Usher's Passing (5 page)

"Well." Boone reached inside his coat and brought out a first-class Delta ticket to Asheville. He dropped it onto the table. "I've seen you and said what I was supposed to. That's from Momma. She thought just maybe you'd have enough heart to come see Daddy on his deathbed. If you don't, I guess that's your little red wagon." He walked to the door, then stopped and turned back. The hot light had returned to his eyes, and there was a curl to his mouth. "Yeah, you run on back to Atlanta, Rixy," he said. "Go on back to that fantasy world of yours. Shit, you're even startin' to look like somethin' out of the grave. I'll tell Momma not to expect you." He left the room and closed the door behind him. His lizardskin boots clumped away along the corridor.

Rix sat staring at the plastic skeleton across the room. It grinned at him like an old friend, the familiar symbol of death from a thousand horror movies Rix had seen. The skeleton in a closet. Bones buried under the floor. A skull in a hatbox. A skeletal hand reaching out from beneath a bed. Uneasy bones, digging free from the grave.

My father's dying, he thought. No, no; Walen Usher was too stubborn to give in to death. He and death were friends of long standing. They had a gentlemen's agreement. "The business" kept death's stomach swollen—why should it bite its feeder's hand?

Rix picked up the airline ticket. It was for a flight leaving around one the next afternoon. Walen dying? He'd known his father's condition had been deteriorating for the past six months, but
dying
? He felt numbed, stranded between a shout and a sob. He'd never gotten along with his father; they'd been strangers to each other for years. Walen Usher was the kind of man who insisted that his children make appointments to see him. He had kept his sons and daughter on short leashes—until Rix gnawed himself loose, earning his father's undying hatred.

He wasn't even sure if he loved his father, wasn't sure if he even knew what love felt like anymore.

Rix knew that Boone had always been a great practical joker. "Dad's not dying," he told the skeleton. "It's just a story to get me back there." The plastic bones offered a grin, but no advice. As he stared at the thing, he saw the cab driver's skeleton earring swinging back and forth in his mind. His skin crawled, and he had to call maid service to get the thing out because he couldn't force himself to touch it.

He made a second call, to Usherland's Gatehouse in North Carolina.

Four hundred miles away, a maid answered, "Usher residence."

"Edwin Bodane. Tell him it's Rix."

"Yes sir. Just a minute, please."

Rix waited. He was feeling better now. He'd been overdue for an attack; the last one had hit him in the middle of the night a week ago, when he was listening to a record from his collection of jazz albums in his Atlanta apartment. After it was over and he could move again, he'd broken the record to fragments, thinking that the music might have helped trigger it. He'd read somewhere that certain chord progressions, tones, and vibrations could cause a physical response.

The attacks, he knew, were symptoms of a condition called—in several medical journals—Usher's Malady. There was no cure. If his father was dying, it was the advanced stage of Usher's Malady that was killing him.

"Master Rix!" the warm, refined, slightly sandpapery voice said from North Carolina. "Where are you?"

"In New York. At the De Peyser." Hearing Edwin's voice had released a bounty of good memories for Rix. He visualized the man standing tall in his Usher uniform of gray blazer and dark blue slacks with creases so sharp you could slice your hand on them. He'd always felt closer to Edwin and Cass Bodane than to his own parents.

"Do you want to speak to your—"

"No. I don't want to talk to anybody else. Edwin, Boone was here a little while ago. He told me Dad's condition is worse. Is that true?"

"Your father's health is deteriorating rapidly," Edwin said. "I'm sure Boone told you how much your mother wants you to come home."

"I don't want to come. You know why."

There was a pause. Then, "Mr. Usher asks for you every day." He lowered his voice. "I wish you'd come home, Rix. He needs you."

Rix couldn't suppress a strangled, nervous laugh. "He's never needed me before now!"

"No. You're wrong. Your father's always needed you, and now more than ever."

Rix paused, torn by emotional crosscurrents. He'd fought for a life of his own, apart from the Usher clan. Why should he expose himself to the mental games that would now be in motion within Usherland's gates?

"He needs you, Rix," Edwin said softly. "Don't turn your back on your family."

The truth sank in before he could block it out: Walen Usher, patriarch of the powerful Usher clan and perhaps the wealthiest man in America, was on his deathbed. Even though his feelings about the man were tied into tormented knots, Rix knew he should attend his father's passing. He asked Edwin to meet him at the airport when his flight arrived, then hung up before he could change his mind. He would stay at Usherland for a few days, he told himself. No longer. Then he had to get back to Atlanta, to get his own life in order, somehow come up with another idea and get to work on it before his entire writing career collapsed under the weight of lethargy.

A Hispanic maintenance man with bags under his eyes came up to the room. He was expecting another dead rat, and was relieved when Rix told him to take the plastic skeleton away.

Rix lay down and tried to sleep. His mind was disturbed by images of Usherland: the dark forests of his childhood, where nightmarish creatures were said to stalk through the undergrowth; the looming mountains black against an orange-streaked sky, clouds snagged like gray pennants on their rocky peaks; and the Lodge—it always came back to the Lodge—immense and dark and silent, holding its secrets like a closed fist.

