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

  “Maybe you will rise again,” I suggested. “Maybe there is a World to Come, where we shall reunite.”

  “Maybe,” she said, “the moon is made of green cheese. Or perhaps it is bleu. I have felt the numb chill of the Oblivion that follows Death, Watt, and you have not. Do not clutter the last moments of a woman’s life with nonsense.”

  She leaned in very close to me, and she shut her eyes, and she smiled sadly.

  “Whether or not Hester will mind, darling, I am going to kiss you goodbye.”

  She did, and it was a kiss full of memory and sadness, and the regret of lost chances.

  Lucy dissolved in my arms, until only air and blue sky was left. Then, as predicted, a hole opened in the shadowy corner of the kitchen, black in the middle, a glowing blue around the edges, tattered, rough-edged and not perfectly round, like a terrible bloody wound in the world. (How much more dramatic it would have been had the hole opened just outside the window, and I’d had to leap across the alley, and I’d barely made it! But no, I am sworn to the Truth, and it opened in the corner of the kitchen.)

  As I have mentioned, back in Weedville, Madame Tang jumped through one of these bloody holes in the world, and whatever became of her after that, I didn’t know. So when the dark hole popped open in front of me, the same hole that had swallowed up Madame Tang and her stallion all those years ago, I wasted no time in jumping in, right into its churning center. I knew that either death or an old friend was on the other side. Either one would have been welcome. And so I leapt from the Chatham Street apartment into the cauldron of Time just moments before it snapped shut, my lips still burning from Lucy’s one-last-kiss.

  Inside the hole, it was arid and stuffy.

  Back in the Sidonian valley, another hole opened up in the sky, black, ragged and wavy, glowing blue around the edges. It was just like the dark hole that claimed me on Chatham Street, except that this one was larger, and it blotted out the sky. Some of the Sidonian patriots were swept up into it and vanished, and many of the Federal soldiers split open and died horribly but quickly as the air boiled.

  By the time the hole had snapped shut and vanished into the sky, only three soldiers stood still alive in an empty field, the lucky few that Sidonia had allowed to live and bring news of the massacre and of Sidonia’s terrific power back to the government in Washington.

  The grass in the valley was soaked with blood and matted flat to the ground, unaffected by the gentle breeze that would have seemed delightful on any other day.

  The soldiers turned and looked, and there was Mimi Sturges Morgan, walking through that bloody, empty valley. She passed right by them, her eyes empty. She called out for her darling Pierpont, over and over again.

  Surrounding them on all sides, that near-impassable mountain.

  Across the valley, Louisa Satterlee watched all this, a woman full-grown and married already for some months, cast back across decades to see her childhood nightmare unfold, about which she had cried to her doting father when she was a girl of eleven, back when her name had been Louisa Morgan. Her dream had come true.

  Mimi vanished, just wilting into dust and fading away into the blood-stained and sunrise-hued morning air.

  “I am a prophetess,” Louisa Satterlee whispered.

  Then she too vanished, roaming back to the early 20th century, where an even greater battle raged.

  Chapter 21

  Hester waited at Lady Amalie’s inn for a while. When news of the Sidonian massacre reached her, she wept in Lady Amalie’s arms. Then she packed her bag, rode her horse out of the enchanted meadow, then out of the woods, followed the deserted tracks of the bankrupt Northern Pacific Railroad all the way to Tacoma, where she boarded a ship that took her to a port in South America. In a little village a few miles inland, a bribe of gold bought her a boat trip down the river and back to our little home in the jungle.

  I was dead dead dead, and Hester mourned me.

  At the house, Hester read ancient poetry by candlelight and rarely ventured out to town. She sometimes sat in the garden. At times, she wandered into the jungle at midnight to watch the lagoon glow, and she thought about how much I had loved the dinoflagellates. She fasted for three days and three nights. Once her fast had ended, one of Farley’s men brought Hester some food from town every third day, and she thanked him with a shaky voice, eyes red from crying.

  One night, J.P. Morgan himself arrived at the house, with Sneed in tow, and even that idiotic Filbank.

