What Moves the Dead (11)
“They say mushrooms spring up where the Devil walks,” said Angus sourly. “And where fairies dance.”
“Do you think they ever get the two confused? The Devil shows up to a fairy ball, or finds himself mobbed with elven ingénues?”
He gave me a look from under his eyebrows. “You shouldn’t joke about fairies. Sir.”
“Oh, very well. As long as I can still joke about the Devil.”
He grunted, which was Angus-speak for not approving but not caring enough to stop me. “The villagers don’t like the place,” he said.
I had passed through the village, but hadn’t thought much about it. It didn’t look bad. It didn’t look good. It was a village. It looked like every other small village in Ruravia, which also look pretty much like every small village in Gallacia, although they carve flowers on their shutters here and we carve turnips. (That is a general we. I have never carved a turnip in my life.)
“Don’t like the house? Or don’t like the Ushers?”
“The house. If anything, I’d say they pity the current crop. Sir Roderick’s great-uncle, or whoever he inherited this heap from, sold the people their land back before the creditors came for it, so they remember him fondly. ‘Our Usher,’ they call him. And Sir Roderick’s ‘Young Usher.’”
“And Madeline?”
He gave me an opaque look. “‘That poor Usher girl.’”
I sighed. Angus raised an eyebrow. “She’s not looking well,” I said, in response to the unspoken invitation. “I see why Roderick thought she was dying. I think she might be.”
Angus is a sympathetic soul, particularly for women. “Ah, the poor lass,” he said, and meant it. “This is no place for a delicate lady. I tell you, it’s haunted, moor or not.”
“Did the villagers tell you that?”
“You laugh, but aye, they did. I asked about hunting hereabouts, and they told me not to do it. Said the place is full of witch-hares.”
“Witch-hares?”
“Aye. Familiars to devils. You shoot one and the next day you find a witch with a bullet in her heart.”
“Hard luck for her. Are many little old ladies with warts turning up with bullets in them around here? That really sounds like a job for the constabulary.”
“Bah. Disbelieve me all you like. They say the hares don’t act right, though. They forget how to run. The man at the inn, he said he’d walked right up to one once and it sat there and stared at him as if it had never seen a human man before.”
“I assume a witch would have seen a man before, so I don’t know if that goes to support your theory.”
Angus drew himself up to his full height, which wasn’t much, and full dignity, which was considerable. “’Tis not my place to speak on the habits of witches. But I’ll not hunt hares here, I can tell you that much. Nor deer.”
I raised an eyebrow. Angus is particularly fond of eating all of God’s creatures, and this seemed like a great sacrifice. “How will you occupy your time, then?”
“I,” said Angus, still with unassailable dignity, “plan to go fishing.”
CHAPTER 4
So here I was. Roderick hadn’t expected me, whatever that meant—possibly that he hadn’t thought I was enough of a friend to come when he needed me, or perhaps he didn’t think he needed me. Maybe he didn’t. Denton didn’t know what to make of me. Madeline was … yes, dying. I had looked in the faces of enough dying soldiers to know. Sometimes people surprise you, sometimes they pull through, but there is a particular waxiness to human skin that tells you when someone is not long for this world. Madeline’s was starting to acquire that texture. If I came down to breakfast tomorrow and discovered that she had died during the night, I would not have been shocked. Saddened, but never shocked.
When I am perturbed, I like to walk. I feel slow and stupid when I sit, but walking seems to wake something up in my brain. I never minded pacing back and forth with a rifle on guard duty, because I could think more easily. Daydream, even, if I’m being honest. Mostly I daydreamed about the end of the war, about scenarios where all my people made it out alive and unharmed. It was only when we were pinned down and I could not walk that it became harder for me to keep those dreams alive.
I did not particularly wish to walk the halls of Usher’s mansion. The tattered wallpaper, the specks of mold … Madeline with her feverish eyes and wisps of white hair … none of these were things I wished to encounter. So I rose early and saddled Hob and went out for a ride.
Hob greeted me more eagerly than usual, possibly because Denton’s horse in the next stall was a terrible conversationalist, or perhaps because the stable was so gloomy. It was clean and fairly dry, but it had the same sullen air as the rest of the manor house.
The air of the heath was cool and damp. I might have found it oppressively silent under normal circumstances, but compared to what we had left behind, it felt free and open. Mist clung to the surface of the dark lake and gathered in hollows on the ground, but Hob cantered through them and broke them up like the shreds of bad dreams.
My thoughts, unfortunately, did not break up as easily. The Ushers were not well, any fool could see that. The house was obviously terrible for anyone who was sick. Miasma, as my great-grandmother would have said. Of course, it was 1890, and no one really believed in that anymore. It was all germs now, thanks to Dr. Koch. Still, germs could linger in a place, could they not? Was there enough disinfectant in the world to cleanse the house of Usher?