Usher's Passing

Usher's Passing Page 12

NIGHT HAD DESCENDED OVER USHERLAND, AND WITH IT THE WIND had risen, sweeping down from the mountains and rattling the Gatehouse windows in their frames.

It was almost midnight when Rix left his bedroom, still clad in the suit he'd worn to dinner, and went downstairs. The corridor lights were on, pools of shadow standing around them like ink puddles. Wind whined around the house with the sound of angry hornets. Rix reached into his pocket and brought out the library key.

He went through the game room and the gentlemen's smoking room and stopped at the library door. The key fit easily into the lock, but the sound of the lock disengaging seemed loud enough to make him wince. As he stepped into the library and switched on the lights, the grandfather clock in the smoking room chimed the quarter hour.

It was one of the largest rooms in the house, its walls lined with book-packed shelves. On the hardwood floor lay a magnificent black and crimson Oriental rug, and from the high, oak-beamed ceiling hung a large wrought-iron chandelier. The library was furnished with several Black Angus-hide easy chairs, a black leather couch, an ornately carved walnut writing desk, and a worktable with a chair and green-shaded high-intensity lamp. Above a black marble fireplace hung the Usher coat of arms: three silver lions on a sable field, separated from one another by red diagonal bands called bendlets.

The room was permeated with the musty aroma of history. On the walls between the bookshelves hung oil portraits of the past masters of Usherland. Rix's grandfather - stocky, athletic Erik Usher - sat astride a beautiful chestnut stallion with the Lodge at his back. His reddish blond hair was pomaded and parted in the middle, his small dark eyes keen behind wire-rimmed spectacles, his mustache neatly trimmed. Across his knees lay the lion-headed cane.

Erik's father, Ludlow Usher, was blond and frail in the next portrait. He was depicted standing in a shadowy room, staring out one of the Lodge's windows toward the forest. He wore a black suit, and most of his pale, sharply chiseled face was shrouded in shadow as well. Behind him, a shard of light glinted off the pendulum of a grandfather clock much like the one in the smoking room. Ludlow was supporting himself on the lion-headed cane.

The following portrait showed Aram Usher, Ludlow's father. Aram was youthful and vigorous, his hair a mass of sandy blond curls, his lean and handsome face almost radiating light. He wore a gunbelt with two gold pistols, and behind him lay a phantasmagoric scene of thundering locomotives, stampeding horses, wild Indians, and flame-snorting buffalos. The lion-headed cane was propped gallantly against his right shoulder.

Hudson Usher, dour and silver-bearded, glowered down at Rix from his gray-tinted picture. His eyes were Rix's metallic shade of pewter, and they held a power that crackled over the generations. He sat in a high-backed, thronelike chair with a scarlet cushion. His right hand was clenched firmly around the lion-headed cane, and his gaze challenged anyone to take it away.

Rix turned to regard the most recent portrait, hanging across the room from Erik's. Walen Usher, broad-shouldered, aristocratically handsome, with wavy reddish blond hair, was dressed in a gray suit and vest. Behind him lay the Lodge - grown dramatically since Erik's portrait - and the blue peaks of surrounding mountains. He gripped the lion-headed cane with both hands, clutching it close to his body.

The next space was reserved for Usherland's new master. Boone would want to be captured in riding silks on a racehorse, Rix mused; he'd probably have that damned cane clenched between his teeth. But what if it was Katt, there on the wall? He could imagine the old bones and mummy dust out in the Usher cemetery writhing with indignation.

Examples of Usher weaponry also decorated the library walls: the Usher 1854 Buffalo Rifle; the 1886 Mark III revolver, which had been adopted by the Chinese navy; the 1900 recoil-operated cavalry pistol; and others, including the Enforcer, a seven-shot, .455-caliber revolver of 1902, used by police officers from Chicago to Hong Kong. The Enforcer could blow a man's head off at ten yards, and was used by the British as a field pistol during World War I.

Several cardboard boxes lay stacked around the worktable. Rix looked into one of them, and found a hodgepodge: yellowed letters wrapped in rubber bands, bundles of bills and checks, what looked like old ledgers and journals - most of them tainted with grayish green streaks of mildew. He picked up a brown leatherbound book, and as he lifted it from the box, old photographs drifted out and to the floor like dead leaves.

They were sepia-toned pictures of the Lodge. Rix put the photo album aside and bent down to retrieve them. In one, Erik Usher stood in a tweed suit and cap, smiling defiantly at the camera while, in the background, workmen crawled over scaffolds attached to the Lodge. In another, Erik sat on a white horse on the carriage bridge; again, construction was in progress on the massive house behind him. He did not smile with his eyes, Rix noted; they were intense and chilling, fixed on the camera in a haughty, challenging stare. His idea of a smile was apparently to simply crook his thin mouth to one side or the other.

