Free Usher's Passing by Robert R. McCammon Page B

tawny marble cats seemed to stretch and move, pacing the ledge as if guarding their territory.
    New watched a flock of six wild ducks feeding in the high weeds on the lake's northern shore. The lake was ebony even in bright sunlight, and in all the many times he'd come to this place to look down, he'd never seen a fish jump from its surface.
    The Lodge took up almost the entire island. A stone bridge over the lake connected it to one of Usherland's paved roads. Once, after a particularly hard rain, New had come here and seen the water lapping against the Lodge's foundations. He let his mind wander over the blue mountains that were the boundary of his world, and he always came back to the same question: What would life have been like, he wondered, if his ma had been an Usher instead of a Tharpe? What if he'd been able to roam those forests, ride horses across the gentle green slopes, see that massive Lodge from the inside? Sometimes he felt a stirring of envy when he saw figures on horseback down there, riding the forest trails. Though he lived on the northern edge of Usherland, he knew he might as well be a hundred miles away. He saw the Lodge in his dreams, and his yearnings to enter it were getting stronger; he never told his ma about the feelings, though. She forbade him and his ten-year-old brother, Nathan, to follow any of the meandering paths from Briartop deeper into Usherland. It was a haunted place, she said. The Ushers were a depraved breed best left alone.
    With the Pumpkin Man and his black familiar running in the woods, New kept his curiosity about the Lodge in check. Though he'd never seen any of them, he knew the tales by heart. There were things in the woods that roamed at night, things that should be avoided at all costs. He'd found large, bestial footprints in the soil before, and once on a cold January night he'd heard something big moving on the cabin's roof. He'd taken a flashlight and Pa's shotgun outside—because now he was the man of the house, no matter how scared he was—and had shone the light up on the roof, but there was nothing there at all.
    Suddenly he saw the ducks flap their wings and rise from the lake almost as one. They made a V formation and began to fly across the lake, passing the Lodge.
    Fly faster, New thought. Faster.
    The ducks gained altitude.
    Hurry, he urged them mentally. Hurry, before it wakes up and—
    The ducks' formation was suddenly disturbed, as if by turbulence in the air. Four of them flapped wildly as they began to spin in a confused whirlpool. The other two dropped lower, skimming across the surface of the lake.
    Hurry, he thought, and held his breath.
    The four ducks veered off course, toward the Lodge's mountainous north face.
    One after the other, they smashed into the wall and cascaded down in a shower of feathers, where they lay amid the rotting carcasses of other birds and wildfowl.
    New heard the distant calling of one of the ducks that had escaped—then silence, but for the prowling wind. The Lodge had no windows; all of them—hundreds, in what had been every conceivable shape and size—were bricked up. New guessed why: over the years, birds had probably smashed all the glass out, and the Ushers had decided to seal them over.
    "Gettin' dark," Nathan said, standing beside his brother. He carried a single bucket heaped with blackberries, and he kept snapping that doggoned blue whistling yo-yo that Ma had bought him in Foxton. "Better be gettin' home, or Ma'll pitch a fit."
    "Yep," New replied, though he didn't retreat from the Tongue's edge. He kicked a loose stone off into space. They'd been picking blackberries for the better part of the afternoon. Ma used them in the pies she baked for the Broadleaf Cafe in Foxton. They hadn't had to pass near The Devil's Tongue, but New had wandered this way, and had been standing here for ten minutes, staring down at the Lodge. Corpses of birds lay like snow on the many balconies. Perched atop the Lodge, among the