detail. So I have guessed, correctly I think, but I cannot guarantee it with perfect certitude.

  Why did Billy Golden permit me to walk into Sidonia with such a feeble dis
guise, one that guaranteed that I would be imprisoned and beaten by that sadistic, nameless prison guard? I realized the truth in the middle of the night in 1928, when I awoke with an epiphany. The prison guard had some sort of historic role to play in either the Battle of Sidonia in the early 20th century or (less likely) the Great Sidonian Revolt of 1917 to 1918; either way, Billy wanted him dead, and he knew from his roaming that I would be likely to kill him if given the motive and the means. That was my true mission, and I knew it not.

  Nothing has ever been as it seems.

  How did Slocum manage to elude detection for so long? I suspect it had nothing to do with the mysterious origin of William Frederick Slocum, the captain of a merchant vessel. M. Rasháh, that quantitative analyst extraordinaire, must have told Allen Jerome that the living Slocum would lead me to Darryl Fawley, whom I would kill, giving Sidonia an important martyr and loosing Fawley’s ancient and parasitic powers to settle into a new host, namely Allen Jerome himself. Allen Jerome would be rid of Darryl Fawley, an assassination he had long desired but could not commit himself, and he grew almost immediately into the most powerful man within our Realm, willing to use his powers in ways that Darryl Fawley would never even have contemplated.

  I am not sure if you have ever felt in control of your life.

  I felt in control of my life only once: when I was riding a train north with Emelina, about to present the greatest Wild West show the East Coast had ever seen.

  Otherwise, I have felt buffeted by uncontrollable tides.

  In fact, I have often been, figuratively, a man pinned to the dusty ground by a voracious sand crab. And, at least once, literally.

  In the Chinese Hell of the Innocent Dead, one could feel the hatred in the air. And smell it. (This kind of hatred smells like old fish. And it makes the air cold. And it makes the sun go away.)

  Just when the crab was about to take a great hungry bite out of my skull, I heard a shot ring out, and the crab loosened its grip just a bit, but not enough. Another shot, and the grip slackened. Two more shots, and the crab was suddenly dead weight. I flopped about until I was out from under the dead crab, unable to feel a thing.