Usher's Passing (44 page)

"Does Dad know you come over here and walk around?"

Boone smiled coldly. "No. Why should he?"

"Just curious."

"Curiosity killed the cat, Rixy. You know, I'm surprised at you. You must have more nerve than I thought. After what happened to you inside there, I never thought you'd get even this close to the Lodge. How's it feel, Rixy? Can't you remember gettin' lost in there? The way the dark closed in on you? The way you screamed, and nobody could hear you?" He leaned against the car, snapping the lantern on and off in Rix's face. "I've got a light. How's about you and me goin' in the Lodge again, together? I'll give you the grand tour. Okay? How about it?"

"No, thanks."

Boone snorted. "I didn't think so. Long as you're in that car, you figure you're safe, huh? Bad ol' Lodge can't get you in that car. See, you ought to be like one of the heroes in those books of yours—they've got the guts to go into dark places, don't they?"

It was time to strike. Rix said, "Dad told me. I know about the freaks."

Boone's thin little smile was jarred. It began to fade; a wildness surfaced in Boone's eyes, the look of an animal trapped in a corner. Then he got himself under control and said easily, "So he told you, so what? I run a good business. Place talent with carnivals and sideshows all over the Southeast! Hell, I made a half-million bucks last year, after taxes!"

"Why the charade? Because you didn't want Mom and Katt knowing what sort of 'talent' you really promote?"

"They wouldn't understand. They'd figure it was beneath an Usher. But they'd be wrong, Rixy! There's a demand for freaks. Armless, legless, midgets, alligator-skinned boys, Siamese twins, deformed babies and animals—people pay to see 'em! Somebody's got to make a profit off it. And somebody's got to find the freaks, too. Which ain't as easy a job as you might think."

"It sounds like a real heartfelt career," Rix said. He could imagine his brother driving out to some dusty old farm where a deformed animal pulled at its chain in the barn, or haggling with a lowlife abortionist who kept "extra-special" fetuses floating in jars of formaldehyde.

"What now? You gonna tell everybody within shoutin' distance?"

"If you're not ashamed of what you do, I wouldn't think you'd mind."

Boone put the lantern down on the hood of the Thunderbird. He crossed his arms and looked at Rix through hard, dead eyes. "Let me spell out how things are, Rixy. After Dad signs over the business and the estate to me, I can either put you on an allowance or cut you off clean."

Rix laughed; his hand was resting on the knob to roll up the window if Boone reached for him. "Dad's passing everything to Katt! Don't you understand that yet?"

"Sure. And I'm the man in the fuckin' moon! A woman can't handle the business! I've got
ideas,
Rixy. Big ideas, for both the business and the estate." When Rix was silent, Boone plowed ahead. "There's a town in Florida, near Tampa, where only freaks live. That's all the town is, just freaks. 'Course, they don't allow no tourists. But what if
I
was to build a town between here and Foxton, and fill it full of freaks myself? Then folks could come in, pay one price, and poke around all they pleased! It'd be a freakshow that went on twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year!" Boone's eyes had begun to gleam with excitement. "Hell, the damned thing could be like Disney World, with rides and everything! And if you'd mind your manners, I'd see that you got a cut of the gate."

Disgust had blocked Rix's throat. Boone was grinning, his face slightly flushed. When Rix found his voice, the words came out strangled. "Are you out of your damned mind? That's about the most repulsive idea I've ever heard!"

Boone's grin cracked. In his brother's gaze was a flash of hurt that Rix had never seen before, and he realized Boone had shared a dream with him—a twisted dream, perhaps, but a dream all the same. For an instant Rix thought Boone would react with characteristic anger, but instead he drew himself up straight and proud. "I knew you wouldn't understand," he said. "You wouldn't know a good idea if it bit you on the ass." He took his lantern and walked to his horse, untied the reins from the hitching post, and swung himself into the saddle. "I'm a reasonable man." He forced a chilly smile. "I'm perfectly willin' to give both you and Katt an allowance, provided neither of you lives within five hundred miles of Usherland."

"I'm sure Katt'll have something to say about that."

"She'll leave me alone, if she knows what's good for her."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means I know some things about our little sister that might spin your head around, Rixy. Dad will never give her Usherland. It's gonna be mine. You'll see.
Giddap
." He kicked his heels into the horse's flanks and galloped away toward the bridge.

Bastard! Rix thought. He watched Boone ride into the distance, and then he started the engine. He was about to follow Boone when he glanced at the Lodge's door.

It was standing wide open.

He'd seen Boone close it. A flurry of dead leaves spun across the steps and was sucked into the Lodge's throat.

He sat staring numbly at the open doorway. An invitation, he thought suddenly. It
wants
me to come closer. He laughed nervously, but he didn't take his eyes away from the entrance.

Then he forced himself to get out of the car. He took the first and second steps with no problem; on the third step his knees turned to putty.

The darkness beyond the doorway wasn't total. He could make out the shapes of furniture in the gray twilight, and a violet-and-gold carpet across a leaf-littered floor. Figures were standing in the gloom, seemingly watching him.

See,
Boone had said mockingly,
you ought to be like one of the heroes in those books of yours.

He climbed the last four steps. His stomach was doing slow flipflops as he stood on the threshold of the Lodge for the first time in more than twenty years.

In his nightmares he had seen the Lodge as a dusty, horribly grim, haunted palace. What he saw now amazed him.

