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

  A holding company structured by Jeremiah G. Hamilton and his attorneys leased the trademark of The Quilford Red Rubber Bouncing Ball Company Incorporated, and the consortium continued to sell Quilford-branded bouncing balls. But they replaced Mr. Quilford’s original design with one that did not bounce quite as magnificently but which could be constructed more cheaply. Investors saw a return at last. The company grew, and it swallowed other small entrepreneurs (who were happy to sell and retire to lives of tea in the garden), and the Hamilton toy consortium grew more.

  “That’s what we’re looking for, when you get down to brass tacks,” Allen Jerome said. “Growth. What we would call a ‘return’ if this were just business. If we sit in our little Montana valley enjoying the good life and do not grow, conquer more territory, win more adherents – if we focus on preservation of capital that is – we die as a movement. Eventually, the J.P. Morgans of the world will kill us and swallow us up, as they did to Mr. Quilford. They will replace us with a Coney Island version of Sidonia, and we will be frozen in the river. Mathematics creates life, and finance keeps you alive.”

  He tapped his colleague on the forehead, and Darryl Fawley flinched.

  “So like my hero Jeremiah G. Hamilton,” Allen Jerome said, “I am always thinking about return. A cheaper bouncing ball. One that is redder. One that is slightly bigger?” He was scribbling on a sheet of paper, which he eventually showed to his colleague. It was filled with numbers, and surrounded by a graph, which showed a parabola curve.

  “To get our return this high,” he said, indicating the highest point of the parabola, “and to keep our return from declining to here,” and he indicated the lowest point of the parabola, “two elements are missing. The element of a martyr, which we have discussed. Lucy is not our martyr, as she was killed by Sidonia.” He smiled sadly. “And I don’t wish for the martyrdom of anyone. I love life too much.”

  At this he laughed, and Fawley fidgeted with his silverware.

  “Lucy loved it that you stole J.P. Morgan’s money,” Fawley said. “You know that? I think I won Lucy’s affection because of you. Because you stole money from a capitalist monster and intended to give it to the people, rather than bask in the adulation of society’s gold-plated kings and queens. She didn’t think you were without human worth.”

  Allen Jerome seemed not to have heard this, and he continued.

  “Our curve inevitably therefore will not reach as high as it would if we had a martyr. We will do without a martyr.” He put his finger to his lips. “But there is a sexual element here that is missing, that according to these calculations is holding down the growth of the movement and the commitment of the people. Not a lack of the act itself, which is available in Sidonia around every bend. But something unattainable. Something to yearn for, to love from afar.”

  Sidonia needed a princess, Allen Jerome concluded. A fearsome warrior princess with red hair, long legs, and a terrifying battle cry.

  And she must of course be beautiful.

  “We could have had a queen,” Darryl Fawley said. “We could have had a beautiful queen who would have fought for the downtrodden with her last breath. A beautiful Sidonian queen.”

  Allen Jerome agreed.

  “Yes,” he said. “We could have had a wondrous queen, indeed. A queen can be loved; but a princess can be loved in an entirely different fashion. You are allowed to gaze upon your princess and wish that you could marry her, and to think about what such a thing might be like. That is what drives your loyalty in battle.”

  “When does it end?” Darryl Fawley asked.

  “November 1918,” Jerome said. Then he thought a little more. “Maybe October, or December. Perhaps 1919. Perhaps a delay until 1936 or 1937. Thereabouts.”

  “And then the Falsturm is triumphant. And what happens then?”

  “He conquers other Otherworlds. And then other Otherworlds.”

  “And when he has conquered every Otherworld there is?”

  “He sends agents through his weirs to fabricate more Otherworlds, and then more. There is no such thing as everything. We are stewards of an ever-growing stock market, Darryl. It never ends.”

  Allen Jerome took a hesitant taste of the coffee in the dirty mug. He winced. When Sidonia arrived in earnest into this little town, much would change, some of it for the better, some of it for the worse. While not everything could be predicted with absolute accuracy, the coffee would improve.

