The Fall of the House of Usher
A dying twin, a sentient house, and the one night they both gave way
Page 1
On a dull, soundless day in autumn, a lone traveler rode across flat, empty country toward a house he knew only by name. He had come at the request of its master, Roderick Usher, a friend from his boyhood whom he had not seen in many years. Roderick's letter had been strange and urgent — it spoke of a bodily illness and a mental disorder that weighed on him, and of an earnest wish to see his one true friend, hoping that cheerful company might ease what medicine could not. Late in the day the traveler came within sight of the place and reined in his horse. Across a black, still tarn stood the House of Usher: grey walls, narrow windows like vacant eyes, a causeway reaching to the door. He did not know why, but the sight of it, doubled in the dead water below, filled him with a gloom no ordinary ruin could explain.
Page 2
Up close, the house seemed older still. Its stones were grey and crumbling, and a fine web of fungus hung from the eaves like a net flung over the whole building, though no single stone had fallen out of place. A faint crack, barely wider than a hair, ran in a zigzag from the roof down the front wall and vanished into the dark water of the tarn below. The narrator told himself a house could not truly be unsound only because it looked so, and yet he could not shake the feeling that the stonework itself was somehow wrong. A manservant met him at the arched door and led him in without many words, through a maze of dim, richly carved passages hung with old dark tapestries and lined with silent suits of antique armor, deeper into the building than he expected, toward the rooms where Roderick now kept himself.
Page 3
The staircase wound up through the house past carved archways and dim galleries where old family trophies rattled faintly as he passed, though no draft that he could feel was moving. Partway up, a man he took for the family physician hurried down past him, his face caught in an odd mixture of cunning and confusion, and said nothing at all before vanishing into the shadows below. The narrator could not say exactly why, but the encounter deepened the gloom already pressing on him. By the time the valet finally stopped before a tall, narrow door and opened it without a word, he felt that the house itself had been watching him the whole way up, floor after floor, judging whether he belonged there.
Page 4
Roderick rose from a sofa to greet him with a warmth that felt almost violent in its suddenness, and for a moment the narrator barely recognized the friend of his boyhood. The face before him was cadaverously pale, the eyes unnaturally large and luminous, the once-dark hair now fine and web-like, floating rather than falling about a face that seemed carved from wax. Roderick spoke quickly of a constitutional illness, a family evil he had long despaired of curing, and of a nervous agitation that had grown to govern him entirely. He confessed that he had come to dread not any one danger but fear itself, certain that before long he must lose either his life or his reason. Beneath it all, the narrator sensed, lay a deeper trouble that Roderick had not yet named.
Page 5
The weeks that followed settled into a strange, close companionship. The two men read together and talked in the long, book-lined library, and little by little Roderick spoke of what truly weighed on him. He told the narrator that the Usher family, for all its ancient lineage, had never once put out a lasting branch — every generation had passed its whole inheritance, direct, from father to son, so that the family and the name had become one and the same thing. He confessed a stranger belief still: that the look of the house itself, the grey stones, the fungus, the black tarn beneath its walls, had over long years come to press upon his spirit and shape his fate. And he spoke, too, of his sister Madeline, the last of the Usher blood besides himself, wasting under an illness no physician could name or cure.
Page 6
In the evenings Roderick would paint, producing strange abstract canvases of vaulted tunnels and endless passages bathed in light that seemed to come from no visible source, images so purely his own that no description could do them justice. Other nights he took up his guitar and sang wild, half-improvised ballads, their words as unsettled as their melodies. One of these he called 'The Haunted Palace,' a song about a once-glorious palace of reason, bright and ruled by a good king, now haunted and overrun, its towers lit from within by lights that danced to no music that made sense. The narrator listened, moved and uneasy at once, certain that Roderick was singing, in a kind of riddle, about the ruin of his own mind.
Page 7
One evening, while Roderick spoke of his sister's decline, the narrator at last saw her. The Lady Madeline crossed slowly through a far corner of the apartment, moving without hurry and without once noticing that she was watched, before passing on into another room and out of sight. He felt, watching her, a feeling close to awe, and could not afterward say why so brief and distant a glimpse had affected him so deeply. It was the last time he saw her alive. Within days she had taken to her bed entirely, and not long after, Roderick came to him with the news, grief-struck but composed, that his sister was dead, and that, owing to the peculiar nature of her illness, he meant to lay her for a time in one of the vaults beneath the house rather than in the family burial ground.
Page 8
They carried her down together, far below the main part of the house, through archway after archway, to an old vaulted chamber that had once served as a dungeon and later as a store for gunpowder, narrow and damp, its walls lined with copper, sealed by a massive door of iron that grated harshly on its hinges when it opened. Before the lid was fastened down, the two men looked once more on her face, and the narrator was struck by the strange, lingering trace of color in her cheeks and lips, faint as the mockery of life, though she had been many days dead. Roderick told him, in a low voice, that he and his sister had been twins, and that a sympathy of a scarcely explainable kind had always existed between them. Together they screwed down the coffin lid, and shut the heavy iron door.
Page 9
About a week after the entombment, a wild storm broke over the house, and the narrator found Roderick pacing his chamber in a state of extreme agitation, certain some strange glow outside the window came from nowhere natural. To calm him, the narrator took up a romance called 'Mad Trist' and began reading aloud, and as he read, the sounds described on the page — a cracking of wood, a dragging, grating shriek — seemed, impossibly, to be echoed by faint real sounds somewhere below them in the house. Roderick's terror grew until he leapt up shouting that they had entombed her alive, that he had heard her stirring for days and said nothing. At that instant the ancient door of the chamber swung slowly open, and the Lady Madeline stood on the threshold in her burial shroud, torn and marked by a terrible struggle, trembling from head to foot — and then, with a low moaning cry, fell inward upon her brother, and in the violence of her dying bore him down with her to the floor, a corpse, as she had feared him to become.
Page 10
The narrator fled the chamber and the house itself, running across the ancient causeway as the storm raged on. A violent gust tore the clouds apart behind him, and the full moon shone out suddenly and fell directly upon the narrow fissure he had once thought barely visible, now split wide open from roof to water. As he watched, the mighty walls came rushing apart with a long, tumultuous sound like the voice of a thousand waters, and the deep, black tarn closed sullenly and silently over the broken fragments of the House of Usher. The narrator did not stop running until the causeway was far behind him, and he never again doubted a single word Roderick had told him.
About this story
- Audience: general readers
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