Usher's Passing

Usher's Passing Page 43

RIX DROVE THE THUNDERBIRD INTO ITS GARAGE STALL AND. CLOSING his eyes, sank his head forward against the wheel.

So close, he thought. I came so close to putting a bullet through Dunstan's skull! Dear God, I wanted to kill him! I wanted him to die!

He flinched at the memory of the Commando going off. He was still sick to his stomach, and had been forced to pull off the road outside Foxton to throw up. A moment or so afterward, a brown van had slowly passed him and disappeared into the rain.

He was beyond caring now. If he was under surveillance, there wasn't a thing he could do about it. The Usher history had vanished in lunatic smoke. He could start the book himself, but it would take years to finish. Years. He had counted on sharing the work that Dunstan had already done, but now that was impossible. What would he do while he was compiling the research? Another horror novel? The failure of Bedlam still hung like an ax over his head.

He had almost killed Wheeler Dunstan, he realized with sickening clarity. He couldn't finish the book on his own. He didn't have the strength to finish such an enormous, exhausting task; he was all the things Walen had called him that he'd lashed back at so vehemently. Walen knew him better than he knew himself -  but he thanked God that he'd moved that gun just before it went off.

He'd seen that the door to the Maserati's stall was open. The lights weren't working, and the interior of the garage was gray and gloomy. He thought bitterly that Katt must have been in a hurry to shoot herself up.

Ten billion dollars, he thought. Why should he have to kiss Katt's hand and settle for an allowance from a junkie? How could she run Usher Armaments? And Boone would drive the business right into the ground!

"Oh God," Rix whispered. What's happening to me? All I really need is a little money to get by on, just enough to keep me going! And it's blood money, he thought. All of it's blood money.

But somebody would always make the weapons. There would always be wars. The Usher name was a deterrent to war, wasn't it? What was wrong with claiming his share of the business and estate?

What do I believe in? he asked himself desperately. He felt lost and frantic. Had his beliefs been like Dunstan's book -  nothing but hollow, meaningless jabbering? Had he ever really been opposed to Usher Armaments? Or was he striking out at his father in the only way he knew, by cursing and denying the business that was the cornerstone of the Usher family?

Behind his closed eyes, the skeleton swung slowly from side to side.

Sandra's hair floated in bloody water.

A small hand reached toward a silver circle with the face of a roaring lion - but this time, as the hand stretched upward, the doorknob began to shrink. It became tiny, and the hand covered it.

Rix opened his eyes as thunder pealed over the garage. The doorknob. It was something he should remember. Something important. Trying to remember exactly what it was, and where he'd seen it, made his head ache fiercely. He tucked the notebook under his sweater and left the garage, hurrying through the gardens to the Gatehouse.

He was drenched when he entered the house. As he walked past the living room, he heard his mother call, "Rix!"

She came out into the hallway after him. Though she was dressed immaculately in a dark blue gown with a necklace of sapphires and pearls, and her makeup was perfect, her eyes were wide with panic. "Where have you been?" she demanded shrilly. Her lipstick was bright red, like the edges of a wound.

"Out."

"You're dripping wet! Look at the water you've tracked in!"

"I'm sorry. I couldn't - "

"Where's Boone?" Her voice shook. "Boone's not home, and neither is Katt! The storm's getting worse! The radio says there might be flooding!"

"Katt's car is in the garage." She'd undoubtedly sneaked in, he thought, to shoot up in her Quiet Room.

"Well, she's not here! And Edwin called Boone's club! He left there after midnight!"

"Calm down," he told her. Right now he didn't give a damn where Boone was, but he saw that Margaret was about to fall to pieces. "They can take care of themselves. Boone'll find a place to wait until the storm's over."

"I'm worried, Rix! Maybe you should call the sheriff, or the highway patrol."

"We'll hear if anything happens. There's no use in begging trouble."

Margaret's frightened eyes searched his face. "You look sick. What's wrong with you?"

"I'm okay." His head was still hurting like hell, and he was shivering and had to get out of his wet clothes.

"Lord, look at the mess you've tracked in on my floor!" she wailed. "And your sweater's ruined! You've pulled a button off! Can't you take care of anything?"

"It's nothing that can't be cleaned up." He reached into his pocket and brought out the small silver button. "And see, I've got the - " He stopped, staring at it cradled in his palm. It glinted orange, catching the light from a nearby candelabra.

The skeleton swung through his mind, blood oozing from its eye sockets.

Boone's plastic skeleton. The skeleton earring the cabdriver wore.

Something jarred inside Rix; the memory was close, very close, but still he couldn't grasp it. The spark of candlelight that jumped off the silver button in his palm pierced like a knife point into his mind.

Sandra's hair, floating in the bloody water.

