Usher's Passing

by Robert R. McCammon

  But New was staring into the underbrush ahead. This trail had been used recently, and used often; the ruts were too deep, too fresh. He guided the truck forward, and saw something metal glint in the midst of the thicket. He let the truck slide down to where the trail ended before he braked again, and at this distance it was clear what lay just ahead.

  It was some kind of square structure, covered over with green netting that effectively served as forest camouflage. A large hole had been cut through the netting at ground level, the rest of it securely staked down.

  Raven’s first thought was that it might be a squatter’s cabin—but what squatter would live on Usherland? The camouflage netting disturbed her. Whatever the structure was, it was meant to be hidden.

  “Let’s take a look,” New said, and picked up one of the lanterns. He grasped the stick and got out of the truck. Raven followed him through the driving rain, carrying the second lantern.

  As New ducked through the hole, he switched on his light. It was a green-painted clapboard structure, larger inside than it had first appeared. Their lanterns reflected off corroded metal.

  “A garage,” Raven said softly. “What’s a garage doing out here?”

  It held three vehicles: a battered old tan Ford, a dark green pickup truck, and a black Rambler pitted with rust holes. None of them had license plates, but shoved back in a cobwebby corner was a cardboard box that gave up a few old North Carolina plates to Raven’s light. Most of their numerals were obscured beneath dried mud.

  New shone his light into the Ford. A black canvas bag lay in the rear floorboard.

  It was large enough, he thought grimly, to hold a child’s body.

  On the front seat of the pickup truck was a scatter of peppermint candies, still in their wrappers.

  Raven looked into the black Rambler. On the floorboard was a map, and she opened the door to examine it. As she picked it up, a large gray rat squeaked and scurried from beneath it, under the protection of the seat.

  “Jesus,” she said quietly, but she opened the map and saw that it depicted the immediate area around Usherland. There were red checkmarks—dozens of them—near the thin lines of backcountry roads. Raven’s stomach had begun to clench, and she heard New say in a taut voice, “Over here.”

  He was standing at the rear of the garage, pointing his light downward. When Raven reached him, she felt cold air on her face. A thick, damp smell wafted up. She aimed her own lantern toward the ground.

  The floor was made of hardpacked dirt. But their lights disappeared down a narrow set of stone steps cut into the earth.

  New took a deep breath and descended them, probing his way with the stick. There were eight steps, and at the bottom a tunnel formed of rough, damp stones stretched on beyond the range of New’s light.

  But his lantern picked out an object lying on the tunnel floor perhaps ten feet away. His heart hammering, New bent to grasp it, and his hand closed around the object.

  “What is it?” Raven asked as he came out. “What did you find?”

  “A tunnel. I think I know where it goes.” His voice was hollow, and above the light, New’s eyes were rimmed with darkness. “And I know why it’s here.” He opened his hand to show her what lay in it.

  It was a child’s toy, Raven saw. A blue yo-yo.

  “Nathan’s,” New said. “The Pumpkin Man took Nathan along that tunnel. I think…this was left here for me to find.”

  “Then the tunnel—”

  “Leads to the Lodge. Maybe it goes right under the lake.” He slipped Nathan’s toy into his jeans pocket. “Are you still sure you want to go with me?”

  “We need a weapon,” she said. “We should’ve brought a gun, or—”

  “That wouldn’t do any good. Whatever it is would be expectin’ a gun. But maybe I know somethin’ it might not expect.”

  “What?”

  “I am a weapon,” he said. “You can go back, if you like. I’ll give you the keys, and you can take the truck.”

  “No,” she replied. “I have to see for myself.”

  New searched her steady gaze. “All right. Then I’ll go through first. Stay close to me.”

  He didn’t have to tell her a second time. They started into the tunnel, and within a moment or two the noise of the storm faded away. Water began leaking from the ceiling, and when Raven caught some of it in her hand and held it to the light, she saw the black stain of peat. They were underneath the lake.

