“It sounds like a real heartfelt career,” Rix said. He could imagine his brother driving out to some dusty old farm where a deformed animal pulled at its chain in the barn, or haggling with a lowlife abortionist who kept “extra-special” fetuses floating in jars of formaldehyde.
“What now? You gonna tell everybody within shoutin’ distance?”
“If you’re not ashamed of what you do, I wouldn’t think you’d mind.”
Boone put the lantern down on the hood of the Thunderbird. He crossed his arms and looked at Rix through hard, dead eyes. “Let me spell out how things are, Rixy. After Dad signs over the business and the estate to me, I can either put you on an allowance or cut you off clean.”
Rix laughed; his hand was resting on the knob to roll up the window if Boone reached for him. “Dad’s passing everything to Katt! Don’t you understand that yet?”
“Sure. And I’m the man in the fuckin’ moon! A woman can’t handle the business! I’ve got ideas, Rixy. Big ideas, for both the business and the estate.” When Rix was silent, Boone plowed ahead. “There’s a town in Florida, near Tampa, where only freaks live. That’s all the town is, just freaks. ’Course, they don’t allow no tourists. But what if I was to build a town between here and Foxton, and fill it full of freaks myself? Then folks could come in, pay one price, and poke around all they pleased! It’d be a freakshow that went on twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year!” Boone’s eyes had begun to gleam with excitement. “Hell, the damned thing could be like Disney World, with rides and everything! And if you’d mind your manners, I’d see that you got a cut of the gate.”
Disgust had blocked Rix’s throat. Boone was grinning, his face slightly flushed. When Rix found his voice, the words came out strangled. “Are you out of your damned mind? That’s about the most repulsive idea I’ve ever heard!”
Boone’s grin cracked. In his brother’s gaze was a flash of hurt that Rix had never seen before, and he realized Boone had shared a dream with him—a twisted dream, perhaps, but a dream all the same. For an instant Rix thought Boone would react with characteristic anger, but instead he drew himself up straight and proud. “I knew you wouldn’t understand,” he said. “You wouldn’t know a good idea if it bit you on the ass.” He took his lantern and walked to his horse, untied the reins from the hitching post, and swung himself into the saddle. “I’m a reasonable man.” He forced a chilly smile. “I’m perfectly willin’ to give both you and Katt an allowance, provided neither of you lives within five hundred miles of Usherland.”
“I’m sure Katt’ll have something to say about that.”
“She’ll leave me alone, if she knows what’s good for her.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I know some things about our little sister that might spin your head around, Rixy. Dad will never give her Usherland. It’s gonna be mine. You’ll see. Giddap.” He kicked his heels into the horse’s flanks and galloped away toward the bridge.
Bastard! Rix thought. He watched Boone ride into the distance, and then he started the engine. He was about to follow Boone when he glanced at the Lodge’s door.
It was standing wide open.
He’d seen Boone close it. A flurry of dead leaves spun across the steps and was sucked into the Lodge’s throat.
He sat staring numbly at the open doorway. An invitation, he thought suddenly. It wants me to come closer. He laughed nervously, but he didn’t take his eyes away from the entrance.
Then he forced himself to get out of the car. He took the first and second steps with no problem; on the third step his knees turned to putty.
The darkness beyond the doorway wasn’t total. He could make out the shapes of furniture in the gray twilight, and a violet-and-gold carpet across a leaf-littered floor. Figures were standing in the gloom, seemingly watching him.
See, Boone had said mockingly, you ought to be like one of the heroes in those books of yours.
He climbed the last four steps. His stomach was doing slow flipflops as he stood on the threshold of the Lodge for the first time in more than twenty years.
In his nightmares he had seen the Lodge as a dusty, horribly grim, haunted palace. What he saw now amazed him.
