Usher's Passing

by Robert R. McCammon

  Usher’s Passing

  Robert R. McCammon

  To Michael Larsen and Elizabeth Pomada

  Contents

  Prologue

  I

  II

  III

  One: Usherland

  1

  2

  3

  Two: The Mountain Boy

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  Three: Raven

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  Four: The Mountain King

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  Five: Time Will Tell the Tale

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  Six: Valley of the Shadow

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  Seven: The Lodge

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  Eight: The Decision

  45

  46

  I dread the events of the future.

  —Roderick Usher

  The Devil’s passing.

  —Old Welsh expression for calamity

  Prologue

  I

  THUNDER ECHOED LIKE AN iron bell above the sprawl of New York City. In the heavy air, lightning crackled and thrust at the earth, striking the high Gothic steeple of James Renwick’s new Grace Church on East Tenth Street, then sizzling to death a half-blind drayhorse on the squatters’ flatlands north of Fourteenth. The horse’s owner bleated in terror and leaped for his life as his cart overturned, sinking its load of potatoes into eight inches of mud.

  It was the twenty-second of March, 1847, and the New York Tribune’s weather scholar had predicted a night of “dire storms, fit for neither man nor beast.” His prediction, for once, was entirely accurate. Sparks exploded into the sky on Market Street, where the cast-iron stovepipe chimney of a hardware store had been lightning-struck. The clapboard building burned fiercely while a crowd gawked and grinned in its merry heat. Steam-spouting fire engines were delayed, wooden wheels and horses’ hooves mired in Bowery ooze. Packs of dogs, rats, and pigs scuttled through the alleys, where gangs like the Dover Boys, the Plug Uglies, and the Moan Stickers shadowed their victims along the constricted, cobblestoned streets. Policemen stayed alive by standing like statues under gas lamps.

  A young city, New York was already bursting her seams. It was a riotous spectacle, as full of danger in the hoodlum’s blackjack as of opportunity in a spilled purse of gold coins. The confusion of streets led from dockyard to theater, ballroom to bawdyhouse, Murder Bend to City Hall, with equal impartiality, though some avenues of progress were impassable due to swamps of debris and garbage.

  Thunder rang out again, and the troubled sky split open in a torrent. It soaked dandies and damsels strolling out the doors of Delmonico’s, slammed against the lofty windows on Colonnade Row, and leaked down black with soot through the roofs of squatters’ shanties. The rain dampened fires, broke up fights, sped indecent propositions or murderous attacks, and cleared the streets in a sluggish tide of filth that rolled for the river. At least for the moment, the nightly farrago of humanity was interrupted.

  Two chestnut Barbary horses, their heads bowed against the downpour, pulled a black landau coach along Broadway Avenue, heading south toward the harbor. The Irish coachman huddled within a soggy brown coat, water streaming from the brim of his low-slung hat, and cursed the decision he’d made early that afternoon to trot his team around to the De Peyser Hotel on Canal Street. If he hadn’t picked up that passenger, he thought gloomily, he might now be home warming his feet in front of a fire with a mug of stout at his side. At least he had a gold eagle in his pocket—but what good would a gold eagle be when he was dead with the wet shivers? He flicked a halfhearted whipstrike at the flank of one of his horses, though he knew they would move no faster. Hell’s bells! he thought. What was the passenger lookin’ for?

  The gentleman had boarded in front of the De Peyser, laid a gold eagle on the driver’s palm, and told the driver to make all possible haste to the Tribune office. Instructed to wait, he’d held the horses until the black-garbed gentleman had reappeared fifteen minutes later with a new destination. It was a long trek into the country, up near Fordham in the shadow of the Long Island hills, while purple-veined storm clouds began to gather and thunder throbbed in the distance. At a rather dismal-looking little cottage, a rotund middle-aged woman with gray hair and large, frightened eyes admitted the gentleman—very reluctantly, it had seemed to the coachman. After another half hour in which a downpour of chilly rain had promised the driver an acquaintance with hot salve and oil of wintergreen, the gentleman in black came out with yet another series of directions: back to New York, as quickly as possible, to a number of tawdry taverns in the most unsavory section of the city. South into the Triangle at night! the coachman thought grimly. The gentleman either wanted a cheap trollop or a brush with death.