Before him was a beautiful, elegant foyer that was perhaps twice as large as the Gatehouse's living room. From white marble walls protruded a dozen life-sized brass hands, offered to receive hats and coats. He realized that the watching figures were statues of fauns and cherubs that gazed toward the door, their eyes made of rubies, emeralds, and sapphires. Suspended from the vaulted ceiling, an immense chandelier of polished crystal spheres glistened. Beyond the foyer, a few steps led downward to a reception area floored with alternating black and white marble tiles. At its center stood a fountain, empty now, where bronze sea creatures reclined on rocks. The rest of the house was shrouded in darkness.

Rix had forgotten how magnificent the interior was. The statues in the foyer alone must be priceless. The workmanship of the marble, the ceiling, the brass hands on the walls—all of it staggered his senses.

He imagined how the Lodge must have looked during one of Erik's parties, ablaze with festive lights. The fountain might be spouting champagne, and guests would dip their goblets in over the side. Aromas from the past found him: the scent of roses, fine Kentucky bourbon, Havana cigars, and starched linen. From deep within the Lodge he seemed to hear the echoes of otherworldly voices: faint notes of a woman's laughter, a chorus of men singing a bawdy song in drunken glee, a business conversation in hushed, stiff tones, a man's booming voice calling for more champagne. All of it overlapped, changed, became a silken, seductive whisper that said

—
Rix—

He felt the voice in his bones. Wind swirled around him, caressing his face like cold fingers.

—
Rix—

Leaves danced on the foyer's floor. The wind strengthened, and there was a suction that tried to pull him across the threshold. The eyes of the statues were fixed on him, the brass hands reaching toward him.

—
Rix—

"No," he heard himself say, as if speaking underwater. He grasped the door's oversized bronze handle and started to swing it shut. But the door was heavy and seemed to resist him. As he pushed against it, he thought he saw something move in the deep gloom near the marble fountain. It was a slow, sinuous movement, like an animal stretching. Then his eye lost it, and the door slammed shut with a dull
boom.

He abruptly turned away and descended the stairs, then slid behind the wheel of the Thunderbird. He was trembling, his stomach knotted with tension. Whom had he spoken to? he asked himself. What was in there, trying to lure him beyond the safety of the doorway? If the Lodge did have a voice, he decided, it was born of his own imagination and the moan of the wind roaming the long corridors and cavernous rooms.

He started the engine, and couldn't resist looking toward the Lodge again.

The front door was wide open.

He put the car into gear and sped along the driveway and back across the bridge.

RIX
ENTERED THE GATEHOUSE LIVING ROOM AND WENT TO THE
decanters to pour himself a stiff drink. As he splashed bourbon into a glass, he heard his mother say, "Where have you been?"

He turned toward her voice. She was sitting in her chair before the fireplace, wearing a white gown and a diamond necklace. Rix poured his drink and took a long swallow of it.

"Where have you been?" she asked again. "Off the estate?" "I was driving around." "Driving around
where?"
"Here and there. Who are Dad's visitors?" "General McVair and Mr. Meredith, from the plant. Don't change the subject. I don't think I like your sudden disappearances very much."

"Okay." He shrugged, trying to think of an excuse to pacify her. "I went to Asheville, to see a friend of mine from college. Then I drove by the Lodge." His hand was shaking as he lifted the glass to his mouth again. What had happened at the Lodge only a short while ago now seemed as vague and strange as an unsettling, half-remembered dream. He felt jittery and irritable, and all he could see in his mind was that open doorway, and beyond it the magnificence of the Lodge. "Where's Katt?" He'd noted that her pink Maserati was missing from the garage.

"She's driven into Asheville, too. Sometimes she has lunch with friends."

"So it's all right for her to leave, but I can't. Right?"

"I can't understand your comings and goings," she said, watching him carefully. "You say you drove by the Lodge? Why?"

"Jesus! What is this, an inquisition? Yes, I drove by the Lodge. No special reason. I saw Boone over there, too. He was prowling around inside with a flashlight."

Margaret turned her attention to the small flames that flickered in the hearth. "He loves the Lodge," she told him. "He's said so a hundred times. He goes inside to walk the hallways. But I've warned him about the Lodge, Rix. I've told him . . . not to trust the Lodge
too
much."

Rix finished his drink and put the glass aside. "Not to trust it? What do you mean?"

"I meant what I said," she replied evenly. "I've warned him that someday . . . someday the Lodge is not going to let him come out again."

"The Lodge isn't alive," Rix said—but he recalled the imagined aromas and sounds, the faint whisper of his own name like someone beckoning him in, the dark form that had moved near the marble fountain. What would have happened, he wondered, if he had continued into the Lodge? Would that door have swung shut behind him? Would the rooms have lengthened and twisted crazily out of shape, as they had when he was a child?

She sat for a moment as if she hadn't heard. Then she said softly, "I loved the Lodge, too. Walen and I lived there during Erik's last days. That was a terrible time, but still . . . I thought the Lodge was the most beautiful house on earth. Walen warned me not to go off alone in the Lodge, but I was a stupid, headstrong girl. I decided to explore it by myself. I went from one exquisite room to the next. I followed corridors that seemed to go on for miles. I took stairways that I'd never seen before— and never saw again." She looked up from the fire at him. "I was lost for ten hours, and I've never been so frightened in my life. It must have been awful for you, wandering in the dark. If Edwin hadn't found you . . . God only knows what might've happened."