Most of the photographs showed various angles of the Lodge. In many of them, workmen were present as blurred forms on spidery scaffolds. They were expanding the Lodge, Rix realized. The photos depicted a variety of seasons: the full halos of summer trees; the same trees skeletal in winter, with snow on the Lodge's roofs and smoke trailing from the chimneys; new buds bursting forth in spring. And still the workmen were there, hammers and chisels in hand, hoisting up slabs of granite or marble, building the framework of an even larger house.

Why was Erik building the Lodge bigger? What was the point, when it was already the largest house in the country? Rix looked back at the two pictures of Erik and suddenly realized something was missing.

The cane.

Erik didn't have the lion's-head cane in those two pictures.

One of the other photographs caught his eye as he started to return it to the album. It was a long shot of the Lodge, probably taken from the lakeshore. Against the massive gray face of the house was a figure in white, standing on one of the upper balconies of the east wing. A woman, Rix thought as he looked closely. A woman in a long white dress. Who was it? One of Erik's many mistresses? Walen's mother?

He dug into the box again, and uncovered a treasure of old blueprints that had been rolled up and secured with brittle rubber bands. Spreading some of them out on the worktable, Rix switched on the high-intensity lamp. The blueprints were items from Usher Armaments' black bag of tricks, circa 1941. Shown in breakaway detail were an antitank mine, a handheld rocket launcher, a flamethrower, and various machine guns.

The next thing that caught Rix's curiosity was a small, battered black book, veined with mold. He opened it under the lamp, and loose pages threatened to spill out. The paper was mustard-colored with age, and in danger of crumbling. Rix carefully turned the pages. His bewilderment mounted. Scribbled in the book were mathematical formulas, some of them going on for page after page; there were strange sketches of what looked like horseshoes with their open ends upward, supported on pedestals. The formulas continued, so dense that Rix couldn't make heads or tails of them.

Then the formulas changed into musical notations: groups of chords, bars of music. More horseshoe drawings, and then sketches of long rods with round, half-moon, or triangular shapes at their bottoms. The last pages of the book were water-stained and too moldy to decipher. Puzzled, he returned it to the box and sat for a moment staring at the wealth of documents in all the other boxes.

How in God's name could he ever hope to make sense of all of it? Months of research would be involved, and the actual writing would be a bitch. Besides, he had no control over these documents; at any time Walen might decide to return them to the Lodge, and then they'd be lost to Rix - because he could never set foot in that house again. But why had Walen brought them out? What was he looking for?

The story of the Ushers, who'd built a multibillion-dollar empire out of bullets and bombs, lay in those cardboard boxes -  certainly not all the story, Rix knew, but enough to start with. How many skeletons and scandals were buried in those moldy graves? The material was all right here, if he could only figure out how to put it together.

He imagined the horror that was his father, lying up in the Quiet Room. His thoughts turned toward the silent Lodge, brooding at the center of Usherland, and its twisting corridors that had drawn him deeper and deeper.

The skeleton with bleeding eyes swung slowly through his mind. Logan Bodane's cunning smile - so much like Boone's, Rix thought - surfaced in his memory.

Wheeler Dunstan had been working on the Usher history for six years. Six years. Wouldn't he at least have the framework assembled by now? Wouldn't he know how the generations linked together? And what other secrets might he know, as well?

Rix wished he could get his hands on Dunstan's manuscript  - if indeed one existed. He'd never met the man, but he'd heard his mother fume about Wheeler Dunstan before. The Foxton Democrat had evidently been owned by the Dunstan family for generations, and though it was only a weekly county tabloid, it delighted in running stories about the Ushers, and editorials on how Usher money had ruined the competitive tobacco market in the Rainbow-Taylorville-Foxton area. The Ushers had subsidized almost every large tobacco farm in the country, and owned every square block of Foxton except for one: the land on which the Democrat office stood.

Rix rummaged through one of the other boxes, and found a scrapbook full of newspaper clippings about the opening of the Usher factories in San Diego and Washington, an old ledger containing notations and monetary figures written in strong, ornate letters, and a brown book inside a manila envelope.

He opened the brown book, and an aroma like dusty roses drifted out. He found himself looking at graceful feminine handwriting. It was a diary, the dates clearly marked before each entry. He began to read the entry dated November 5, 1916:

"Mr. Usher sat across from me at the dining table. While he and Father were occupied in discussion about the war and the economy, I could feel his eye upon me. He commented on the new blue dress I was wearing, and inquired as to whether I enjoy the horse races. I told him yes, if the winning horse belongs to St. Clair Stables. Mr. Usher curls his lip when he smiles.