  As they moved deeper into the lawless southern streets, the coachman was relieved to see that the heavy rain was keeping most of the thugs under wraps. Saints be praised! he thought—and at that instant two young boys in rags came running out of an alleyway toward the coach. One of them, the driver saw with horror, held a brick intended to smash the spokes of a wheel—the better to beat and rob both himself and his passenger. He swung his whip with crazed abandon, shouting, “Go on! Go on!” And the team, sensing imminent danger, surged ahead across the slick stones. The brick was thrown, and crashed against the coach’s side with the noise of splintering wood. “Go on!” the coachman cried out again, and kept the horses trotting until they’d left the murderous little beggars two streets behind.

  The sliding partition behind the coachman’s seat opened. “Driver,” the passenger inquired, “what was that?” His voice was calm and steady—accustomed to giving orders, the driver thought.

  “Beggin’ your pardon, sir, but…” He glanced back over his shoulder through the partition, and saw in the dim interior lamplight the man’s gaunt, pallid face, distinguished by a silvery, neatly trimmed beard and mustache. The gentleman’s eyes were deepset, the color of burnished pewter; they fixed upon the coachman with the power of aristocracy. He appeared oddly ageless, his face free of any telltale wrinkles, and his flesh marble white. He was dressed in a black suit and a glossy black top hat, and his long-fingered hands in black leather gloves toyed with an ebony cane topped by a handsome sterling silver head of a cat—a lion, the coachman had seen—with gleaming emerald eyes.

  “But what?” the man asked. The driver couldn’t peg his accent.

  “Sir…it’s not too very safe in this neck o’ town. You look to be a refined, respectable gentleman, sir, and it’s not too many of those they gets down here in this part o’—”

  “Just concern yourself with your driving,” the man advised. “You’re wasting time.” He slid the partition shut.

  The coachman muttered, his beard heavy with rain, and urged the team onward. There was just so much a man would do for a gold eagle! he thought. Then again, it sure would buy some fine times at the bar rail.

  Sandy Welsh’s Cellar, a bar on Ann Street, was the first stop. The gentleman went in, stayed only a few moments, and then they were off again. He stayed barely a minute in the Peacock, on Sullivan Street. Gent’s Pinch, two blo
cks west, was worth only a brief visit as well. On narrow Pell Street, where a dead pig attracted a pack of scavenger dogs, the coachman reined his team up in front of a rundown tavern called the Muleskinner. As the gentleman in black went inside, the coachman pulled his hat low and pondered a return to the potato fields.

  Within the Muleskinner, a motley assemblage of drunkards, gamblers, and rowdies pursued their interests in the hazy yellow lamplight. Smoke hung in layers across the room, and the gentleman in black wrinkled his finely shaped nose at the mingled aromas of bad whiskey, cheap cigars, and rain-soaked clothes. A few men glanced in his direction, sizing him up as a profitable victim; but the strong set of his shoulders and the force of his gaze told them to look elsewhere. The rain and humidity had put a damper on even the most eager killer’s energies.

  He approached the Muleskinner’s bar, where a swarthy gent in buckskin was drawing a mug of greenish beer from a keg, and spoke a single name.

  The bartender smiled thinly and shrugged. A gold coin was slid across the rough pinewood bar, and greed flickered in the man’s small black eyes. He reached out for the coin—and a cane topped by a silver lion’s head pressed his hand to the wood. The gentleman in black spoke the name again, calmly and quietly.

  “In the corner.” The bartender nodded toward a man sitting alone, absorbed in scribbling something by the light of a smoking whale-oil lamp. “You ain’t the law, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Wouldn’t want to get him in no trouble. He’s the Shakespeare of America, y’know.”

  “I wouldn’t know.” He lifted his cane, and the other man’s hand crawled like a spider upon the coin.