  Chapter 8

  “You ever think about death, Hester?” I asked, with the campfire embers burning out in the night, and Hester laughed, and she said, “No, O’Hugh. I’ve never thought about death. Not a once.” I nodded, and I remarked, “Well, I hope we don’t die to-morrow,” and Hester said she reckoned that she agreed with that sentiment. I held up my bottle and said, “Here’s to not dying,” and Hester apparently could wait no longer, and she quickly blurted out, almost as though it were one word: “Watt O’Hugh, I was a young woman fifteen years ago, and I was there in New York on that day in 1863 that neither one of us will ever forget, and I saw you brave that monstrous drunken crowd. I know the children you saved. More to the point, I know the ones you tried to save and couldn’t save, and they were the finest children I ever had the pleasure of meeting, and if it’s true that they’re your ghosts, then I know that they will not let us down to-morrow. I know your ghosts, Watt, and I love them, too.”

  I sat silently for a while, and then Hester wrapped her arms around me, and we fell asleep like that, listening to the sound of the wind just whistling and hissing in the night. We slept for a while, and then around two in the morning, I woke up. I figure that Hester had been awake for a while. The fire was just a haze of barely, gently glowing ashes now, and Hester was smiling up at me, with that hopeful look in her eyes. And there you have it. I am constrained by the gentlemanly code of the late 1930s (as well as the racial one) from continuing on in any great detail, except to muse that the stars might have been to blame, that starry clear moonless Nevada night, or maybe the terrifying and exhilarating fact that we were about to die or get rich. Maybe we just couldn’t sleep, and so we had some time to kill. But I think it was Hester’s smile. All that randy business took till about 3 in the morning, and I didn’t have any time to think about what it meant or why it had happened, because I needed to get word to Wesley before sunrise. I rode into Pyeton, and I just made an appearance in the grub shop where Wesley ate breakfast. That was all it took, that was my code: I just needed to make an appearance and order some coffee, using my special ordering coffee code, just to be safe. Within earshot of Ringleader Wesley, I asked for the slop “with three lumps, and black as tar.” Wesley heard, and the scheme was one step closer to success or failure, and I was one step closer either to riches or a more permanent sort of death than any I had experienced previously.

  I drank my slop, left the grub shop, mounted my horse and trotted out of Pyeton.

  I returned to my campsite, to the dead fire, and to Hester, who had recently woken and was finishing her coffee. She smiled that smile at me, and this time, though it was maybe the last time I would see it, her smile was a little restrained and scared. She asked me for all my liquor, and so I emptied my pockets and then my saddlebag. I guessed Hester’s behavior was for the best, though I was sorry to see the liquor leave camp, being as how I had a whole empty day ahead of me. She rummaged around in the bag and found one more, which she also confiscated. I said to her that I supposed we’d have a little sniff to celebrate once we were rich. She nodded with a little worried cheerfulness, and she handed me a pocket watch and told me not to lose it. I held it in my left hand. It was a cheap one. Hester kissed me goodbye, ruffled my hair fondly, mounted her horse and rode off without another word.

  So I sat around by the dead ashes till a little before nightfall, reading my dime novels, concentrating to-day on a couple of romantic ones that had somehow wound up in my personal library and ignoring the violent ones, which to-day would hit too close to home. I wondered
if I would need to kill anyone. If the train reached New York, all would be lost. The men who had let Lucy Billings die would be triumphant; they would dine on caviar in the New York taverns and kiss the New York maidens till dawn, dancing on Lucy’s metaphoric grave. I hated this train, and I hated all aboard, and I wished them dead, and I wished that I could justify killing them. Something had fundamentally changed inside me since the range war in Lervine, when I’d happily let my adversaries escape my bullets. Lucy’s death had made me an angry, ruthless soldier in the battle against Sidonia, and only my ghosts could hold me back now.

  As sunset approached I galloped out in the direction of Pyeton. I tied up my horse in a little thicket of trees a few meters back of the train tracks and settled into the bushes.

