Gothic Lovecraft

by Lynne Jamneck

  As it chanced, the letter arrived at a time when I had determined to take a break from my esoteric experiments in lucid dreaming. I was burned out, as the vulgar saying goes, and could no longer enter the dreamlands at will, but struggled to transit even the first portal of deep sleep. The cynicism of my Boston literary acquaintances tainted my imagination, and I found myself eager to see if a separation from their world-weary ennui would revive my childhood wonder and once more open the gates of dreams for my explorations.

  Also, it must be confessed, I felt curiosity to see the estate that Usher had so often alluded to during our late-night chats at the university. He had painted it as an otherworldly place, a house forgotten by time. As I held his letter folded in my hand and heard his words echo in my memory, it seemed the ideal retreat in which to set aside for a short while the burden of the practical concerns that had been imposed on my mind by my publisher and certain members of my family.

  It would be less than honest to say that the memory of Usher’s sister played no part in my decision to accede to his request. During his student days he always kept a photograph of her in the lid of his ornately engraved silver pocket watch, and at quiet times he would open the watch and gaze at her with an expression of melancholy affection. She was a strikingly beautiful young woman, very like to Usher himself in countenance, with lustrous grey eyes and fine, curling black hair that framed an alabaster brow. I even remembered her name. Madeline. Neither Usher nor I had married during the years of our separation. His bachelorhood was presumably due to his indulgence in the vices of the world, whereas mine was the result of an almost monkish asceticism.

  It was with a bewildering brew of emotions that I drafted a reply to my friend agreeing to visit his estate within the fortnight, although I gave no promise as to the date on which I would arrive or how long I intended to remain there as his guest. It was in my mind to see how the two of us got on together before binding myself to a prolonged sojourn.

  2

  Usher’s family estate lay some dozen miles inland from the ancient port of New Bedford. It nestled between the hills in a secluded stretch of Massachusetts countryside, remote from villages and farms. Whatever had impelled the first Usher who ventured his fortunes in the New World to choose so isolated a geography was a puzzle. When the house was erected more than two centuries ago, it must have been even more remote than it is today. That was before the railroads, before the automobile, even before the steamship. Usher had never explained why the house had been built where it stood, but he had often waxed eloquent about the rugged grandeur of the forested hills that guarded its solitude. The timber was old-growth that had never been logged.

  The nearest habitation was the farming hamlet of Benton, some seven or eight miles distant from the Usher estate. Fortunately for me, it was serviced by a rail spur. The rustic residents were typical of our fair state—taciturn, suspicious of strangers, and surly of manner. My casual remark that I was a friend of Roderick Usher was met with blank stares and pinched lips. By paying twice what the job was worth, I was able to induce the owner of the general store to allow his labouring man to drive me to the Usher estate in the store truck, an ageing and rust-eaten Ford of uncertain and variable coloration.

  The man, who smelled strongly of horse manure and who wore a chequered flannel shirt so faded that it almost looked a dirty white, spoke less than a dozen words during the entire drive along the twisting, rutted forest road, which in places had been almost washed away by the floods of the previous spring. Six months later the damage had still not been repaired. We were forced to edge around places where the road fell away into the swiftly running creek that flowed beside it. At several points the creek bubbled and frothed beneath sagging covered bridges scarcely wide enough to accommodate the truck’s fenders. Their rotted beams groaned ominously beneath our weight, and I had occasion to be thankful that the truck had been unloaded before our departure.

  The trees that pressed close on either side of the narrow road were ancient sentinels, their twisted and blackened trunks half covered in green moss and shelved with ledges of white fungi. Their drooping boughs met above our heads and shut out most of the grey afternoon light, so that it was impossible to see the piled leaden clouds that filled the October sky. Dead leaves covered the road ruts with faded red and gold hearts, or hung trembling from the branches of the younger oaks and maples that struggled for life between the shoulders of the brooding evergreens. The dark masses of these ancient guardians muted the annual celebration of autumn.

  At last the truck ground its gears wearily over the crest of a low rise, and the trees opened on either side of the road, affording me the first glimpse of my destination. It was the bleakest prospect over which I have ever gazed, and my heart fell to look upon it.

  True to Usher’s description, the house occupied a hollow between the low, forested hills that surrounded it. Autumn had browned the grasses of the poorly cut lawn that extended down a gentle slope from its left side. The right side of the property and part of the front were flooded with a tarn of black and stagnant water that pressed against the very foundation stones of the structure. From my elevation, scant though it was, I could see no inlet for this fetid pool, in which grew rank weeds and rushes, but a dry bed of pebbles showed where the water ran out when it overflowed during rains. Its surface was more than half covered by a kind of scum or algae, but where the water was open it reflected the leaden sky and the mould-blackened stone blocks and sightless black windows of the house of Usher in the most dismal fashion that may be imagined.

