Usher's Passing (3 page)

"Huh?" The cabbie frowned. He was a Rastafarian with red dreadlocks and amber eyes. "Where's that, mon?"

"Canal Street. On the corner of Greene."

"You got it, mon." He slammed the cab into gear, pressed his palm against the horn, and nosed into the afternoon traffic, letting out a curse when a Bloomingdale's delivery truck almost sideswiped him. He fought his way to Fifth Avenue and headed south through a sea of taxis, trucks, cars, and buses.

The man in the back seat loosened his tie and unfastened his collar button. He realized numbly that his hands were trembling. The sound of a curbside jackhammer pierced his brain, and he wished he'd had one more bourbon at La Cocotte, the small French restaurant where he'd just eaten lunch. One more might have smoothed out the kinks in his head. But he was going to be all right, he decided. He was a survivor, and he could take the bad news that had just been dished out to him.

The blast of a truck's horn behind the cab almost startled him out of his skin. His head had started throbbing like the raw ache of a rotten tooth. A bad sign. He gripped his thighs and sat stiff-spined, trying to concentrate on the steady tick of the cab's meter. He found himself staring fixedly at an earring the cabbie wore—a tiny skeleton wearing a top hat, dangling from the Rasta's left lobe. It danced back and forth with the cab's jerky motion.

I'm getting worse, the man told himself.

"You're a professional, Rix," Joan Rutherford had told him less than an hour before at La Cocotte. "And it's not the end of the world, anyway." She was a sturdy woman with dyed black hair, and she chain-smoked Kools through a discolored ivory cigarette holder. One of the foremost literary agents in the business, she had handled his three previous horror novels and had just delivered the jarring truth about his fourth effort. "I can't see any future for
Bedlam,
not the way it's constructed now. It's too episodic, there are too many characters, and it's hard as hell to follow what's happening. Stratford House likes you, Rix, and they want to publish your next book, but I don't think it's going to be this one."

"What do you propose I do? Toss the book into the trashcan after I've spent over sixteen months working on it? The damned thing is almost six hundred pages long!" He had heard the note of pleading in his voice, and stopped until he could control himself again. "I've done four rewrites on it, Joan. I can't just throw it away!"

"Bedlam
isn't the best you can do, Rix." Joan Rutherford looked at him with her level blue gaze, and he felt a trickle of sweat under his left armpit. "You've got characters crawling out of the woodwork, a little psychic blind boy who can see into the past or something, and a crazy doctor who carves people up in an apartment house basement. I still can't figure out what was going on. You've got a six-hundred-page novel that reads like a telephone directory, Rix."

The food he'd eaten lay like sawdust in the pit of his stomach. Sixteen months. Four agonizing rewrites. His last book, a moderate best-seller titled
Fire Fingers,
had been published by Stratford House three years before. The money he'd made from it was all gone. The movie deals had dried up and blown away. An iron band of pressure had settled across the back of his neck, and he'd begun having nightmares in which his father's voice told him with relish that he had been born to fail.

"Okay," Rix had said, staring into his second bourbon. "What am I supposed to do now?"

"You put
Bedlam
away and start on another book."

"Easily said."

"Oh, come on!" Joan stabbed out her cigarette in the little ceramic ashtray. "You're a big boy now, you can take it! If pros run into problems, they just backtrack and start again."

Rix had nodded and smiled grimly. His soul felt like a graveyard.

In the three years since his best-seller, he'd tried writing several different books—had even gone to Wales to do research on an idea that hadn't panned out—but the plots had collapsed like houses of cards. When he'd found himself sitting in an Atlanta bar, pondering a
Fire Fingers
sequel, he'd known he was in trouble. The idea for
Bedlam
had come to him in a nightmare of shadowy corridors, distorted faces, and corpses hanging on hooks. Halfway into the writing, it had come apart like so much flimsy cloth. But to give it up after all this time! To strike the scenes and sets like tawdry cardboard, to cut the characters off from the umbilical of his imagination and let them perish! It seemed as cold as murder. Joan Rutherford had said "start on another book" as if it were as simple as changing clothes. He was afraid he could never finish another book. He felt wrung out by useless exercises of the mind, and he could no longer rely on his instinct to plot out decent stories. His health was continuing to weaken, and in him now was a fear he'd never experienced before—fear of success, fear of failure, fear of simply taking a chance. Over the tumult that raged within him he could hear the mocking note of his father's laughter.

"Why don't you try some short pieces?" Joan had asked as she signaled for the check. "I might be able to get something placed in
Playboy
or
Penthouse.
And you know I've said many times that using your real name might be a help, too,"

"I thought you agreed Jonathan Strange was a good pen name."

"It is, but why not capitalize on your family name, Rix? There's no harm in letting people know you're descended from the Ushers that Poe wrote about. I think it'd be a plus, particularly in the horror genre."

"You know I don't like to do short stories. They don't interest me."

"Does your career interest you?" Joan had asked, too sharply. "If you want to be a writer, you write." She'd produced an American Express card and given it to the waiter after carefully going over the check. Then she'd narrowed her eyes as if looking at Rix Usher for the first time. "You didn't eat very much of your lunch. You look like you've lost some weight since the last time I saw you. Aren't you feeling well?"

"I'm okay," he'd lied.

When the check was paid, Joan had said she'd mail the manuscript back to him in Atlanta. He stayed behind, nursing his drink, as she left the restaurant. The slash of light that came in when she opened the door stung his eyes, though the mid-October day was heavily overcast.