Before him was a beautiful, elegant foyer that was perhaps twice as large as the Gatehouse’s living room. From white marble walls protruded a dozen life-sized brass hands, offered to receive hats and coats. He realized that the watching figures were statues of fauns and cherubs that gazed toward the door, their eyes made of rubies, emeralds, and sapphires. Suspended from the vaulted ceiling, an immense chandelier of polished crystal spheres glistened. Beyond the foyer, a few steps led downward to a reception area floored with alternating black and white marble tiles. At its center stood a fountain, empty now, where bronze sea creatures reclined on rocks. The rest of the house was shrouded in darkness.
Rix had forgotten how magnificent the interior was. The statues in the foyer alone must be priceless. The workmanship of the marble, the ceiling, the brass hands on the walls—all of it staggered his senses.
He imagined how the Lodge must have looked during one of Erik’s parties, ablaze with festive lights. The fountain might be spouting champagne, and guests would dip their goblets in over the side. Aromas from the past found him: the scent of roses, fine Kentucky bourbon, Havana cigars, and starched linen. From deep within the Lodge he seemed to hear the echoes of otherworldly voices: faint notes of a woman’s laughter, a chorus of men singing a bawdy song in drunken glee, a business conversation in hushed, stiff tones, a man’s booming voice calling for more champagne. All of it overlapped, changed, became a silken, seductive whisper that said
—Rix—
He felt the voice in his bones. Wind swirled around him, caressing his face like cold fingers.
—Rix—
Leaves danced on the foyer’s floor. The wind strengthened, and there was a suction that tried to pull him across the threshold. The eyes of the statues were fixed on him, the brass hands reaching toward him.
—Rix—
“No,” he heard himself say, as if speaking underwater. He grasped the door’s oversized bronze handle and started to swing it shut. But the door was heavy and seemed to resist him. As he pushed against it, he thought he saw something move in the deep gloom near the marble fountain. It was a slow, sinuous movement, like an animal stretching. Then his eye lost it, and the door slammed shut with a dull boom.
He abruptly turned away and descended the stairs, then slid behind the wheel of the Thunderbird. He was trembling, his stomach knotted with tension. Whom had he spoken to? he asked himself. What was in there, trying to lure him beyond the safety of the doorway? If the Lodge did have a voice, he decided, it was born of his own imagination and the moan of the wind roaming the long corridors and cavernous rooms.
He started the engine, and couldn’t resist looking toward the Lodge again.
The front door was wide open.
He put the car into gear and sped along the driveway and back across the bridge.
29
RIX ENTERED THE GATEHOUSE living room and went to the decanters to pour himself a stiff drink. As he splashed bourbon into a glass, he heard his mother say, “Where have you been?”
He turned toward her voice. She was sitting in her chair before the fireplace, wearing a white gown and a diamond necklace. Rix poured his drink and took a long swallow of it.
“Where have you been?” she asked again. “Off the estate?”
“I was driving around.”
“Driving around where?”
“Here and there. Who are Dad’s visitors?”
“General McVair and Mr. Meredith, from the plant. Don’t change the subject. I don’t think I like your sudden disappearances very much.”
“Okay.” He shrugged, trying to think of an excuse to pacify her. “I went to Asheville, to see a friend of mine from college. Then I drove by the Lodge.” His hand was shaking as he lifted the glass to hi
s mouth again. What had happened at the Lodge only a short while ago now seemed as vague and strange as an unsettling, half-remembered dream. He felt jittery and irritable, and all he could see in his mind was that open doorway, and beyond it the magnificence of the Lodge. “Where’s Katt?” He’d noted that her pink Maserati was missing from the garage.
“She’s driven into Asheville, too. Sometimes she has lunch with friends.”
“So it’s all right for her to leave, but I can’t. Right?”
“I can’t understand your comings and goings,” she said, watching him carefully. “You say you drove by the Lodge? Why?”
“Jesus! What is this, an inquisition? Yes, I drove by the Lodge. No special reason. I saw Boone over there, too. He was prowling around inside with a flashlight.”
Margaret turned her attention to the small flames that flickered in the hearth. “He loves the Lodge,” she told him. “He’s said so a hundred times. He goes inside to walk the hallways. But I’ve warned him about the Lodge, Rix. I’ve told him…not to trust the Lodge too much.”