  I knew from Usher’s reminiscences of the place at university that the house was built of locally quarried stone blocks, but my imagination had never conceived so uninviting a façade. Its architecture bore no resemblance to the conventional timber-frame houses of historic New England that I love so well. It stood taller than it was broad, and its chimney-pierced roofs were steeply pitched and covered in black slate. The windows, although quite lofty and framed in Gothic arches, were narrow and infrequent in number, so that the walls I could see from the elevation of the road seemed expanses of all but unbroken stone. The house reminded me of illustrations of old Scottish keeps— miniature castles built by minor lords in the Highlands to serve as strongholds against warring clans and bands of outlaws.

  The road wound down across an open stretch of browning lawn to a wooden bridge that spanned part of the tarn. I could not resist thinking of it as a drawbridge, although there was no mechanism for raising it, and the door of the house, though uncommonly wide, was a conventional door and not a castle gate.

  The truck wheels squealed in protest as my taciturn driver applied the brakes. He sat looking forward through the dusty windscreen, his calloused hands tightly clenched on the steering wheel. The uneven idle of the engine seemed unnaturally loud.

  “Why have you stopped?” I asked him.

  “There’s the house,” he said in his thickly accented Yankee English.

  “I know that. Drive me down to the bridge so that I can unload my trunk.”

  “This here’s the turning place,” he said.

  I repressed the impulse to anger and kept my tone casual.

  “You can drive down to the house and let me off, then back the truck up the hill, if you don’t wish to turn on the lawn. You cannot expect me to carry my trunk all that distance.”

  His hands tightened on the steering wheel until their big knuckles turned white.

  “I won’t go no further. This here’s the turning place.”

  Nothing I could say would induce him to change his mind. Even a bribe of money left him unmoved.

  So that’s the way it is, I thought to myself. There is some feud between the locals of Benton and the Ushers, and the fools won’t venture onto the Usher estate.

  When I realised the futility of arguing with the man, I dragged my travel trunk off the back of the truck and watched as he turned the rusting vehicle and drove away without so much as a backward glance. I sat upon t
he trunk lid in disgust, facing the house, and listened to the sound of the poorly tuned engine diminish down the road. At length there was silence.

  No movement came from the house or its grounds. My expectation that the truck had been heard or seen soon faded.

  “I’ve had warmer welcomes,” I muttered to myself with a rueful smile.

  Silence swallowed my words. Not a leaf rustled. Not a bird sang. It was the stillness of death.

  Leaving my trunk in the middle of the road where I had dragged it, I made my way to the neglected strip of lawn and crossed the bridge, which I noted was in need of minor repairs and fresh white paint. The heels of my travel boots on the planks thudded in the grey quiet, but no nesting bird was frightened from the black waters of the tarn. Only a few bubbles arose and broke on its surface, emitting a foul stench.

  As I came near the house, I noticed a crack in the stonework that ran up from the tarn all the way to the eve of the roof in a jagged line, like the path followed by a bolt of lightning, but a path of shadow rather than a path of light. It was barely wide enough to have slid in the tips of my fingers—but it seemed out of keeping with the general state of the house, which overall was in good repair, although it had evidently been neglected during the past ten years or so. I grasped the verdigris-covered brass knocker on the massive front door and let it fall twice against its sounding plate. After half a minute, footfalls echoed within and the door swung wide. A dignified and elderly servant in a black suit, his grey hair carefully brushed to one side of his head and his thin grey moustache waxed on the ends, regarded me through watery brown eyes with the complete lack of emotion of all good butlers. I handed him my card.

  “Randolph Carter. Mr. Usher is expecting me.”

  The elderly servant bowed without a word and admitted me into the front hall. He withdrew through a set of double doors of age-blackened walnut, closing them behind him and leaving me to admire the sweeping marble staircase with its massive and ornately carved banister, and the enormous crystal chandelier that hung above my head. The black marble tiles of the floor were polished to such a high lustre that they reflected, as in a mirror, the portraits hanging on the panelled walls.

  I approached beneath a painting that appeared from its ebony frame to be the oldest, and studied the unforgiving visage captured in oils. He was dressed in the costume of the early eighteenth century, with a powdered wig on his head. The family resemblance to Roderick Usher was unmistakable. His dark eyes glittered with life force, so that I found it disconcerting to gaze long upon them.

  Here sits the patriarch of the Usher clan, looking like some Oriental potentate surveying his lands and slaves, I thought. It must have been an unpleasant experience to fall under the power of so pitiless a countenance. Yet here he was today, no more than a few daubs of paint on canvas. Such is the transient mortality of all living things.

  3

  The walnut doors parted with more authority than they had closed, and between them stood Roderick Usher, dressed in a blue velvet smoking jacket and matching Turkish smoking cap with a tassel that hung down to his broad shoulder. A slender black Russian cigarette glowed between his fingers.

  I recognised his familiar features at once, but found myself regarding them with more alarm than affection. It was the same high brow, the same grey, heavy-lidded eyes and hooked nose, the same strong jaw and sardonically curled lips, so familiar in my memory, but how changed they were! His eyes in their hollow sockets looked haunted, and the skin across his prominent cheekbones seems stretched like dry parchment. His hair, once a glossy black, had turned to grey and hung in ragged disorder where it escaped his cap, so fine in texture that it seemed to float around his countenance like the smoke that rose from his cigarette.

