Beyond the blackness of my closed eyelids I found myself seized by the snarled limbs of white birch trees. This blighted woodland was remarkably dreary on the evening of my trespass, but perhaps not quite as bleak as a gothic mansion erected within its densest perimeters. The estate materialized like a gloomy fortress encased in a tarnished scabbard. A reflecting pond cast a muted duplication of the house’s fungi-stained masonry. But the majority of the miry tarn percolated with a mist that besmirched the air with an unfathomable stench. Despite this deterrent, I wandered heedlessly through the sedges, which entangled my feet like a linkage of rooted chains.
It seemed equally fitting that a crescent moon cleaved at the sky like a sickle stained with blood. If any reservation remained regarding the likelihood of my present whereabouts, it abruptly vanished from my thoughts after I inspected the prodigious domicile at closer range. The building’s plaster façade, although generally intact, displayed one unremarkable fissure that looked like a lightning bolt splintering from its cornerstone to the opposite side of its eaves.
I immediately concluded that the proprietor of this sullen residence was none other than the reclusive Roderick Usher. I fully anticipated this man’s unbalanced disposition, yet couldn’t prevent myself from hoping that he now served as a remedy to my current malady. As I expected, nothing detained me from entering this house, save for my own consternation. A faceless valet soon escorted me into the shadowy dwelling, but he disappeared like an apparition before I uttered a word to him. After a few seconds, I surmised that Roderick’s childhood friend hadn’t yet honored his invitation to visit the premises. If my assumption proved accurate, then I suspected that Roderick was still ailing and nearly bedridden within this abode. I hesitated in the foyer only long enough to permit my pupils to dilate to the darkened interior. A dearth of windows on the home’s lower floor rendered the surroundings almost impenetrable to sight. Fortunately, a few candlelit sconces were spaced randomly along the length of a hardwood corridor, which directed me to a staircase’s ornately crafted balustrade.
I paused at this vantage point, looking at intricate tapestries inlaid in the walls encompassing me. An odor of musty wood, similar to the pages of olden books, permeated my nostrils. While contemplating my ascent of the staircase before me, my extremities shuddered as if I had inhaled too much of the opaque fog engulfing the structure’s entire foundation. But what did I truly have to fear in the framework of this mirage? After all, an ample portion of insufferable turmoil awaited me when I wasn’t reposed in sleep.
My footsteps soon shepherded me up a corkscrewed staircase, presumably leading to the precise section within the house where Roderick waited for his friend’s arrival. I proceeded down a hallway, disregarding the creaking ebon floors as I passed numerous rooms that revealed no signs of occupancy. Finding the quarters where the master lay in persistent and unnamable sorrow became an exercise of blind faith, but one that seemed predestined. I rapped my knuckles thrice upon a door’s dark oaken panel at the corridor’s end; the chamber where Roderick slowly withered now resided one panel’s width from my eyes.
Because I was already mentally obligated to interact with this man, I grasped the door’s brass knob and turned it until a resounding click set the barrier ajar. I suddenly felt like Howard Carter unsealing King Tutankhamen’s Egyptian tomb. The door edged open on hinges that screeched with a hundred years of rust. Only a smattering of light spilled into this area from perpendicular windows flanking an entire wall within the chamber. Each pane of glass was no wider than a single human frame. Curtains as black as the muck at the bog’s farthest reaches adorned each frame.
While surveying the room’s innards from its threshold, I remembered that Roderick’s disease rendered him hypersensitive to harshly illuminated environments. This crypt-like ambiance, replete with a reddish glow, served as a necessary habitat for its anguished occupant. Upon entering the chamber, I nearly stumbled over piles of nondescript books, painting supplies, and musical instruments strewn about the floor. Had not the décor of antique furniture been virtually undisturbed, I might’ve presumed that Roderick intentionally disorganized his surroundings. Amidst the room’s clutter I then noticed an acoustic guitar and a couple volumes of Romantic lure set closest to an unmade bed. Only these few objects had been recently relieved from their mantled dust.
My wait to greet the cloistered inhabitant would not be delayed much longer. Before my eyes fully adapted to the crimson light filtering through the windows, I witnessed my first glimpse of the House of Usher’s master. As I anticipated, the haggard man looked aged well beyond his years, reduced to little more than an animated skeleton veneered with a transparent layer of flesh. His concaved cheeks and drooping eyes told of his emaciation better than his own words. But these physical signs of a rampant illness didn’t recapitulate the extent of his agony. Roderick suffered in ways indiscernible to an untrained eye.
