Usher's Passing (2 page)

"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 ran 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 money; 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!"

"Then," the other man said coldly, "it seems the world would've been the better if you had been born blind."

"I've said all I possibly can." Poe reached for his glass of sherry again. "Is your business with me finished, sir?"

"Yes. I've had my look at you, and one look is all I can bear." Usher submerged his cigar in Poe's inkpot. There was a quick hiss as it went out, and Poe stared blandly at Usher with the glass of sherry at his lips. Usher took his cane and rose to his feet; he dropped a coin upon the table. "Have another bottle, Mr. Poe," he said. "It seems your brain thrives on such inspiration." He waited, watching, until Poe had picked up the coin.

"I . . . wish you and your family a long and profitable existence," Poe said.

"And may
your
fortunes continue their course." Usher touched the brim of his hat with his cane, then stalked out of the Muleskinner Bar. "The De Peyser Hotel," he told the soggy coachman as he slipped into the coach's black satin interior.

As the coach rumbled away from the curb, Usher lowered the interior lamp's wick to rest his eyes, and took off his top hat. From a widow's peak on his high forehead, his hair was luxuriant and glossy silver. He was satisfied with the day's events. He would have the deed to the De Peyser Hotel tomorrow afternoon, and his curiosity about Edgar Poe had been slaked. The man was obviously indigent, a madman with one foot in the grave. Poe knew nothing of any significance about the Usher family; the tale had been simply fiction that carved a bit too close. Within five years, Usher assured himself, Edgar Poe would be bones in a box and the tale he'd written would blow away in yellow dust like all other minor attempts at "literature." And that would be the end of it.

Rain hammered at the coach's roof. Usher closed his eyes, his hands gripped around the cane.

Oh, he thought, if Edgar Poe only knew the
rest
of the story! If he only knew the real nature of the madness that brother Roderick had harbored! But Roderick had always been weak; it was he, Hudson, who'd inherited the brute strength and determination of his father, the sense of survival that had passed down through the ages from the ancient Welsh clan of Ushaars. An Usher walks where he pleases, he mused, and takes what he wants.

The Usher name would be seared into the tapestry of the future. Hudson Usher would make certain of it. And God help those, he thought, who tried to resist the force of the Usher will.

The coach's team clattered across slick cobblestones. Hudson Usher, who at the age of fifty-three looked barely thirty, smiled like a lizard.

"THE DE PEYSER HOTEL, PLEASE," THE TALL, BLOND MAN IN
A
brown tweed suit said as he climbed into a Yellow Cab on East Sixtieth Street, less than three blocks from Central Park.