Usher's Passing (8 page)

On the second floor, the smell of decay was stronger. He passed by his old room without pausing to look inside. Brightly colored flowers and greenery were placed in crystal vases all along the corridor, in a vain attempt to mask the stench. Moody oil paintings—including
War Clouds
by Victor Hallmark,
After the Battle
by Rutledge Taylorson, and
Blood on the Snow by
George H. Nivens—lined the walls as testimonial to Walen Usher's bleak taste in art. At the end of the corridor, another staircase ascended to a single white door—the Gatehouse's Quiet Room.

Rix stood at the foot of the stairs, gathering his courage. The odor of decomposition drifted around him, a foul miasma. Nothing that smelled like that, Rix thought, could still be alive.

The last time Rix had seen his father, Walen Usher had been the tall, ramrod-straight figure of authority that Rix knew from his
childhood. Age had done nothing to diminish the power of his
gaze or the strength of his voice, and his rugged, rough-hewn features might have been those of a man in his early forties except for swirls of gray at his temples and a few deepening lines across his high, aristocratic forehead. Walen Usher's jaw jutted like the prow of a battleship, and his mouth was a thin grim line that rarely broke into a smile.

Rix had never been able to understand how his father's mind worked. They had no common ground, no means of easy communication. Walen ran the estate and the business with a dictator's firm control. He had always kept his various business projects a secret from the family, and when Rix had been a child,
there were long periods of time when Walen locked himself into his
study and didn't come out. Rix knew only that a lot of military men visited his father behind locked doors.

When Walen was around, he treated his children as if they were soldiers in his private army. There were predawn military-style inspections, strict codes of conduct, dress, and manners and savage verbal attacks if his children failed in any way. His most vicious assaults had been against Rix, when the boy was deemed lazy or uncooperative.

If Rix "talked back," failed to keep his shoes brightly polished, was late to the dinner table, or committed some other infraction of the unwritten rules, then the broad leather strap that his father called the Peacemaker raised red welts across his legs and buttocks—usually with Boone smirking in the same room, behind Walen's shoulder. Boone, on the other hand, was a master at playing the perfect son, always dressed immaculately, always neat and clean and fawning around his father. Kattrina had learned the art of bending to whatever wind Walen blew, and so escaped much of the abuse. Margaret, ever busy with planning parties and charity events, knew it was best to stay out of Walen's way, and had never taken Rix's side against him. Rules, she would say, were rules.

Once, Rix had seen Walen knock a servant to the floor and kick him in the ribs for some imagined dereliction of duty. If Edwin hadn't intervened, Walen might have killed the man. Sometimes, late at night when the rest of the house had gone to sleep, Rix had lain in his bed and heard his father walking the corridor outside his room, pacing back and forth in some mind-less expenditure of nervous energy. He feared the night when his father would throw open his door and set on him, rage burning in his eyes, with the same fury that had made him break their servant's ribs.

But in mellow moods, Walen would summon Rix to his huge bedroom, where the walls were painted dark red and the furnishings were heavy black Victorian monstrosities brought from the Lodge, and order Rix to read to him from the Bible. What Walen wanted to hear were not chapters that had to do with spiritual things, but instead were long, tongue-twisting lineages: who begat who begat who. He demanded them over and over again and sometimes the ebony cane he carried would smack the floor with impatience when Rix stumbled over the names.

When he was ten, Rix had run away from home after a particularly nasty meeting with the Peacemaker. Edwin had found him at the Trailways bus station in Foxton; they'd had a long talk, and as Rix collapsed into tears, Edwin held him and promised that Walen would never hit him again, so long as Edwin lived. The vow had remained intact for all these years, though Walen's taunts had increased. Rix was still the failure, the black sheep, the weakling who whined that the Ushers had thrived and gotten fat on generations of the dead.

Rix's heart was pounding as he forced himself up the steps. A hand-lettered sign had been taped to the door:
TAP
QUIETLY, Beside the door was a table bearing a box of green surgical masks.

He put his hand on the doorknob and then abruptly drew it back. Corruption oozed out of that room; he could feel it, like furnace heat. He didn't know if he could take what was waiting In there for him, and suddenly his resolve slipped away. He started back down the stairs.

But in another second the decision was made for him.

The knob turned from the other side, and the door opened.

A
UNIFORMED NURSE WITH A SURGICAL MASK OVER THE LOWER HALF
of her face peered from the Quiet Room at Rix. She wore skintight surgical gloves as well. Above the mask her eyes were dark brown and set in webs of wrinkles.

A wave of decay rolled out of the Quiet Room and struck Rix with almost tangible force. He gripped the banister tightly, his teeth clenched.

Mrs. Reynolds whispered, "A mask should help," and motioned toward the box.

He put one on. The inside was scented with mint, but it was not much help.

"Are you Rix?" She was a big-boned woman, possibly in her mid-forties, with curly iron-gray hair cut short. Rix noted that her eyes were faintly bloodshot.

"Of course it's Rix, you damned fool!" came the hoarse, barely human rasp from the darkness. Rix stiffened. His father's melodic voice had degenerated to an animal's growl. "I told you it would be Rix, didn't I? Let him in!"

Mrs. Reynolds opened the door wider for him. "Quickly," she said. "Too much light hurts his eyes. And remember, please keep your voice as soft as possible."