  And there it was, coming around the bend, my fate, with its bells clanging in the quiet night; it was a grand train approaching, two express cars, baggage car, mail car, smoker, day cars, and then two Pullman cars and the caboose. The train was a lumbering and dirty blur of steam and smoke.

  I waited till the train got to the slow spot – the steep four mile ascent that led to Pyeton, where the train would slow to a crawl – then I crept out of the night, whispered, “Damn you, train,” but was otherwise silent as I hopped stealthily onto the blind baggage platform at the front of the express car, and I waited.

  Nothing seemed unusual to anyone on this cursed, evil train. The passengers slept in the Pullman cars. The engineer, in the express car, sat by the cannonball stove, staring out into the starry blackness. He was a heavy, older man, a Sidonia veteran, an adherent from the very beginning. The fireman, sitting up front in the locomotive, fed spruce logs into the boiler, relaxed and happy in the moonlight.

  Black smoke billowed. And while I waited, and while the engineer stared, and the fireman fed the blaze, Sheriff Wesley was in the Pyeton train station house with a hat pulled over his head, a kerchief over his face and a gun trained on a terrified young station agent named Fiskher Pike. Pike was bound and gagged, his cap pulled down over his eyes. The sheriff was cutting the telegraph wires.

  Pike was not supposed to be there that night; the station agent that night was intended to be Pike’s apprentice, a man with whom the sheriff was less acquainted, but instead the apprentice spent the night under a pile of wool blankets, shivering with fever, and Pike trudged the five miles to the station from his home just outside Pyeton to spend a second shift with the trains.

  Sheriff Wesley had been to Pike’s wedding, had celebrated the birth of Pike’s baby daughter, had offered condolences and comfort upon the untimely death of Pike’s homely and loving wife, Eileen.

  This was nothing personal.

  It was just that Sheriff Wesley could use some money. And Fiskher Pike would never believe that the man holding the gun was a dear friend. The sheriff prayed that Pike wouldn’t try anything heroic, something for which a true outlaw would have shot him, because Sheriff Wesley would not, could not, even try to bring himself to shoot Fiskher Pike, and the plan would fail. Sheriff Wesley would not be rich. He would be poor. His name would be tainted, poisoned, forever. He would be imprisoned. And so he prayed that his good friend Fiskher Pike would let him bind him, that Fiskher Pike would prove himself a coward.

  At that moment, the train was still slogging up the hill, the wind barely riffling my hair; we’d gone two slow miles since the ascent began, and we were still three miles from Pyeton, and I finally spotted the red warning lantern on the track, a signal to the engineer to stop, that there was danger ahead.

  As indeed there was.

  The fireman summoned the engineer from the express car, and the engineer blew his whistle, acknowledging the warning. He braked, and the train slowly squealed to an uncertain, wobbly halt, till it eventually sat immobile on the track.

  Two hundred feet ahead of us, and two hundred feet behind us, Anichka’s giant powder cartridges exploded, mangling the tracks, making escape impossible, but hurting no one, to Anichka’s terrible chagrin.

  I tied a kerchief over my own face, climbed over the tender and captured the engineer and fireman without much fuss. Hester and Anichka bounded from the hills into the car moments behind me, similarly disguised. A random passenger charged at Hester, she slammed his head against the wall, and he slumped to the floor, generally unharmed but thoroughly chastised.

  Two cars back was the day car, rows of seats for the passengers accompanying the load to New York, and some Sidonians traveling to New York to plead their Cause to friends and relatives back home. Behind that were the two Pullman sleeper cars. Outside, two of Wesley’s men rode back and forth on horseback alongside the train’s passenger cars, firing shots randomly in the air and working the passengers into a state of panic.

  Hester nodded to me.

  “We’ll blow the safe,” she said. “You check for the guards.”

  So that’s what I did.

