I realised that since entering the house I had not heard a clock chime the quarter hours.
“Have you always suffered so?”
“In my youth the condition was much less severe, but as I grow long in years, it worsens.”
They played several German folk songs while I listened and watched Madeline. Her beauty was ethereal, almost fairy-like. She seemed to inhabit another realm and this one at the same moment. I could see that she was Usher’s twin. It was evident in the line of her shoulder, the length of her neck, the noble height of her brow, but all that was angular and harsh in his features was softened and beautified in hers.
“Wonderful,” I said, applauding effusively when they indicated the performance was at an end. “I’ve never heard such beautiful playing.”
Usher acknowledged the compliment with a slight bow of his head.
“My family has always been gifted in music, among other things.”
“Brother, I grow tired. I must go to my room and lie down.”
“Of course, Madeline. How thoughtless of me. Let me help you to your feet.” He called for his butler. “Simmons will help you up the stairs.”
We watched the little grey man walk with her into the entrance hall and ascend the marble staircase.
“She is dying,” Usher said to me without preamble.
I stared at him, uncertain if I had heard him correctly. “It is a wasting illness, hereditary in nature. Nothing can be done in a medical way to cure it. The doctor was here in the morning. He told me in confidence that she may have as much as three months remaining, or she could take a seizure and die tomorrow.”
I went to him and took his hand into mine.
“Roderick, I am saddened beyond words. If there is anything I may do, you have only to ask.”
“One thing you may do for me, old friend. Remain in this house and help me to find the source of the curse that has blighted my family for untold generations, and that now kills my dear sister.”
4
Taking a step back from him, I studied his face for signs of madness.
“Curse?”
“You heard me rightly, Randolph. Do not look at me so. My reason remains sound, though for how much longer, I cannot predict. Come with me into the library.”
We passed through the arch, and he closed its pocket doors, sealing us away from the rest of the house. A single window let in a pale greyness, for the days are short in October and the hour had grown late.
“It is unfortunate you did not arrive sooner, but we may still have enough time. I told you there was nothing that could be done medically, but there may be another way to save her.”
“Why did you not mention this curse in your letter?”
He looked at me with a bitter smile on the corners of his lips.
“Would you have come?”
I hesitated only for an instant.
“To help your sister? I would have come immediately.”
“I believe you,” he said, nodding so that the cloud of fine grey hair around his brow rippled like seaweed in an invisible current. “But I could not take that chance, old friend. I’ve grown cynical over the years, and my faith in men has often been disappointed.”
He went to a sideboard and used a Lucifer match to light the wick of a glass oil lamp. The greyness from the window was replaced by a wavering golden glow, and the acrid tang of sulphur mingled with the smell of tobacco smoke.
“Come to the reading table and seat yourself,” he told me.
Setting the lamp on the table, he went to a shelf behind me and drew down a leather-bound journal that was closed by means of a tied red ribbon. He tugged one end of the ribbon loose from its bow and opened the journal before me.
“This is our family record. My great-great-grandfather, Ezekiel Usher, began it, and various members of my family have added bits of lore to it over the generations.”
I leafed through the journal without enthusiasm. The antique writing was in several different hands. It would take hours to read through the record from beginning to end, even if I were able to decipher all its pages.
“Tell me about this family curse.”
His eyes widened with enthusiasm. There was a disturbing fanaticism in their depths. He shuffled the pages of the journal and pointed to a place near the beginning.
“The first mention of it occurs in this record, but I believe it to be as old as the house itself. Ezekiel wrote of a servant girl found drowned in the waters of the tarn. The explanation was that she had slipped off the bridge and hit her head on its edge, but my forbear never believed it. He writes here of various members of the household seeing movement in the water.”
“Movement?”
“As though something were sliding beneath the surface. You may have noticed that the water is as black as ink. Nothing can be seen within it beyond a depth of a few inches, but sometimes I myself have observed ripples and heard splashes.”
“Fish, perhaps? Frogs?”
“The water is poisonous. Nothing of the animal kind lives in it.”
“What has this to do with your family curse?”
He straightened up and paced to the other end of the reading table.
“I don’t know. Perhaps nothing.”
I gazed at the pages of the open journal in perplexity.
“How does this curse express itself?”
Usher sat abruptly in the chair at the opposite end of the table and leaned forward, staring into my eyes with disturbing intensity.
“It has been a peculiarity of my family line that it flourishes only in direct paternal descent, and only within the walls of this house.”
“I’m not quite sure I understand you, old fellow.”
He clenched his fist and brought it down on the table with a thud.
“The women of my family who marry and move away to live with their husbands are invariably childless. Either they are sterile, or the fruits of their wombs abort themselves.”
“Always?” I was unable to keep a sceptical tone from my voice.
He nodded.
“That is most strange, I agree,” I said at length. “Still, I hardly see how it affects the health of your sister.”