Rix stepped into the high-ceilinged, rubber-walled room. Then were no windows. The only light came from a small green shaded Tensor lamp on a table next to the chair where Mrs Reynolds had been sitting. It cast a low-wattage circle of illumination that extended for only a foot or so into the room. He had an instant to see his father's grim bedroom furniture arranged in the room before Mrs. Reynolds closed the heavy rubber-lined door, sealing off the corridor's light.

He'd seen his father's canopied bed. There had been something lying in that bed, within a clear plastic oxygen tent. Rix thanked God the door had closed before he'd been able to see it too well.

In the darkness he could hear the soft chirping of an oscilloscope.

The machine was just to the left of his father's bed; he saw the pale green zigzag of Walen Usher's labored heartbeat. His father's breathing was a pained, liquid gasping. Silk sheets rustled on the bed.

"Do you need anything, Mr. Usher?" the nurse whispered.

"No," the agonized voice replied. "Don't shout, goddamn it!"

Mrs. Reynolds returned to her chair, leaving Rix to fend for himself. She continued where she'd left off in her Barbara Cartland novel.

"Come closer," Walen Usher commanded.

"I can't see where I'm—"

There was a sharp inhalation.
"Softly!
Oh God, my ears . . ."

"I'm sorry," Rix whispered, unnerved.

The oscilloscope had started chirping faster. Walen didn't speak again until his,heartbeat had slowed down. "Closer. You're about to stumble into a chair. Step to your left. Don't trip over that cable, you idiot! More to the left. All right, you're five paces from the foot of the bed. Damn it, boy, do you have to
stomp?"

When Rix reached the bed, he could feel the fever radiating from his father's body. He gripped one of the canopy sheets and felt sweat trickling down under his arms.

"Well, well," Walen said. Rix could sense himself being examined. The silk sheets rustled again, and a form slowly shifted on the bed. "So you've come home, have you? Turn around. Let me look at you."

"I'm not a prize horse," Rix mumbled to himself under his breath.

"You're not a prize son, either. You don't fill out those clothes, Rix. What's wrong with you? Doesn't writing put enough food on your table?"

"I'm all right."

Walen grunted. "Like hell you are." He was silent, and Rix heard the gurgling of fluid in his lungs. "I'm sure you recall this room, don't you? It used to shelter you, Boone, and Kattrina whenever you had attacks. Where do you go now?"

"There's a closet I use in my apartment. I've got egg cartons stapled to the walls to muffle sound, and I've fixed the door so light can't get in."

"I'll bet you've got it looking like a womb. Something about you always craved a return to the womb."

Rix let the remark go. The darkness and smell of corruption pressed on him. The sickening heat from his father's body glared in his face like sunlight off metal. "Where do Katt and Boone go, now that you've moved in up here?"

"Boone's built his own Quiet Room, a chamber next to his bedroom. Katt's cut a hole in the wall behind her closet. They don't have many attacks. They don't understand what I'm going through in here, Rix. They've always lived at Usherland, where it's safe. But
you
—
you understand what hell can be like, don't you?"

"I don't have that many attacks."

"No? What would you call that experience you endured yesterday in New York?"

"Boone told you?"

"I heard him telling Margaret, down in the living room last night. You forget how much I
can
hear, Rix. I heard you talking downstairs with them. I heard you climbing the stairs. I can hear your heartbeat right now. It's racing. Sometimes my senses are more acute than at other times; it comes in waves. But you understand what I mean, don't you? Ushers can't survive for very long beyond the gates of Usherland; it's a fact I'm sure you're beginning to appreciate."

Rix's eyes were getting used to the darkness. Lying on the bed before him, beneath the folds of the oxygen tent, was something that looked like a brown stick-figure, horribly emaciated. It lay motionless—but when one bony, shriveled arm reached out to draw the silk sheet closer, a shiver rippled up Rix's spine. A little more than a year ago, Walen Usher had stood over six feet and weighed one hundred eighty-five pounds. The shape on the bed couldn't possibly weigh more than half that.

"Don't stare at me," Walen rasped. "Your time'll come."

A knot clogged Rix's throat. When he could find his voice, he said, "It doesn't appear that living at Usherland all your life has made a difference for you, one way or the other."

"You're wrong. I'm sixty-four years old. My time is almost up. Look at yourself! You could be my brother instead of my son. Every year you live outside the gates of Usherland, your health will continue to erode. Your attacks will get worse. Soon that little womb won't be enough. You'll try to hide in there one day, and you'll realize too late you've overlooked a chink of light. You'll go blind and mad in there, with no one to help you. Before this"—his voice dripped with disgust—"I hadn't suffered an attack for five years. Hudson Usher knew that the air, here, the peace and solitude, would be a balm to the Malady. He built this estate so his ancestors could live long, full lives. We have our own world here. You're insane to want to live anywhere else—or you're intent on committing slow suicide."

"I left because I wanted to make my own way."

"Of
course."
There was a liquid rush and gurgle from beneath the bed. Bodily waste, Rix realized. Walen was hooked up to tubes that carried his fluids away. "Yes, you've certainly 'made your way.' You wrote advertising copy in some Atlanta department store for a while. Then you took a job selling books And after that you were a copy editor on some local tabloid. Magnificent occupations, one and all. And let's not forget the. progress of your personal life. Shall we discuss your misbegotten marriage and its aftermath?"