  “Mr. Morgan was looking into some investments in Mexico,” Filbank said, “and he took a detour to say hello.”

  “A long detour,” Hester said.

  Filbank blinked. He hadn’t really checked the geography before inventing his lie.

  “Venezuela, I think. Brazil. Maybe. Anyway, I am lying, you know.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  Morgan said: “You don’t mind if I sit down?”

  He sat down with a great thud in my armchair, and the legs of the armchair creaked beneath him, and Hester thought of me, now, crushed by J.P. Morgan, like my chair.

  His face assumed an expression of sincerity that seemed rather sincere, come to think of it.

  “I have treated Watt poorly,” he said. “And I have treated you poorly.”

  “Yes,” she agreed.

  There was a whoop from outside. Some kind of bird.

  Morgan listened for a moment.

  “A bird,” Hester said. “A parrot, I think.”

  “I destroyed Watt’s livelihood,” Morgan went on. “I brought him to New York on false pretenses, and I shut down his extravaganza.”

  She smiled.

  “It was a good show, Mr. Morgan,” she said. “The audience thrilled to scenes of Watt O’Hugh the Third battling an entire band of outlaws, single-handedly shooting them all dead, saving a stagecoach from ferocious bandits, riding on horseback across a lonely prairie town street and sweeping a little orphan girl[21] into his arms moments before a stampede thundered around the bend, and rescuing hysterical passengers from an exploding locomotive. In Watt’s show, buffalo pounded across the open plains; cowboys rode wild broncos and lassoed bulls; and natives roamed the land as though the white man had never set anchor off the coast. And then there was the voluptuous Emelina, who rode out into the arena standing on a stallion in an ankle length calfskin dress and topped by a cowboy hat, drew a sixteen-gauge, double barrel, breech-loading hammer-mode shotgun and blasted a series of airborne glass balls as they plummeted to earth, shot an apple off Watt’s head, and then, at the end of her act, and after a few more examples of impossible dexterity, chased her stallion around the arena, leapt onto its back, and galloped away waving her hat in the air, leaving the crowd coughing in a thick smelly cloud of gunpowder smoke.”

  (Or words to that effect.)

  “It sounds magnificent,” Morgan admitted.

  “Do you know how it feels to have your destiny stolen from you?”

  “I do,” he acknowledged reluctantly. “I do know exactly how that feels.”

  “It was one of the finest spectacles of our time, Mr. Morgan. Watt O’Hugh was one of the greatest showmen of them all.”

  “And I framed him.”

  “You did indeed,” she said. “And for the worst kind of thing. Passion crime!”

  “I needed him near Allen Jerome,” he said.

  “You had him shot off the top of a tenement building,” she added.

  “My instructions,” he said, objecting mildly, “were to take him alive.”

  “Still,” she said. “You were negligent in the execution of the operation. Like those Chinese workers who died beside the train tracks. Those piles of bones that used to be men you hired to build a railroad line for you. They were supposed to build train tracks. They were not supposed to die. And yet they are no less dead to-day for your good intentions.”

  “I didn’t order anyone killed. I want O’Hugh alive. I want the men who built my railroad alive. I don’t want anyone to die.”
r />   “You destroyed Watt’s life. Do you know all the things that he was meant to do? And the life he had instead, because of you?”

  Morgan nodded.

  “I am not happy with myself,” he said. “I am not happy with the things I have done, or even the unintended results of my actions. If I could change every single thing in my life, I would. To-day, I would be sitting on a deck chair on a transatlantic ocean liner, Miss Smith. Drinking a glass of French wine with Mimi. Watching the gulls dive for scraps by the side of the ship as we pulled out of some exotic port. Can one change things? Can one undo the past?”

  “One cannot,” she said. “Unless one has an utterly pure heart.

  “And then,” she added, “one can.”

  “My heart,” said Morgan, “is impure.”

  “There you are,” she said. “So there is no hope for it. You cannot change the past. I cannot change the past. We all have regrets.”

