Usher's Passing by Robert R. McCammon Read Free Book Online

gardens, rolling hills, fountains, and stables in the alien world beneath them. They were distrustful of all but their own, and rarely came down to trade in Foxton.
    Rix suddenly felt the back of his neck prickle. If he'd been looking at a map of property lines, he wouldn't have known with any greater certainty that they had entered the Usher domain. The forest seemed darker, the autumn leaves of such deep reds and purples that they appeared to shimmer with an oily blackness. The black canopy of leaves overhung the road, and tangles of briars—the kind that could gash to the bone and snap off— twisted in ugly corkscrews as dangerous as barbed wire. Massive scabs of stone clung to the hillsides, threatening to slide down and smash the limo into junk. Rix realized his palms were sweating. The wilderness seemed to be a hostile environment unsuited for a civilized human being—yet this was the land that Hudson Usher had fallen in love with. Or, perhaps, seen as a challenge to be broken. In any case, it had never been Rix's cup of thorns.
    In traveling this way over the years, though infrequently, Rix had never failed to catch a sense of brutality in the land, a kind of soulless crushing power that made him feel weak and small. It was little wonder, he thought, that the people of Foxton considered Usherland a place best avoided, and had created folktales to emphasize their fear of the dark, forbidding mountains.
    "Pumpkin Man still in the woods?" Rix asked softly.
    Edwin glanced at him, then smiled. "My God! Do you still remember that story?"
    "How could I forget it? Let's see, how did that rhyme go? 'Run, run as fast as you can, 'cause out in the woods walks the Pumpkin Man.' Is that it?"
    "Near enough."
    "I should put the Pumpkin Man in a book someday," Rix said. "What about the black panther that walks like a man? Any new sightings?"
    "Yes, as a matter of fact. In August the Democrat said some lunatic hunter swore he'd seen it up on Briartop. I suppose stories like those sell newspapers."
    Rix scanned the tangled forest on both sides of the road. A knot of tension had thickened in his stomach as he recalled the tale told to him by Edwin about the Pumpkin Man, a creature the locals said had lived in the mountains for more than a hundred years and stole away children who roamed too far from home. Even now, as an adult, Rix still thought of the Pumpkin Man with childlike dread, though he knew the story had been concocted by the hillbillies to keep their children from getting lost in the woods.
    Around the road's next curve stood a formidable granite wall that held an intricately fashioned pair of wrought-iron gates. Scripted in iron on a granite arch above the gates was the name USHER. Edwin reached over to the dashboard and switched on a small device that triggered the radio-controlled locks. As the gates swung open, Edwin never even had to lift his foot from the accelerator.
    Rix looked over his shoulder when they were through and saw the gates locking themselves again. The design on them had always reminded him of a spider's web.
    At once the landscape changed. Though there were still places of deep, wild forest, there were also lush greenswards and meticulously kept gardens where roses, violets, and sunflowers grew amid prancing statues of fauns, centaurs, and cherubs. A tall glass roof sighted through orderly rows of pine trees signaled the conservatory where one of Rix's ancestors had grown a variety of cacti and succulents. Honeysuckle, tall maiden grass, and English ivy boiled up from the forest. Rix saw several gardeners at work, trimming hedges and pruning trees. In one garden stood a huge red Baldwin locomotive mounted on a stone pedestal. It dated from the early days of the railroad pioneers and had been the first piece of equipment purchased by his great-great-grandfather Aram, Hudson's son. At one time the Ushers had operated their own railroad—the Atlantic Seaboard Limited—to haul freight of gunpowder,