  Here, as elsewhere in these Memoirs, you may pick up certain clues that should convince you that my story is true. While in your world, my friends of the 20th or the 21st century, it will be unremarkable for a Colored g’hal to employ and even order around a white man, it was a definite unknown in my era, and I suppose a humiliation of a certain consequence, and so if I were making this story up, I suppose I would put myself at the center of the operation. I would have brilliant ideas. I would yell at folk. Other people would nearly bungle the job, and I would save the day, the way I allegedly did back in Little Mount.[15] I would make a few cleverish comments that would sound good in the “action movie” that these Memoirs would then inevitably become.

  But I am telling you no such thing. Plans were formulated while I was out of earshot. Events moved around and through me. I took orders. I did as I was told. Ergo (as the philosophers say at Harvard), my tale is true.

  On Hester’s command, a .45 in my left hand, and another in my right, I kicked through the door of the sleeper, a long narrow corridor with curtains on each side. I made a few remarks in an improvised Irish accent that I gurgled through my kerchief, telling them how no one would be hurt if no one tried to be a hero (the standard clichés, and even back then they weren’t new) and I told everyone to open up their curtains and step out with their hands up, but before I could think about the curtains and the bleary-eyed, frightened and confused passengers behind those curtains, two guards burst into the sleeper car, one from the back door, one from the front. One was tall, one was a little short, one was fully dressed, one in white pajama gown, one with long hair and a mustache (all of it brown and beautifully coiffed), and the other almost hairless, but they shared one trait in common, which was that they were both firing at me from close range and reloading quickly, which seemed to leave me little choice but to depart the living world without further delay.

  Then a protective shroud descended over me like a warm blanket, and I felt no fear. The wind outside ceased howling. The bullets slowed to a slow slither, and I ducked each one with a tight, nervous smile as it fluttered past me like a moth, like a soft downy chickadee. Utterly powerless, the guards stopped wasting their bullets. Each stood helpless and frozen motionless, and they waited for death.

  So apparently my cause was just. As I have noted, my ghosts sometimes neglect me in times of need, but they have an innate sense of justice that I can feel in the air when they’ve visited me. One ghost patted me on the small of my back. Her touch dissolved in the air like a drop of dew.

  I called out to the gunmen that I didn’t want to kill anyone. This was a lie; I wanted to kill the gunmen just because of their association with Darryl Fawley, who had done the unspeakable. I hated this train, and I hated everyone onboard it, and I hated and wished to kill these gunmen. But I thought of my ghosts, and I felt them near me. And so I took a breath, I forced my hatred to subside, and I gestured to the gunmen to approach.

  “I don’t like killing folk,” I said, when they were near. “You’ve both likely got families that love you, and if you don’t, then anyway I know you’ve got sk
ulls that’ll hurt if bullets crack them open and lodge in your brains, and I don’t want to do that to a fellow.”

  They gave me their guns. I didn’t know who they were, what they knew, why they’d come to Sidonia, and I supposed that letting them live was the right thing to do. Bigger fish to fry, and all that.

  I heard a tremendous explosion, and when I arrived at the express car with the guards, I found Hester and Anichka staring at the solid iron safe with no little chagrin. They’d shot their way through the messenger’s barricade, subdued him, packed the safe with dynamite and set it off, but in spite of all this, when they’d returned to the car after the explosion, the safe had ne’er a scratch.

  Anichka touched the safe.

  “I told you,” she said to Hester. “This is not any safe. The material is from Otherworld. It’s an Otherworld metal.”

  “Maybe you just couldn’t blow the safe.”

  Anichka pretended to consider this, but I think she was really trying to calm her temper. At last, she said, “I can blow any safe. I can blow anything up. This is an Otherworld metal. And why not?”

  Anichka was suddenly superfluous to our mission, and she knew it. No matter what happened now, whether we succeeded or failed, it would have nothing to do with her. She was here to blow a safe, and this was the one safe she could not blow, and so we no longer needed her. Any gold she might earn from this mission would be naught but charity. And I think that realization had much to do with what was to come next.

  The two women turned to the messenger. He was a wiry and agitated young man, a bouncing toy of a man, certain of extinction, resigned to it, welcoming it. Why should to-day be any better? his voice said, without saying it.