Usher's Passing (55 page)

"When Dad signs everything over to me," Katt said quietly, "I'm going to give you and Boone a yearly allowance of a million dollars. Mom will get five million a year. She can stay in the Gatehouse if she likes. So can Boone. I'm planning on living in New York. I wanted to tell you what I intend to do, because I'm not cutting anyone out. You can write pretty damned comfortably on a million a year."

"Yes," he replied tonelessly. "I guess I can."

"Bring the stuff to me, Rix. I need it."

Why not? he thought. Why not cook it for her and jam the needle in her vein? If she wanted to kill herself, why not help her? But he shook his head. "No. I'm sorry. I won't do it."

"I don't know what you're trying to prove—but you're not proving it."

"I don't know, either," he said, and left the room so her tormented, desperate stare wouldn't drive him insane.

In his bedroom, he ordered Puddin' out. She whined to stay, then cursed him when he shut the door in her face. He took the metal box from beneath the bed and flushed the heroin down the toilet.

He looked at himself, by candlelight, in the bathroom mirror. Since he'd returned to Usherland, the lines around his mouth and in the corners of his eyes had faded dramatically. His eyes were clearer than they'd been in years. There was color in his cheeks. His premature aging had seemed to reverse itself in the space of only a few days. Even his hair shone with new vitality.

But his face unsettled him. It was like looking at another face that had gathered around the bones—the face of someone who'd been lurking within his flesh and was finally emerging into the light.

It was the composite, he realized, of the faces in the library's oil paintings. Hudson, Aram, Ludlow, Erik—they had merged within him like a dark stranger in his soul. They lived inside him, and no matter how hard he fought against their influence, he could never really banish them. Didn't he deserve some of that ten billion dollars just for being born an Usher?

He didn't want Katt's handouts, he told himself. There was no way she could handle the pressure of Usher Armaments—not with a drug problem and a death wish! She was trying to buy his silence and cooperation. But maybe she could be persuaded that she needed an advisor?

My God! he thought, shocked at the turns his mind was taking. No! I'm my own man! I don't need any blood money!

Ten billion dollars. All the money in the world. Someone would always make the weapons. And, as Edwin had said, the Usher name was a deterrent to war.

Rix took off his jeans and stepped into the shower. When he'd finished, he dressed in a pair of dark blue pants and a white shirt from his closet. He chose a gray cardigan sweater—one of the new items that Margaret had provided for him—and put it on. The buttons were burnished silver, and were stamped with the Usher coat of arms.

He went downstairs to continue his research in the library. His mind was still confused, torn between the opposite poles of idealism and reality. The past seemed the only safe place to hide.

It was the future that he dreaded.

I'VE KILLED MY OWN SON, THE MOUNTAIN KING HAD SAID.

New Tharpe sat in the clinic's waiting room with the old man's cane across his knees. On the other side of the room, Raven was using the pay phone, and Myra Tharpe sat in a corner and hadn't moved for almost an hour.

New stared at his mother. Conflicting emotions raged inside him. She hadn't wanted Nathan to be found. The men who'd gone out searching hadn't really wanted to find him, either. Nathan had been a sacrifice to the Pumpkin Man, like all the other children who'd disappeared over the years. But
could
the Pumpkin Man send an earthquake to destroy Briartop if he was denied? Was there a way to destroy him, or would he have the run of the mountain forever? His mother was afraid. He could smell her fear, as sour as buttermilk.
Stretch,
he ordered her mentally, and pictured it in his mind.

She hesitated for a couple of seconds, then stretched like a marionette on a string. When she was through, she sat exactly as before. Her lank hair hung down and obscured half of her face.

New turned his attention to Raven Dunstan.
Scratch your head,
he commanded.

She glanced at him, but was engrossed in her conversation. Her left hand casually came up and scratched the back of her scalp.

Was there any limit to the magic? he wondered. He thought of the knife rising from the tangle of thorns; of the lamp lifting from the mantel; of the blue wall of stones that had protected him from Greediguts; of his mother, sitting with her hands clasped in the truck on the ride down to Foxton. If this magic had been in him from birth, as the Mountain King seemed to believe, then New thought it might have been unlocked by his rage in the thorn pit. There had never been a reason for him to need the magic before that day—and now he realized that if the Pumpkin Man had not taken Nathan, he might never have been aware of what lay dormant in his mind.

And if what the Mountain King had told him was true, then New was descended from a line of warlocks and witches that stretched back hundreds of years.

The old man, dying now in a room down the corridor, was his grandfather.

The comets had fallen on the Fourth of July, when he was ten years old, the Mountain King had told him and Raven. Lizbeth had been six, and the year was 1919. The comets had shrieked down from the sky, their blasts shaking the cabin. Shocked from sleep, he'd run out to the front porch and seen the surrounding forest on fire. His father was shouting that they had to gather up what they could and flee. A red streak flashed overhead, and when the explosion tore trees from the ground, the boy who would later be called the Mountain King knew the end of the world had come.

His mother put Lizbeth in his arms and told him to get away, then ran back in to help her husband. Holding his sister tightly, the boy ran from the house through the flaming woods as Lizbeth cried in terror. There was a high, piercing wail that grew deafeningly loud. He looked back and saw the figures of his mother and father coming out of the cabin.

And then there was a blinding flash of fire and the cabin exploded, timbers spinning through the air. Something hit him in the face, knocking him on his back as the hot Shockwave swept past. His next memory was of Lizbeth's hair and night clothes on fire, and himself trying to put out the flames with his hands. His hands were covered with blood, and when his sister saw his face, she screamed.

