“I know her neck’s been broken,” I said. “Roderick, I assume?”
Denton inhaled sharply. “How did you know?” he asked.
“I went down to the crypt and looked.”
“Ah.” He grimaced. “It wasn’t murder, if that’s what you mean. Well, it was, but it’s not—that is—” He rubbed his face. “I need a drink.”
“I’ll pour. And tell me everything.”
I would have burned my last bottle of livrit in such a just cause, but fortunately Denton had his own brandy. His rooms did not look much different than mine, although he had no man to help him.
“Roderick called me in a month ago,” he said, collapsing into a chair. It sent up a puff of dust and probably mold spores, but really, what was one more set at this point?
“For the catalepsy.”
“Not exactly.” He took a swig of brandy. “It was the madness that concerned him.”
“What madness was that?”
Denton groaned, got up, and fished through his belongings until he came up with a battered envelope. “Here. No sense in playing twenty questions when you can just read it.”
I recognized Roderick’s spidery handwriting as I unfolded the letter. He wasted no time on salutations.
Denton—
I need your help. There’s something desperately wrong with Madeline, more than just the catalepsy that has afflicted her for some years. Since her near-drowning, she has fallen under the spell of a strange madness, one that leaves her speaking in ways entirely unlike herself. She will be entirely herself one morning, and then by afternoon, I will find her speaking to the servants as if she is a small child. She points at things and asks for their names and seems astonished. Her voice is very strange. When I confront her, she will revert immediately to her old self, but she acts very strange and sly, saying that it was merely a moment of muddle-headedness.
What she is doing is frightening the servants. Worst of all, I have heard someone speak this way before, but it was Alice, her maid, who spoke in such fashion. I would overhear them sometimes in Madeline’s room. At the time, I thought Alice was doing impressions to make her laugh.
You will think me quite deluded, Denton, but when I hear this voice she speaks in, I begin to think of stories of demonic possession, not of illness. It is very terrible to witness.
I know that you are a man of reason, and I strive to be, though this dreadful estate has acted badly on my nerves. Please, I beg of you, if there is any kindness in your heart left for either of us, come and help me.
The signature was Roderick’s. I read the letter twice, remembering the strange way that Madeline had spoken that night I found her sleepwalking, the way that she had counted. Not Maddy, she’d said.
If she wasn’t Maddy, who was she?
“You don’t believe in possession, of course,” I said, looking up.
“‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio’ … but no, I don’t believe in that particular one.” He paused, then said, very quietly, “Didn’t believe in that particular one.”
“And now?”
Denton shook his head. “I don’t know what I believe anymore. When I spoke to Madeline, she was exactly as she had always been. Until she wasn’t.”
“Explain.”
“I can’t. Not rationally. She seemed to undergo some kind of mental shift, and then her speech changed. Not like anything I’ve seen before.” He stared at the ceiling. “Slurred speech with aphasia, which is about as useful a diagnosis as catalepsy. Most of us get that when we’re drunk, for God’s sake. I’m a cut-rate surgeon, Easton, I chop off limbs. I’m not an alienist.” He scowled. “I told you that she almost drowned, yes?” I nodded and he continued. “Roderick thought—and I begin to agree—that there was nothing almost about it. He told me that she had been in the water for hours when he found her.”
I stared at him, willing the words to make sense, and couldn’t. “What?”
“I thought he’d lost it,” said Denton bluntly. “Time slows when you panic, of course. He pulled her out and thought that it was much too late. So he took her down to the crypt and sobbed over her for half the night.”
I swallowed. “And?”
“And she woke up. And began speaking to him in that voice he found so upsetting.”
“How is that possible? Could she really have drowned?” I didn’t know why I was asking, when I had seen the hare twitching, but hares are not the same as humans, are they?
Denton shook his head. “Drowning is strange,” he admitted. “People come back sometimes, long after you’d think they were gone, particularly when they’ve been in cold water. That’s what I told Roderick, anyway, when he insisted she had been in the water more than a few minutes.” He sank back into the chair. “And I went on believing that Madeline was just groggy from waking up after a fright, and Roderick had panicked and believed she was in the water far longer than she was.”
“And it was after this that she began to manifest this … this otherness.”
Denton nodded again. “I thought the drowning had little to do with it. It seemed more likely that it was a result of the suicide of her maid. They were close. Perhaps she was trying to keep a game they had played alive somehow.”
“And now?”
He snorted. “Now it’s obvious, isn’t it? It’s this fungus. It’s causing this altered state somehow. First in the maid, then in Madeline. Perhaps it’s a hallucinogenic effect of some sort, or perhaps simple poisoning.”
