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

  The mayor laughed.

  “What if you promised me a fish right now?”

  Jerome mimicked the mayor’s laugh, and it sounded almost friendly, although Fawley understand that to be unintentional.

  Jerome put one long, bony finger to his white lips.

  “I promise you a fish right now,” Jerome said, and the mayor’s fishing line went taut, and he pulled up a beautiful carp.

  “Hark!” the deputy mayor shouted.

  “This isn’t malarkey,” Allen Jerome said, angry, glassy blue eyes glaring.

  The fish sputtered and gasped in the mayor’s arms.

  Dawsey, North Dakota, later changed its name to Pearce, North Dakota, named for Asa Levi Pearce, the postmaster. Sometime later, it changed its name to Freda, North Dakota, named for Freda Van Sickle, the daughter of the railroad’s construction foreman, after the Milwaukee & Waukesha Rail Road did indeed bring some semblance of prosperity to the town. Around 1918, the whole shebang was destroyed by a meteorite, and so, as I write this in the 1930s, the town is no more, though a drifter may sometimes hunt rabbits in the surrounding woods and occasionally squat in one of the few abandoned buildings that half-survived the meteor. As you read this in the 20th or 21st century, the town of Freda is naught but rotting lumber, weeds and rusted train tracks.

  “What can we do for you, Mr. Jerome, Mr. Fawley?” Mayor Figg asked, as the fish gasped its last gasp and expired.

  “Just take advantage of our generosity,” Allen Jerome replied.

  The country, Darryl Fawley said, should not be run by a central dictator in Washington, D.C., periodically sending soldiers funded by robber barons to crush the ordinary man and woman of the nation, those who succeed by the sweat on their brows and the calluses on the palms of their hands.

  “They will sweep in from the East, one day,” he said. “We will try to hold the West, and perhaps allies from the far Winter North will be awakened after a few millennia. All we would ask is your loyalty, when the crisis comes. In the Dakotas, we will need line after line of fortifications to hold them back. People willing to die for justice, for what is right and just. This very land may well be one of the pressure points of the War. But we shall prevail, because we have justice on our side, and those who stand with us will never know want.”

  Well, I am sure that this little speech would have sounded to be pure craziness but for the miracles wrought by Sidonia, which were already well-demonstrated. The only argument against an alliance was that Sidonia might be the devil, rather than simply a rich uncle.

  “Will we have a grain elevator?” Mayor Figg asked.

  His fishing line went taut again, and he pulled up a beautiful trout.

  “We can manage to buy you a grain elevator, you stupid little son of a bitch,” Allen Jerome said. “Do you even have any idea of the magnitude of what we are talking about? Grain elevator, he asks! Stupid, foolish little bastard. I’m dangling the keys to the castle in front of your nose.”

  Mayor Figg flushed, and his slightly puffy cheeks turned a rosy red. He looked down at the two fish in his rowboat.

  “It’s just … we need a grain elevator. So I thought I’d ask about the grain elevator. I apologize.”

  “Mayor,” Darryl Fawley asked gently, “if the farmland around these parts turns fertile, and if we can arrange the railroad stop, could we count on you to put together a well-armed militia that might stand its ground in the event of an unprovoked attack from a tyrannical government? Would your men at least do their best to slow the cavalry’s ascent to the northwest?”

  Mayor Figg nodded.

  “If you stand by us,” he said, “we would stand by you. If you do right by us, we’ll do right by you. We’re suffering up here, but we’re loyal people.”

  Darryl Fawley took Mayor Figg’s arm, and even more gently, he said, “The government may try to infiltrate your little outpost here. They may plant a mole. You know what I mean by that? A spy. Someone who pretends to be loyal to you and to Sidonia, but who is instead loyal to Washington and the counter-Revolution. This spy could even be a friend of yours. If we could prove his guilt, we would need you to stand with us.”

  Mayor Figg nodded his fat little head.

  “I understand,” he said. “I fought in the War. I know how to do what needs to be done when a soldier’s turned sour.”