  “I once thought only Allen Jerome could answer a question for me,” he said, “but I understand that you now possess his secret as well.”

  The great man lurched forward, his great hands clutching his great walking stick so tightly that his great knuckles turned white.

  “How,” he said, “can a person be both dead and not-dead?”

  Sneed smiled, a patronizing little smile.

  “Mr. O’Hugh was killed in the mountains of Wyoming, just outside of Laramie, some years ago,” Sneed said.

  Filbank stared at the ground.

  “And yet,” Sneed went on, “he lived to tell the tale. Dead in a shallow grave lo’ these many years, and yet this home shows signs of a man reasonably alive.”

  “As you and Mr. Morgan have already agreed,” Filbank said, “Mr. Morgan will quash the arrest warrant for Mr. O’Hugh, if you can explain this phenomenon. And in addition to the earnings from the train robbery, which Mr. Morgan has allowed you to keep, there’s a … a million dollars in it for you as well, as per previous arrangement.”

  It was very hard for him to say this. A million dollars for Hester and me.

  Hester smiled bleakly.

  “I think my darling may truly be dead this time. With Watt, one never knows. But I lack true hope.”

  Morgan leaned forward.

  “I am very sorry to hear that, Miss Smith. Truly sorry. And I will leave you to your grief if it is your intention to end our partnership prematurely.”

  Hester did not seem inclined to end their partnership prematurely.

  “I intend to return to my homeland and fight to restore it to its glorious past as a golden kingdom,” she said. “Even to-day, my people struggle to re-establish their kingdom at Petach Tikvah. And so I would ask for five hundred thousand for Petach Tikvah. And five hundred thousand for Watt.” With a glance at my chair, which Morgan now occupied: “To do with as he might see fit. Should he prove to be alive.”

  “You have a great world plan. You and your people.”

  Hester smiled.

  “Some are in central Africa. Some are in India. But we are everywhere. Everywhere the sea could take us. We were once a seafaring people.”

  “What is this homeland of yours?” Morgan asked.

  Hester laughed.

  “What do you think?”

  “And who are your people?”

  “The Z’vulunites,” she said.

  “Hmmm,” Morgan grunted.

  “Rejoice Z’vulun in your journeys,” she said. “The true-hearted people of the sea, who put their life in jeopardy to the point of death in the Midianite war, the Assyrian campaigns, and the battle of the wadi Kishon, the people of Yotvat-Yodpat, and Zevudah, of the town of Rumah, in the Valley of Beit-Netophah. We need very little – all we seek is the return of our little Z’vulun kingdom on the border of Yissachar and Menashe, from Rimmon in the Northeast to Yokne’an in the Southwest with passage to our capital Akko on the coast. Our army of yore, reconstituted at the foot of Mount Tavor, will be triumphant against the occupiers, from Sarid, through Shimron, and up into Hannathon. Leave Naphtali and Asher to whomsoever should wish to claim them. Perhaps the Naphtalites and the Asherites. Or whomsoever else. It is no matter to me.”

  Morgan nodded.

  “How will you all find each other, all around the world, to form this army?”

  “Billy is helping. All Z’vulunites know who they are, wherever they are,” she said, with what seemed to Morgan unwarranted confidence. He was a little bit shaken by her zeal, a little pale in the jowls, but he persisted. He had a mission here in the jungle, and he would see it through. It did not matter to him who might occupy the town of Shimron (whatever that was), and if it would serve his purposes, he was more than happy to help the Z’vulunites succeed in their conquest. He was willing, in fact, to become a full-blown partisan of the Z’vulunite cause, and whole-hearted sponsor of the settlement of Petach Tikvah.

  “Nothing would please me more than to ensure the Z’vulunites safe passage to their port city in Akko,” he said. “Shouldn’t a sea-faring people like the Z’vulunites have access to the sea, after all? I don’t remember much from Sunday school, but I believe that the Z’vulunites were my favorite of all the lost tribes. I greatly preferred them over the tribes of Reuben and Simeon, for example.”

