Usher's Passing (11 page)

". . . hear me, New? Can you hear me?" Nathan's voice was frantic.

Tears of pain coursed down New's cheeks. He couldn't see, and when he tried to wipe his eyes he couldn't get his arms free. He was hung in something. There was the strong odor of earth— and a sharper, sweeter smell. The aroma of something dead, very close to him.

"Nathan?" he called. Didn't think he'd spoken above a whisper.
"Nathan?"
Louder.

"You all right?"

Just fine, he thought, and almost laughed. Every joint in his body was on fire. He wrenched his right arm as hard as he could, and heard cloth rip; then he wiped the wetness and gummy dirt from his eyes, and he saw in the faint purple light where he was.

He hadn't stepped off Briartop, but only into a hollow that had been hidden by underbrush. It was about thirty-five feet deep, he figured, with steeply sloping dirt walls, and angled down into darkness. New was caught in a barbed-wire prison of thorns that had tangled around his chest and legs, manacling his left arm at the wrist. Ugly, inch-long barbs curled all around him, in loops and coils and knots. If he moved, he realized with a shock of fear, they might grab him even tighter.

But the worst part was what lay caught in the thorns with him.

There were moldering carcasses in various stages of decay, from fresh bloat to yellow bone. A stag's skeleton reared its rack of horns toward the sky, hopelessly tangled. There were raccoon, skunk, fox, snake, and bird bones everywhere. A fresh deer carcass was tangled on his right; it had recently burst open. As New twisted his head to the left, barbs scraped across his neck.

Not six feet away, enmeshed in the tangle, was a human skeleton. It wore the rags of a red flannel shirt, fringed buckskin pants, and boots. Its mouth gaped wide, as though in a final gasp or scream. Thorns grew along the spine, kudzu vines burst through cracks in the skull. The skeleton's right arm was twisted backward at a sharp angle, the bone clearly snapped. Several feet away was a rusted rifle, and the hunter wore an empty knife sheath around his waist.

New struggled violently to free himself. The coils snaked more firmly around his chest.

"Help!" he shouted. "Nathan! Go get help!" His head throbbed mercilessly.

Nathan didn't respond for a few seconds. Then: "I'm scairt, New. I thought I heard somethin' just then. Somethin' walkin'."

"Go get help! Get Ma! Hurry, Nathan!" A thorn was spiked deeply into his cheek.

"I
heard
somethin', New!" The boy's voice was shaking. "It's gettin' closer!"

The moon was rising. Like a pumpkin, New thought—and he went cold inside. "Run," he whispered. Then he shouted, "Run home, Nathan! Go on!
Run home!"

When Nathan's voice came floating back, there was new determination in it. "I'll run get Ma! I'll save you, New! You'll see!" There was the sound of him struggling through the brush, and then a faint cry—
"You'll see!"
—
and silence.

The wind moved. Dead leaves floated down into the hollow.

New listened to the sound of his own harsh breathing. The smell of death wafted around him.

He didn't know how much later it was, but he suddenly shivered as a terrible, aching cold passed through his bones. Something was watching him—he could sense it as surely as a hound on the track of a redtailed fox. He looked up toward the lip of the pit, his heart pounding.

Touched by moonlight, a figure stood thirty-five feet above him, on the pit's edge. It was shrouded in black, and carried something that looked like a sack under its right arm.

New almost spoke—almost—but his blood had turned icy, and he knew what he was looking at.

The thing was motionless. New couldn't tell what it was, but it seemed . . . vaguely human. Whatever was under its arm didn't move, either, but New thought for a terrifying instant that the moonlight shone upon a white, upturned face. The face of a small boy.

New blinked.

The thing was gone. If it had ever been there. It had slipped noiselessly away in the space of a heartbeat.

"Nathan!"
he shouted. He continued to call his brother's name until his voice was reduced to a weary whisper. In his soul he felt the same black despair as when he'd watched Pa's coffin being lowered into the ground.

Run, run as fast as you can, 'cause out in the woods walks the Pumpkin Man . . .

A shuddering cry of anguish left his lips. Around him, bones rattled when the cold wind swept past.

RIX WAS DRESSING FOR DINNER.
AS
HE KNOTTED HIS TIE IN FRONT
of the oval mirror above his chest of drawers, a gust of wind that scattered blood-red leaves against the north-facing windows caught his attention. The trees parted for an instant, like a fiery sea opening, and Rix saw the high roofs and chimneys of Usher's Lodge in the distance, tinted orange and purple in the fading light. The trees closed again.

He had to reknot his tie. His fingers had slipped.

When he was barely nine, he'd gone into the Lodge for the first and last time. Boone had goaded Rix into playing hide-and-seek inside. Rix had to do the seeking first. It was dark in there, but they'd had flashlights. Boone laid down the ground rules: there would be hiding only on the first floor in the main house, no use of the east and west wings. Close your eyes now, count to fifty! Rix had started hunting him when he reached thirty. There was no electricity in the Lodge because it had been uninhabited since 1945, and it was as silent as winter in there. And
cold
—
the deeper he'd gone, the colder it had been. Which was strange, since it was file first of October and still warm outside. But the Lodge, he was certain now, repelled heat. It clutched within its winding corridors and maze of rooms the frozen ghosts of one hundred forty years of winters. It was always deep January inside the Lodge, a world of icy, remote magnificence.