"What is it?" Margaret asked. "What are you looking at?"

Bloody water, Rix thought. Hair floating in bloody water. A bathtub. A metal tub. What was it? What should he remember? His temples began to pound, and the images in his mind - ghostly, fragile shapes and shadows - started to fracture. He saw Dunstan lying on his side with the button in his hand, his eyes staring blindly. Except that Dunstan's face shifted and changed, melted and re-formed. The face became younger: a little boy's face, a little boy with sandy brown hair, the pewter-colored eyes mirroring shock.

Himself, Rix realized. He was seeing himself.

He held the silver button up, could see his face reflected over the Usher coat of arms. A button, he thought. Not a silver doorknob, but a silver button! But whose? Where had he seen one embossed with the face of a roaring lion? And what did remembering it mean?

Pain shot across his skull, vibrated at his temples. He grasped the button tightly in his hand. Not supposed to remember, he thought. It's something I'm not supposed to remember . . .

"Rix?" She recoiled from him. "My God, are you going to have an attack?"

He hardly heard her. He had thought, suddenly and clearly, of his childhood treasure box, where he kept his collection of coins, marbles, and stones. The pain pulsated behind his eyes, as if the pressure were about to blow them out of their sockets. The treasure box, he thought. There's something I put into the treasure box, a long time ago . . .

Rix passed his mother and ran upstairs, afraid that an attack was close but knowing also that he was close to remembering something important - something about the dangling skeleton, the hair in the bloody water, the silver button. Something important - and terrible.

In his room, he grasped the box with shaking hands and spilled its contents out across the top of the chest of drawers. There were Indian-head pennies, buffalo nickels, a couple of old silver dollars, smooth gray stones from the Usher woods, rough black pebbles found near the lakeshore, topaz cat's-eye marbles, one that looked like a brilliant exploding star, another that held in its depths a dozen shades of cool blue. His collection had remained intact, part of the shrine his mother had kept for him, but what he was looking for wasn't here. He couldn't remember when he'd put it here, or how he'd gotten it, but what he searched for was gone.

A silver button with the face of a roaring lion. Remembering it brought a pain that bowed his back and broke a cold sweat out on his face. An attack! he thought. Oh Jesus, I'm going to have an -

"Rix?"

With an effort, he turned toward the voice. His face was chalky, his eyes rimmed with red.

Edwin stood in the doorway. He glanced from Rix to the scatter of objects across the chest, then to Rix again. "Are you all right?" he asked, a sharp note of concern in his voice.

"Yeah. I will be. I just need to - "

At once, Edwin was at his side. Edwin's comforting hands kneaded the back of his neck. "Breathe deeply and slowly. Relax, relax. Clear your mind, just drift. Relax."

Rix's muscles responded. He followed Edwin's calmly spoken instructions, and the pain began to leave him. Something dropped from his hand to the floor - what was it? He didn't care. All he cared about was the soothing power of Edwin's hands.

"You came close that time, didn't you?" Edwin asked. "But you feel better now, don't you?"

Rix nodded. The pain was almost gone. His head was clearing. What had he been thinking about? It was indistinct now, and very far away. Dunstan, he remembered. Dunstan was insane, and there was no Usher history.

But before Rix could say anything, Edwin said quietly, "He wants to see you. He said I was to bring you to the Quiet Room as soon as you came home."

"Dad?"

"He's fading. We've called Dr. Francis, but I don't think he can get here in this storm. Come on, I'll take you to him."

Rix paused, looking at the contents of the treasure box. What had been there? What was he looking for? He couldn't remember. Part of his mind seemed to have been blanked out. He frowned, trying to think.

"Rix?" Edwin urged. "You'd better go up and see him."

"Yeah. Right. I'd better go up and see him."

Edwin walked with him along the candlelit corridor to the foot of the stairs to the Quiet Room. Rix ascended the steps alone and, still dazed, put on a surgical mask to ward off the stench.

In the Quiet Room, the storm's fury was muted to a distant bass rumble. Rix stood near the door after he'd closed it, letting his eyes get used to the darkness. A few feet away from him was the vague form of Mrs. Reynolds, sitting motionless in her chair. Sleeping? he wondered. She didn't rise to greet him. He could hear his father's hoarse breathing, and followed it across the room.

"You," Walen hissed.

Rix flinched. It was cold in the room, but hanging around his father's bed was the fever of decay, like a stifling preview of hell.

"Where . . . have you been . . . this morning?" Walen's whisper was so mangled, so far removed from a human voice, that Rix could hardly understand it.

"I drove to Foxton."

"Why?"

"I needed to go for a drive. To think." He saw his father's shape, curled like a reptile on the bed. The ebony cane lay beside him.

"You think . . . I'm an utter fool, don't you?"