The ailing man was dressed in silken nightclothes, colorless by design, and perhaps assembled from the only fabric that wouldn’t irritate his skin. When he finally looked at me, I sensed an unworldly agitation whirling in his vacant eyes. Even in this subdued light, I perceived an aberrant pallor consuming his countenance. I detected paranoia and confusion in his lopsided gait as I crossed the room towards his bed.
“Your face isn’t how I remembered it,” Roderick murmured. Before I managed to finagle a suitable response, he shifted toward the windows to inspect the fumes still rising in a poisonous drift from the tarn outside. A temptation to misrepresent myself as the chronicler of his story loomed briefly in my thoughts, but I instead opted for the truth. Besides, if he was insulted by my intrusion I could’ve departed just as hastily as I arrived. The only proper way to proceed with this visitation was through forthright motivations. I therefore pronounced my true name and explained the accidental nature of this infringement.
By now, Roderick’s face transformed to a shade closer to limestone, but after I assured him that I had only come to his attention as an observer, he seemed moderately receptive of playing host to me. As he shifted toward his bed, I heard his bones grinding against the joints of his body. If this man’s inventory of mental instabilities included hypochondria, I could not fault his reasoning in this sole regard. Rather than second guess my position, he preoccupied himself with the material possessions scattered around his quarters. One object in particular captivated his mindset most intently. The ravaged man clasped the neck of his guitar as one might’ve taken hold of an old friend’s hand. I already knew that he had a penchant for strumming his antique six-string, but I expected an improvised use of its frets under these circumstances.
“Do you enjoy music, Mr. Cobbs?” he inquired listlessly.
“Have you ever greeted a man who hasn’t?”
Roderick gestured at me like a wizard who had access to a single incantation. He then quoted from Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’. “If music be the food of love, play on.” I watched him repose on the edge of his bed with his guitar in strumming position. “In these dire hours,” he sulked, “there’s not too many diversions left that are potent enough to soothe my discontent. I’ve therefore fancied a rhapsody to put me at ease.” His fingers plucked delicately at the instrument’s strings for several seconds, resulting in a series of cords that might’ve silenced his harshest critics.
“You play very gracefully, sir.”
“Much obliged. I shall now sing a dirge entitled ‘The Haunted Palace,’” he announced with a vigor the belied his feebleness. I appreciated his insistence to entertain me, of course, but believed our time would’ve been more beneficially spent if we skipped the lyrical ballad altogether. When my expression revealed a hint of disapproval to this harmony, he stopped singing as if his voice was snatched from his throat by an unseen hand.
“Perhaps music isn’t a preference of yours after all, Mr. Cobbs,” he said, frowningly.
“It’s not that at all,” I insisted. “But my time here with you is brief and I’d much rath
er talk about something relevant to us both.”
“And what might this be?”
“The source of our melancholy.”
The master sedately leaned his guitar against his bed’s frame, while a ghostly pallor glazed his exposed skin. I likened this sheen to the mist engulfing the House of Usher itself. Before he uttered another syllable, I watched his reflection shine transparently in a frame of glass in his chamber’s corner. “All things spawned from evil have a home,” he uttered. “It’s not a strain on one’s imagination to suggest that this dwelling casts a spell as black as a necromancer’s invocation.”
Roderick then hoisted himself into an upright position, depleting much of his vitality in the process. As he hobbled closer toward me, I detected a sulfurous whiff of air enveloping him; other odiferous secretions clung to his ravaged frame as well. Yet this proprietor currently favored little in his character resembling vanity. Because I only remembered a sparse portion of his past, I had no infallible way of surmising how long he’d been ill. But, of course, I did know beyond certainty that his strife wouldn’t endure for too many additional evenings.
“When you first entered my quarters,” he admitted somberly, “I suspected that you weren’t my childhood friend. From my memory, he never stood as tall as you. But since you’ve gone to such trouble to do what few sensible men would’ve ordinarily undertaken, I then assumed that you’ve come to assist me with my beloved sister.”
My face might’ve whitened to a shade closer to Roderick’s visage before I said, “Sadly, I am not. “But I am aware of her illness, too, and share in your grief.” The master mashed his hands together as if he was attempting to smooth a jagged piece of glass between his palms.