Malengine, Rix thought. It was a word he'd been mulling over to use as the title of a book someday. It meant "evil machination" or, more literally, something constructed for an evil purpose. The Lodge was a malengine, built with the spoils of destruction, meant to shield the generations of murderers that Rix called his ancestors. If Usherland could be compared to a body, the Lodge was its malignant heart—silent now, but not stilled. Like Walen Usher, the Lodge listened, and brooded, and waited.

It had trapped him in its maw for almost forty-eight hours when he was nine years old, like a beast patiently trying to digest him. Sometimes Rix's mind slipped gears and he was back in that nine-year-old body, back in the Lodge's darkness after the weak batteries that Boone had put in his flashlight flickered out. He didn't remember very much of the ordeal, but he remembered that darkness—absolute and chilling, a monstrous, silent force that first brought him to his knees and then made him crawl. He hadn't known it then, but two hundred rooms had been counted in the Lodge, and due to the madness—or cunning—of the floor plans, there were windowless areas that could not be reached by any corridor yet discovered. He thought he recalled falling down a long staircase and bruising his knees, but nothing was certain. All shadows that he tried to keep behind a bolted door.

He'd awakened in bed several days later. Edwin had gone inside, Cass told him afterward, and had found him wandering up
on
the second floor in the east wing. Rix had been all but sleepwalking through the Lodge, banging into walls and doors like a wind-up toy robot. God only knew how he'd kept from breaking his neck. From that time on he'd never stepped into the Lodge again.

The image of the bloody-eyed skeleton on its hook swung slowly through Rix's mind. He quickly shunted it aside. His head was aching dully. Boone had deliberately lured him into the Lodge and gotten him lost.

It amused Rix that Walen would let Boone have nothing to do with Usher Armaments. Boone had never even toured the plant, and Rix had no desire to. Though the racehorses seemed to be his primary occupation, Boone owned a talent agency with offices in Houston, Miami, and New Orleans. He was close-mouthed about his business, but had bragged once to Rix that he handled "about a dozen Hollywood starlets so pretty they'd melt your pecker off."

If that was so, Rix had wondered, then why didn't Boone have an office in California? Rix had never visited any of his brother's offices—and was unlikely to be invited—but Boone apparently made a good deal of money from his agency. At least he dressed and talked the role of a successful businessman.

Nothing but writing had ever been even moderately successful for Rix. He had a few thousand dollars in savings, but he knew it would be gone soon enough. Then what? Find another poorly paying job that would last four or five months at the most? If he couldn't write another book—a best-seller—everything that Walen had ever said about his being a failure would turn out to be true, and he'd have to come crawling back to Usherland.

Rix tried to put his uncertainties out of his mind. He put on his tweed jacket and inspected a tear under his right sleeve, caused when he'd tumbled to the sidewalk in New York. Some of the lining was ripped, too, but he decided his mother wouldn't notice. He was as ready as he would ever be. He went downstairs.

On his way to the living room, he stopped to peer into the game room, with its two large billiard tables and antique aquamarine Tiffany lamps. Everything was still the same—except, he noted, for two new additions: Wizard's Quest and Defender arcade games. They were shoved discreetly into a corner, probably there for Boone's pleasure. He went through the game room into the "gentlemen's room," a high-ceilinged, oak-paneled parlor that still smelled faintly of cigar smoke. Oil paintings of hunting scenes adorned the walls, along with the stuffed heads of moose, rams, and wild boars. Standing in a corner was a seven-foot-tall grizzly bear that Teddy Roosevelt had supposedly shot on the estate. A grandfather clock with a beautiful brass pendulum struck softly seven times.

A pair of sliding oak doors stood on the other side of the gentlemen's room. Rix walked across to open them. His father's library lay beyond.

But the doors were securely locked.

"Have you seen your brother?"

Rix jumped like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He turned toward his mother, who was wearing a shimmering gray evening gown. Her makeup and hair were perfect. "Nope," he said easily.

"I suppose he's gone over to the stables again, then." She frowned with disapproval. "If he's not spending his time clocking the horses, he's playing poker with those friends of his at the country club. I've told him time and again that they're ganging up on him to cheat him, but does he listen? Of course not." Her gaze sharpened. "Were you looking for something to read?"

"Not particularly, just poking around."

"Your father keeps the library locked now,"

"It wasn't locked the last time I was here."

"It's locked," she repeated, "now."

"Why?"

"Your father was doing some research . . . before he got sick, I mean." There was a quicksilver flicker of distress in her eyes, then it was gone. "He had some books brought over from the Lodge's library. Evidently he doesn't want them to deteriorate any more than they already have."

"Research on what?"

She shrugged. "I have no earthly idea. Doesn't your brother know that we eat dinner at seven-thirty
sharp
in this house? I don't want him sitting at my dining room table smelling of horse perspiration!"

"I'm sure he'll smell like his nice malodorous self."

"Sarcasm never won any popularity contests, son," she told him firmly. "Well, I have to know if that little wife of his is going to join us tonight or not. She's gone a straight week of eating her dinner in bed."

"Why don't you just send a servant up to ask her?"

"Because," Margaret said icily, "Puddin' is
Boone's
responsibility. I won't have my servants bowing to her like she's a princess! I don't give a damn if she's too lazy to get out of bed to use the commode, but Cass would like to know how many places to set."

"I can't help you with that." He glanced once again at the library door's brass handles and then directed his attention to an elk's head on the wall above the fireplace.