“I have been under pressure,” Rix admitted. “A lot of it. I think…it must’ve started when Sandra died. I loved her so much, Edwin. After she died…it was as if part of me had died, too—like a light being turned off. Now I just feel dark inside.” He paused, but sensed that Edwin was waiting for him to continue. “And… I’ve been having nightmares. Actually, flashes of things that I can’t really get a grip on. Boone hung a plastic skeleton in the door of the De Peyser’s Quiet Room, so it would swing right in my face. I keep seeing that damned thing in my mind, Edwin—only it gets bloodier every time I see it. And—this sounds crazy, I know—I keep seeing something that scares the hell out of me: it looks like a doorknob, with the face of a roaring lion on it. It’s made of silver, and it just floats there, in the dark. Can you think of a door like that, somewhere in the Lodge?”
“There might be,” Edwin answered. “But there are thousands of doors in the Lodge, Rix. I can’t say I’ve paid much attention to their knobs. Why? What does the Lodge have to do with it?”
“I’m not sure, I just think… I must’ve seen a door like that, when I was wandering in the Lodge. And that trick skeleton was plastic, but now…it seems so real.”
Edwin said softly, “That was a terrible experience for you. Alone in the darkness for hours. I thank God I found you when I did. But that was a long time ago, Rix. You have to let your fears of the Lodge go. I’ll admit, though, the Lodge turned me around often enough. Several times I was so lost I had to call for help. Which brings me to why I was looking for you. Have you seen Logan this morning?”
“Logan? No. Why?”
“I think he’s run away. We had a disagreement the other day. Logan seems to think his work hours are too demanding. He was gone from his room this morning, when I went in to wake him up.”
“Good riddance,” Rix said curtly. “Logan could never take your place. You should realize that by now.”
“I honestly thought Logan had the potential to do something with his life. Cass told me I was being foolish; maybe she was right.” He scowled, an expression Rix was unused to seeing on Edwin’s placid features. “Logan has no discipline. I should’ve known that, after Robert told me about all the scrapes he’s been in. Well… I wanted to give him a chance, because he’s a Bodane. Was that so wrong?”
“Not wrong. Maybe just too trusting.”
“That’s exactly what Cass says. I’m not going to call Robert yet; I’ll give Logan the rest of the day. But if Logan can’t do it, who’s going to take my place?” He massaged the knuckles of one hand. “The boy needs a good whipping to straighten him out.”
“He’s long past that,” Rix said.
Edwin grunted. “I haven’t gone over to the Lodge yet. If Logan went in there alone after I told him not to, he’s as stupid as he is disobedient. Well, I won’t bother you with Logan. Unfortunately, he’s my problem.” He started across the library to the door.
“Edwin?” Rix said, and the other man stopped. Rix motioned toward the cardboard boxes. “I’ve been going through those to find out how Ludlow Usher got the ebony cane back into the family. I know it was stolen away by the man who killed Aram Usher in a duel, and it was gone for at least thirteen years. Obviously the cane is very important. Do you have any idea how Ludlow might’ve retrieved it? Any stories you might’ve heard from your father or mother?”
“No,” Edwin replied—but he’d said it too quickly, and at once Rix’s interest perked up. “I’d better see if I can track down—”
Rix planted himself between Edwin and the door. “If you know anything at all, I want you to tell me. Who’s it going to hurt? Not Mom, and certainly not Dad. Not you or Cass, either.” He saw the indecision on Edwin’s face. “Come on. Please, I need to hear what you know.”
“Rix, I don’t—”
“It’s important to me. I have to know.”
Outside the library, thunder echoed like a bass kettledrum. Edwin said in a resigned voice, “All right. I do know how Ludlow found the cane. When I was about Logan’s age, I was just like him; I hated to work. I found a good hiding place—the library in the Lodge’s basement.” He smiled vaguely. “I used to steal cigars from the drawing room and smoke them down there. It’s a wonder I didn’t set fire to the house, with all those books and journals around. Naturally, I read a great deal, too.”
“And you found something about Ludlow and the cane?” Rix prompted.
“Among other things. It was in a volume of old newspaper clippings. Of course, that was a long time ago. I’m not sure my memory is very reliable anymore.”