“Even as we speak,” he assured me, “the Lady Madeline’s condition becomes graver. Should you encounter her stumbling through the corridors of this mansion, I’m sure you’ll be appalled by the observance. Frankly speaking, she hasn’t much longer to live, Mr. Cobbs.”
Roderick’s narrator supplied me with at least a rudimentary understanding of his twin sister’s inexplicable ailment. I recalled that Madeline’s chronic disease caused her to lose control of her motor skills. The physicians of this time had only confirmed a diagnosis of catalepsy, but no treatment existed to counteract her systematic demise. Of course, this insidious malformation hadn’t only deformed its primary victim; Roderick’s own sanity balanced on the welfare of the penultimate Usher.
Not so strangely, this quest to converse with Roderick now seemed indelibly linked to my own disorder. Although my physical state of deterioration wasn’t nearly as perceptible as his or Madeline’s decline, perhaps he detected the gravity of my intentions. “I sense that my company has made you anxious,” I said. “Unfortunately, no words from me will help cure your sister, but I think our weaknesses have connected us in a peculiar manner.”
“I assure you,” said Roderick, “you needn’t assign any divination to this exchange. If you insist on doing so, then I suggest you rummage no farther than the walls in which you presently occupy.”
I had only a limited comprehension of this house being described as sentient to its environment. In this way of thinking, this inanimate structure may have projected a life force of its own, thereby methodically sapping the living energy encompassed within its space. Although I remained ambivalent to this theory’s legitimacy, I couldn’t deny Roderick’s unflustered credence to it. I aimed to stay resolute in my belief that his disposition had more to do with psychological torment than a phantasmagoric phenomenon.
“I can relate to what’s happening here,” I exclaimed. “Don’t you see, sir? My own mind has turned against me.” I edged deeper into the master’s chamber, positioning myself nearer to an enclosed candle lamp set on the corner of a walnut dressing table. Roderick maintained his stance, monitoring me as warily as he studied the shadows shifting between the bedroom’s eyelike windows.
“We aren’t so dissimilar, sir,” I continued. “In a physical sense, you’ve isolated yourself from most of humanity. At least from a mental perspective, I’ve devolved in the same way. In each situation we’ve shut out many people from our lives. Does it make any difference that we hide behind blocks of gray stone or gray matter? Haven’t we both learned that it’s impossible to escape the pain of living while we still breathe?”
Roderick mused over my assertion with a visible expression of interest, but his concentration periodically diverted to the view outside his chamber’s windows. His eyes returned to the tarn’s miasmatic vapors ascending like a fetid gas from the bowels of an unseen terror. I angled myself behind him so that my own image cast in an adjacent window’s pane of glass.
“By electing to visit me, you’ve placed yourself in a rather precarious situation. Even a man inclined to analytical thought couldn’t decipher this estate’s numerous conundrums.”
“Maybe we aren’t meant to solve all the mysteries of life,” I offered. “Wouldn’t it be less of a burden to accept the fate awaiting us? I’d say that’s in accordance with your own beliefs more so than mine, right?”
“The doctors who’ve treated my dear sister have adopted a similar philosophy, Mr. Cobbs. But there’s always room for a little magic.”
“Where do you propose to find it now?”
My words set the surprisingly fidgety master into motion again. This time he crossed the creaking floorboards to retrieve a leatherback volume of literature. Based on the convenient placement of this book next to his nightstand, I gathered it was one of his favorite pieces of Romanticism. With the book opened in his hands, he gingerly returned to within three feet from where I waited. The man’s voice was suddenly as sharp as a young rabble-rouser’s oration. A zestful gleam ignited at the center of his pupils as he readied himself for a lesson on the elements of fantasy.
“I will assume that you’ve not yet been acquainted with Launcelot Canning’s ‘The Mad Trist.’”
My only familiarity with that particular tale was preserved in his narrator’s transcription, but I didn’t wish to filch the spark from Roderick’s impassioned eyes. When a man had a story to tell, it was prudent to let him finish uninterrupted. I therefore remained mute as he relayed the synopsis as if he had perused the words an untold number of times prior to this occasion.
“This legend involved a brave knight named Ethelred,” he started. “He refused to turn away from a hermit’s door so that he had a chance to hold a dragon’s shield. Of course, as it always must be in such spirited yarns, the valiant Ethelred couldn’t claim the sought after treasure until he traversed a floor of silver and challenged the hellish beast in combat.”
