I found Roderick at breakfast before Denton. “Have you seen Maddy today?” I asked. “She was sleepwalking again last night. And she seemed very confused. She didn’t know me, and she couldn’t talk very well.” I decided not to mention that terrible smile, or the way that her stiff walk had reminded me of the strange crawling hare.
“That happens sometimes,” said Roderick, staring at his plate.
“Can’t her maid keep her from walking?”
“Her maid died three months ago.”
This rocked me back. No maid. Of course they wouldn’t have money to hire a new one. I was an ass. I tried again. “Her hair is falling out. She’s … shedding. It’s terrible.”
“Her hair. Yes.” Roderick nodded. After a moment he added, “That’s been happening. The servants try to clean it up, but…”
“Roderick…” The defeat in his voice infuriated me. Couldn’t he see that his sister was dying? “You have to do something!”
“Do what?” He slammed his fist down on the sideboard with sudden rage. “Don’t you think I know? Don’t you think I’d fix it if I could? Take her to Paris—blow up this damned house—fill in that accursed lake—”
I blinked at him. Part of me said that blowing up the house was not actually a solution to Madeline’s problems, but another part was already calculating how much dynamite would be required.
He must have read my expression because he sagged in his chair, his rage gone as quickly as it had come. “Don’t tempt me, Easton. I already know where I’d put the match.”
“I believe the lieutenant actually meant that you should get another doctor,” said Denton from the doorway. He nodded to me. “Morning, Easton.”
“That’s not exactly what I meant,” I said, even though the thought of calling a specialist in from Paris had crossed my mind.
“I don’t know why not,” said Denton. “I can’t have impressed you with my depth of knowledge of her case.” He didn’t seem particularly offended.
“You know more about it than I do, certainly. Have you seen how her hair is falling out?”
“I have.” He glared at his cup of tea. “Not surprising in a severe illness. Now ask me how she still has any hair left to shed.”
I paused with my tea halfway to my lips.
“I don’t know,” he said, answering the question anyway. “No goddamn idea. If it’s falling out like that, it shouldn’t be regrowing, but it is.”
“Coming in stark white, too,” I said.
“Yes. The closest I can guess is that it’s not growing so much as the follicles and the skin receding, the same way that people grow hair after they’ve die—” He cut himself off and applied himself savagely to his breakfast.
“No one else,” said Roderick. “No more doctors. This has all gone much further than it should have already. I do not want Madeline poked and prodded like … like some kind of animal in a cage.” His sudden animation seemed to have fled. He leaned against the sideboard, swaying as if exhausted.
I bowed my head, made my excuses, and headed for the stables.
“This is all a mess, boy,” I told Hob.
His ears indicated that he agreed, particularly since he was not being given a treat. Speaking of, I dug an apple out of a nearby saddlebag. There had been large orchards farther down the mountain and I had purchased several bags, then forgotten about them. Hob, it seemed, had not.
“I’m starting to wonder if there really is something in the water. Something fatal.”
Hob expressed that lack of apples might prove equally fatal.
“Denton doesn’t know. I don’t know who else to ask.” The doctor’s gelding put his nose over the stall door and, though he offered no useful advice, I held an apple out to him as well. Satisfied equine crunching noises followed me as I went looking for Usher’s library.
Every manor house has one, of course. I don’t know what I really expected to do there—it’s not as if I am a terribly keen reader, and I knew even then that a medical textbook would probably be beyond my ability, particularly in another language. I speak quite good Ruravian, French, and English, and I can manage to get by in German (mostly because Germans always instantly switch to another language, which they inevitably speak better than you do, and politely ask you to practice it with them). But reading in those languages is something else again, particularly when it’s technical. Still, I had to try. I had some idea in my head that there might be a disease among the hares that had also affected Maddy. If not a disease, perhaps a parasite. Undercooked pork and the like can sicken a human, so why not something in a hare?