“There is more, Randolph. Those of my family line who remain within these walls suffer a strange wasting of their vitality and are afflicted with all manner of uncommon infirmities. In my own case, it takes the form of my preternatural sensitivity to harsh noises. Suffice it to say that the Ushers do not live into old age, but shrivel and die in their prime of life, as though the very life-force of their souls were being drained away.”
“You believe that Madeline’s complaint is the result of this hereditary wasting of vital force?”
“I do indeed,” he said with emphasis.
Spreading my hands in apology, I shook my head.
“If the Usher family line suffers from some form of hereditary wasting disease, I fail to see how I can be of any use to you, Roderick. I am not a physician.”
He ignored my attempt to placate him.
“As I said before, I do not believe my sister’s complaint to be medical.”
“Then what is it?” I asked bluntly.
He looked from side to side as though expecting to see something in the shadows, but what that might have been I could not imagine, as we were quite alone in the library. Leaning still further forward, he lowered his voice.
“I believe there is something in this house that feeds on the lives of my family. It has sapped my dearly beloved sister of her strength and largely of her sanity; and unless we stop it, I am convinced that it will soon deprive her of life, as it has so many of my ancestors.”
In the stillness my uneasy chuckle sounded ghoulish.
“Then the solution is simple enough. You and your sister must move out of this house and return to it no more.”
He closed his eyelids and sighed like a man whose heart is about to break from sorrow.
“Do you think I haven’t thought of that?
If only it were so easy.” He opened his eyes and studied me with a solemn gaze. “I cannot expect you to understand our situation. I am the last of my line. All the Ushers are dead other than my dear sister. Were we to leave the house, it would pass into other hands, and that is unthinkable. This has been the seat of the Ushers for more than two centuries. How can you comprehend, you whose ancestry means so little to you? For the Ushers, family is everything. This house is our world. We cannot and will not abandon it.”
His words made little sense. With the very life of his sister in the balance, what other considerations where there? Yet it was obvious from his sincerity that he believed what he told me, so I made no attempt to argue.
“Have you formed any conjecture as to the origin of this family curse?”
“Indeed I have. My forbearer Ezekiel mentions in the journal a family legend that old Uriah Usher, who sailed from Ireland to America in 1747 and built this house, erected it on the site of a circle of stones.”
“A stone circle? Do you mean a ritual circle erected by the natives of this land?”
“A stone circle, yes, but as to who erected it—” He paused as though hesitant to finish the thought. “It was a circle of large stones. Uriah surveyed the surrounding hills and concluded that it was the best location to build upon. The legend says that he incorporated the stones of the circle into the foundations of the house itself. As for the rest of the blocks, he quarried them from nearby to save the cost of transport, which would have been considerable.”
“Do you mean to say that the tarn is not a natural body of water, but a stone quarry?”
His eyes flashed with enthusiasm.
“So I believe, although it is not written anywhere in the journal or in any other family account.”
Usher’s ancestor was a practical man, I thought. When building of stone, the greatest cost is often that of transporting the stones from the quarry to the construction site. Yet to deliberately create such a dismal pool of poisonous black water at the very foundation of the house itself seemed folly.
Usher read my thoughts.
“We would drain the tarn were it possible to do so, but the terrain of the valley is against us. There is simply no lower-lying hollow into which to drain the water. My grandfather tried pumping it out with a stationary steam engine, but he could never lower the level by more than six or seven inches, and within a night it was back to its usual elevation, from which it never varies by more than an inch.”
“Where do you suppose the water comes from?”
“When the quarry was excavated, the workers must have tapped into some concealed spring. The mass of the water above pressing down upon it keeps more water from issuing from its vent, but when the water level drops, the spring replenishes the tarn. At any rate, that is my surmise.”
He fell into a brooding silence. I waited for him to speak at greater length, but he seemed lost in his interior ruminations.
“Is it your belief that this family curse is due to the desecration of the stone circle?”
“It must be,” he snapped. “What else could it be?”
“If you are correct, then I suggest you consult the local Indian tribe. It may be that their medicine man—”
His harsh bark of laughter cut off my words.
“Don’t you think I’ve tried? I spent the better part of last summer talking to Indians, and do you know what I learned? They’re dead, Randolph. The tribe that built that stone circle ceased to exist centuries ago, probably before the house was erected.”
The silence lengthened between us. I found myself unable to think of any words that might comfort him. That his mind was unbalanced by worry over Madeline’s condition, there could be no doubt.
“You know the studies of our university days?” he said.
It took a few moments reflection before I understood his meaning.
“Do you mean our occult experiments?”
“Precisely those. It may be that they will serve us best when at last we are confronted by the source of my family curse.”
“Is such a confrontation imminent?”
He looked at me across the table with dispassion, as though from some great eminence, and there was nothing of human emotion in his voice.
“I feel it must be. My sister and I are the last of our line, and when she dies I cannot imagine how I shall go on alone.”
“What is it you expect me to do?” I asked, ignoring the implication of his words.
