The Fall of the House of Usher
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. At length I found myself within view of the melancholy House of Usher. Upon crossing the threshold, I felt a sense of insufferable gloom pervading my spirit—a chill, a sickness, a revulsion of the heart.
Roderick Usher, my boyhood companion, had summoned me in a letter filled with wild desperation. His sister, Madeline, he said, suffered from a mysterious malady—a cataleptic trance that had slowly drained her of life. Yet when I looked upon Roderick, I saw a man already haunted. His pale, ghostly skin and his eyes, liquid and terrible, spoke of a terror beyond mere illness. The house itself seemed sentient—its stones, its turrets, its cadaverous vaults, all alive with a sinister sentience.
We passed days in haunted silence, painting and reading by candelight. Then came the entombment. Believing Madeline dead, we placed her within a copper-lined vault deep beneath the mansion. But on the seventh night, a storm of invisible fury raged outside. Roderick, trembling, whispered, “Hear you not it? She is coming!” A moment later, the doors flew open. Madeline Usher stood there, blood upon her white robes. With a low, gasping cry, she fell upon her brother, and in his death, she died.
I fled in terror. As I rode away, the ancient walls split and crumbled. The tarn closed over the ruins with a dark and silent wave. The House of Usher was no more.