The problem, of course, was that I had only a hunter’s notion of what the inside of a hare is supposed to look like, so if it was anything more subtle than “there is a large squirmy bit where a large squirmy bit does not belong,” I could not tell merely by shooting a hare and dissecting it. Hence the library.
Rows of leather bindings stared down at me from high shelves. There was no fire laid in the grate and the cold, creeping damp hung in the air like fog.
Looking up at all those bindings, my heart sank. What was I even looking for? A book that said, “The Anatomy Of The European Hare, With Clearly Labeled Diagrams For The Novice” perhaps? Did they even make books like that?
“Well, they ought to,” I grumbled to myself. “It’d be more useful than half the books that get written these days. How many works on the life of Lord Byron does the world really need, anyway?” I pulled down a book at random and opened it.
Tried to open it.
The swollen pages stuck together. I fitted my fingernail between two of them and managed to pry them apart, only to rip one in half and leave most of it stuck to the opposite page. The book wasn’t just damp, it had been soggy for so long that it had practically turned to mush.
I groaned and pulled down another book. This one’s pages were wavy from having swollen and dried and swollen and dried, and while it opened, there was a line of mold all around the edge, so dark that it could almost have been mistaken for a decorative border.
“Christ’s blood,” I muttered to myself.
“Ah,” said Roderick from the doorway. “You have found the great library. Pride of generations of Ushers.” He must have seen my expression, because his lips twisted into a humorless smile. “Don’t worry, my father sold all the rare books already. We didn’t lose anything much.”
“Are they all like this?” I asked, gazing up at the bookshelves with their burden of rotting words.
“Every last one. The servants dry out some of them to use as tinder now and again. They’ll burn if you get them hot enough.” His gaze swept across the shelves, as if picturing them in flame.
I did not know what to say. How do you express sympathy for a man’s manor house gone to ruin? I struggled for a joke instead. “Should have stayed in Gallacia, Roderick. Then you could have gone to the royal lending library and checked out a book.”
“We should have all stayed in Gallacia,” he said, not bothering with my attempt at humor. “My mother was right.”
“Bah, you can both come stay with me,” I said. “Admittedly I only own one very small former hunting lodge and we’d be living in each other’s pockets, but it’s a snug little place.”
Roderick shook his head. “She won’t leave,” he repeated. “And I…” He looked around the room, a man gazing on the face of his enemy. “I begin to think that this place has killed all of us, in its time. Perhaps it’s too late for me as well.”
“It’s only a building, Roderick.”
“Is it?” He turned away. “I hear the woodworms gnawing in the beams,” he muttered. “Would to God that they would gnaw a little faster.”
I can’t say this discussion put me in a particularly hopeful frame of mind. I left the library myself and went looking for Denton.
“Hello,” he said, looking up from a book that he was reading (which, presumably, he had brought with him). “You have a singularly focused look about you.”
“What do you know about hares?” I asked.
He blinked at me. “Come again?”
“Hares. The animal. Long ears. Hops around. Boxes in springtime.”
“You mean rabbits?”
Christ save me from Americans. “No, they’re bigger. You don’t have hares?”
He had to think about it. “Err … wait, I think they’ve got them up north. Snowshoe hares, they call them. Why?”
“Is it possible there could be a disease in the hares that might have affected Madeline? Something that she could catch from them somehow?”
“I don’t know of any.”
“But is it possible? Something that could afflict both hare and human?”
“Of course it’s possible. Rabies affects them both. But I trust you’re not suggesting that Madeline has rabies?”
“No, no.” I sank down in the chair. “The hares around here act strange. All the locals say they’re possessed. No, I don’t believe that.” I raised a hand to forestall Denton’s protests. “Most of us go to the Devil without him having to personally oversee things. But I saw a hare out on the moors that moved very strangely, and Maddy sleepwalking reminded me of it.…”
It sounded ridiculous when I said it out loud. I was grasping at straws and I knew it. But to his credit, Denton was apparently willing to grasp those straws alongside me. “You think there’s some connection?”