“Tell me what you remember. Anything.”
Edwin still looked uncertain. He started to protest again, but then he sighed and slowly eased himself into a chair. “All right,” he said finally, watching a candelabra burn on a table near him. “I know that Luther Bodane, my grandfather, went with Ludlow to New Orleans in the summer of 1882. Ludlow wanted to see his half sister, Shann. She was in a convent outside the city, and had been there for more than eight years.”
“Shann was a nun?” Rix asked. “I thought she was a concert pianist. Didn’t she study music in Paris?”
“She did. Obviously she was a musical prodigy, because she was composing when she was ten years old. As I understand it, Shann was in Paris when her father was killed. His death must have been a terrible shock to her; she was a shy, gentle girl who idolized Aram Usher. But she finished her education. Her final examination at the academy was an original concerto, which she played for the headmistress.” Edwin’s eyes seemed to darken as he saw beyond Rix and into the past. “The concerto was written in honor of her father. Shann graduated with high marks. When she returned to America, she immediately started a concert tour.”
“So how did she become a nun?”
“The academy’s headmistress hanged herself after Shann left,” Edwin continued, as if he hadn’t heard Rix’s question. “On her tour, Shann played what came to be known as the Usher Concerto. There are dozens of clippings in the Lodge’s library praising her performances. The tour continued for more than four months, and everywhere Shann played she was a phenomenal success. Then the suicides began.”
“Suicides? I don’t understand.”
“Neither did anyone else, at first. A dozen people in New York City, ten in Boston, eight in Philadelphia, another dozen in Charleston. And all of them had heard the Usher Concerto.”
Rix recoiled inwardly. He remembered the faded photograph of the little girl sitting happily at her white grand piano. “You mean…the music had something to do with their suicides?”
“Evidently so.” Edwin’s voice had taken on a grim tone. “The music was so…beautifully strange that it worked on the imagination long after it was heard. The press began to put everything together. When Shann stepped off the train in New Orleans with her entourage, the newspapermen were waiting for her like a pack of hounds. There was a mob outside the station; they called her a murderess, shouted that she was a witch who’d discovered some sort of satanic symphony. The stress was too much for Shann, and she collapsed in the terminal. For the next several years, she lived in a New Orleans sanitarium. She joined the convent after she was released.”
“And she never came back to Usherland? Isn’t she buried in the cemetery.”
“No. The monument was erected to her memory, but Shann was buried in New Orleans. It’s unclear exactly why Ludlow went to see her; possibly he was trying to bring her back home. In any case, she wouldn’t leave the convent.” Edwin hesitated, arranging his thoughts. His shadow was scrawled on the wall behind him. “There’d been heavy thunderstorms and flooding in New Orleans, and the trains had been canceled,” he continued quietly. “Ludlow and Luther booked passage on one of the last of the old Cordweiler steamboats, the Bayou Moon. According to the newspaper accounts, the boat was in decrepit condition. Anyway, somehow Ludlow let himself be lured into a backroom poker game—and that’s the beginning of how he retrieved the family scepter…”
&
nbsp; As Edwin spoke, the muffled boom of approaching thunder rang out over Usherland. In his imagination, Rix saw the once proud Bayou Moon, now an unsightly patchwork of cheap timbers, plowing northward along the swollen Mississippi. A high-stakes card game was in progress in a lamplit room, and twenty-four-year-old Ludlow Usher sat down at the round table for what was to become much more than a game.
Mr. Tyson—the top-hatted older gentleman who had struck up a conversation with Ludlow at the bar—introduced him to the other three players. Ludlow had given his name as “Tom Wyatt,” aware that the older gentleman was probably looking for a sheep to fleece. The Usher name might be known to him, and this was a precaution Ludlow often took with strangers.
Ludlow nodded toward each of them in turn: a heavyset, bald-headed man who wore flashy diamond rings and gave his name as “Nicholls, with two l’s”; a coffee-colored man named Chance, who wore a gray goatee and had a brown velvet eyepatch over his right eye that matched the color and cloth of his suit; and a lean Negro who called himself Brethren and wore a ruby stickpin through one flared nostril. A glass of whiskey was poured for Ludlow, a fine Havana cigar was offered to him, and the game of five-card draw was under way.