  Then I am sorry to say, it was Allen Jerome’s turn to test Mayor Figg’s loyalty. Would Mayor Figg kill a mole with no proof at all, just on the word of the Sidonian authorities? Would he nevertheless stand with Sidonia and execute his brother? What if one day, Mayor Figg were to have a son, and Sidonia informed him his son was the mole? Mayor Figg nodded again and again, though his nods grew less emphatic as the questions grew more severe and morally questionable.

  “It says in the Bible that a man can stone his son,” Mayor Figg said, “if he’s done wrong. Right in the Old Tersterment, it says that there.” (This is incorrect, by the way, but I do not know if Mayor Figg recognized his error. The Old Testament says that a man cannot stone his son, but this mistake is often made. I remember a few things from the school on Randall’s Island.)

  “There may come a time when we will just ask you to trust us,” Allen Jerome said. “When you will have to trust us that we know what needs to be done. You will not have the right to ask questions, to debate with us, to say no. The line of defense that runs through the Dakotas is too important. Can you do this?”

  Mayor Figg thought.

  “Would you do anything at all for us, for Sidonia?” Allen Jerome asked. “Anything we ask?”

  Would Mayor Figg put an axe to the womb of a pregnant woman who had committed no crime and watch her bleed until dead? Would he set fire to a farmhouse and stand guard while the family inside screamed as they burned? Would he put the barrel of his rifle on the forehead of an innocent three-month-old infant and pull the trigger, if Sidonia told him to do so?

  All of this was followed by a terrible silence.

  Allen Jerome raised one eyebrow.

  The mayor remained ever silent.

  An exceptionally large and twisted coiled fish burst from out of the water, snakelike but with gills, fishlike but with limbs, light green with a white underbelly. It opened its mighty jaw and clamped its terrific fangs into the meatiest, most tender cut of the mayor’s shoulder as it leapt over the rowboat, vanishing into the water on the other side, the mayor flipping headlong in tow.

  The hapless politician struggled in the water even as the creature devoured him. Unfortunately, this creature was human-like in its eating habits: it savored its meals.

  The deputy mayor stood and hit the creature a few times with his oar, but he did no particular harm. The deputy mayor took out his gun and shot until he was out of ammunition, but the bullets just lodged in the creature’s scaly skin. A greenish pus oozed from the creature’s body and floated around on the surface of the pond, algae-like, but the creature did not release the mayor, and the bullets seemed to cause it no particular pain. The beast continued to devour its meal, slurping with its great mouth, gnawing with its great teeth and licking with its great tongue.

  None of the men still in the rowboat could understand how it was that the mayor remained conscious for such a long time, as the pond-beast chewed and slobbered, but he did indeed remain both alive and conscious until he was almost entirely consumed, and he screamed and screamed.

  After a while, the screams subsided, and the creature sank to the bottom of the lake with a satisfied little purr. The top of the mayor’s skull bobbed about on the pond’s surface, but the mayor otherwise no longer physically existed.

  At least five minutes passed in dead silence.

  Allen Jerome turned to Deputy Mayor Weatherford.

  “You didn’t tell us,” Allen Jerome said, “that there was a ferocious monster in this pond. I do not think Mr. Fawley and I would have come fishing with you in this particular pond had we known of the ferocious monster in this pond. This was an irresponsible
oversight, Angus.”

  Deputy Mayor Weatherford assured them both that this was the first he had heard of it.

  “I think the pond should probably be closed to fishermen in the future,” Deputy Mayor Weatherford said, “in the interest of public safety.”

  Both Allen Jerome and Darryl Fawley agreed that this was a good idea.

  “I suppose,” Allen Jerome said, “that you’re the mayor now.”

  “I suppose I am. I didn’t want to become mayor this way.”

  “There are better ways to a promotion, you’ll get no argument from me,” Allen Jerome said. “No one wants to see his boss eaten by a ferocious pond monster, Angus. No one plans for such a thing. But events don’t always evolve as we plan them. A ferocious pond monster – well, pretty much by definition, if it’s going to eat the mayor, it’ll eat the mayor when no one’s expecting it to.”

