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CHAPTER 1

During the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone on horseback through a singularly dreary tract of country and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was, but with the first glimpse of the building a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit.

I say insufferable, for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me — upon the mere house and the simple landscape features of the domain, upon the bleak walls, upon the vacant eye-like windows, upon a few rank sedges and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees — with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium. The bitter lapse into everyday life, the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart, an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it — I paused to think — what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?

It was a mystery all insoluble, nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion that while beyond doubt there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression. Acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling and gazed down — but with a shudder even more thrilling than before — upon the remodelled and inverted images of the grey sedge and the ghastly tree-stems and the vacant and eye-like windows.

Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a sojourn of some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been one of my boon companions in boyhood, but many years had elapsed since our last meeting. A letter, however, had lately reached me in a distant part of the country — a letter from him which in its wildly importunate nature had admitted of no other than a personal reply.

The manuscript gave evidence of nervous agitation. The writer spoke of acute bodily illness — of a mental disorder which oppressed him — and of an earnest desire to see me, as his best and indeed his only personal friend, with a view of attempting by the cheerfulness of my society some alleviation of his malady. It was the manner in which all this and much more was said — it was the apparent heart that went with his request — which allowed me no room for hesitation, and I accordingly obeyed forthwith what I still considered a very singular summons.

Although as boys we had been even intimate associates, yet I really knew little of my friend. His reserve had been always excessive and habitual. I was aware, however, that his very ancient family had been noted time out of mind for a peculiar sensibility of temperament, displaying itself through long ages in many works of exalted art and manifested of late in repeated deeds of munificent yet unobtrusive charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily recognisable beauties, of musical science.

I had learned too the very remarkable fact that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honoured as it was, had put forth at no period any enduring branch. In other words, the entire family lay in the direct line of descent and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain.

It was this deficiency, I considered — while running over in thought the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with the accredited character of the people, and while speculating upon the possible influence which the one in the long lapse of centuries might have exercised upon the other — it was this deficiency perhaps of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission from sire to son of the patrimony with the name, which had at length so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the House of Usher. An appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion.

I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment — that of looking down within the tarn — had been to deepen the first singular impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition — for why should I not so term it? — served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis. And it might have been for this reason only that when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy — a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it to show the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed me.

I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity. An atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees and the grey wall and the silent tarn. A pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible and leaden-hued.

Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen, and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old woodwork which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault with no disturbance from the breath of the external air.

Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinising observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.

Noticing these things, I rode over a short causeway to the house. A servant in waiting took my horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of the hall. A valet of stealthy step thence conducted me in silence through many dark and intricate passages in my progress to the studio of his master.

Much that I encountered on the way contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have already spoken. While the objects around me, the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been accustomed from my infancy — while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this — I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up.

On one of the staircases, I met the physician of the family. His countenance, I thought, wore a mingled expression of low cunning and perplexity. He accosted me with trepidation and passed on. The valet now threw open a door and ushered me into the presence of his master.

The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows were long, narrow and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trellised panes and served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around. The eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique and tattered. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all.

Upon my entrance, Usher rose from a sofa on which he had been lying at full length and greeted me with a vivacious warmth which had much in it, I at first thought, of an overdone cordiality — of the constrained effort of the ennuyé man of the world.

"Oh, Edward, it pleases me so that you have answered my missive with your arrival! How joyful and delighted I am that you are here. Your presence is the happiest of occurrences in an otherwise hopeless existence."

A glance, however, at his countenance convinced me of his perfect sincerity.

"Dear Roderick, please do not get up for my sake. I can see that I have arrived at a time when you are at rest."

We sat down and for some moments while he spoke not, I gazed upon him with a feeling half of pity, half of awe. Surely man had never before so terribly altered in so brief a period as had Roderick Usher!

It was with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of the wan being before me with the companion of my early boyhood. Yet the character of his face had been at all times remarkable. A cadaverousness of complexion. An eye large, liquid and luminous beyond comparison. Lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve. A nose of a delicate Hebrew model but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations. A finely moulded chin speaking in its want of prominence of a want of moral energy. Hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity. These features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple, made up altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten. And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these features, and of the expression they were wont to convey, lay so much of change that I doubted to whom I spoke.

