What Moves the Dead (36)

“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…”