As Roderick relayed the novel’s events, I imagined myself in place of the gallant knight. What expanses have I navigated to confront the monsters lurking in the caverns of my brain? It then occurred to me that the shockingly wily master had referenced this character to reveal the foolishness of my own concessions.
“There is no treasure for a man who flees from peril,” Roderick stated solemnly. “Ask yourself how many dragons you have slain?”
“Likely fewer than you, sir.”
“Some entities cannot be vanquished,” he confessed with a sigh that served as a harbinger to his own fate. “But if I am to do any good in my time remaining here, maybe I can change the course of things yet to come for you.”
If Roderick truly believed he had insight into my affliction, I didn’t presume he’d treat it by reciting passages of prose. Perhaps I distrusted him because I already knew the ending of his story. Mine was yet to be written. Of course, adhering to the protocol of my journey, I couldn’t divulge what his narrator planned to disseminate for future generations. Roderick must’ve sensed the uncertainty of my uneven glances. After only reading for a few seconds, he clamped the book shut and flicked it on top of a chair.
“I cannot assist you any further,” he declared broodingly. “You don’t accept supernatural and fantastical lore as being part of your reality.”
“
Why are you convinced of this?”
“I can confirm my allegation by asking you one question.”
“Then ask it, sir.”
Roderick’s sickly eyes locked squarely with my own before he proceeded. “Do you believe that spirits exist among us?”
“You mean ghosts?”
“Ghosts, specters, phantoms, banshees,” he clarified. “Call them by these names or from a list of others. What is your opinion?”
“In the past,” I said reflectively, “I’ve accepted only what can be seen. But if it makes my response any more palpable, I’m now at a point in my life where I want to believe in something everlasting.”
“Wanting isn’t good enough. A man such as yourself could just as easily dismiss seraphs and other Heavenly embodiments.”
Now wasn’t the proper time to preach my agnostic beliefs. Besides, Roderick’s keen intellect defied my earlier interpretations of his persona. He had already dissected the frailest ligaments holding me together. But neither of us had time to excavate the source of my indifference toward spiritual matter. Before Roderick had an opportunity to lecture me further, a disturbance outside his chamber attracted his melancholic curiosity.
He pivoted toward the bedroom door as the sound became increasingly prominent. This noise registered like the movement of footsteps being deliberately dragged across the hardwood corridor. We both already realized that the friction of this approach wasn’t intentional; it was also not the figment of some deranged fantasy. The master immediately started to convulse as the racket intensified. Yet his obvious fear didn’t prevent him from nearly pressing his ear against the door’s panel.
“Do you hear that?” he whispered. His petrified manner of speaking and twitching had a potent influence over my own disposition. “It’s her. The Lady Madeline knows I have a visitor.” Roderick’s bony fingers methodically curled around the door’s brass knob. From the door’s opposite side I distinguished the raspy breathing of a woman in dire pain. Then, as if this commotion wasn’t unnerving enough, I detected what sounded like fingernails scratching against the wood in a ferocious manner. I likened it to dull metal scraping across a dry piece of slate. Roderick’s body still quivered as if he was in the midst of a seizure, but I most likely appeared more vulnerable.
Pure mischief invaded the master’s tone when he asked, “Shall I open the door now, Mr. Cobbs? Would you like to extend a warm salutation to my long-suffering sister?”
Under the circumstances I figured it was wiser to postpone such a meeting. But Roderick fastened his hand tighter on the knob, and in that moment I envisioned him as the courageous Ethelred securing his grip on the dragon’s shield.
“Don’t open the door,” I exclaimed. The urgent pitch of my voice startled even me. Despite my request, the owner of this doomed domicile seemed to relish the dread he evoked from within me. His eyes sparkled with malice as the moon’s vermilion glow bled through his stare.
“What does a man such as you have to fear?” he questioned. I watched in disgust as his thin lips parted, revealing a chain of decayed teeth. “You’ve already stipulated your disbelief in otherworldly influences. A man as insightful as you couldn’t possibly be frightened by the presence of an ailing woman of such an insignificant size—or could he?”
I suspected that the maniacal master had no intention of waiting for me to relay a response that might’ve dissuaded his morbid objective. The unbearable clawing from outside the door still persisted. If indeed the Lady Madeline was solely responsible for such a clamor, I didn’t wish to discover her motivations.
“I don’t want to see her,” I told Roderick sternly.