“Possibly? Maddy was never sickly. But Roderick doesn’t have it, so I thought it couldn’t just be some miasma in the air or the water.…”
“The servants would have mentioned if there was some similar disease in the village.”
“Yes, of course.” I sighed. The mention of the servants reminded me, though—“Madeline’s maid. Do you know what she died of?”
“She threw herself off the roof.”
I stared at him.
“This is not a good house for anyone,” he said, “but certainly not for those of melancholic temper.”
“Christ’s blood.”
Denton took pity on me, or perhaps it was just his way of holding on to that straw. “It’s still not a bad notion. There are diseases that only affect a very few people. Leprosy, for example. The vast majority of us are immune, except for the poor devils who aren’t.”
I nodded eagerly. “So Maddy could be susceptible. The problem is that if I shoot a hare, I realize that I have no way of telling whether it’s normal unless there’s something really extraordinarily wrong. Would you be able to tell?”
“I’m not a veterinarian,” he said. “Or a cook. But I suppose I could take a look at one and see if anything jumps out at me.”
I nodded. “Then tomorrow I’ll see if I can fetch you a hare.”
In the end it was Hob who located the hare, by virtue of nearly stepping on it. He spotted it at the last moment, snorted, and pulled sideways, hopping on three hooves. I was rather startled myself, particularly when the hare didn’t move. It just sat there, staring up at the pair of us with its wild, empty eyes.
“Go on,” I told the hare. “Walk a bit.” It would do me no good to shoot a hare that wasn’t afflicted by this nameless malady.
It did not oblige. I slid off Hob’s back and took out the gun I used on small game (not cows). “Come on, scoot.”
The hare stared at me. I took a step forward, then another. Christ, was I going to have to actually nudge the thing with my boot?
Before I touched it, it turned and began that strange crawling walk. It moved more rapidly than I would have expected. I took aim, only to watch it vanish into a stubby copse of trees, which were either dead or doing a remarkable imitation of it.
“My own fault for being slow,” I muttered. “Hob, stay.” I ground tied him and went after the hare.
The dead trees did not improve upon close inspection. I stepped inside the copse, looking for the hare, and found it sitting up, watching me.
“Right,” I said. “You’ve definitely got it, whatever it is.” I started to sight down the barrel, although I could probably have bashed it over the head with the butt of my gun just as easily.
Movement in the corner of my eye distracted me. I turned my head and saw another hare, moving in the same unpleasant fashion. It looked almost spidery somehow. I had the sudden absurd notion of a disembodied hand walking along on its fingers, or of living limbs separated from their owners. Clearly Denton’s dream had lodged itself in my brain.
I turned back to the original, only to find that a third had joined it. All three of them stood up on their hind legs, watching me.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood to attention.
I shot one of them. It might have been the first of them, but they might also have been changing places. A child could not have missed at that range. The copse rang with the shot and the hare collapsed.
None of the other hares moved. They did not even flinch.
A wave of tinnitus struck in the wake of the gunshot, and as I waited for the ringing to subside, I realized that there could be even more hares behind me now and I would not hear them approaching.
Which meant nothing, I told myself. (I hate how the tinnitus seems to drown out my thoughts as well, so that I feel as if I’m shouting inside my own skull.) They were hares, not wolves. A hare might give you a nasty bite if you grabbed it, but it wasn’t going to go for your throat.
I knew all this, and yet every instinct I had began to scream that something was behind me. Something dangerous. Something that was not a hare.
I do not argue with my instincts. They kept me alive in the war. I spun around to find two more hares sitting at the edge of the copse, watching.
My hearing began to slowly return to normal, but the skin-crawling sensation that Something Else was there did not subside. I turned again, and the original three hares were now four, as if another had sprung up from the ground like a mushroom.
“Right,” I said. I stomped forward and snatched up the dead hare. “That’s tha—”
It moved in my hand.