He couldn't remember how they'd gotten to the ruins. It might have been hours or days later that they huddled together in the stone structure that would become their home. His father had brought him up here and told him the story of his family's past, and the boy remembered how quiet it was, how desolate, how no one else would come up here because it was thought to be a haunted place.

Lizbeth was badly burned. Her mind had slipped away, and most of the time she sat crouched in a corner, rocking herself and crying. He was half blind, tormented by pain, fearful of every noise in the woods. But later—and how much later he didn't know—he left Lizbeth and went down the mountain to where their home had stood. Only a pile of rubble remained. He went through the ashes, found a few scraps of clothes that he and Lizbeth could wear, a pair of his father's boots, a few cans of food that had survived—and his father's charred corpse. The only thing recognizable about it was the gold tooth at the front of his father's skull. Clutched in one hand was the crooked walking stick that had been carved from a piece of hickory by his great-great-grandfather. The stick, though badly scorched, had withstood the fire. It had been passed from generation to generation, his father had told him, and contained within it was both his ancestor's rage and the love he'd felt for the girl in the valley. It was an awesome thing that had to be handled carefully, for it held depths of power that were as yet unfathomed.

He worked the stick loose from the corpse's grasp, and returned to the ruins. Soon afterward, his injured eye hardened and rolled out of his head like a gray pebble. His wounds puckered and scarred. He returned one day from gathering firewood to find Lizbeth playing with the stick. Her trance had broken, but the only thing she recalled was the shriek of the falling comets.

As the years passed, blurring and merging with each other, they rarely left the ruins. They grew closer; their love changed from that of a brother and sister, though the Mountain King couldn't say when or how it had happened.

In May of 1931, Lizbeth delivered a baby boy—her only infant that hadn't been born dead or miscarried. She was eighteen, and the Mountain King was twenty-two. In the autumn of that year, Lizbeth was seen with her baby at a creek near the ruins. Before a week was out, the sheriff came up the mountain and found them.

New could imagine how they'd appeared: an emaciated, filthy man and girl in rags, the infant playing on the littered floor. The sheriff had called the county seat to find out what to do, and some people came to take the child to a state home.

The Mountain King had said he almost killed them; he could have, he said. It would have been easy. But deep in his heart, he knew the baby would be better off. The state people tried to coax them down from the mountain, but neither would leave. They took the child away in a brown Ford after promising to bring them food and clothes, but as far as the Mountain King knew, those people never set foot on Briartop again.

But, New wondered, why had his father chosen to settle on the mountain after growing up in the state home? Had the place of his birth been rooted somehow in his subconscious? Had he been drawn back to it because he sensed the same evil that the Mountain King now said held sway over Usherland? New remembered what his mother had told him about his father's nightmares: he saw the end of the world in his mind. Was it some kind of dim ancestral memory of the coven's destruction? He'd never know for sure; but whatever had been calling his father was now beckoning to him, from Usher's Lodge. What lay in wait for him, inside that house? And what would happen to him if he dared face it?

"New," Raven said, breaking the boy's chain of thought. She stood next to his chair, her notepad in hand. "My father verified the old man's story. On the Fourth of July, 1919, Erik Usher fired cannons at Briartop Mountain; the falling shells were what the Mountain King called comets. The fire destroyed a dozen cabins and killed at least seventeen people." She consulted the notes she'd written down. "There was a list of the dead and missing in the July tenth issue of the
Democrat.
A couple named Ben and Orchid Hartley were killed—but their children, named Elizabeth and Oren, were never found."

"Oren Hartley," New said. "That's his name, isn't it?"

"I think so. There's no way to verify his story of the baby, though, unless we talk to someone at the state orphanage. The sheriffs records may show something—though I doubt it."

"Do you believe him?"

Raven nodded. "Yes, I do. Why would he invent it? I think Oren Hartley is your grandfather. The rest of the story . . . I don't know. I've seen those figures burned into the walls up at the ruins. I've seen what the Mountain King can do. But . . . I still can't make my mind to accept it, New. I've always thought of witches, warlocks, and magic wands as superstitious folklore." She frowned, looking at the stick across the boy's knees. "He said . . . you were like him. What did he mean?"

New took a deep breath, held it for a second, and then let it leak out. He put his hands around the stick and looked across the room at the pay phone.

Raven saw the boy's green eyes brighten vividly. A vein pulsed rhythmically at his right temple. He was immobile, shutting out everything except what he was concentrating upon.

Raven heard something clicking behind her, and she turned toward the sound.

The pay phone's dial was spinning. There was a metallic snap, and a few quarters tumbled out of the coin-return slot, jingling to the floor.

New directed his attention somewhere else. A white ceramic ashtray on a table near the door leaped up and clattered down. Magazines jumped, their pages flapping. A trashcan whirled like a top, balanced on its rim. The chairs in the room started hopping, leapfrogging over each other. The telekinetic display went on for more than a minute before the objects were still again. Then New looked up calmly at Raven.

Her face was ashen. "Oh," she said softly.

"It's been inside me all this time," New told her, "but I never needed it until I fell into the thorns. Maybe it was in Nathan, too. I don't know." His composed expression suddenly cracked, and Raven had a glimpse, of the scared little boy underneath. "I feel like my insides are on fire," he said. "I think . . . I can do anything I want to do.
Anything.
I could make you dance if I wanted to. I could crack the walls of this place wide open. I'm scared, because . . . I'm not sure I know how to control it. All I have to do . . . is want something to happen. If I want it hard enough, it does."