“Why kill her?” It was a measure of how far I had come that I could ask the question without any particular condemnation.
“Roderick says he didn’t mean to kill her, but the thing that had taken over her body.”
“So the fungus got into her from the lake and now it’s affected her, made her act this way.…”
“So it would seem.” Denton’s face was bleak. After a moment he said, tonelessly, “After he killed her, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what was going on, but Roderick said it was evil and it was devouring Maddy, and … God have mercy on me, I can’t say he was wrong.”
I thought of Maddy’s smile that night, the flat-eyed rictus, and the way that I had recoiled from it. Evil might not be the right word, but I could see how Roderick had come to it. “So you covered for him.”
“Yes. I know it was wrong, but…” He lifted his hands and let them drop. “He’s dying, too. I can’t imagine him lasting much longer in this state.”
“All right,” I said. “All right.” I tried to formulate the words that had to be spoken and then drained my brandy instead. I would have liked to get extremely drunk. I would have liked to get on a horse and ride away as fast as its hooves could carry me, but Hob was gone and Angus with him. Both Denton and I knew the truth, but saying the words would make it real, and dear God, how I wanted it not to be real.
I set the tumbler down and took a deep breath. “Madeline’s like the hare now,” I continued grimly. “That’s why she’s not on the slab. This thing is moving her around.”
I don’t know how long we sat there after that, drinking our courage. Too long, probably. But sooner or later you have to act or resign yourself to not acting at all.
“We have to find her body,” I said, rising from my chair.
“She must still be in the crypt,” said Denton. “Surely it can’t move her very far.”
I stared at him, then realized that he had not seen the hares and their terrible ratcheting crawl, only the one on the table who had managed a few feet before being stopped. “I think, perhaps, it can do a bit more than that,” I said.
Denton picked up the bottle and drained it dry. “We can’t let Roderick see her like this,” he said. “We’ll have to burn the body.”
I nodded and picked up a lamp. So did Denton. I still had my pistol, but what good would shooting Maddy’s corpse do? It hadn’t stopped the hare.
The crypt steps were cold and dark and both Denton and I were jumpy. Every movement of the lamps made the shadows flicker and whenever one loomed too large, we both recoiled.
“You’d think we were a pair of children, not soldiers,” I muttered. Denton mumbled something under his breath that I didn’t quite catch.
A dozen steps from the bottom, I stopped. Denton nearly ran into my back. I lifted the lamp high, revealing the crypt door.
The unbarred crypt door.
The door that was now ajar.
“Why did you stop?” whispered Denton.
“The door’s open.”
“Did you close it before?”
“I thought I had.” I hadn’t barred it, though. Why bar a door to an empty crypt? “Could Roderick have gone in?”
“Roderick shouldn’t even be able to get up to piss in the pot,” said Denton. He paused, then added grudgingly, “Of course, I’ve been nothing but wrong since the beginning, so my medical opinion isn’t worth a plug nickel.”
I wondered what the hell a plug nickel was, but it didn’t seem like the time to ask. I went down the last few steps and pushed the door aside.
The slab was still empty. “Maddy?” I called. The echoes rushed through the room like birds, and I could hear my voice ringing faintly down the corridor on the far side of the crypt, into the catacombs where generations of Ushers lay moldering.
No answer. I listened for any sound at all: a rustle of winding cloths, the sound of a body dragging itself along, one limb at a time.
Nothing.
“She isn’t here,” I said.
“She’s got to be,” said Denton. “You can’t tell me she managed all those stairs.”
“Why not?” A suspicion had been forming in the back of my brain for hours now and I had been fighting it down. If I didn’t put it into words, I could pretend I wasn’t thinking it at all.
“Because she’s dead! And it’s a fungus, not a … not a…” He groped for words. “It’s a glorified mushroom! Maybe it can make a body flail around, but that’s all! She must have just rolled off the slab.…”
I lifted the lamp, splashing light in the corners of the room. “Look around, Denton. Do you see her?”
He strode forward, rounding the slab, clearly expecting to find the body there. I would have been offended that he thought Miss Potter and I could have missed an entire corpse, but I had a feeling that he had thoughts of his own that he was trying to avoid.
Not finding a body, he went all the way around the slab again, then took a few steps toward the corridor deeper into the catacombs. Then he stopped, clearly thinking better of it. “Are you certain you closed the door?” he asked.
