Usher's Passing

by Robert McCammon

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.

“I’ll spare you that, then. Let’s talk about your literary achievements. Three pieces of jibbering nonsense. I understand that last book of yours was on the best-seller lists for a short time. As they say, if you put a monkey in a room with a typewriter long enough, he’ll eventually produce Shakespearean sonnets.” He paused, letting the pain of the lashings sink in. As a child, Rix had fought against crying when the Peacemaker was in use, but the pain ultimately won. Had enough? Walen would ask, and when Rix remained stubbornly silent the belt would whistle again. Walen said offhandedly, “Those books of yours probably drove your wife to suicide, you know.”

even if my books end up being shit, at least no one will say this to me about them i guess?

Malengine, Rix thought. It was a word he’d been mulling over to use as the title of a book someday. It meant “evil machination” or, more literally, something constructed for an evil purpose. The Lodge was a malengine, built with the spoils of destruction, meant to shield the generations of murderers that Rix called his ancestors. If Usherland could be compared to a body, the Lodge was its malignant heart—silent now, but not stilled. Like Walen Usher, the Lodge listened, and brooded, and waited.

And then she found her voice, and though she couldn’t hear herself over the noise, she screamed, “Stop it you bastard stop it you murderer stop it!” The artillery pieces were razing the mountainside. She saw leaping tongues of fire where the shells hit. Standing up, she groped through the descending pall of smoke, bumping into people, tripping over dazed bodies. A shape approached through the haze, and only when she was right in front of him did she realize it was Erik. “Why?” she screamed. “Why?” He stopped, blinked at her. His smile was hanging lopsided from his mouth. “Because,” he said, and it was then that Nora realized the cannonfire had ended, “I can.” Then he brushed past her, like a sleepwalker, into the thickening whorls and eddies of smoke. She stood watching the fires burn on Briartop Mountain, and she began to sob. At her feet, tiny American flags blew across the ground in the scorched turbulence that the howitzers had created.

Jessamyn’s description of the creature standing over Erik’s crib sounded like something from a Roger Corman horror flick.

The comets had fallen on the Fourth of July, when he was ten years old, the Mountain King had told him and Raven. Lizbeth had been six, and the year was 1919.

You were wasting a valuable resource that should be channeled through Usher Armaments. We talked over the phone, and I told her what I wanted her to do. I knew it would disrupt your writing. Do you understand that I did it for you?” A tear slid down Rix’s cheek. “I … loved …” “That wasn’t love. It was waste. What you’re going to do for the landlord, for me, and for Usher Armaments … that’s love.” Something twisted within New’s soul. From a terrible distance, what the Mountain King had said to him started to come back: Evil … evil exists … evil exists to destroy love.

“Master Newlan has come home, where he belongs. He’ll be the next Pumpkin Man. The landlord and I will teach him very well. You see, the Usher diet is very important. If they don’t eat properly, the Malady ages them before their time. Hudson Usher and his brother, Roderick, and their father, Malcolm, were trapped in a caved-in coal mine in Wales. It was weeks before they were found. But Hudson and Roderick survived by … sharing their father between them. The Ushers are cannibals, Miss Dunstan. For years they got their meat from a butcher shop in Chicago. Uriah Hynd also served the landlord. But, alas, the Chicago Fire destroyed his business—and the man himself.” “They … eat …” “The children, yes. My wife makes a wonderful Welsh pie.”

A blade grazed Rix’s cheek with a noise like a hornet. A trickle of warm blood ran down, and the pain cracked the ice that had closed around him. As he stared at the swinging hooks, reality flooded back into him. Edwin was the Pumpkin Man. Edwin had caused Sandra’s suicide. Cannibalism kept the Ushers young, warding off the Malady as long as possible. The Ushers worshiped evil, and had built Usher Armaments as an altar to the force that lived within the Lodge—the great malengine that had gathered around him and shaped him to be fuel for the furnace of destruction. Edwin contorted on the floor in a spreading pool of blood. When a spasm jolted him, the shockwaves shook the walls. Like an animal snapping madly in its death throes, he was striking in all directions with his awesome, evil magic. The chamber’s door blew off its hinges. The freezing crosscurrents of energy whipped back and forth, staggering Raven to the floor and throwing Rix against a wall as if he were caught in a hurricane.

“Does she … know about Boone and Kattrina yet?” “I think she really wants to believe that Katt is in Italy and Boone is on a tour of Europe. Of course, she knows something’s wrong. If she lets herself realize that they’re dead, she’ll go to pieces. She’ll have to know sometime, I guess, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. I’m … really grateful for that story you wrote, Raven. I still don’t understand why you didn’t blow the lid off everything, but I want you to know how much I appreciate it.”