  Whatever weapons the government of the United States might have at its disposal, the new Mayor Weatherford was quite sure it didn’t have a ferocious pond monster. He felt rather uncomfortable now, sitting in the rowboat, the top of Mayor Figg’s skull bobbing about in the water just two feet from the edge of the boat and a ferocious monster slumbering at the bottom of the pond.

  “We can count on you?” Allen Jerome asked.

  Mayor Weatherford assured both Messieurs Fawley and Jerome that he would be a good and loyal soldier for Sidonia, even if it meant committing unspeakable crimes. Shooting babies. Burning families alive. And whatnot. He hoped that these questions were hypothetical, but he was nevertheless willing to burn a family alive and shoot an infant child if it meant riches and political power, the favor of the Sidonian overlords and the assurance that he would never be eaten alive by the Dawsey pond monster. He stood straight up in the boat, shouted out, “Hail Sidonie! Hail Sidonia! I will stand by you and follow your commands, come what may!” The boat wobbled a bit but did not capsize. He held his right hand aloft in an odd little salute that he had just invented on the spot, but to which Allen Jerome took a liking.

  What other choice did he have, after all?

  The remains of Mayor Figg’s skull fragments sank to the bottom of the pond, which surprised Mayor Weatherford, who’d have supposed that they would have floated. Now there was nothing at all to bury, and explaining all this would be difficult, indeed.

  Hester and I picked up my horse at the Death Spa. No sign of Monsieur Rasháh or his gang. In fact, Pete greeted me cheerily. I couldn’t let this one go, and so I asked him if the ruffian in black had returned to make more trouble, and Pete laughed as though this were just a joke. I glanced at the children’s wading pool, and I saw the pot-bellied little boy and the giggling black haired girl who had so recently been occupants of Rasháh’s cranium. So Rasháh had apparently vanished not only from the parking lot, but from the Spa’s recent past as well, as I had hoped. I pointed out to Hester that my theory had been proved utterly correct. She smiled, glad to see the boy intact, and delighted that my confidence was returning, but perhaps still unconvinced by my quack science. Still, there it was – we drowned Rasháh in the Pangaean sea, or so I thought, and his bad deeds in 1980s America were thus erased like a footprint on a windy beach. I believed myself very wise.

  I shook Pete’s hand and promised I’d return soon.

  Then Hester, the horse and I sped back to 19th century Lida, where there was also no sign or recollection of Rasháh or his gang. While I enjoyed another horn of fat, old Fitzgerald’s famous anti-fogmatic, Hester bought herself a feisty little brown trail horse that took to her like a long-lost friend. I wanted to return to my hut, but Hester said that it probably was no longer safe, and anyway not worth the risk. “Why do you want to return?” she asked, and I shrugged and said that it had been my home, and I wanted to look at it one last time. “I suppose I would like to have been able to bury my mule,” she said. “He was a nice mule. Not a lot of help, but a nice mule, and he did save my life. It doesn’t seem right to leave him there.” But still she shook her head and said that sentimentality would only put us at risk, and so instead, after we bought a couple of weeks of rations, we rode about five miles southwest of my hut and dug up my Lervine loot, and then we were finally off, heading north to Pyeton, where we intended to save the world and make some money, though for me not necessarily in that order of priority.

  A trip that would take you – my 20th century readers – six or seven hours by horseless carriage took Hester and me a few weeks, scraping along at the foot of the mountains in the lush forest that straddled California and Nevada states. The desert shimmered through the trees to our immediate east, a near-uninhabited region till we reached Carson City.

  During that time we pushed our exhausted horses during the day through the densely packed pines and set up camp inconspicuously at nighttime, which was when we plotted our pending and (we hoped) brief life of crime.

  Every morning, Hester rose, faced the sunrise, and mumbled incoherently to herself for half an hour, blind and deaf to the world.

  This ritual disconcerted me some, I will admit. I didn’t ask her about it. It wasn’t the most troubling thing I had ever seen in my life, although admittedly I had lived a particularly troubling life. It never even occurred to me to ask her about it.