A skeleton with bleeding eye sockets swung slowly through his mind's eye, and he sat up in the leaden light.

A recurring idea had snapped on in his brain again. It was the same idea that had sent him to Wales, the same idea that had made him enter genealogy rooms in libraries from New York to Atlanta, in search of the Usher name in half-forgotten record books. Sometimes he thought he could do it, if he really wanted to; at other times he realized it would be a hell of a lot of work, probably for nothing.

Maybe now
is the time, he told himself. Yes. He certainly needed a
project, and he was going back to Usherland anyway. A
smile
flickered across his mouth; he could hear Walen's shout of
outrage
over four hundred miles.

Rix went into the bathroom for a glass of water, then picked up the copy of
Rolling Stone
that Boone had folded and left on the tiles. When he took it back to bed to read, the fist-sized tarantula that Boone had carefully wrapped up within it dropped onto his chest, scuttling wildly across his shoulder.

Rix leaped
out of bed, trying to get the thing off him. The attack that
crashed over him like a black tidal wave drove him into the
protection of the Quiet Room. With the door closed, no one could
hear him scream.

Boone had always been a great practical joker.

"Tell me a story," the little boy asked his father. "Something scary, okay?"

"Something scary," the man repeated, and mused for a moment. Outside the boy's window, the darkness was complete except for the moon's grinning orb. The boy could see it over his father's shoulder—and to him it looked like a rotting Jack-o'-lantern in a black Halloween field where no one dares to walk.

His father leaned closer toward the bed. "Okay," he said, and the low light gleamed in his glasses. "I'll tell you a story about a dying king in his castle, and the king's children, and all the kings that came before them. It may go off in different directions and try to trick you. It may not end like you want it to .. . but that's the way this story is. And the scariest thing about it—the
most
scariest thing—is that it might be true . . . or it might not be. Ready?"

And the boy smiled, unaware.

—
The Night Is Not Ours
by Jonathan Strange, Stratford House, 1978

AS
RIX
WALKED OFF THE DELTA JET AND INTO THE AIRPORT TERMINAL
seven miles south of Asheville, he saw Edwin Bodane's head
above the group of people who'd come to meet other passengers. Edwin stood six feet four, aristocratically thin, and was
definitely hard to miss. He grinned like an excited child and rushed over to embrace Rix—who didn't fail to catch the almost imperceptible wince on Edwin's face when he saw how much Rix had aged in the past year.

"Master Rix, Master Rix!" Edwin said. His accent was old-blood Southern and as dignified as polished silver. "You look—"

"Like hell on a Popsicle stick. But you look great, Edwin. How's Cass?"

"She's as fine as ever. Getting feistier with the years, I'm afraid." He tried to take the garment bag that Rix was carrying, but Rix waved him off. "Did you bring any more luggage?"

"Just a suitcase. I don't plan on staying very long."

They stopped at the baggage check for the suitcase, then walked out into the cool breeze and sunlight of a beautiful October afternoon. At the curb was a new limo, a maroon Lincoln Continental with tinted windows and a sunroof. The Usher passions included mechanical as well as thoroughbred horsepower. Rix stored his luggage in the cavernous trunk and sat on the front seat, seeing no need to ride separated from Edwin by a plate of Plexiglas. Edwin put on a pair of wire-rimmed sunglasses and then they were off, driving away from the airport and toward the dramatic line of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Edwin had always reminded Rix of a character in a favorite tale—Ichabod Crane in Washington Irving's Headless Horseman story. No matter how precise the cut of his gray blazer, Edwin's wrists always jutted from the coatsleeves. He had a beak of a nose that Boone said a hat could be hung from. His softly seamed face was square-jawed and held luminous, kindly blue-gray eyes. Under the black chauffeur's cap that he wore was
a lofty forehead topped by a fragile crown of white hair. His large ears—true masterpieces of sculptured flesh—again invited comparisons to Irving's poor schoolmaster. In his eyes was the dreamy expression of a boy who still longed to join the circus, though Edwin Bodane was in his late sixties. He'd been born into service to the Usher family, continuing the long tradition of the Bodanes who'd acted as confidants to the Usher patriarchs. Wearing his gray blazer with gleaming silver buttons and the Usher emblem of a silver lion's head on the jacket pocket, his dark trousers carefully pressed, his black bow tie in place and his oxfords spit-shined, Edwin looked every inch the chief of staff of Usherland.

Behind that comical, unassuming face, Rix knew, was an intelligent mind that could organize anything from simple housekeeping duties to a banquet for two hundred people. Edwin and Cass had the responsibility of overseeing a small army of maids, laundry staff, groundskeepers, stable help, and cooks, though Cass preferred to do most of the cooking for the family herself. They were answerable only to Walen Usher.

"Master Rix, Master Rix!" Edwin repeated, relishing the sound of those words. "It's so good to have you home again!" He frowned slightly, and immediately tempered his enthusiasm. "Of course . . . I'm sorry you have to return under these circumstances."