“Yes. The bar I might have forgotten, but we would have closed the door.” I raised my hand. “I know, I know doors are too complicated for a fungus to figure out. But here we are.”
“It must have been Roderick. Or one of the servants. Your man Angus, if you told him…”
“It was not Angus.”
“A servant, then.”
I just looked at him. He growled and stalked back to the corridor, lamp in hand. I went after him, not wanting him to vanish into the depths of the catacombs alone. What if Madeline is in there? Waiting?
I looked down and stopped short with a hiss.
“What?” Denton turned, the flame reflecting an orange pinprick in his eyes.
“Look at the floor. Look at the dust.”
It had been years since the dust of the corridor was disturbed. Perhaps decades. I could not remember how long it had been since Roderick’s father died. It lay in a thick carpet across the floor.
Two lines of footprints stood out in stark relief. Someone with small feet had shuffled through here, not long ago. Their feet had dragged along the floor, leaving smeared lines, but every few feet, the imprint of bare toes was unmistakable. Then they had come back the other way.
Denton swallowed convulsively. “Someone came this way.”
“Someone. Yes. And then came back.” I took a step back, toward the main crypt. Gratitude flashed across his face and then the two of us rushed back the way we had come. (We did not run. If we ran then we would have to admit there was something to run from. If we ran, then the small child that lives in every soldier’s heart knew that the monsters could get us. So we did not run, but it was a near thing.)
The door was still open. The floor here was too overwritten with too many footprints to hold any clues as to who had gone where. I went to the crypt door, trying to think. Heavy wood, with ornate iron scrollwork, as Gothic as the rest of the damned manor. Madeline had been a little shorter than I was. If she had reached out to the door …
“Denton.”
“What?”
I pointed silently. Next to the iron ring, just where someone’s arm would fall if they leaned their weight against the door, was a metal cross. Caught along the edge were a dozen fine white hairs.
I expected Denton to argue, to tell me that it must have been the shroud brushing against the door. But he stared at the white hairs for a long, long moment, and then he breathed out all at once and squared his shoulders. “I see.”
“She walked into the catacombs by herself. And walked out again later.” And had done so on two feet, and operated the door.
He nodded once, not taking his eyes off the door.
“Denton,” I said, “I think we must face the possibility that Madeline is…” I struggled for a word, and finally settled on “… conscious.”
“It’s impossible,” he said, almost casually. “But that hasn’t stopped anything so far, has it?”
“Why is it impossible?”
“Because she’s dead. And mushrooms aren’t conscious.”
“Suppose she isn’t dead. No, listen to me. You said people drown sometimes and they come back long after they should have been dead, yes?”
“Hours after, Lieutenant. Not days.”
“Suppose the fungus kept her alive. It lives in water, yes? So it can survive drowning. What if it did something so that its host survived, too?”
Denton finally did look at me, opening his mouth, then closed it again. I could practically see him thinking it through. “Brains die from lack of oxygen,” he said slowly. “If this fungus could somehow provide oxygen … absorb it and pass it to the brain … yes, all right. It’s a damfool notion and I shouldn’t believe it for a second, but if it’s already in the brain stem, why not?”
“Madeline wakes up, a few days after her neck is broken,” I said. “She gets up and walks into the catacombs. Miss Potter and I come down and then leave, and she comes back to the crypt and finds the door unbarred. She opens it and goes out.” I gestured up the steps.
“Which means she’s somewhere in the house.” Denton sounded amused, but I recognized it as the humor that men get when they see the line of cannons pulled into position. Ha, yes, of course the enemy has cannons, why wouldn’t they? Oh, and we’re out of bullets, you say? Ha!
“Yes.”
“Where would she go?”
“Where do you think?” I started up the stairs. “Where would you go, if somebody broke your neck? She’d go after Roderick.”
This time we did run. We pounded up the stairs. Denton led the way to Roderick’s chambers. Our bouncing lamps filled the halls with shadowy giants. If we weren’t careful, we’d spill the oil and burn the whole damn place down.
The upper hall was already lit, not by candles but by a pale, sickly light through the window at the end of the hall. Christ, it was dawn already. How long had we sat drinking and trying to get our minds around this? How long had we spent in the crypt?
How long had Madeline been alone with her helpless brother?
Roderick’s door opened outward into the hall and stood ajar now. Denton and I shared one frantic glance and then both of us tried to jam ourselves through the doorway simultaneously. I was marginally faster and so I was the one who burst into Roderick’s room, pistol in one hand and lamp in the other, to find Madeline.
Sitting on Roderick’s bed.