"What?"

With the cane, Walen reached painfully out to the control panel beside the bed. A switch clicked. One of the television screens came on. Though the contrast and brightness were adjusted very low, the picture was unmistakable. It was a shot of Wheeler Dunstan's house on a sunny day. At the bottom of the screen were white numerals that gave the date and time, the seconds ticking past. Rix caught his breath; it was the first afternoon he'd gone with Raven to her house. The remote-control camera must have been hidden twenty feet or so up a tree, because there was a downward angle to the picture.

The yellow Volkswagen entered the frame and stopped in front of the house. As the two figures got out and started up the porch steps, Dunstan emerged in his wheelchair. The camera lens zoomed in. The frame froze, showing Rix, Raven, and her father standing together, linked in complicity.

The brown van. Usher Security.

"Mr. Meredith . . . brought that videotape to me. Look at me, damn you!" Walen commanded.

Rix forced himself to look fully at his father, and almost choked with terror. Since Rix had seen him in the hallway early this morning, Walen had deteriorated at a horrifying speed. His head was misshapen, the forehead and temples swollen by some hideous internal pressure. The gray flesh of his face was splitting open, like ill-fitting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Yellow fluids had leaked out, gleaming in the screen's faint glow like the mucous tracks of garden snails. Walen's eyes were deep black holes, registering no light or life.

"You've been followed . . . ever since you came here. I knew you'd show your true colors, eventually. Traitor," he whispered. "You miserable goddamned traitor! You're unfit to carry the Usher name, and I. . . swear I'll see you driven off Usherland . . . like a dog! There won't be a dime for you, not one! Go back to Atlanta and find some other weak little slut . . . to support you until you drive her to suicide, too!"

Rix had started backing away from his father's verbal onslaught, but the reference to Sandra stopped him. His face contorted; memories of a hundred unsettled scores from his youth flooded unbidden into his mind. The rage swelled within him, twisted and bitter. Rix slowly approached the bed again.

"Let me tell you something, old man," he said. His voice was at a normal register this time, and Walen cringed. "I'm going to write that family history. Me. No matter how long it takes, I'm going to keep at it until it's finished. It'll be a good book, Dad, I promise you. People are going to want to read it."

"You . . . little fool . . ." Walen gasped, his hands clasped to his ears.

"I've found out so many enlightening details from those documents downstairs," Rix continued. "Like how Cynthia Usher murdered her first husband. And how Shann Usher lost her mind after she wrote music that made people kill themselves. Ludlow was insane before he died, locked up in his Quiet Room, raving about thunderstorms. And let's not forget about Erik, Dad. The Caligula of the Usher line. I'll be sure to write about the Fourth of July when Erik shot up Briartop Mountain, and about the deal he made to buy Nora St. Clair like breeding stock. How about that, Dad? Want me to dedicate the book to you?"

Suddenly, with a moan that made the hair stir at the back of Rix's neck, Walen heaved himself up in bed. In the ghostly light of the television screen, his face was a rictus of hate, the yellow and crooked teeth glittering in his mouth. His arm flashed out with the ebony cane. It struck Rix sharply on the collarbone. The next blow hit Rix's shoulder, near the bruise where Wheeler Dunstan had struck him with the poker, and he cried out. When Walen flailed with the cane a third time, Rix caught it and wrenched it from his hand. A cold jolt of power shot up Rix's arm.

His hand tightened around the cane until he was holding it defiantly in his clenched fist. He held it up toward his face, saw light spark off the lion's head. Ten billion dollars, he thought. All the money in the world. Someone would always make the weapons. The Usher name was a deterrent to war. Ten billion dollars . . .

"The scepter!" Walen rasped. "Give it . . . back to me!"

Rix stepped away from the bed as Walen reached for him. Behind him, Mrs. Reynolds remained motionless in her chair.

Walen's hand stretched for the cane. Tubes tore out of his arm. "Give it back!" he commanded. "It's mine, damn you!"

Thunder shook the Gatehouse. The scepter seemed to burn into Rix's hand as if he had thrust his fingers into fire. Magic, he thought. There was magic in the cane, something powerful and protective. Someone would always make the weapons. All the money in the world . . .

A terrible, greedy laugh strained to escape from behind his clenched teeth. And from the dark stranger in his soul came the shout I want it I want it all!

Walen screamed. In the screen's glow, Rix saw the flesh ripple over his father's face. The bones were moving. There was a sharp cracking noise, as of twigs being snapped by a brutal hand. The fissures in Walen's face split wider.

Walen began babbling in a mad, keening whine: "Boone . . . where's Boone . . . Kattrina . . . oh God oh God I heard her scream . . . traitor you traitor . . . Edwin . . . in the Lodge Pendulum in the Lodge . . ." His body thrashed in agony. His entire head was swelling, the fissures gaping open. A steaming grayish green substance began oozing through the cracks.