  The gentleman in black strode purposefully to the solitary man writing by lamplight. On a scarred plank table before the writer were an inkpot, a scatter of cheap pale blue foolscap, a half-drained bottle of sherry, and a dirty glass. Wads of discarded paper littered the floor. The writer, a pale, slight man with watery gray eyes, was scribbling on a piece of paper with a quill pen gripped by a slender, nervous hand. He stopped writing to press his fist against his forehead, and then he sat without moving for a moment, as if his brain had gone blank. With a scowl and a bitter oath, he crumpled the paper and flung it to the floor, where it bounced off the toe of the gentleman’s boot.

  The writer looked up into the other man’s face; he blinked, puzzled, the sheen of fever-sweat glistening on his cheeks and forehead.

  “Mr. Edgar Poe?” the gentleman in black asked quietly.

  “Yes,” the writer replied, his voice slurred from sickness and sherry. “Who’re you?”

  “I’ve looked forward to meeting you for some time…sir. May I sit down?”

  Poe shrugged and motioned toward a chair. There were dark blue hollows beneath his eyes, his lips were gray and slack, and the cheap brown suit he wore was blotched with mud and mildew. The front of his white linen shirt and his tattered black ascot were dappled with sherry stains; his frayed cuffs shot out of the coat like a poor schoolboy’s. He radiated the heat of fever, and as he shivered in a sudden chill he lay down his pen and put a trembling hand to his brow; his dark hair was damp with sweat, and tiny beads of moisture in his thin dark mustache glinted with yellow lamplight. Poe gave a deep, rattling cough. “Forgive me,” he said. “I’ve been ill.”

  The man put his cane on the table, careful not to disturb papers or inkpot, and sat down. At once a corpulent barmaid waddled over to ask him what his pleasure might be, but he waved her away with a flick of his hand.

  “You should try the amontillado here, sir,” Poe told him. “It fans the flames of the intellect. At the very least it provides warmth in the stomach on a wet night. Excuse my condition, sir, I’ve been working, you see.” He narrowed his eyes to try to keep the gentleman in focus. “What did you say your name was?”

  “My name,” the gentleman in black said, “is Hudson Usher. Roderick Usher was my brother.”

  Poe sat very still for a moment, his mouth hanging half open; a small sigh escaped it, followed by a chuckle squeezed through a moan. He let out a high burst of laughter, and laughed until his eyes teared, laughed until he began coughing, until he knew he was in danger of choking and his hand clutched the black cloth of his ascot.

  When he could control himself again, Poe wiped his eyes, caught back another spasm of coughing, and poured more sherry into his glass. “That’s a fine joke! I commend you, sir! Now you may return your plumage to the costume shop and tell my dear friend Reverend Griswold that his attempt to give me a lung seizure very nearly succeeded! Tell him I won’t forget his kind efforts!” He swallowed a mouthful of sherry, and his gray eyes gleamed in the sickly, pallid face. “Oh, no—wait! I’ve more to let you share with Reverend Griswold! Do you know what I’m writing here, my good ‘Mr. Usher’?” He grinned drunkenly and tapped the few pages he’d finished. “My masterpiece, sir! An insight into the very nature of God! It’s all here, all here…” He gripped the pages in one hand and brought them to his chest, a crooked grin on his mouth. “With this work, Edgar Poe will stand alongside Dickens and Hawthorne! Of course, we may all be eclipsed by that literary solaristarian, Reverend Griswold—but I think not!”

  Poe waved the pages in front of the other man’s face. They appeared to be a mess of ink blotches and sherry stains. “Wouldn’t he pay you a pretty penny to see this for him? To spy for him, and help his plagiarizing pen along its confused course? Begone, sir! I’ve nothing more to say to you!”

  The gentleman in black hadn’t moved during Edgar Poe’s tirade; he held the other man with a hard, steely stare. “Are you as hard of hearing as you are drunk?” he asked in his strange, melodious accent. “I said my name is Hudson Usher, and Roderick was my brother—a man you maligned with poisonous gall. I am in this American bedlam on business, and I chose to take a day to locate you. I first went to the Tribune, where I learned of your country cottage from a Mr. Horace Greeley. Your mother-in-law provided me with a list of—”

  “Muddy?” Poe gasped. A page of his work slipped to the floor and lay in a puddle of spilled beer. “You went to see my Muddy?”

  “—a list of taverns in which you might be found,” Hudson Usher continued. He placed his black-gloved hands on the table and folded his fingers together. “I understand I just missed you at Sandy Welsh’s Cellar.”

