The Fall of the House of Usher

Mortuorum Secundum Chorum Ecclesiæ Maguntinæ.
I could not help thinking of the wild ritual of this work, and of its probable
influence upon the hypochondriac, when, one evening, having informed me
abruptly that the lady Madeline was no more, he stated his intention of
preserving her corpse for a fortnight (previously to its final interment), in one
of the numerous vaults within the main walls of the building. The worldly
reason, however, assigned for this singular proceeding, was one which I did
not feel at liberty to dispute. The brother had been led to his resolution (so he
told me) by consideration of the unusual character of the malady of the
deceased, of certain obtrusive and eager inquiries on the part of her medical
men, and of the remote and exposed situation of the burial-ground of the
family. I will not deny that when I called to mind the sinister countenance of
the person whom I met upon the staircase, on the day of my arrival at the
house, I had no desire to oppose what I regarded as at best but a harmless, and
by no means an unnatural, precaution.
At the request of Usher, I personally aided him in the arrangements for the
temporary entombment. The body having been encoffined, we two alone bore
it to its rest. The vault in which we placed it (and which had been so long
unopened that our torches, half smothered in its oppressive atmosphere, gave
us little opportunity for investigation) was small, damp, and entirely without
means of admission for light; lying, at great depth, immediately beneath that
portion of the building in which was my own sleeping apartment. It had been
used, apparently, in remote feudal times, for the worst purposes of a donjon-
keep, and, in later days, as a place of deposit for powder, or some other highly
combustible substance, as a portion of its floor, and the whole interior of a
long archway through which we reached it, were carefully sheathed with
copper. The door, of massive iron, had been, also, similarly protected. Its
immense weight caused an unusually sharp, grating sound, as it moved upon
its hinges.
Having deposited our mournful burden upon tressels within this region of
horror, we partially turned aside the yet unscrewed lid of the coffin, and
looked upon the face of the tenant. A striking similitude between the brother
and sister now first arrested my attention; and Usher, divining, perhaps, my
thoughts, murmured out some few words from which I learned that the
deceased and himself had been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely
intelligible nature had always existed between them. Our glances, however,
rested not long upon the dead—for we could not regard her unawed. The
disease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity of youth, had left, as
usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint
blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon

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the lip which is so terrible in death. We replaced and screwed down the lid,
and, having secured the door of iron, made our way, with toil, into the scarcely
less gloomy apartments of the upper portion of the house.
And now, some days of bitter grief having elapsed, an observable change came
over the features of the mental disorder of my friend. His ordinary manner had
vanished. His ordinary occupations were neglected or forgotten. He roamed
from chamber to chamber with hurried, unequal, and objectless step. The
pallor of his countenance had assumed, if possible, a more ghastly hue—but
the luminousness of his eye had utterly gone out. The once occasional
huskiness of his tone was heard no more; and a tremulous quaver, as if of
extreme terror, habitually characterized his utterance. There were times,
indeed, when I thought his unceasingly agitated mind was laboring with some
oppressive secret, to divulge which he struggled for the necessary courage. At
times, again, I was obliged to resolve all into the mere inexplicable vagaries of
madness, for I beheld him gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an attitude
of the profoundest attention, as if listening to some imaginary sound. It was no
wonder that his condition terrified—that it infected me. I felt creeping upon
me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet
impressive superstitions.
It was, especially, upon retiring to bed late in the night of the seventh or eighth
day after the placing of the lady Madeline within the donjon, that I
experienced the full power of such feelings. Sleep came not near my couch—
while the hours waned and waned away. I struggled to reason off the
nervousness which had dominion over me. I endeavored to believe that much,
if not all of what I felt, was due to the bewildering influence of the gloomy
furniture of the room—of the dark and tattered draperies, which, tortured into
motion by the breath of a rising tempest, swayed fitfully to and fro upon the
walls, and rustled uneasily about the decorations of the bed. But my efforts
were fruitless. An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at
length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm.
Shaking this off with a gasp and a struggle, I uplifted myself upon the pillows,
and, peering earnestly within the intense darkness of the chamber, hearkened
—I know not why, except that an instinctive spirit prompted me—to certain
low and indefinite sounds which came, through the pauses of the storm, at
long intervals, I knew not whence. Overpowered by an intense sentiment of
horror, unaccountable yet unendurable, I threw on my clothes with haste (for I
felt that I should sleep no more during the night), and endeavored to arouse
myself from the pitiable condition into which I had fallen, by pacing rapidly to
and fro through the apartment.
I had taken but few turns in this manner, when a light step on an adjoining