I flung it violently away, even knowing that it was a convulsion, that many animals kick after being killed. I had shot it in the head, it could not possibly be alive. Muscles spasm, that’s all.
I was cursing myself for a fool when the dead hare began to crawl away.
It did not try to escape. That was somehow the most horrible part of all. It crawled back to its position in the circle of hares and it sat up, despite half its skull being missing. It turned its head so that its remaining eye pointed at me and tucked its paws against its chest like all the others.
Whatever looked out at me through that eye was not a hare.
My nerve broke and I ran.
Perhaps if I was less skeptical and more credulous, I might have fared better. At the time, all I could think was that I could not possibly have seen what I thought I saw. The dead did not get up and walk around.
Sometimes, however, the nearly dead do. I have seen men with terrible injuries run a hundred yards to fall upon the enemy. I have seen men with bullets lodged in their skulls continue to fight, sometimes for days. Hell, Partridge, who was under my command, thought ka was merely hit in the head until a doctor found the bullet hole almost a week later. Fortunately he had the good sense not to try to remove it. So far as I knew, Partridge was still alive, although ka complained that ever since the bullet, ka’d had no sense of taste.
It was possible that the hare had been like Partridge. Perhaps my shot hadn’t been true. Perhaps when I thought that it was missing part of its head, it was simply bloody fur falling down in a particularly grotesque formation. The hares were the same dull gray-brown as the sedges, were they not? My eyes might have been playing tricks on me. And Christ knew that I had been jumpy and my nerves had been playing up. No, I was not a reliable observer.
I recast it in my head, trying to make an amusingly self-deprecating tale of it, and eventually related it to Denton. “The damn things all stared at me and I had a fit of nerves and ran away from a pack of animals that wouldn’t come up to the top of my boots. Can you believe it? Chest full of medals for valor under fire, and I squawked like a chicken because I flubbed the shot and the damn thing kicked in my hand.” I forced a rueful grin. “Between that and the cow, I’m not showing up well in the gunnery department.”
Denton, despite my best attempts at a diverting tale, was not diverted. He draped his hands over his knees, a line forming between his thick eyebrows. “That is most unsettling.”
“For the pride of Gallacia, certainly.”
“Not that.” He frowned. “Roderick says that you are not particularly fanciful.”
“I like to think that, though you wouldn’t know it from this afternoon.” I shrugged. “Well, you know as well as I do. Sometimes the oddest things set off our nerves.”
“True enough,” Denton admitted. “Soldier’s heart, we called it after the war. I once had a bit of an episode because they had lined the street with flags, and the wind came up and they were all snapping … the sound wasn’t like cannon fire at all, but it still was, you know?”
I nodded. I did indeed know.
“Then one of the flags came loose and it blew toward me.” He snorted. “Found myself down a stairwell two streets over.” His voice had that light veneer of humor that we all get, because if we don’t pretend we’re laughing, we might have to admit just how broken we are. It’s like telling stories at the bar about the worst pain you’ve ever been in. You laugh and you brag about it, and it turns the pain into something that will buy you a drink.
“There, you see?” I waved a hand airily. “Névrose de guerre, the French call it. Makes it sound like a bloody pastry. Though I do feel bad that I flubbed the shot. I should have stayed to finish it off. Hopefully a fox or a falcon or something will take it before too long.”
Denton’s humor faded. He took a large swallow of the drink beside him. “Perhaps you didn’t flub the shot,” he said, not looking at me.
“Of course I did. It got up and walked away.” I didn’t tell him about it sitting up and watching me. That went well beyond névrose de guerre.
He said nothing.
“The dead don’t walk,” I said, hearing my voice rise angrily. “You of all people should know that.”
Denton looked at me for a long, long moment, searching my face for something. He must not have found it, because he looked away and said, “Ignore me. I’m becoming as fanciful as Roderick. I don’t know what I know anymore.”
I stalked away and took my dinner in my room that night. Angus watched me angle the chair so that my back was against the wall and said nothing at all.