  He hesitated only a moment, then swept across the tiles and took my hand between his.

  “It was good of you to come, Randolph.”

  His tone held genuine warmth. At such closeness the signs of dissolute living were plain in the lines indelibly graven across his face—lines that only a youth wasted in vice can cut on living flesh. I detected a slight tremble in his hands before he released me. Moved by some impulse of remembered youth, I clapped him on the shoulder in a familiar way and squeezed his upper arm before dropping my hand.

  “There’s nowhere else I’d rather be,” I said, and at that moment I truly meant the words.

  He glanced up at the portrait in the ebony frame.

  “I see you’ve made the acquaintance of Uriah Usher, the builder of this house. He laid many of these stones with his own hands, did you know.”

  “We were having a staring contest, but I lost.”

  He laughed lightly, in the way I remembered from our university days.

  “Well, well, come into the drawing room where we can talk. Where are your bags?”

  I described the uncouth behaviour of my driver. It raised no surprise in Usher’s grey eyes. He ordered his man, whose name was Simmons, to have the trunk carried into the house and up to my room.

  The cavernous drawing room boasted a dizzyingly high panelled ceiling and a great stone fireplace. A grand piano occupied a corner of the floor. Beside it, near the wall, stood a harp, and across the cushion of a chair rested a guitar.

  Usher guided me to a padded French settee covered in pink silk, and we sat together on it. Behind us, the weak light from the clouded sky came through three mullioned windows framed by long drapes of a deep burgundy. It illuminated with a kind of pallid glow the smoke that hung in the air and softened the edges of things, rendering the shadowed furnishings of the room vague. Opposite the settee, an open arch led into what I presumed to be the library, as I could see tall cases of books lining its walls.

  “If only you’d informed me in advance of the day of your arrival, I might have arranged for your transportation from the village.”

  “I didn’t know myself when I could get away from Boston. It’s a matter of no importance.”

  He studied me with a smile on his lips, but in his eye lurked a calculating assessment that he failed to conceal, or perhaps did not attempt to conceal. It was hardly to be expected that his manner could be other than worldly, I told myself, given his globe-spanning travels and his varied experiences.

  “I almost feel we’ve never been apart, I see your name so often in the literary magazines. You’ve gained a sizeable reputation as an artist.”

  I shrugged and made a deprecating gesture with my hand.

  “The critics need something to write about. Next year it will be somebody else.”

  “You are too modest. I have all your books, in there.” He nodded toward the library.

  For the better part of an hour we talked of Miskatonic and Arkham, each contributing scraps of information overheard during the intervening years about boys we had known there, since grown to men and making their way in the world with varying degrees of success. The expressionless butler, Simmons, brought in a silver tray with brandy glasses and a crystal decanter filled with an amber liquid. The drink warmed my blood and made me more animated in my story telling, but I declined the offer of the Russian cigarettes that Usher continued to smoke as he listened, all the while watching me with his keen gaze.

  A bit of white moving at the corner of my eye drew my attention through the arch to the library, where a woman stood before a set of shelves studying the polished leather spines of books. She drew down a slender volume and opened it, seemingly oblivious to my regard.

  “Sister, our guest has arrived,” Usher said without raising his voice. So silent was the house, it was scarce necessary to speak above a whisper.

  She closed the book and turned with a bemused smile. Her grey eyes wandered for a moment before settling on my face.

  “Come and join us, Sister.”

  She seemed to float rather than walk across the marble floor. The long and full white skirts of her dress concealed her shoes, adding to the illusion. The upper part covered her arms with white lace but left her hands and shoulders
bare, creating a charming effect. She was even thinner than her brother, except for a portliness about the waist that her lacings could not entirely conceal. Her eyes seemed almost shining, they were so filled with vital spirits, but her lips though fuller than her brother’s were pale as wax, and her cheekbones stood out sharply on the oval of her face, which was framed by her long curling hair, as black as the wing of a raven.

  We stood as she entered, and Usher made the introductions.

  “Madeline has been looking forward to having someone other than me to talk to,” Usher said. His voice had a slight edge, and she glanced sharply at him.

  “It is a pleasure to meet you at last, Randolph. My brother has told me so many of your adventures at Arkham.”

  Her fingers felt chill against mine, as though no blood flowed through them.

  “Adventures?” I looked at Usher. “Did we have adventures, Roderick?”

  Her laughter sounded hollow, as though it echoed in an empty room.

  “The time you and my brother used an old book you found in the university library to summon a demon? Don’t you remember?”

  I forced laughter and cast a glance at Usher, surprised that he had spoken of the event, which I had uttered to no living human being.

  “Our minds were filled with the spirit of inquiry, my dear. We were so young.” Usher laid his hand on her arm. “Shall we play for our guest?”

  She smiled and nodded. He went to the chair and took up the guitar from its seat. I expected her to sit at the grand piano, but instead she sat before the harp and tilted it back against her shoulder.

  Usher noticed my gaze upon the piano.

  “I suffer from a rare affliction that causes any harsh sounds to be physically painful. I can no longer bear to hear the piano—a pity, for it is a fine instrument. The softer music of strings does not torment my ears.”