  He shuddered dramatically. Reuben and Simeon! He had no use for them!

  And this made Hester laugh.

  “There are a few ways to be dead and not-dead at the same time,” Hester Smith said, out in the garden. “Watt was killed in the Wyoming mountains after he broke out of the Laramie prison, but he remained ever alive. I can show you this. But I need a gun. And you need to tell your men to stand down.”

  She thought.

  Morgan nodded.

  “You see,” she said. “This will look as though I am killing you. I cannot have them protect you when I am killing you.”

  “Stand down,” he said to Sneed and Filbank. “I need no protection.”

  “I am going to kill Mr. Morgan,” she said.

  Morgan nodded.

  “Allow her to kill me,” he said. “Do nothing. That is my instruction to you.”

  Sneed and Filbank raised no objection to this instruction, and I have wondered to this day how that made Morgan feel. Hated, I suppose, which was perhaps not particularly enlightening or unusual.

  The moon and the stars shined sporadically through the thick canopy above the garden, lighting Hester like a ghost, an angel of death.

  She lifted her gun to Morgan’s head, and she pulled the trigger. I gather that what happened next came as a shock to Hester, although not precisely as a surprise. The top of the banker’s skull split in two, and his brain flew across the jungle night and splattered against the bark of two trees that had grown twisted together. Although dead, his face held a look of pain and surprise, and his body seemed to stand upright for longer than was actually physically possible before slumping to a jelly-like heap on the jungle floor.

  Filbank wiped a bit of brain from the side of his face with a fresh handkerchief.

  “Did that hurt?” Hester asked. “I’ve always wondered if that would hurt.”

  Morgan sat down on a log. Sneed handed him a flask of whiskey, and Morgan took a long slug.

  “It hurt.”

  He looked at the body.

  “And who was that?”

  Hester sat beside him.

  “He was you, in a manner of speaking. Everyone has twenty-one essences. Most of them we never use. It’s possible to kill one, without killing the whole man. Takes a little skill, though. I didn’t tell you beforehand, but this was my first try. I wasn’t entirely sure it would work. I knocked off one that has been holding you back. Your avarice. It’s smaller than most people think. Now it’s gone.”

  “No avarice?”

  “None. But that was never what mainly drove you.”

  “And this is how O’Hugh died and lived on?”

  “Exactly. The Sidonians ordered him executed in the mountains of Wyoming. A Sidonian doubl
e-agent shot him in the head but kept his face recognizable, and they left a dead body in the snow.”

  Back in the house.

  “My business,” she said, “means I will travel much in the next decades. I will often be on ships, traveling back and forth. Anyplace where my people live. And I will convince them to return to a glorious past. So I will often be on ships.”

  She touched his left temple with her right pointer finger, and his right temple with her left pointer finger. She stared into his eyes.

  “This shedding of essences is good for killing a harmful part of one’s personality,” she said, “and as you might guess, it is useful for faking one’s own death, for being, as you put it, ‘dead and not-dead at the same time.’ And there are essences that allow a body to roam Time, to flitter about, seeing things that other people cannot see, which I have managed to access. I cannot tell you much, J. Pierpont! But I can tell you a little bit, and I think it might make you feel a little more hopeful.”

  And so she told him that around a decade and a half into the new century, when all would seem lost, he would board a ship to the Middle East, not having thought about her, Hester, for decades, and he would see her onboard as the ship left the Mediterranean Sea and entered the mouth of the Nile. If by then, he had tired of the lawyers, the politicians and the conspiracies, and if he wished to shed one more essence – “your desire for power” – to live anonymously and happily in a far-off land, she would allow it to happen. She would let an essence expire peacefully in his ship-board bed.

  Filbank was mixing drinks. Hester sat beside Morgan on the couch.

  “J.P. Morgan will die,” Hester said, “so that J.P. Morgan might live. If you wish it, at the time. I will promise you a home in the Z’vulun kingdom, if you wish it. Dry air, good for the lungs. For a few shekels more.”

  “It sounds like a bargain. I will keep it in mind.”