  About five miles north of the noisy Mammoth City mining town – an economic bubble of a town, home to 1500 burly entrepreneurs, but which would be deserted within two years – we pitched camp a little ways inland from a large pond, fed by a small stream that wound itself carefully around the forest pines. I washed myself off in the pond, while Hester sat on a log and looked the other way. Then Hester washed herself off in the pond, while I sat on that same log and looked the other way. I could hear her splash in the bubbling water, in the quiet late afternoon.

  We were both tolerably clean when night fell and the moon came out, and a little mist rolled off the mountains to the west and glowed in the starry night like a cloud of diamonds. Hester quizzed me on our criminal plot, on the route in and the route out, our secret codes and whatnot. My role was really rather easy to understand, it seemed to me, but all-in-all, it seemed a good plan, especially the part where she’d gotten the sheriff of Pyeton in on the scheme, although I was not entirely convinced that we could trust a lawman ….

  Anyway, apparently I passed the test, because Hester leaned back against a cedar tree, looking satisfied and more than a little bit proud both of me and also her train robbery plan. The fire crackled, struggling against the chilly haze. Hester poked the glowing embers with a stick, and they flared up a bit.

  “Why did everyone call you Mr. Darcy?” she asked. “When we were in the 1980s?”

  “I said my name was Hugh Watt,” I replied, “and Pete looked up and said, ‘Mr. Darcy?’ I didn’t think ‘Hugh Watt’ sounded so much like ‘Mr. Darcy’, but there you have it. I figured it would be more trouble to correct him than to just nod, stoic-like.”

  I look a swig from my flask.

  “And it had its advantages,” she said.

  “In the 1980s,” I explained, “it was not entirely impossible to imagine that a thoroughly respectable young woman might drive along the desert highway in a beat-up old car, and entirely unchaperoned, if she honestly wished to, a woman with what in the 20th century one might call ‘a mind of her own.’ A ‘free spirit’ who had just graduated from college, exploring America. But in spite of it all – discovering America, college book-learnin’, mind of her own, blah blah blah – when she might chance to meet a man in the desert named Mr. Darcy, none of that would matter. In the 1980s, anyway. To a woman of most other eras, you know … I would assume that Mr. Darcy doesn’t mean as much to them.”

  “So it won you the hearts of many women-folk?”

  “Just one. But I won her heart over and over again.”

  I told her, as delicately as I could, about Julie Johnstone, who had approached me at my regular table at the Death Inn with a smile and an arched eyebrow at 6:45 p.m. on August 11, 1981 and how, as on
e would have said in 1981, one thing led to another. “But I could return to that day again and again, whenever I wanted to. And I did.”

  “And you never bump into yourself?”

  I shook my head.

  “A Roamer is only in one place when he’s roaming. When he leaves the future, he’s gone.”

  “And why didn’t that kick you off the Maze?” she asked. “Didn’t that change the woman’s heart?”

  “Not even a bit,” I said. “A little romantic lark, barely remembered years from now. The world, unchanged. The woman’s heart, merely tickled. And feelings of love scarcely fleeting.”

  Evaporating with the memory of the next morning’s coffee, as the Death Spa and my own manly shadow shrank away into nothing in Julie’s rear-view mirror. I thought for a moment to explain to Hester the state of future womanhood – the powerful, passionate and uniquely evanescent needs of a young woman in 1981 in a rusty car driving through the desert, but I didn’t think she’d really understand, and I didn’t want her to.

  Well, Hester admitted, she couldn’t really blame me, even though the morals of the situation were decidedly murky.

  “It must have been lonely, in the middle of the desert,” she said. “You must have been lonely.”

  “A little bit lonely,” I agreed, “but that’s what I was looking for. See here. Sidonia is spreading its Magic … I suppose you’d call it ‘Magic’ for lack of another term. It’s spreading its Magic all across North America. Maybe beyond; I can’t tell you that for certain. And this Magic, it has some side effects. Some things a body might find pleasant, if he didn’t know any better. It feeds on our hopes and dreams and weaknesses, as best as I can figure it. But in the middle of the desert, I was safe from all that. From false hopes, and long-dead visitors in the night. You understand? No people around, no Sidonian Magic. And I could drink, and I could forget, without being reminded.”

  “So why leave? Why Roam to the future?”