The Fall Read online

  A pocket watch rests heavy in my hand, hidden in the pocket of my dress. I toy with it, even as I stand transfixed by the brittle dead insects.

  The words on the identifying parchment slips are in Latin. Could I learn to read them? Everything I try to read slithers about on the page, and I cannot make even the simplest words stay in place. A dead language may be easier for me to decipher.

  But even staring too long at the labels makes me dizzy.

  I steady myself on a table, knocking a sheaf of blank paper to the floor. Left behind, as though waiting for me, is a page filled with cramped handwriting and blurred ink, followed by other pages. A journal.

  Like so many books in this house, the bindings have nearly crumbled away.

  A crash from inside the butterfly case makes me jump . . . and then another crash. The velvet-covered boards that hold the preserved insects are collapsing inwards. Gossamer wings disintegrate before my eyes, and the library blurs around me for a moment.

  I should go to my bedroom. In case of a fit, I’d rather not fall and hit my head on one of these tables.

  The thought is not fully my own. So . . . the house wants me back in my room. As a child, I would have thought it was protecting me. I collapse into a leather armchair and lift the journal gingerly.

  I do not want to die, but I must be very clever in order to survive. The answers are in the library. My guardian and I are sure of it.

  I start as the watch in my pocket begins to tick. Sometimes I twist the pin round and round while I’m thinking. A nervous habit. For a moment, everything seems clearer. I look back to the page.

  The answers are in the library.

  What answers? What is the house hiding?

  4

  FROM THE DIARY OF LISBETH USHER

  My name is Lisbeth Usher. I am cursed by beauty, the delicate beauty of a dewdrop, which lasts for but a few moments. Three days ago I could leave the house without fear. Three days ago, I had a future.

  Then my sister, Honoria, put on her best dress, the one she was supposed to wear on her wedding day, and went up to the widow’s walk. No one was with her when she jumped. But I suspect that she did it solemnly. Honoria did everything solemnly. She rarely smiled. Now that the curse has passed to me, I understand why.

  I will not succumb. I will not. Unlike Honoria, who passed the curse to me, I will protect our youngest sister. I will not die. The house has claimed my mother and my sister. But I will prevail. In the end I will laugh at all of them, wringing their hands and wailing about being consumed by the House of Usher.

  5

  MADELINE IS NINE

  Placing one hand in front of the other, Roderick and I crawl forward through the accumulated dust of the library. Roderick points to a table, and I head toward it. In our carelessness, we overturn a stack of books. Roderick smears the dust on the leather cover and peers at the gold writing. I hold out my hands, and he gives it to me, but as I open it, the pages disintegrate and fall to the floor. I shrug; there are plenty of empty corners to investigate, and books that are in better condition than this one.

  A chest sits halfway across the room, a thing of carved dark wood. I gesture toward it. Roderick grins.

  The seeking game is our favorite game. We crouch under tables and lurk in dark corners, always together, always searching. We are intent on going through each room of the house, learning their shapes, textures, temperatures. Tasting the melancholia of each space.

  They are very important to me, these little explorations. The house is so huge, and sometimes the rooms seem changed when we enter them. If we don’t explore, we could someday wander into a corridor we’ve never seen before, and we might not find our way back out. I’m more worried for Roderick than for myself. He doesn’t pay attention.

  The floor creaks outside the door, and we scurry under a table. A pair of soft velveteen house shoes, the hem of a dressing gown sweep by. Father. I sit, unable to hold my crouching position, as he pulls the heavy draperies shut. That means Mother will be joining him. I tell myself not to be afraid, but it is Mother, so of course I am.

  Father sits at the table, right above us. Roderick puts a hand over his mouth, stifling a laugh. But I frown at him. I don’t want to make Father angry. A servant brings him tea.

  So this dismal room is in use. So few of the rooms are. Most are haunted rather than lived in.

