Usher's Passing (39 page)

"What are you doing?" Walen asked finally. "Tearing the library apart?"

"No. I didn't think you'd mind if I went inside and looked around."

"I
do
mind! Edwin was a fool to let you in there without asking me first!"

"Why? Are you trying to hide something?"

"Those documents in there . . . are very fragile. I don't want them disturbed. Before I 'got sick,' as you put it, I was reading through some materials for a business project."

Rix frowned, puzzled. "What do family documents have to do with a project for Usher Armaments?"

"It's nothing that concerns you. But since you ask about Simms, I'll tell you; I haven't hidden anything. Simms was my younger brother, yes. He was retarded. He died when he was a child. That's the end of it."

"How did he die? Natural causes?"

"Yes. No . . . wait. It had something to do with the woods. I haven't thought of Simms in a long time, and it's hard for me to recall things. Simms died in the woods. He was killed by an animal. Yes, that's it. Simms wandered into the woods, and a wild animal killed him."

"What kind of animal?"

"I don't know. That was a long time ago. What does it matter now?"

Why indeed? Rix thought, then said, "I don't suppose it does."

"Simms was retarded," Walen repeated. "He liked to chase butterflies, but he'd never catch the damned things. I remember . . . when they brought what was left of him to the Lodge. I saw the body before Father pushed me away. There were flowers clutched in his hand. Yellow dandelions. He was picking
flowers
when the animal jumped him! I remember how much Mother cried. Father locked himself in his study. Well . . . that was a long time ago."

Rix was disappointed. There was no mystery about Simms's death, after all. Walen had never mentioned Simms because it was obvious he'd never fully recognized his younger brother as a human being, just as a retarded simpleton who was picking flowers when he was killed.

"I called you up here," Walen said, "because I want to announce something to the family through you. At breakfast you will inform them that there will be no more electric lights burning in this house. All electric appliances will be cut back as much as possible. I can't control the sound of the wind, or of heartbeats or of goddamned rats scratching in the walls—but sometimes I can hear electrical current running through the wires. Twice today it happened. The sound grates on every bone in my body. Do you understand?"

"I know they won't like it."

"I don't care what they like or don't like!" he hissed. "While I'm alive, I'm still the head of this house! Do you understand?"

"Yeah," he said.

"Good. Then do it. You can go now."

Feeling like a dismissed servant, Rix started to thread his way through the darkness to the door; but then he stopped and turned toward Walen again.

"What is it?"

"I'll do the favor for you if you'll do one for me. I'd like to know about Boone's talent agency."

"His talent agency? What about it?"

"That's what I'm asking. You put up the money for it. What does the agency
do?"

"It contracts and hires out talent. What do you think?"

Rix smiled thinly behind the two surgical masks. "What kind of talent? Actors? Singers? Dancers?"

"That's business between Boone and myself, and none of your concern."

Rix's senses sharpened. Walen's evasiveness told him he was walking on forbidden ground, and he was determined to find out why. "Is it something so bad you don't want anyone else knowing?" he asked. "What's brother Boone into? Pornography?"

"I said you can go now," Walen rasped irritably.

It dawned on Rix that whatever Boone was doing, Walen didn't want Katt or Margaret knowing. Maybe that was another reason Puddin' wasn't allowed to leave the estate—not only did she know too much about the Usher family, she had learned what Boone's talent agency did. "I can find out from Puddin'," he said calmly. "And I'm sure Mom would like to hear all about it." He started toward the door again.

"Wait."

He paused. "Well?"

"You've always despised Boone, haven't you?" Walen whispered. "Why? Because he's got more guts than ten of
you?
You've brought me nothing but shame. Even when you were a boy, I saw how spineless you were." The cold cruelty in his father's voice stabbed Rix. His stomach tightened in his effort to inure himself to the pain of Walen's contempt. "You never fought back. You let Boone step on you like a piece of dogshit. Oh, I
watched
you. I know. Now you've got hate festering in you, and you don't know how to let it out, so you want to hurt
me.
You never were anything, and you never—"

Rix stepped forward. Anger shattered his tense self-control. His face flamed, and he almost shouted, but at the last second he clenched his teeth together. "You know, Dad," he said in a barely checked whisper, "I've always thought the Gatehouse looked great all lit up. I could probably go from room to room right now and make this house shine like a Christmas tree."

Shame stabbed at him, but he couldn't stop himself, nor at the moment did he want to; he had to go on, to fight back, cruelty against cruelty. "Think of all that electricity running through the wires! Wouldn't that be great? Have you taken your tranquilizers lately, Dad?"

"You wouldn't do it. You haven't got the courage."

"I'm sorry"—Rix raised his voice to a normal speaking level, and Walen convulsed—"I didn't hear that. The agency. What does it do?" There were tears of rage in his eyes, and his heart was hammering.
"Tell me!"

"Quiet! Oh God!" Walen moaned.

Rix mouthed the words with slow exaggeration: "Tell me."

