Usher's Passing Read Online Free PDF

drink. Then he said quietly, "Momma wants you to come home. Daddy's taken a turn for the worse."
    "Why the hell won't he go to a hospital?"
    "You know what Daddy's always said. "An Usher can't live past the gates of Usherland." And lookin' at you, brother Rix, makes me think he's been right about that. There must be somethin' in that North Carolina air, because you've broken down pretty badly ever since you left it."
    "I don't like the estate. I don't like the Lodge. My home is in Atlanta. Besides, I've got work to do."
    "Oh? I thought you said you'd just finished another book. Hell, if it's anything like those other three, no amount of work can save it!"
    Rix smiled grimly. "Thank you for the encouragement."
    "Daddy's dying," Boone said, a quick flicker of anger like lightning behind his eyes. "I've tried to do all I could for him. I've tried to be what he wanted, all these years. But now he's askin' to see you. I don't know why, especially since you turned your back on the family. But I think he's holdin' on because he wants you at his side when he dies."
    "Then if I don't come," Rix told him flatly, "maybe he won't die. Maybe he'll get up out of that bed and start making deals for laser guns and germ-warfare bombs again, huh?"
    "Oh Christ!" Boone rose angrily from his seat. "Don't play that worn-out, holier-than-thou routine with me, Rix! The business brought you up on the finest estate in this country, fed you and clothed you and sent you to the best business school in America! Not that it did a damned bit of good! And who says you have to go to the Lodge if you come home? You always were scared shitless of the Lodge, weren't you? When you got yourself lost in there and Edwin had to bring you out, your face looked like green cheese for about a—" He stopped speaking abruptly, because Rix looked for a second as if he might leap across the table at his brother.
    "That's not how I remember it," Rix said, his voice strained with tension.
    They stared at each other for a few seconds. The image came to Rix of his brother tackling him from behind when they were children, planting a knee in the small of his back so the breath was squeezed out of him and his face was pressed into Usherland dirt. Get up, Rixy, Boone had taunted. Get up, why can't you get up, Rixy?
    "Well." Boone reached inside his coat and brought out a first-class Delta ticket to Asheville. He dropped it onto the table. "I've seen you and said what I was supposed to. That's from Momma. She thought just maybe you'd have enough heart to come see Daddy on his deathbed. If you don't, I guess that's your little red wagon." He walked to the door, then stopped and turned back. The hot light had returned to his eyes, and there was a curl to his mouth. "Yeah, you run on back to Atlanta, Rixy," he said. "Go on back to that fantasy world of yours. Shit, you're even startin' to look like somethin' out of the grave. I'll tell Momma not to expect you." He left the room and closed the door behind him. His lizardskin boots clumped away along the corridor.
    Rix sat staring at the plastic skeleton across the room. It grinned at him like an old friend, the familiar symbol of death from a thousand horror movies Rix had seen. The skeleton in a closet. Bones buried under the floor. A skull in a hatbox. A skeletal hand reaching out from beneath a bed. Uneasy bones, digging free from the grave.
    My father's dying, he thought. No, no; Walen Usher was too stubborn to give in to death. He and death were friends of long standing. They had a gentlemen's agreement. "The business" kept death's stomach swollen—why should it bite its feeder's hand?
    Rix picked up the airline ticket. It was for a flight leaving around one the next afternoon. Walen dying? He'd known his father's condition had been deteriorating for the past six months, but dying ? He felt numbed, stranded between a shout and a sob. He'd never gotten along with his father; they'd been strangers to each other for years. Walen Usher