Rix was paralyzed with revulsion and terror. Then he turned toward Mrs. Reynolds in nightmarish slow motion. "Help him!" he heard himself shout, but Mrs. Reynolds didn't move.

"It's . . . you," Walen whispered in disbelief. His head was slowly bursting apart. "Oh my God. You're . . . the next one."

There was a brittle, sickening crunch. Two tears rolled down from the darkness of Walen Usher's eyes. "God . . . forgive . . ." he managed to say - and then his entire face burst open, a ragged seam running from forehead to chin. The grayish green matter, like mold that had grown too long in a hidden and evil place, bubbled out of the rip.

With a soft, relieved sigh, the body slithered to the bed and lay still. The oozing stuff that had broken through his head formed a foul halo on the sheet.

Rix stood staring at his father's corpse as shock enveloped him like a freezing shroud.

"It's done." A strong hand gripped his shoulder. "The scepter's been passed."

When Rix didn't respond, Edwin stepped around in front of him and removed Rix's surgical mask. He lifted Rix's chin with a forefinger and examined the dilated, unfocused eyes. "Can you hear me, Rix?"

He was a little boy again, lost and trembling in the Lodge's cold darkness. Edwin's voice was distant - Can you hear me, Rix? - but he followed it through the winding corridors. Edwin was there. Edwin was his friend. Edwin would protect him, and take care of him forever.

Rix flinched. The skeleton with bloody eye sockets swung through his mind. Hair floated in a bloody metal tub. Edwin's face, daubed with orange and black by firelight and shadows, emerged from the darkness. It was a younger face, and in it the blue-gray eyes held a steely glint. As Edwin's arms folded little Rix against him, the child saw orange light dance on one of Edwin's blazer buttons.

It was made of silver, and bore the embossed face of a roaring lion.

The child stared at it, mesmerized, his eyes swollen and unblinking. It was a pretty button, he thought. His hand rose up and slowly covered the button. It was round and shining and would look fine in his treasure box.

Edwin stroked the child's hair. "Rix?" His voice was as soft as black velvet. "I want you to forget what you've seen in this room. You were never here. I want you to forget. Can you hear me, Rix?"

All his attention was focused on the silver button. Nothing else mattered - not the thing behind him that dangled from a hook in the ceiling, not the bloody washtub with the hair in it - nothing but the silver button.

And the little boy who had grown up to be a man with a terrible memory locked behind the image of a silver blazer button said, "Yes sir."

The adult Rix blinked as the visions from the past whirled through his mind like a storm. Pumpkin Man's in the woods, he thought crazily. And then: No, no.

The Pumpkin Man was standing before him, wearing the face of a man he loved.

Edwin looked toward the bed, at the corpse of Walen Usher, then returned his attention to Rix. "The old passes away," he said, "and the new takes its place. Cass and I love you very much, Rix. You were always our favorite. You're the one we chose, a long time ago. We hoped the landlord would choose you, too."

"Land . . . lord?" Rix asked huskily, hearing himself speak as if from the bottom of a well.

"The landlord of Usherland. The real landlord. You have the wand now, Rix. The landlord's chosen you, and discarded Boone and Katt. You're going to make us proud, Rix; and you're going to make the landlord proud."

"I . . . don't . . ."

"I want to answer your questions," Edwin said. "I want to help you understand. But to do that we have to go into the Lodge. There's someone else the landlord wants - someone who can help you after Cass and I have fulfilled our duties."

"Logan . . .?"

"No." Edwin shook his head. "I was wrong about Logan. I chose him to follow me, but he's too weak, too undisciplined. The landlord's chosen someone stronger. We have to go now, and we have to hurry. I want you to wait at the front of the house until I bring the limousine around. Do you understand that?"

Rix couldn't think beyond the sound of Edwin's voice. Edwin was here. Edwin would protect him and take care of him. "Yes," he answered.

Edwin led him out of the Quiet Room. Rix moved like a sleepwalker, but kept the cane gripped tightly in his hand.

Ten minutes after they'd gone, Mrs. Reynolds awakened from a terrible dream. She'd been sitting here in the dark, she recalled, but then she'd drifted into a netherworld of eerie disembodied voices, angry shouts, and screams of agony. Her body had been leaden, and she'd had no voice. The last thing she remembered with anything approaching clarity was Mr. Bodane coming up to ask how Mr. Usher was feeling today. She rubbed her eyes; they were raw, as if she hadn't blinked and all the moisture had dried up.

She noticed the dim glow of the television screen, rose from her chair, and went over to Mr. Usher's bed.

Nothing in her years of training as a nurse could have prevented the scream that followed.