"Your . . . brother . . . contracts performers. Entertainers . . . for shows."

"What kind of shows?"

Walen suddenly lifted his head from the pillow. His body was trembling violently. "Sideshows!" he said. "Boone's agency . . . finds freaks for carnival sideshows!
Get out! Get out of my sight!"

Rix had already found the door. He stumbled on the stairs in the darkness, and almost fell. Mrs. Reynolds was waiting in the corridor with her newly lit candelabra, and as Rix tore the masks off his face he told her she could return to the Quiet Room, that his father had finished with him.

When she was gone, Rix leaned against the wall, fighting nausea. His temples were aching violently, and he pressed the palms of his hands against them.

What he had just done repulsed him. He felt unclean, tainted by Walen's decay. It was something, he realized, that Walen himself might have done, or Erik, or any of the Usher men who'd gone before them. But he wasn't like them! Dear God, he
wasn't!

It took a few minutes for the sickness to pass. The headache lingered longer, then slowly faded away.

Left within him was a cold, unaccustomed excitement.

It was a new-found sensation of power.

Rix breathed deeply of the reeking air, and then he moved away into the darkness.

GRAY CLOUDS WERE SCUDDING ACROSS THE SUN AS RAVEN DUNSTAN
guided her stuttering Volkswagen up Briartop Mountain. An occasional strong gust of wind parted the trees and hit the car, and the tires slipped on a thick layer of decomposing leaves.

She'd found Clint Perry's house about an hour before, and told the man where she wanted to go. Perry—a lean, hawk-nosed man in overalls—had looked at her as if she were crazy. It was a long haul up there, he'd warned her, and the only road was so bad it had busted the bottom out of his truck when he'd gone up with Sheriff Kemp a couple of months before. Raven insisted that Perry draw her a map, and offered him twenty dollars to go with her, but he said—nervously, it seemed to Raven—that he had better things to do than to go running all over the mountain.

She'd already climbed well past the Tharpe house, passing other rundown shacks hidden in shadowy hollows. She came to the crossroads that Perry had indicated on the map, and took the road that branched off to the left. Almost at once the wheels of her car were being battered by potholes. The road reared up so steeply she was sure the car couldn't make it, but she fought the gears and was rewarded when the grade leveled off. To the left, through breaks in the forest, she could look over the side of Briartop onto Usherland. The chimneys and spires of Usher's Lodge speared through thin, low-lying clouds.

The torture to her car went on for another mile or more, and she cursed her stupidity at coming up here. Then, abruptly, she turned a wooded bend and the road stopped at a group of large boulders. A path snaked between the rocks and vanished into the forest.

Following the directions Perry had given her, Raven left her car and walked up the path. It was steep, and her leg was aching before she'd gone thirty yards. Coils of thorns curled from the woods; the vegetation on either side of the path was impenetrable. But then, at the crest of the rise, Raven caught her first glimpse of the ruined town that stood atop the mountain.

To call it a town, Raven realized, was a wild exaggeration. Perhaps it had been a small settlement of some kind more than a hundred years ago, but now all that remained were piles of stones, a jutting chimney here and there, and an occasional standing wall. A couple of stone structures were still mostly intact, but only one of those had any semblance of a roof, and the other had gaping holes in its walls. Oddly, the ruins were not overgrown with weeds, thorns, and kudzu vines; though a few straggly bushes had struggled up from the dark, bare earth, the ruins sat at the center of a clearing strewn with rocks. Even the sparse trees that had taken root around the ruins looked dead and petrified, their leafless branches frozen into weird angles. The place appeared desolate, totally deserted for many, many years.

Raven was cold; she lifted the collar of her corduroy jacket around her neck. If indeed an old man lived up here, she wondered, how in the world did he survive? Raven followed the path into the ruins. Her boots crunched on the brittle ground; she stopped, bent down, and scooped up a handful of earth.

Bits of glass glittered in her palm. She let the earth sift between her fingers, then stood up again. As she walked amid the ruins, Raven saw that most of the crumbling stones resembled lumps of coal. Sometime in the past, a fire of brutal heat had burned here. She moved aside fallen leaves with her foot, and looked down at clumps of glass in the ground.

And then she walked around to the far side of a standing wall, and stopped. On the black stones was the pale gray silhouette of a human being, arms splayed as if in impact with the wall. The body was contorted like a question mark. At the figure's feet was another shape, barely recognizable as a human being, lifting one arm as if in supplication.

A nearby jumble of loose stones caught her attention. She bent down carefully, because of the pain in her leg. One of the stones had a rusted nail driven into it. Another showed the outline of a hand and wrist.

Raven ran her fingers over the stone. She was reminded of pictures she'd seen in a book about Hiroshima. In those photos, outlines of the atomic bomb victims were left burned into walls— just as these figures were. Whatever had happened here, Raven thought uneasily, the results—the silhouettes, the black stones, the ground burned to clumps of glass—were uncannily similar.