Usher's Passing (41 page)

"Tharpe," the old man whispered. His breathing was a low tumble of congestion.
"Tharpe.
The man who lived in that house was your pa?"

New nodded.

"And what was his name?"

"Bobby," Myra offered.

"Bobby Tharpe. I seen him, comin' and goin'. Sometimes I stood all night in the woods across the road from your house, just watchin'. I followed him to the Tongue, and saw him look down on Usherland. I knew what was in his mind, callin' and tauntin' him. I followed him many a time when he left his house and walked the woods. Oh, he never saw me—but I was there, all the same. Once he went down from Briartop to that Lodge, and he stood on the shore and he wanted to go inside so bad he could hardly stand it; but he resisted. I
helped
him resist, 'cause I knew he couldn't do it alone. Just like you couldn't get out of them thorns alone, boy. Nor could you hold back Greediguts alone."

"What?"
New whispered.

"I don't know nothin' about you," the Mountain King continued, "just like I didn't know nothin' about your pa. But I
do
know the Lodge wanted him; and I know it wants you, as well. I seen you on the Tongue, too. I seen the way you stared down at that house, a-wantin' to walk its halls and run your fingers over that fine marble. Greediguts didn't come to kill you last night; it came to test you, to find out if you're stone or paper. Before your pa died, he was weakenin'. You ought to give thanks he
is
dead—'cause he was about to go into that Lodge, and what he would've come back out as . . . you wouldn't want to know."

Raven shook her head, utterly confused. To her, the old man was speaking gibberish. Was he insane, or was
she
?
"No one lives in Usher's Lodge," she said. "It's empty."

"I didn't say no
person
lived in there, woman!" the Mountain King told her scornfully. His gaze flicked toward her like a whip, then back to the boy. "Ain't no person wanted your pa. Ain't no person wants
you.
That Lodge is more than halls and fine marble, boy. It's got a black heart, and a voice like a knife in the night. I
know
—
'cause it's been workin' at me ever since the comets fell. Chidin', a-tauntin' and callin' me, slippin' through my dreams, tryin' to strangle me. Just like it did to your pa, and like it's doin' to you. Only I'm an old man, and pert' soon Greediguts is gonna slip up to my house and I'll be too weak to hold it off. That'll be the end of me; but the Lodge wants you now. Like it wanted your pa."

The old man gripped his walking stick tightly. His eye was unflinching. "He was about to give in, boy. The stones he'd built in his soul were comin' apart at the seams. That's why . . . I had to make sure he couldn't listen no more."

Myra sucked in her breath. New hadn't moved, but now his heart was pounding.

"I killed him, boy," the Mountain King said quietly. "Surely as if I'd put a gun to his head and blowed his brains out. He come upon me on his way down the mountain, the day it happened. I knew the kind of work he did. He was weak, so it didn't take much; all he had to do was fill up a tire with air—and keep fillin' it till it blew up in his face. He never even knowed what he was doin'."

New was silent; all the blood had rushed from his face, and blue veins throbbed at his temple. It was Myra who spoke first, in an incredulous, hoarse voice: "You . . . you ain't nothin' but a crazy old man!" She came up behind her son. "You didn't even know my Bobby! Ain't nothin' special about you! You're just a crazy old liar!"

"Look at me, boy," the Mountain King commanded. He thrust his cane out and rested it beneath New's chin. "You know if I'm lyin' or not, don't you?"

New brushed the cane aside. He looked helplessly at Raven, and started to speak, but then his voice cracked and he stood there dumbfounded, his sallow face mirroring the battle of emotions within him. He forced himself to return the old man's gelid stare. "You're . . . a crazy old man," New said, with an obvious effort. "Ain't nothin' to you a-tall!" Abruptly he turned and left the house; Myra shot a poisonous glance at Raven and hurried after her son.

The Mountain King sighed deeply. His lungs rattled, and he fended off a fit of coughing. "He knows," he said when he'd recovered his breath. "He didn't want to say it before his ma, but he knows."

And you're as nutty as a Christmas fruitcake, Raven thought. The shape of the skeleton under those rags and papers sent a shiver up her spine. She'd assumed it was the old man's sister— but what if it
wasn't
? What if it was the skeleton of one of those children whose pictures were on the posters she'd had printed up? "When did your sister die?" she asked.

"I don't know the year," he said wearily, and rubbed his good eye. "She was twenty years old . . . or twenty-two. I can't recall. You seen her bones."

"Why didn't you bury her?"

"Didn't want nothin' gettin' to her. Swore I'd protect her, and that's what I did." He hobbled over to the bed, lifted the tattered blanket, and reached under a mass of rags. "Didn't want the thing that killed her to chew her bones." He withdrew a small skull that had been all but crushed; the lower jaw was missing, the nasal area smashed in. "The pant'er did this. Caught her in broad daylight, at the stream." Gently he set the skull down again and picked up the can of mixed fruit he'd set aside. "The boy knows," he muttered. "He
knows."

"Knows what?"

The Mountain King stared at her, and smiled thinly. "That he's like me," he said, thrusting his forefinger through the top of the can as if it were wet cardboard. He withdrew the finger and licked fruit syrup off.

Raven had had enough. She fled the house. Behind her she could hear the old man laughing; his laughter erupted into spasmodic coughing. She ran past the figures on the wall, over the ground that had been scorched to glass, and she never looked back.