“I want you to enquire about the curse in the dreamlands, which I understand you have the power to enter at will. Seek there for an antidote, or at least an anodyne.”
My expression caused him to fall silent. In a few words I told him of my inability to enter the dreamlands for the past several years, and my despair of ever regaining my former ability. Usher gave no outward sign, but I sensed the frustration within him.
“You must make the attempt. Everything I have—this house, its lands, my very life and that of my sister—depend on it. Tell me that you will try.”
To humour his mania, I assured him that I would attempt to inquire in the dreamworlds about his family curse.
5
My bedroom was spacious and well appointed, but it still retained an odour of dust and mildew when I entered it to sleep. Not enough time had passed since my unexpected arrival to air it properly.
By way of compensation, the staff of the house had done their best to make me welcome. One of the servants had lit a glass oil lamp similar to the one in the library and placed it on the stand beside the bed, which was a massive edifice of carved mahogany with four tall spiral posts as thick through their middles as the leg of an elephant. My trunk rested in a corner out of the way. I discovered by inspection that my clothing had been taken from it and put into the drawers in the cedar-lined armoire, or hung from the hangers on its rod. My change of shoes was set neatly beside the door.
It had been my intention to read some of the Usher family journal before sleep, and for this purpose I had carried it up the stairs from the library; but I soon found that the train journey from Boston and the ride in the delivery truck had left me so fatigued that my thoughts kept wandering. After ten minutes of effort, I closed the leather cover of the journal with a sigh of frustration and went to bed. The sheets and pillowcase had been changed and were newly laundered. For this small grace I gave silent thanks and turned down the wick of the lamp until the flame died within its glass shade.
The perversity of human nature is consistent and predictable. Now that I lay in bed, in total darkness, my fatigue lifted from my mind and the need for sleep abated. I found myself listening to the tiny sounds of the old house: the creak of a beam, the squeak of a mouse, the ticking of a beetle in the wall. Each small noise was like thunder in the silence. The clouds that all afternoon had blocked the rays of the sun at last unrolled from the darkened heavens and allowed silvery moonlight to paint itself across the foot of the bed quilt as I lay beneath it, staring upward at the dark ceiling, wide awake.
As a rule, my control over my ability to fall asleep is greater than that of the average person. Indeed, it might almost be called preternatural. This is a gift I was born with, and that I have honed through years of intense dream working. This night some inner governor refused to allow my awareness to relax into the arms of Morpheus. I even found myself holding my breath during long intervals of complete silence, when the only sound was my own heartbeat.
The crack of a twig came faintly to my ears from outside my window. For a time I continued to lie in bed, resolved to ignore it. Finally, curiosity got the better of me. I threw off the quilt and the sheet and went to the narrow mullioned window, which looked better suited to a Gothic church than a private dwelling. My room was on the second level, and the ceilings of the ground level were uncommonly high. This gave me an elevation from which to overlook the grounds.
My bedroom was located on the side of the house against which the main body of the tarn pressed. The black mirror of the
water reflected the starry sky, for the clouds of the afternoon had completely vanished. A moon nearing its fullness rode high above, painting the ragged grass of the lawn at the water’s edge, and the leaves of the shade trees beyond it, with a whiteness like frost. It was a convincing illusion, but the night was too mild for frost.
A figure moved with slow steps around the far edge of the tarn. It was a woman wrapped in a green cloak, her head bowed as she watched the path before her feet, which appeared to be naked. I recognised Usher’s sister, Madeline.
The elevation of the nearly full moon told me that the hour must be close to midnight. It occurred to me that Madeline might be walking in her sleep and might be in danger of tumbling into the tarn and drowning. Then she turned her head to look behind, and I saw that her eyes were wide open. Another more insidious possibility forced its way into my thoughts: that she might have come to the decision to end her own life before it was terminated against her will by her illness. If so, was it my place to intervene?
In the end, I did not descend to the lawn but continued to watch from my window. At times she seemed to look directly at me, as though she could see me standing in the darkened room, but this must have been impossible. I kept my face out of the moonlight that shone through the glass.
She continued along the edge of the tarn until she came to a stone that jutted up from the grass at a crooked angle. Here she stopped and seemed to caress the stone with her hand before turning to face the star-shot black pool. An owl sounded its night call from the trees, but she did not turn her head. All her attention was directed at the tarn. She seemed entranced, as though mesmerised, and had her eyes not been wide open I would have judged her to sleepwalk.
She raised her slender white arms in a gesture of invocation and began to speak, but in so low a voice that I could not distinguish any words. Only a faint murmur reached my straining ears. When she had done, she stood and waited.
The stars in the tarn rippled and parted, and the very water itself rose and moved toward her. For the first time the thought occurred to me that I was the dreamer, and that I lay asleep in the bed, only imagining that I stood at my window. But when I glanced back to the bed, I found it empty. My years of experience as a traveller through the dreamlands gave me assurance that I was wide awake, and even though I could no longer dream-walk at will, I trusted the old instincts.
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