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staircase arrested my attention. I presently recognized it as that of Usher. In an
instant afterward he rapped, with a gentle touch, at my door, and entered,
bearing a lamp. His countenance was, as usual, cadaverously wan—but,
moreover, there was a species of mad hilarity in his eyes—an evidently
restrained hysteria in his whole demeanor. His air appalled me—but anything
was preferable to the solitude which I had so long endured, and I even
welcomed his presence as a relief.
“And you have not seen it?” he said abruptly, after having stared about him for
some moments in silence—“you have not then seen it?—but, stay! you shall.”
Thus speaking, and having carefully shaded his lamp, he hurried to one of the
casements, and threw it freely open to the storm.
The impetuous fury of the entering gust nearly lifted us from our feet. It was,
indeed, a tempestuous yet sternly beautiful night, and one wildly singular in its
terror and its beauty. A whirlwind had apparently collected its force in our
vicinity; for there were frequent and violent alterations in the direction of the
wind; and the exceeding density of the clouds (which hung so low as to press
upon the turrets of the house) did not prevent our perceiving the life-like
velocity with which they flew careering from all points against each other,
without passing away into the distance. I say that even their exceeding density
did not prevent our perceiving this—yet we had no glimpse of the moon or
stars, nor was there any flashing forth of the lightning. But the under surfaces
of the huge masses of agitated vapor, as well as all terrestrial objects
immediately around us, were glowing in the unnatural light of a faintly
luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation which hung about and
enshrouded the mansion.
“You must not—you shall not behold this!” said I, shuddering, to Usher, as I
led him, with a gentle violence, from the window to a seat. “These
appearances, which bewilder you, are merely electrical phenomena not
uncommon—or it may be that they have their ghastly origin in the rank
miasma of the tarn. Let us close this casement;—the air is chilling and
dangerous to your frame. Here is one of your favorite romances. I will read,
and you shall listen:—and so we will pass away this terrible night together.”
The antique volume which I had taken up was the “Mad Trist” of Sir
Launcelot Canning; but I had called it a favorite of Usher’s more in sad jest
than in earnest; for, in truth, there is little in its uncouth and unimaginative
prolixity which could have had interest for the lofty and spiritual ideality of
my friend. It was, however, the only book immediately at hand; and I indulged
a vague hope that the excitement which now agitated the hypochondriac,
might find relief (for the history of mental disorder is full of similar
anomalies) even in the extremeness of the folly which I should read. Could I