The Bayou Moon rocked and heaved over rough water, its timbers groaning as if about to split apart. Fifty- and hundred-dollar bills littered the card table, and the oil lamps arranged around the room glowed through shifting layers of blue cigar smoke. Ludlow expected to lose his money quickly and return to the bar for the rest of the long trip to St. Louis—and so he was surprised when, less than an hour later, he’d won almost five thousand dollars.
Tyson poured him another whiskey and complimented him on his shrewd handling of the cards. Ludlow had done nothing particularly shrewd; in fact, most of his winnings had come when the other players folded. Nicholls, with the practiced delivery of an ex-thespian, suddenly offered the suggestion that all bets should be doubled. “It’s doom on my own fool head, I know,” he said with a thin smile, “but perhaps this young man’s luck will change.”
“I’m not so sure, Mr. Nicholls,” Tyson replied. “Our Mr. Wyatt has a canny look about him. What say, Mr. Wyatt? Are you agreeable?”
Ludlow knew he should take the money and run. All eyes were on him. There was a moment of strained silence. Ludlow decided to play it out. “I’m agreeable,” he said.
To his amusement, he continued to win with no apparent effort. Ludlow’s quick, retentive mind was calculating the odds on each hand; it took no genius to realize he was being primed for disaster. It began slowly, as Brethren won a thousand-dollar pot that was mostly Ludlow’s money. Then Ludlow was only winning one hand out of four, and his stack of chips was dwindling fast. Still, just when it appeared that Ludlow might fold and rise from the table, he was allowed to win a substantial pot. They were toying with him, he knew, and had to be all in it together for such clockwork precision. Perhaps Tyson had chosen him as a mark because of his well-cut clothing, or his diamond stickpin, or the wad of cash with which he’d paid his bar bill. Though their faces were innocently concerned with their own cards, the men seemed to know exactly what Ludlow held, and bet accordingly. Ludlow was puzzled; how were they doing it?
He stopped drinking the whiskeys that Tyson pressed on him, and concentrated with a vengeance on the cards. Ludlow was down to his last thousand dollars of winnings when his fingers touched three tiny raised dots in the lower left corner of the king of spades. The other cards he held also had a combination of dots in the same place; they would not be perceived, Ludlow realized, by a drunken man who was convinced the tide of luck would again return in his favor. The cards were marked in what seemed to be random patterns of faint dots—an intricate code that told the dealer exactly what cards each man held. Ludlow smiled inwardly at the double challenge that faced him: to decipher that code, and to gain control of the deck.
“Well,” he said, adding a slur to his voice as he lost another four hundred dollars, “I think that’ll be all for me, gentlemen.” He started to rise.
Tyson clasped his arm. “One more hand, Mr. Wyatt. I sense you’re a very lucky man today.”
Ludlow won the next hand, and the one after that as well. Then his losing streak started in earnest. His winnings were gone, and he was playing with Usher money. Control of the deck circulated around the table, with Chance’s chips on the rise.
For the next hour, as the Bayou Moon fought the river currents and rain thrashed down in torrents, the mind behind Ludlow’s mask worked like a machine. He calculated odds like a master mathematician, his fingers playing over the series of dots, entering each combination and the card it signified into memory. He began to fold more regularly, to conserve his money, and subsequently—with a quick glance from Chance to Tyson that Ludlow caught from the corner of his eye—his “luck” returned with a heavy pot, encouraging him to bet recklessly the next round.
As long as he could deal, Ludlow knew, he would stand a better chance of beating them at their own game. But they had more experience than he, and he would still have to play the bewildered fool—until the time was right to destroy them. He focused all his concentration on the cards he dealt, letting the marked corner slide against his finger, but he was clumsy at it and only recognized half of the cards.
He had to wait six more hands before he got the deal again. This time, he did it more slowly, deliberately. Though he lost to Brethren, Ludlow’s percentage of correct calls went up considerably. When he dealt the next time, Ludlow was down seven thousand dollars of his own money. There was blood in the eyes of the other men; they smelled fresh meat, and were pressing forward for the kill.