"In the candlelight he appeared handsome, though I have seen photographs of him in the news journals, and in them he looks like a schoolyard bully. He is in his late twenties or early thirties, I believe, and he has the build of a sportsman. His eyes are very dark, but in the light I thought I could detect a spark of color in them, like the glint of a copper coin. Mr. Usher has a laugh like a bassoon, which Father encouraged by telling him dreary business anecdotes.

"For all his coarseness, Mr. Usher does possess a certain appeal. He has a strong, uncompromising face. I noted he was wearing bay rum. Was that for my benefit? No, silly! Mr. Usher only came because he was interested in buying some of the new colts. Over dessert, Father inquired about the health of the elder Mr. Usher, and a change came over our guest. He said his father was in fine health, but he seemed to bite the words off with his teeth, and I wonder if Mr. Usher doesn't wish his father were ill. The strained mood soon passed, however, as Mr. Usher began telling Father about a new automatic pistol his company was producing. Mother and I were dismissed from the table, while Mr. Usher and Father took their brandy and cigars in the parlor."

Rix looked ahead to the next entry with Erik Usher's name in it, dated the eleventh of November: "Amazed at Mr. Usher's generosity. Today arrives a wagonload of red roses. For me! Father said that Mr. Usher was quite taken with me, and I should write him at Usherland to say thank you for his attention."

On November thirteenth: "Mr. Usher has interesting taste in gifts. This afternoon a gilded carriage, pulled by four of the finest white Arabians I have ever seen, came up the drive. Inside it were more than a hundred fishbowls full of Japanese goldfish. It was testimonial to the carriage and horses that none of them had spilled out. A letter from Mr. Usher - he wants me to call him Erik, dear diary - said he hoped I would enjoy the fish, and that I would use the carriage and stallions to visit him at Usherland for Christmas. Mother says I shouldn't go unescorted, but Father got angry and said all those things written about Erik Usher were simply lies, and that he is a fine, upstanding Christian businessman."

Right, Rix thought. He pulled the wool over your daddy's eyes, didn't he, Nora?

This diary belonged to Nora St. Clair Usher - Erik's only wife, Walen's mother, his own grandmother.

The grandfather clock in the smoking room chimed out one o'clock. For a moment Rix listened to the wail of wind, moving past the Gatehouse's walls.

He could start with this diary, he told himself. At least it might help him get a better understanding of Erik Usher, and certainly of Nora St. Clair Usher, whom Walen rarely talked about. Then he might begin to make sense of some of the other material.

Rix returned everything to the cardboard boxes and left the library, taking the diary with him. He switched off the chandelier and locked the door again, then climbed the stairs to his bedroom. The house, but for the noise of the raging wind, was quiet.

In his room, Rix sat at his desk and began to read where he'd left off. On the first day of 1917, Erik had asked for Nora's hand in marriage. Nora was indecisive. Her mother told her she'd have to make up her own mind, but Erik was the catch of a lifetime. Nora's father said that only a fool would pass up such a sterling opportunity.

They were married at the First Methodist Church of Charlotte on the second of March, 1917. Ludlow Usher did not attend the ceremony. Details of the wedding night were omitted. The next entry was a week later Erik had left on a business trip to England, and Nora was alone in the Lodge.

Old bastard, Rix thought.

A spark of light caught his attention, and he looked up from the diary.

There was nothing but darkness beyond his window; then, lasting for only a second, there came the glint of a light, out in the forest between the Gatehouse and the Lodge. It did not reappear.

Rix sat watching for several minutes longer. The darkness was absolute. Had he imagined a light out there, or not? Christ! he thought. Thinking you saw a light in a dark forest past midnight was the oldest horror-fiction cliche in the book! At this point, in his books at least, the gallant - and stupid - hero would go out there to investigate and get turned into walking hamburger. But this was real life, and Rix was no hero. He knew no local thief would be prowling across Usherland in the dark; you couldn't find one man in the whole county who'd set foot on the estate after nightfall, not with all the stories that circulated about the Pumpkin Man, the black panther, the hag who supposedly lived in the depths of one of the lakes, and all the other beasties roaming about.

There was nothing out there, anyway. Nothing except Erik's zoo, and that lay in ruins.

Still - had he seen a light, or not?

There was no light now, if he had. If some fool had fallen into the empty alligator pit, he'd still be there with a broken leg in the morning.

Rix returned to his reading, but every now and then he glanced into the darkness.

The Lodge was out there. A malengine, waiting for someone to turn the key again, set it thundering. Waiting for Katt? Or for Boone?

Ten billion dollars, he mused. Then he submerged himself into the life of Nora St. Clair Usher.