The pale-skinned proprietor leered at me as if I was as uncomplicated as a child’s storybook. Even as I pleaded with him to release the door’s knob, he clasped it as if his fingers had melded with the oxidized metal. “You must learn to face that which makes the blood quicken in your veins,” he proclaimed. “Do not fail this test. What I am proposing is nothing short than an act of altruism. What kind of host would I be if I permitted you to leave my estate in the identical condition of your arrival?”
Roderick’s pledge struck me as disingenuous. I couldn’t trust a man whose brain was potentially more contorted than his twin sister’s limbs. Of course, simply voicing my disapproval to his rather bizarre brand of therapy didn’t alter the circumstance in my favor. Lady Madeline’s tortured moaning still rebounded against my eardrums, prompting me to forward a frantic demand.
“As I already told you, sir,” I stated. “I don’t wish to see your sister. I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do to help her. You will find a way to deal with her in your own time, but I don’t want to be a part of it.”
“It’s already too late for that,” Roderick gushed mordantly. He then deliberately turned the knob, which permitted the door to creak open. In a bid to escape the horror of his sister’s emergence, I bounced like a rubber ball to the chamber’s opposite end, attempting to escape through another door. Adding to my chagrin, this exit was locked from the other side. Even with my avenue of departure nullified, I still couldn’t amass the courage to direct my eyes to where I believed the Lady Madeline had entered the room.
“Stare upon her, Mr. Cobbs!” Roderick bellowed. I ignored his command by keeping my back turned toward the now open door. After several seconds I realized that Madeline’s anguished cries had vanished. I discerned nothing more than Roderick’s haunting snicker. When I finally faced the master again, he scowled at me through half-closed eyelids. We were still the chamber’s only visible occupants.
“I don’t understand what you’re trying to do,” I complained.
“Then perhaps you never shall.”
“Where is your sister, sir?”
Roderick forwarded no coherent response. He was content to let me formulate my own conclusion. As it now stood, I was convinced that the woman managed to hide herself within the quarters. A few seconds earlier I heard her guttural sighs just as audibly as Roderick’s own tittering. “If this is a joke,” I informed my demented host, “then I don’t share in your warped sense of humor.”
“It seems proper that laughter is absent from these premises,” he noted.
“Except for your own,” I countered.
“All is not as it seems. Sometimes a laugh is really a cry for help. When you stop running, you’ll appreciate my insight.”
“I’m not running.”
“Oh, but you are, Mr. Cobbs, and with such uncanny speed that your eyes can barely adjust to the scenery at hand.” Roderick extended his arms as if to present the chamber’s contents to me for the first time. “You’ve trusted your eyes for far too long. But once you accept that even the keenest onlooker can’t detect everything he needs to understand, you’ll slow down and learn to perceive your surroundings with an internal lens. Only then will you observe the fears that have delivered you to the House of Usher.”
In spite of Roderick’s insistence on my inner blindness, I couldn’t embrace the ranting of a man who was arguably sicker than me. Lady Madeline’s presence among us no longer mattered. I already decided my next course of action. “I must leave here now,” I pronounced tonelessly. “My intrusion has been a grave mistake.”
Roderick shifted to one side of the door’s frame, designating access into the blackened corridor. “You’re free to leave whenever you wish,” he declared. “After all, we both know that I have no power to detain you any longer than you’ll willingly grant.” I required no further encouragement from him before initiating my next move. His pledge to permit me to flee unimpeded proved sincere. Once my footsteps were in full motion, I had no inclination to glance back at the despondent master.
Within a few moments I vacated the fated house where Roderick Usher prepared to die alongside his sister. I planned to keep a steady gait until the estate’s architecture became too distant for my eyes to intercept. But a force stronger than my own willpower compelled me to face the gothic mansion’s façade one last time. Be
tween the elevating funnels of mist encircling the house, I discerned the infamous fissure that inconspicuously split the foundation in two sections.
It had occurred to me many years before this visitation that the crack signified something far more pertinent than a dwelling in disrepair. Those familiar with Roderick’s motivations debated the evidence of his insanity through the jagged line of structural decomposition. Now, I too questioned the framework of my own stability. I couldn’t predict how much longer I’d be capable of maintaining the appearance of a man who was impenetrable to the sorrows of his surroundings. Was Roderick Usher the only person to plainly observe the division of my sensibilities? I simply couldn’t yet presume to know the answer.
Chapter 56
2:37 P.M.
The Classic Crusade of Corbin Cobbs Page 56