  And then Mother comes and settles herself on the faded blue fainting couch. She covers her eyes with a dark velvet cloth. Roderick makes his frightened sound, and I reach for his hand. Even Roderick, her beloved, cowers in fear when our mother has one of her spells.

  There is a curse upon our family. We are cursed. My parents are ill and often in pain.

  “Perhaps we shouldn’t separate them,” Father says. His tone tells me that he’s resuming an ongoing conversation. “They are twins.”

  Roderick scoots away from me, toward the door. He’s ready to run. If we go now, we probably won’t even get in trouble, but I have to hear. What is Father talking about?

  “Nonsense,” Mother answers. “They have the rest of their lives to be together. Sending him away may delay the illness.”

  “You truly believe this?”

  “The doctors have assured me.”

  Mother always believes the doctors. They live in our tower. Father says that they descended upon our family like white-coated vultures, hungry for bits and pieces of our ancient family. The local doctor won’t visit the house; he says it is too far from the village and the main road. More likely he doesn’t know what to do for us and is afraid of the house. Many of the locals are. With Mother so sick, we need a doctor here all the time, as much as we need a cook or a butler, or the flock of maids who dust the cabinetry. So we have Dr. Paul and Dr. Peridue.

  “We have to give him the best possible chance of survival,” Mother says. “To do anything less would be murder.” Her voice rises, and Roderick pales.

  Father’s fingers tap against the table. It’s a habit of his. He must be trying to write. The table above our heads wobbles. His hand is shaking, and that always agitates him. He throws down the quill, or perhaps knocks it off the table. It lands on the floor beside us. If he retrieves it, will he discover us? The feather is long and glossy and black. The ink soaks into the floor.

  If Mother is getting one of her spells, soon she will be able to sense our breathing. Her hearing is exquisite. If you drop a pin, she screams with pain; her agony is also exquisite. It’s fortunate that she has not sensed us yet.

  “Perhaps you should go far away and take them both,” Father says. “You say often enough that you wish you had never come here.”

  “Sending Roderick will be enough. There is something poisonous here, something that infects the children, turns them to monsters.” Mother says these things all the time. It’s because she’s ill. Still, Father seems offended.

  “I was a child in this house,” Father says. “My sister and I were children here.”

  “I know. And so was I.”

  Silence. Father shuffles his papers, as though his tremors might stop and he might be able to actually write.

  I grip Roderick’s hand. They cannot take him away from me. We are inseparable. Without Roderick, I will be alone with Mother and her cruelty. Father? He has no time for us. Even when he is conscious, he is distracted. And so often he is insensible from his illness. I will be completely alone. The curtains rustle, and the floor creaks.

  A scrap of paper drifts down. I pick it up and strain to see the writing through the gloom. Roderick peers over my shoulder.

  I love you.

  Was this what Father was writing? Does he know we are here? I touch the brownish ink. A bit flakes away from the intricate L. Too old to be freshly written. So who wrote it? Where did it come from? I peer beneath the tablecloth. Mother is staring toward Father.

  “And will Roderick ever really return to Madeline?” Father asks.

  She doesn’t answer.

  My chest is tight an
d tears run down, smearing the grime on my face. My hands press against the floor, which goes from warm to icy. Rage overwhelms me, followed by grief. I’m not sure which emotions are my own.

  Roderick takes the scrap of paper from me. Is it . . . could it be a message from the house? He slides it between the pages of a disintegrating book. And then, very quietly, we slip out of the room. Our parents are too absorbed in their own pursuits to notice, or to call out to us if they do.

  6

  FROM THE DIARY OF LISBETH USHER

  Things that confuse the house:

  Music, particularly drums, repetitive music. Waltzing.

  The tide.

  Saying a poem repeatedly.

  Patterns in paintings and wallpaper.

  The ticking of a clock.

  All of these can distract the house from what is happening within the walls. Be warned. They also make it querulous; pictures are likely to fall from the walls when it regains its awareness.