Rix finished his drink and put the glass aside. “Not to trust it? What do you mean?”
“I meant what I said,” she replied evenly. “I’ve warned him that someday…someday the Lodge is not going to let him come out again.”
“The Lodge isn’t alive,” Rix said—but he recalled the imagined aromas and sounds, the faint whisper of his own name like someone beckoning him in, the dark form that had moved near the marble fountain. What would have happened, he wondered, if he had continued into the Lodge? Would that door have swung shut behind him? Would the rooms have lengthened and twisted crazily out of shape, as they had when he was a child?
She sat for a moment as if she hadn’t heard. Then she said softly, “I loved the Lodge, too. Walen and I lived there during Erik’s last days. That was a terrible time, but still… I thought the Lodge was the most beautiful house on earth. Walen warned me not to go off alone in the Lodge, but I was a stupid, headstrong girl. I decided to explore it by myself. I went from one exquisite room to the next. I followed corridors that seemed to go on for miles. I took stairways that I’d never seen before—and never saw again.” She looked up from the fire at him. “I was lost for ten hours, and I’ve never been so frightened in my life. It must have been awful for you, wandering in the dark. If Edwin hadn’t found you… God only knows what might’ve happened.”
“It’s a miracle I didn’t break my neck on a staircase,” Rix said.
“Not only that. No…not only that.” She paused, as if trying to decide whether to continue or not. When she spoke again, her voice was pitched very low. “Erik was always building onto the Lodge. The work stopped not because the job was finished—but because the workmen wouldn’t complete it.”
“Why? Wasn’t he paying them enough?”
“Oh, he was paying them, all right,” she said. “Paying them triple wages. But Walen told me they stopped because they were afraid. One day before Walen and I were married, thirty workmen went into the Lodge. Twenty-eight came back out. The other two…well, the other two did not. And never did. I’ve always thought that, somehow, the Lodge would not let them go”
Rix had never heard his mother talk this way about Usher’s Lodge. It both unnerved and fascinated him. “Why did you and Dad decide to leave the Lodge after Erik died?”
“Because it’s just too big. And I never got over that feeling of being lost in there, almost…as if I were at the Lodge’s mercy. Besides, the Lodge is unsteady. I’ve felt the floors shake under my feet there. At the center of the house, the walls are cracking.” She was nervously fingering the rings on her hands. “We didn’t brick in the windows because of the birds, Rix; we bricked them in because they kept shattering. Over the years, every window in the Lodge has exploded outward. What that is, I don’t know. I just know… I dreaded thunderstorms when we lived there. Thunderstorms, particularly violent ones, when thunder shook the house, scared me to death. It was during those that most of the windows blew out.”
Thunderstorms, Rix thought. He remembered Ludlow’s fear of them from Nora’s diary, and Nora’s perception of the Lodge trembling around her. Erik had said the Lodge was built in an area that was prone to earthquakes. Could severe thunderstorms, Rix wondered, actually be triggering quakes?
“I think Boone’s love of the Lodge is a dangerous infatuation,” Margaret said. “He’s been after me lately to have the electricity turned on again in there. It wouldn’t surprise me if he actually wanted to move into the Lodge.” She hesitated, and Rix saw dismay pass over her face. “I’ve always thought that for some reason the Lodge was meant to attract thunder and lightning, with all those rods and tall spires on the roof. When a storm comes over the mountains, it seems to be drawn right to that house.” She said it with a hint of revulsion. “If the thunder is loud enough, it almost shakes the Gatehouse to pieces.”
“There was an earthquake around here in 1892 or 1893, wasn’t there? Didn’t it damage the Lodge?”
She looked at him questioningly, as if she wondered where he got his information, but then she said, “I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I was sitting right in this room four years ago, when most of the windows on the north side of the house exploded. One of the servants had to be taken to a hospital. Cass was cut on the arm. And I’ve been in the dining room several times when the plates trembled on the table. So perhaps we do have tremors from time to time—though it’s nothing like living in the Lodge at the height of a thunderstorm.”