The now ghastly pallor of the skin and the now miraculous lustre of the eye above all things startled and even awed me. The silken hair too had been suffered to grow all unheeded, and as in its wild gossamer texture it floated rather than fell about the face, I could not even with effort connect its Arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity.

In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with an incoherence, an inconsistency, and I soon found this to arise from a series of feeble and futile struggles to overcome an habitual trepidancy — an excessive nervous agitation. For something of this nature I had indeed been prepared, no less by his letter than by reminiscences of certain boyish traits, and by conclusions deduced from his peculiar physical conformation and temperament.

His action was alternately vivacious and sullen. His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision when the animal spirits seemed utterly in abeyance to that species of energetic concision — that abrupt, weighty, unhurried and hollow-sounding enunciation — that leaden, self-balanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance which may be observed in the lost drunkard or the irreclaimable eater of opium during the periods of his most intense excitement.

It was thus that he spoke of the object of my visit, of his earnest desire to see me and of the solace he expected me to afford him. He entered at some length into what he conceived to be the nature of his malady. It was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despaired to find a remedy — a mere nervous affection, he immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon pass off. It displayed itself in a host of unnatural sensations. Some of these as he detailed them interested and bewildered me, although perhaps the terms and the general manner of the narration had their weight. He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses, the most insipid food was alone endurable, he could wear only garments of certain texture, the odours of all flowers were oppressive, his eyes were tortured by even a faint light and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.

To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave. "I shall perish," said he, "I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus and not otherwise shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have indeed no abhorrence of danger except in its absolute effect — in terror. In this unnerved, in this pitiable condition I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, fear."

I learned, moreover, at intervals and through broken and equivocal hints, another singular feature of his mental condition. He was enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted, and whence for many years he had never ventured forth, in regard to an influence whose supposititious force was conveyed in terms too shadowy here to be restated. An influence which some peculiarities in the mere form and substance of his family mansion had by dint of long sufferance, he said, obtained over his spirit. An effect which the physique of the grey walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down, had at length brought about upon the morale of his existence.

He admitted, however, although with hesitation, that much of the peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more natural and far more palpable origin. To the severe and long-continued illness, indeed to the evidently approaching dissolution, of a tenderly beloved sister, his sole companion for long years, his last and only relative on earth. "Her decease," he said with a bitterness which I can never forget, "would leave me" — him the hopeless and the frail — "the last of the ancient race of the Ushers."

While he spoke, the lady Madeline — for so was she called — passed slowly through a remote portion of the apartment, and without having noticed my presence, disappeared. I regarded her with an utter astonishment not unmingled with dread, and yet I found it impossible to account for such feelings. A sensation of stupor oppressed me as my eyes followed her retreating steps.

For whilst she appeared almost as a spectre before me, there was still a radiant beauty by which I was captivated. Wavy tresses of a rich auburn hue flowed down her back, and even though her skin was as pale as alabaster, her features were powerfully outlined with a strong nose and high cheekbones. Full lips and large doll-like eyes made me long to get closer so that I might ascertain their colour. When a door at length closed upon her, my glance sought instinctively and eagerly the countenance of the brother, but he had buried his face in his hands, and I could only perceive that a far more than ordinary wanness had overspread the emaciated fingers through which trickled many passionate tears.

The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person and frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical character were the unusual diagnosis. Hitherto she had steadily borne up against the pressure of her malady and had not betaken herself finally to bed, but on the closing in of the evening of my arrival at the house, she succumbed — as her brother told me at night with inexpressible agitation — to the prostrating power of the destroyer by shutting herself in her quarters and accepting the comfort of her bed at last. I learned that the glimpse I had obtained of her person would thus probably be the last I should obtain — and my assumption was that the lady, at least while living, would be seen by me no more.

I fretted upon this, for that brief glimpse of the Lady Madeline intrigued me endlessly and I hoped that Roderick was mistaken. I yearned for the opportunity to see her closer, and perchance to even speak with her.

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Excerpted from "The Fall of the House of Usher"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Morticia Knight.
Excerpted by permission of Totally Entwined Group Limited.
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