  “You’re a liar!” Poe whispered, his eyes wide with shock. “You’re not…you can’t be who you say you are!”

  “Can’t I be? Well, then, shall we explore the facts? In 1837 my anguished older brother was drowned in a flood that destroyed our home in Pennsylvania. My wife and I were in London at the time, and my sister Madeline had recently run off with a traveling actor, leaving Roderick alone. We salvaged what we could, and we now reside in North Carolina.” Usher’s ageless face seemed drawn as tightly as a mask, his eyes glittering with long-repressed rage. “Now imagine my discomfiture, Mr. Poe, when five years later I happen to be shown a volume of despicable little figments called Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Grotesque, indeed. Particularly the tale entitled—But you’re well aware of the title, I’m sure. In it you make my brother out to be a madman and my sister a walking corpse! Oh, I’ve looked forward to meeting you finally, Mr. Poe; the Tribune mentions you frequently, I understand, and you were the literary lion of a few seasons past, weren’t you? But now…well, fame’s a tenuous commodity, isn’t it?”

  “What do you want of me?” Poe asked, stunned. “If you’ve come to demand money of me, or to drag my name through the dirt in a libel case, you’re wasting your time, sir. I have very little money, and before God I never intentionally libeled your family’s name or honor. There are hundreds of people named Usher in this country!”

  “Perhaps there are,” Usher agreed, “but there is only one drowned Roderick, and only one maligned Madeline.” He spent a silent moment examining Poe’s face and clothes. Then he smiled thinly, a humorless smile that showed the even white points of his teeth. “No, I don’t want your mone
y; I don’t believe blood can be squeezed from a stone, but if I could, I’d confiscate every copy of that ridiculous tale and set them all blazing. No, I wanted to see what kind of man you were, and I wanted you to know what kind of man I am. The House of Usher still stands, Mr. Poe, and it shall stand long after you and I are dust in the earth.” Usher produced a silver cigar case, from which he took a prime Havana; he lit it at the lamp and put the cigar case away. Then he blew gray smoke in Poe’s face. “I should have your skin stretched and nailed to a tree for besmirching my family name. You should at the least be confined to a lunatic asylum.”

  “I swear I… I wrote that tale as fiction! It mirrored…things that were in my mind and soul!”

  “Then, sir, I pity your soul in the hereafter.” Usher pulled at the cigar and leaked smoke through his nostrils, his eyes narrowing to slits. “But let me try to guess how you stumbled onto this foul idea. It was never a secret that my brother was mentally and physically tormented; he’d been unbalanced since our father died in a mine cave-in before we came to this country from Wales. When Madeline left the house he must’ve felt totally deserted.

  “In any event, Roderick’s mental state—and the deterioration of the house I’d left him to protect—was not unnoticed by simpletons who lived in the villages around us. Small wonder, then, that his death and the ruin of our house in a flood should be the source of all kinds of vicious rumors! I suggest, Mr. Poe, that the seed of your tale came from some establishment like this one, where drink loosens the tongue and inflames the imagination. Perhaps you heard mention of Roderick Usher in a tavern between Pittsburgh and New York, and your own besotted brain invented the details. I blame myself for leaving Roderick alone at a crucial point in his sanity; thus you must see how your dirty little tale stabs me like a spike through the heart!”

  Poe lowered his pages to the table and caressed them as if they were living flesh. He gave a soft whimper when he noticed the page lying in filth on the floor, and when he carefully picked it up he wiped the residue on his sleeve. He spent a moment trying, with shaking hands, to put the edges of the pages in true. “I…haven’t been well for a while, Mr. Usher,” he said softly. “My wife…recently passed away. Her name was Virginia. I… I know very well the pain of separation from a loved one. I vow to you before God, sir, that I never set out to sully your family’s name. Perhaps I…did hear mention of your brother’s name somewhere, or I read about the circumstances in a newspaper article; it’s been so long now, I forget. But I am a writer, sir! And a writer has the defense of curiosity! I beg your forgiveness, Mr. Usher, but I must also say that as a writer I am compelled to view the world through my own eyes!”