What Moves the Dead (22)
“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.”