“The windows on the north side?” Rix walked across the room to the north-facing picture window and pulled aside the curtain. He was facing Briartop Mountain and the Lodge. “I never heard about that.”
“After it happened, we never discussed it among ourselves. Walen said it was a freak thing—something to do with air pressure, or a jet breaking the sound barrier or something. The rain got in and made an awful mess, I remember.”
Rix turned toward her. “Did that happen during a thunderstorm, too?”
“Yes, it did. There was glass all over the rug, and I’m lucky it didn’t put my eyes out when the window blew in.”
“The windows blew inward?” he asked, and she nodded. Earthquakes, thunderstorms, and the Lodge, he mused—was there a connection between them? She’d said that the Lodge’s windows exploded outward. That seemed to suggest a disturbance in the air, rather than a quake—maybe a Shockwave, he thought. But a Shockwave from what?
“I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told a living soul,” Margaret said. She peered into the fire, avoiding his gaze. “With all my heart, I despise Usherland.”
It was spoken with such conviction that Rix couldn’t reply. All his life, he’d assumed that his mother gloried in the grandeur of Usherland, that she’d rather live nowhere else on earth. “At first,” she continued, “I thought Usherland was the most beautiful place in the world. Perhaps it is. I loved Walen when I married him. I still do. Oh, he’s always been a loner; he doesn’t really need anyone, and I understand that. But before Erik passed his scepter to Walen, your father was a carefree, happy young man. I saw him the afternoon he came down from Erik’s Quiet Room with that cane clenched in his hand. I swear to you, he looked as if he’d aged ten years. He locked himself in his study for three days and nights, and on the fourth morning he came out, because Erik had died in the night.” She lifted her chin, and her glassy eyes met Rix’s. “From that time on, Walen was different. He didn’t smile anymore. He turned his entire life into his work.” She shrugged. “But I hung on. What else could I do? Having you children gave me something to occupy my time.”
“And you blame Usherland for changing Dad?”
“Before that scepter was passed, your father and I took vacations. We went to Paris, to the French Riviera, to Madrid and Rio de Janeiro. But after Walen became the master of Usherland, he refused to leave it. There was always the business to answer to. Usherland had seized both of us, made us into prisoners. T
hese”—she motioned wanly at the walls—“are our gilded bars. The time is coming,” she said, “when that scepter will be passed again. I pity the one who accepts it. You others will be free, to lead your lives as you please. I hope both of you live them very far away from Usherland.” She sighed deeply and without strength, as if released from a great burden. Rix came over to stand beside her. She looked frail and tired, an old woman with a strained, overly made-up face. Rix felt she wouldn’t live very long after Walen’s death. Everything she was, her total identity, was enmeshed in Usherland. Katt would of course insist that she stay here, but Margaret’s life had been lived as a decoration in the house of Walen Usher.
He felt an overwhelming surge of pity for her. How could it be, he wondered, that one’s own parents were often the most distant strangers? He leaned over to kiss her cheek.
She shifted uncomfortably, and turned her face away. “Don’t. You smell like bourbon.”
Rix stopped, and straightened up until his back was rigid.
Their silence was interrupted by a light tapping on the door. “What is it?” Rix said curtly.
The doors slid open. A maid peered tentatively in. “Mrs. Usher? The gentlemen would like to speak with you, ma’am.”
“Send them in,” Margaret told her, and Rix saw a transformation come over his mother as suddenly as if a switch had been thrown in her head. She rose from her chair and turned to greet her visitors with the smooth, gliding motion of a practiced hostess, her eyes bright and her smile turned to full incandescence.
The uniformed man that Margaret had identified as General McVair—heavyset, craggy-featured, with close-cropped gray sideburns and small eyes as powerful as pale blue laser beams—came into the living room. He was followed by Meredith, from the armaments plant. Meredith wore a dark blue vested suit, and had short blond hair flecked with gray. Aviator-style sunglasses obscured his eyes. Handcuffed to his left wrist was a black briefcase.