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have judged, indeed, by the wild overstrained air of vivacity with which he
hearkened, or apparently hearkened, to the words of the tale, I might well have
congratulated myself upon the success of my design.
I had arrived at that well-known portion of the story where Ethelred, the hero
of the Trist, having sought in vain for peaceable admission into the dwelling of
the hermit, proceeds to make good an entrance by force. Here, it will be
remembered, the words of the narrative run thus:
“And Ethelred, who was by nature of a doughty heart, and who was now
mighty withal, on account of the powerfulness of the wine which he had
drunken, waited no longer to hold parley with the hermit, who, in sooth, was
of an obstinate and maliceful turn, but, feeling the rain upon his shoulders, and
fearing the rising of the tempest, uplifted his mace outright, and, with blows,
made quickly room in the plankings of the door for his gauntleted hand; and
now pulling therewith sturdily, he so cracked, and ripped, and tore all asunder,
that the noise of the dry and hollow-sounding wood alarumed and reverberated
throughout the forest.”
At the termination of this sentence I started and, for a moment, paused; for it
appeared to me (although I at once concluded that my excited fancy had
deceived me)—it appeared to me that, from some very remote portion of the
mansion, there came, indistinctly to my ears, what might have been, in its
exact similarity of character, the echo (but a stifled and dull one certainly) of
the very cracking and ripping sound which Sir Launcelot had so particularly
described. It was, beyond doubt, the coincidence alone which had arrested my
attention; for, amid the rattling of the sashes of the casements, and the ordinary
commingled noises of the still increasing storm, the sound, in itself, had
nothing, surely, which should have interested or disturbed me. I continued the
story:
“But the good champion Ethelred, now entering within the door, was sore
enraged and amazed to perceive no signal of the maliceful hermit; but, in the
stead thereof, a dragon of a scaly and prodigious demeanor, and of a fiery
tongue, which sate in guard before a palace of gold, with a floor of silver; and
upon the wall there hung a shield of shining brass with this legend enwritten—
Who entereth herein, a conqueror hath bin;
Who slayeth the dragon, the shield he shall win.
And Ethelred uplifted his mace, and struck upon the head of the dragon, which
fell before him, and gave up his pesty breath, with a shriek so horrid and
harsh, and withal so piercing, that Ethelred had fain to close his ears with his

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hands against the dreadful noise of it, the like whereof was never before
heard.”
Here again I paused abruptly, and now with a feeling of wild amazement—for
there could be no doubt whatever that, in this instance, I did actually hear
(although from what direction it proceeded I found it impossible to say) a low
and apparently distant, but harsh, protracted, and most unusual screaming or
grating sound—the exact counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured
up for the dragon’s unnatural shriek as described by the romancer.
Oppressed, as I certainly was, upon the occurrence of this second and most
extraordinary coincidence, by a thousand conflicting sensations, in which
wonder and extreme terror were predominant, I still retained sufficient
presence of mind to avoid exciting, by any observation, the sensitive
nervousness of my companion. I was by no means certain that he had noticed
the sounds in question; although, assuredly, a strange alteration had, during the
last few minutes, taken place in his demeanor. From a position fronting my
own, he had gradually brought round his chair, so as to sit with his face to the
door of the chamber; and thus I could but partially perceive his features,
although I saw that his lips trembled as if he were murmuring inaudibly. His
head had dropped upon his breast—yet I knew that he was not asleep, from the
wide and rigid opening of the eye as I caught a glance of it in profile. The
motion of his body, too, was at variance with this idea—for he rocked from
side to side with a gentle yet constant and uniform sway. Having rapidly taken
notice of all this, I resumed the narrative of Sir Launcelot, which thus
proceeded:
“And now, the champion, having escaped from the terrible fury of the dragon,
bethinking himself of the brazen shield, and of the breaking up of the
enchantment which was upon it, removed the carcass from out of the way
before him, and approached valorously over the silver pavement of the castle
to where the shield was upon the wall; which in sooth tarried not for his full
coming, but fell down at his feet upon the silver floor, with a mighty great and
terrible ringing sound.”
No sooner had these syllables passed my lips, than—as if a shield of brass had
indeed, at the moment, fallen heavily upon a floor of silver—I became aware
of a distinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous, yet apparently muffled,
reverberation. Completely unnerved, I leaped to my feet; but the measured
rocking movement of Usher was undisturbed. I rushed to the chair in which he
sat. His eyes were bent fixedly before him, and throughout his whole
countenance there reigned a stony rigidity. But, as I placed my hand upon his
shoulder, there came a strong shudder over his whole person; a sickly smile
quivered about his lips; and I saw that he spoke in a low, hurried, and

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gibbering murmur, as if unconscious of my presence. Bending closely over
him, I at length drank in the hideous import of his words.
“Not hear it?—yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long—long—long—many
minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it—yet I dared not—oh, pity
me, miserable wretch that I am!—I dared not—I dared not speak! We have put