  As Raven followed the mountain boy, her nerve threatened to snap. Hairline cracks in the ceiling streamed with water. The tunnel had been here for a long time. Who had built it? Hudson Usher, when he first constructed the Lodge? If the Ushers and the Pumpkin Man were somehow connected, why was it that the Pumpkin Man hadn’t appeared until 1872? The Ushers had been here since the 1840s. What was the Pumpkin Man, and how had he been able to roam freely for more than a hundred years? What had happened to the missing children? Her answers, she felt, lay before her in the darkness at the other end of this tunnel.

  Distant thunder echoed along the tunnel. It must have been a huge crash, she thought, for them to be able to hear it down here.

  New stopped. “Listen,” he whispered.

  Coming from the tunnel beyond was a low bass rumble, the growl of an awakening beast. But it wasn’t an animal’s noise; it sounded like a combination of off-key notes, the bass vibration of some kind of machine. Raven felt the sound in her bones, and even her teeth ached. New touched the walls of the tunnel. The stones were trembling. They could feel the vibration in the floor. Stressed mortar cracked and popped all around them.

  Then, as suddenly as they had begun, the strange notes died away.

  An earth tremor? Raven wondered. My God, she thought; if a quake split the tunnel ceiling open, the lake would pour in over their heads. But what had caused that rumbling noise? Raven’s teeth were still throbbing.

  “Okay?” New asked, his voice echoing okay?…okay?

  “Yeah,” she said shakily. “I’m still with you.”

  But as she followed New, trying to concentrate solely on the circle of light before her, Raven became increasingly aware of soft scraping noises from the darkness at her back.

  She turned and shone her light in the direction from which they’d come.

  “What is it?” New asked.

  “I don’t know.” Raven brushed her damp curls back from her forehead. The light showed nothing but tunnel stones and trickles of water.

  But from the darkness beyond came a faint chirrrrr that sounded like the warning of a rattlesnake.

  And then New realized why the hole had been cut into the camouflage netting. The panther had entered the tunnel behind them, and blocked the way out. “Let’s keep goin’,” he told her. “I want you to watch behind us. If you see anythin’ move, let out a holler.”

  “Damn straight,” she breathed.

  They continued. Raven heard quick, furtive scrapings—like the sound of claws on stone—but whatever was following them stayed far enough behind to avoid the light.

  New’s beam illuminated another set of steps, leading up to an open doorway. They had come to the end of the tunnel. Above them sprawled the massive Lodge, he suspected, and within it the answers to questions that would change him forever. He paused, a chill of indecision and fear sweeping through him.

  Satan finds the man, the Mountain King had said.

  His ancestor had been a man who worshiped the lord of darkness. Was there a spark of that same kind of evil in him? Had he been beckoned and lured by a force that could fan that spark into a flame again?

  He remembered how he’d made his mother act like a mindless puppet on strings. But the worst part, the very worst, was that he’d liked the power. It had first broken free from his rage in the thorn pit, but now he knew that the act of controlling the magic knife, or making his mother do what he wanted just by thinking about it, was child’s play. There were other things he could do, other powers that lay deep inside him, steaming and p
ulsing to be set loose from the furnace of his soul. He wanted to set them free, wanted to explore the limits—if there were any—of the powers he commanded. He felt like a greedy flame that could burn his old life, as a boy trapped by the confines of Briartop Mountain, into ashes.

  And suddenly he feared himself—what lived in him, in the darkest basement of his soul—most of all.

  Raven let out a quick, hoarse gasp. “Oh…my God,” she whispered.

  New turned.

  Greediguts’ eyes were golden-green lamps in the dark. Slowly the monster emerged into Raven’s light—first its blood-smeared maw, then its black skull with the lightning-streak burn across it—and began to slink toward them. Its muscular body blocked the tunnel, and its leathery, scaled tail rose up and snapped brutally in the air.

  42

  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.”