  Or worse. Deaths. When angered, the house becomes more dangerous than ever. Unfocused. It might even strike out at an Usher.

  7

  MADELINE IS NINE

  “Don’t be frightened, Madeline,” Roderick says.

  We stand in front of a small wooden door that he discovered behind a wall hanging on the first floor. He pushes it open, and we look into the depths. Three stairs lead down to an indistinct darkness. The roof appears to be hard-packed dirt, tunneled directly into the earth.

  “I want to see where it goes,” he says. “I think it might lead to the crypt.”

  Our parents have forbidden us ever to go beneath the house. Because of the crypt. It is a sacred place, and dangerous.

  I eye Roderick. Usually he is much more timid than this. Something is pushing him to be brave. It’s easy to see how proud he is of this discovery. A hundred times we have walked past this door. Something of significance must be behind it. Except, in this house, the secrets hide behind secrets, and tight places like this hole in the earth make my stomach clench with fear.

  Roderick lifts the torch that he took from an alcove in a twisty corridor on the second floor.

  “Do you know how to light this?”

  When I touch it, my fingers come away slick with animal fat. We are not allowed to handle torches, so this is one more uncharacteristic act of rebellion.

  The tunnel terrifies me, but Roderick is begging me with his eyes.

  “I love you best of anyone, Madeline.”

  When he says this, he knows that I will do anything for him.

  “Let’s get this over with,” I say. I am three minutes older than Roderick. Being older means I must be braver.

  His smile is full of delight.

  Squaring my shoulders, I take my beeswax candle and hold the tiny flame to the end of his torch. It bursts into fire, and we both jump back. My cheek feels tender, nearly scorched.

  “Shall I hold it?” I ask.

  “I’ll keep it.” He points down into the tunnel. “You go first.”

  He may be acting brave, but he’s still scared of the dark. And he’s sending me into the pit first with no light, and no guess as to what could be waiting below.

  “Leave the door open.” I sit and edge downward an inch or two. Looking up, the torch makes his face golden and his cheekbones frighteningly high. “I mean it, Roderick. I don’t care if the servants come along and see what we’re doing. I don’t want to be closed in.”

  “I won’t close the door.”

  I scoot a bit farther. The earth is slightly moist. I pat it with my hand. It feels unhealthy, as if the meanest plant wouldn’t grow in this soil, even with sunlight.

  Bits of earth rain down on me as Roderick wriggles back and forth above me. And then, with a sense of horror that is neither brave nor heroic, I hear the angry creak as the door slams.

  8

  MADELINE IS FIFTEEN

  Moonlight shines blue through the window, bathing the parlor in clean, bright light. Roderick is home from school for four nights.

  He strums a mandolin. He calls it a guitar, but I am sure it is a mandolin. It belonged to Father, and when he felt well enough, sometimes he sang lullabies to us while playing it. Or perhaps that was part of a story that I imagined. Father was kind, yet so often distracted—in pain.

  The only sound is Roderick’s intermittent strumming and the wind outside, but we don’t need to speak to understand each other. We sit, comfortable, warm, complete.

  We are alone. The servants have retired; they are afraid of the corridors and the corners of the house on nights when the moon is full and the wind is blowing the last leaves from the dead branches of the white trees that surround the house. At my feet, Cassandra snorts and watches us with her wise dog eyes.

  The wind blows, and through the window I watch a decaying tree crash to the ground.

  “It’s good to be home,” Roderick says, and I am overwhelmed with happiness. For once I’m not alone. We are together and content.

  But the pleasure is not completely mine. The house wants him here. Wants him to stay, though I know that he won’t.

  The room goes even darker. I can barely make out the shape of my hand or of Roderick’s. Only the silver arcs of his fingernails, glowing slightly.

  “Madeline . . .”

  Dark foreboding washes over me. My heart misses a beat. Roderick is here, but his time with me is so short.

  I turn to face him. There are so many things that I must tell him. But my movement distracts him from whatever he was about to say, and he leaps to his feet, stalking across the room.