One more drink. Down the hatch. Time to go.

Near Washington Square, the cabbie said, "Shit, looka that!"

A maniac was playing a violin in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

The Rasta leaned on his horn, and Rix Usher felt its treble scream like sandpaper on his spine.

The mad violinist—a stoop-shouldered elderly man in a long black coat—continued to saw at his instrument, snarling traffic in the intersection.

"Hey, freak!" the cabbie yelled from his window. "Get outta the way, mon!" He slammed his hand against the horn and sank his foot to the floor. The cab jerked forward, inches away from the violinist, who closed his eyes and kept right on playing.

Another cab suddenly spurted into the intersection, swerved to avoid the madman, and was sides wiped by a
Times
delivery van. The second cab, with a shouting Italian at the wheel, missed the violinist by less than a foot and plowed into the Rastafarian's left front fender.

Both cabbies leaped from their vehicles and began screaming at each other and at the lunatic. Rix sat frozen, his nerves jangling. His headache had turned vicious; the voices of the drivers, the blare of horns, and the violin's dissonant wail were for him a symphony of pain. His fists clenched so tightly that his fingernails cut into the flesh of his palms. I'll be all right, he told himself. Just need to stay calm. Stay calm. Stay—

There was a noise like a sizzle of grease, followed by the sound of a fingernail drawn slowly down a blackboard. The sounds repeated twice more before Rix realized what it was.

Rain.

Rain hitting the windshield, rolling down the glass.

His pores began leaking oily sweat.

"You crazy old fart!" the Italian shouted as the violinist played on. Rain started peppering down, plunking off roofs and hoods and windshields of vehicles caught at the intersection.

Hey, you! I'm talkin' to you!"

"Who's payin' for my cab, mon!" the Rastafarian demanded from
the other driver. "You hit my cab, you pay for it!"

Rix heard raindrops strike the roof above him like cannon-balls. Every blast of a horn felt like an icepick inserted more deeply into his ear. His heart throbbed mercilessly, and as the rain
popped and sizzled along the windshield, he knew he would lose his mind if he stayed in this maelstrom of noise. Beyond the drumming thunder of the rain he heard another sound—a deep, basso booming that was getting louder and louder, more terribly out of control. Rix put his hands to his ears, his eyes burning with tears of pain, but the booming noise was like a hammer striking the top of his head. A chorus of car horns pierced him. The razor-blade siren of an approaching police car slashed at his nerves. He realized the booming noise was his own heartbeat, and
he was one breath away from panic's edge.

With a moan of pain and terror, Rix leaped out of the cab and started running through the rain toward the sidewalk. "Hey!" the Rastafarian shouted, in a voice that gripped the back of Rix's neck like a steel claw. "What about my goddamn fare, mon!"

Rix ran on, his head pounding, the sound of his runaway heartbeat dogging his steps. Rain on awnings along the sidewalks sounded like artillery explosions. He slipped on the remnants of a Danish and went down against a wire-mesh trash container, tipping it and spilling its contents all over the curb. Black motes spun before his eyes, and suddenly the dim gray light was so harsh he had to squint to see; gray buildings shimmered with light, the wet gray sidewalk glistened like a reflecting mirror. He tried to rise and skidded in trash, blinded by the riotous colors of cars, signs, people's clothing and skin. An orange scrawl of graffiti on the side of a city bus dazzled him senseless, like something from an alien world; a multicolored umbrella opened in the steady drizzle radiated laser beams of pain; the electric-white
WALK
at the corner seared into his eyes. When some well-meaning pedestrian tried to help Rix to his feet, Rix shrieked and pulled away; the man's hand on his shoulder had seemed to burn right down through the tweed to his flesh.

The Quiet Room—he had to get to the Quiet Room!

Bombarded from all sides by light, color, and noise, Rix struggled up and ran like a wild animal; he felt the pulse of human body heat as if the people around him were walking furnaces, and added to his own tumultuous heartbeat were theirs—a universe of heartbeats, functioning at different rhythms and intensities. When he screamed, his voice repeated itself in his he over and over again, like a crazy taped echo-loop. He ran across the street as blinding yellow, red, green, and blue shapes wailed around him, snorting at his heels. Tripping over a curb, he ripped his sleeve and scraped his knee, and as a vague glowing figure with a thundering heartbeat paused over him, he screamed not to be touched.

The rain fell harder, hitting the pavement around him with the sound of crashing boulders flung from a catapult. Each drop that hit his face, hair, or hands seemed to blister his skin like caustic acid. He had no choice but to keep running, half-blinded, south toward the safety of the De Peyser Hotel.

Finally, against the white glare of the pulsing sky loomed the Gothic spire of the De Peyser Hotel; its windows streamed and seethed with reflected light, and the tattered red awning above the hotel's Greene Street entrance shouted at Rix's ravaged senses. As he ran across the street, the screech of brakes and the horrendous cacophony of horns brought another scream of anguish from him, but he dared not slow his pace. His hands clasped to his ears, he threw himself into the De Peyser's revolving door and then across the long, moldy-smelling lobby with its garish carpet of red and gold interlocking circles. Heedless of whoever might be watching, Rix punched the button for the single elevator again and again, each contact of flesh and plastic bringing a scorch of pain. He could hear gears turning far above, the thick slapping of cables as the elevator descended. When it came, Rix stepped inside and punched the door shut before anyone else could enter. He depressed the button for the eighth floor, the De Peyser's highest level.