When she reached her car, she received a new shock.

The Volkswagen now faced downhill. Something had picked up the car and turned it around. She slid quickly under the steering wheel and started the car.

She was almost halfway down Briartop when she realized she'd
run
through the ruins.

Her limp was gone.

WHEN WHEELER DUNSTAN OPENED THE FRONT DOOR, RIX OFFERED
him the Baird Retreat's casebook. Dunstan paged carefully through it, taking his own sweet time, and then he motioned Rix inside without a word.

Dunstan put the casebook on a table and began filling his corncob pipe with tobacco. "I had a call from Mr. Bodane this mornin'," he finally .said. "He verified what Raven told me about you, that you're a published writer. Called the library yesterday to see if they had any of Jonathan Strange's books over there. They didn't. So I sent one of the fellas from the
Democrat
over to the bookstore at Crockett Mall." His wheelchair whirred across the room to a bookshelf, and he showed Rix the paperback copies of
Congregation
and
Fire Fingers.
"Read a little bit out of each of them last night. They ain't too bad—but they ain't too
good,
either."

"Thank you," Rix said dryly.

"So." Dunstan turned the wheelchair around and regarded him thoughtfully through a haze of pipe smoke. "You want to help us with the book, and you figure I'll go for the idea since you're a published writer."

"Something like that."

"This is a project I've been workin' on for a long time. I suppose you could say"—his mouth curved to one side—"that it's a labor of love. Raven and I are a good team. I'm not so sure we need another member."

"Maybe you don't," Rix agreed, "but I've shown you how serious I am about this. I'm taking a hell of a risk by coming here. I had to sneak out after lunch like a thief. I can get you whatever you need from the Gatehouse library. I can help you with the writing. And most important, an Usher name on the cover will give it credibility. Have you thought about that?"

Dunstan didn't reply, but Rix saw his eyes narrow almost imperceptibly. He had scored a point, Rix thought. "I brought you the casebook. And I've told you what you wanted to know, haven't I?"

The other man grunted. "I've known about the Baird Retreat for months. I digested that material and returned the book to Mr. Bodane. Sorry, I'm still not sold. I can't figure out exactly
why
you want to help so badly." His teeth were clamped around the pipe's stem like a bulldog's. "If you think you're gonna waltz in here and get your hands on the manuscript—maybe screw it up, for all I know—you're wrong, my friend."

This was like trying to find a chink in a granite wall. "Edwin trusts me," Rix said, nettled. "Why won't you?"

"Because I'm not the trustin' type."

"Okay, fine. Then what can I do to
make
you trust me?"

Dunstan pondered the question. He rolled the chair over to the bay window and watched gray-bellied clouds scudding across the sky, then looked at Rix. "Mr. Bodane entered this deal with the stipulation that he supply documents only—no verbal information.

In his own way, I guess he's still bein' loyal to Walen. I admire that. He wouldn't tell me what Walen's condition was, and that's why I had to find out from you. I've got some questions that need answers: things that connect events of Usher history. And only an Usher can give me the answers."

"Try me."

Dunstan motioned toward a chair, and Rix sat down. "Okay. I want to know about the cane. The black cane with the silver lion's-head. Why's it so important to your family? Where'd it come from, and why does every patriarch carry it like some kind of royal scepter?"

"As far as I know, Hudson Usher brought it with him from Wales. Old Malcolm probably carried it, too. I think whoever possesses it is recognized by the family as the head of the estate and the business. There's no secret about that."

"Maybe not," Dunstan said, "but maybe it's more than that, too." He let smoke leak from the corner of his mouth. "The cane wasn't always in your family. It was stolen once, from Aram Usher—your great-great-grandfather—and was lost for almost twenty years. In those twenty years, your family had more than its share of bad luck: Aram was killed in a duel, his son Ludlow was almost killed several times, Ludlow's half-sister, Shann, had a career tragedy, Usherland was overrun by Union troops, and your family's steamboat, railroad, and textile businesses went bust."

This rash of information was startling to Rix. "Are you suggesting there's a connection between all that and the cane?"

"Nope. Just speculatin'. That was probably the most disastrous period of Usher history. The only thing that didn't suffer too much was the armaments business. That rolled in a fortune during the Civil War—especially since Usher Armaments sold rifles, bullets, and artillery pieces to both sides. Old Aram was smart. His heart might've belonged to the South, but he knew the North was gonna clean house."

"Who stole the cane?" Rix asked, intrigued by these new facts of Usher history. "A servant?"

"No. An octoroon gambler from New Orleans named Randolph Tigré. Or at least that was one of his names. I say 'stole' only figuratively. Aram's second wife, Cynthia Cordweiler Usher, gave it to him."

"Why?"

"He was blackmailin' her. She was the widow of Alexander Hamilton Cordweiler, who owned steamboat lines, a network of railroads, and a big chunk of the Chicago stockyards. Cordweiler was sixty-four when he married her; she was eighteen."

"Blackmailing her? What for?"

Dunstan's pipe had gone out, and he took a few seconds to relight it. "Because," he said, "Cynthia Cordweiler Usher— your great-great-grandmother—was a murderess." He smiled faintly at Rix's grim expression. "I can tell you the story, if you want to hear it. I've put together bits and pieces from various sources, and I've had to guess at some of it—from what happened later." He raised his bushy eyebrows. "Well? Got the nerve to hear it, or not?"