Usher's Passing by Robert R. McCammon Page B

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