  “Candles,” he says. “There’s no point in sitting in darkness.”

  He won’t look at me now, and I can’t look away from him. Cassandra rolls over and whines. I ignore her, captivated by Roderick’s energy, and his willful ignorance. Since he’s been away, I can see, it’s become easier to pretend the things that frighten him aren’t real. He’ll never admit that at this moment, like the boy he used to be, he’s afraid of the dark.

  He lights one candle after another, lining them up across the table until the darkness is nothing more than a memory, and we are encapsulated in this room, where candle flame gleams in dark wood, and his hair glows silver-blond, the exact same shade as my own.

  He takes paper from my desk, the same paper, embossed with a U for Usher, that I use when writing to him, nearly every week since he’s been gone away to school.

  He takes my ink and my quill without asking. He never needs to ask, but I know what he’s doing. He’s reminding himself of the wide world away from the House of Usher, and that he’ll be returning to that world soon.

  “I must write a letter,” he says.

  I shiver. My mood mirrors the mood of the house, and I am afraid to touch the woodwork, just inches from my head, afraid of the iciness that will meet my fingertips. Roderick, as always, is unaware. I am careful, very careful, about what I do, where I go, even what I think. But Roderick ignores our danger. If my love for my twin brother was selfless, I would prefer it when he’s gone; he is safer then. But when he goes, the loneliness is overwhelming. He knows what I’m feeling. He’s more sensitive to my emotions than to the undercurrents from the house.

  “My friend,” he says gently, “will be expecting to hear from me.”

  “You go back to school at the end of the week,” I remind him. Cassandra hears the pain in my voice and thumps her tail. Roderick doesn’t notice. He’s engrossed in his letter.

  The doctors will want to examine us tomorrow. They are always excited when they can see us together.

  Roderick stares out the window, weighing the words before he writes them. Hunched over the desk, he’s far away from me. Above his head, ghosts shimmer. As always, they remind me of bits of mist, silent. The dusty remnants of an old house.

  School draws him away from the house, back into the world. There is a way to get him to stay. To make him forget the outside world.

  Horror overwhelms me. This thought is not my o
wn.

  Curled on the settee, I struggle to ignore the house’s urgings and rediscover my contentment from earlier.

  9

  MADELINE IS NINE

  The secret tunnel door is firmly closed.

  “I asked you to leave the door open!” My voice quivers, and I despise myself for showing my fear.

  At least we have the torch. Though I am farther down the tunnel than Roderick, I can feel the warmth of it, and I can still see the flickering above me.

  “I didn’t close it,” he insists. I believe him. “And Madeline? It won’t open.”

  I crawl up next to him, and we both push with all our strength. It doesn’t budge. I sigh. “We have to follow the tunnel.”

  It is what the house wants. And despite my horror of closed-in places, I am curious. Who . . . or what . . . scratched this passage out of the hard-packed earth and stone? Father had warned us about dangers in the cellars and cavernous places under the house. On Roderick’s dare, I tried to steal the keys once, when Father was in bed with one of his fits, but he caught me before I reached the door of his bedchamber. It was the only time Father ever screamed at me. But this time the house is obviously watching, and it won’t let us come to harm.

  As we creep along, the earthen ceiling presses down so that I have to lie on my back, twisting my body back and forth.

  Roderick’s shoe touches my face.

  “Slow down,” I warn him. My skirts bunch up around me, slowing my progress.

  The air is very still. My hands are dusted with particles of dry earth, and I imagine they are clogging my throat. I choke.

  Pebbles rain down on me.

  “Sorry,” Roderick calls. “I was trying to get a handhold, to keep from slipping down on your head. The dirt is crumbly.”

  This tunnel could cave in on us at any moment.

  If Roderick and I are buried beneath the house, at least our parents won’t be able to send him to school. That’s probably why he’s being so brave, pretending not to be afraid of the only place he’s ever known, because he’s about to be sent to a new place.