And now it was time. “Gentlemen,” Ludlow said, as he cut and shuffled the deck, “I feel lucky. What say we up the ante?”
A slick smile spread over Tyson’s face. “Another thousand dollars apiece, Mr. Wyatt?”
“No sir,” Ludlow replied. “Another ten thousand dollars apiece. In cash.” In the sudden silence he put the deck carefully down in front of him and peeled off the bills from the roll in his coat. He laid the money out in the middle of the table.
“That’s…a hell of a sum of money,” Nicholls said, his eyes dancing around at the other men.
“What’s wrong?” Ludlow feigned stupid surprise. “Aren’t you gentlemen up to it?”
“Ten thousand dollars as ante for one hand?” Brethren took the cigar from his mouth, his black eyes slitting. “What’s the limit?”
“The sky,” Ludlow said. “Is anyone willing to play?”
The silence stretched. Tyson cleared his throat nervously and slugged down a shot of whiskey. Across the table from Ludlow, Chance stared fixedly at him, smiling coldly. “I’ll play,” Chance said. He brought a wad of bills from his own brown velvet jacket, counted out ten thousand dollars and tossed the money to cover Ludlow’s. Brethren said, “I’m out, men.” Nicholls sputtered with indecision, then added his money to the pot. Tyson paused; his eyes had turned reptilian, and studied Ludlow’s face. Then he grunted softly and came up with ten thousand dollars.
Now Ludlow had to be both careful and precise. He dealt slowly, sliding the dots against his finger, identifying each card before he dealt the next. When the cards were out and the draw had been dealt, Ludlow had a pair of tens, the queen of hearts, the five of diamonds, and the five of hearts. By his calculations, Tyson had two aces, Nicholls a mixed hand, and Chance held two pair, jacks and nines.
“Bets?” Ludlow asked softly.
Tyson opened with a thousand dollars. Nicholls met it, and so did Chance.
“I’ll see your thousand,” Ludlow told them, “and raise you another ten thousand.” He peeled the bills off and flung them to the table.
A soft cough of cheroot smoke left Nicholls’s mouth. Tyson’s face had begun to take on a yellowish cast; he picked up his cards and stared at them as if trying to read the future. Ludlow met Chance’s gaze across the table, their faces revealing nothing. “Well?” Ludlow asked silkily.
?
??A gambler who runs away,” Tyson said as he laid his cards on the table, “will live to win another day. Sorry, gents.”
Nicholls had a bead of sweat on his nose. With a resigned moan, he pushed away his worthless hand.
“You think you’ve got me, don’t you?” Chance’s single eye was the color of a murky topaz. “No sir, I don’t believe you do.” He began to count off the bills—but after eight thousand three hundred dollars, his luck had run out.
“You’re short, sir,” Ludlow said. “I think that finishes you.” He started to rake the money toward him.
But Chance’s hand shot forward, the fingers clamping around Ludlow’s wrist. The gambler’s eye was blazing, a bitter twist to his mouth. “I have something,” Chance said tersely, “that I think may make up the difference.” He reached down to the floor beside his chair—and placed upon the table an object that bleached the blood from Ludlow’s face.
It was the lion-headed Usher scepter.
“A beauty, isn’t it?” Chance asked. “It used to belong to a rich man. Look at the workmanship in that silver lion’s-head. Look at the ebony, as smooth as glass. It was given to me by that rich man’s wife. She and I were, shall we say, well acquainted?”
Ludlow looked into Chance’s face and realized he’d been playing cards with the man who’d killed his father. His heart had begun pounding, the blood rushing into his face again. “What…makes you believe that stick is worth seventeen hundred dollars, sir?”
“Because it’s magic,” Chance said, leaning toward Ludlow with a conspiratorial smile. “You see this patch, Mr. Wyatt? I was shot in the face in Atlanta six years ago. Point-blank, with a derringer. I lost my eye, but I lived because I had that cane in my hand. Two years ago, a man on a train stabbed me in the stomach. The knife went deep…but the wound was healed in a week. A woman cut me in the neck with a broken bottle in Kansas City. The doctor said I should’ve bled to death, but I didn’t. I had that cane in my hand. It’s magic, and that’s why it’s worth seventeen hundred dollars and a lot more.”