“Why would you try to leave the house, silly girl? The house is everything, and you are the key. I’ve spent my life keeping you safe. For the house.”
I would ask him what he means, but exhaustion is settling over me, and perhaps a fit that I’m no longer strong enough to fight off.
He asks something about bleeding, but I can’t answer him. He wavers before my eyes.
When I wake, I am hooked to the doctors’ machine. My arms are tied down with bandages made from ripped bedsheets. Red roses are embroidered among thorns. I can move my arms, but only a little.
The machine is pumping pumping pumping. The bellows puff air in and out. Something moves through miles of tubing, slow and sluggardly. It is my blood. I look down at my wrist. It is dripping; one drop after another falls into a wide pan below me, and then funnels into more tubing. It’s all made from sheep’s guts, I know, because I asked Dr. Winston once.
I dream that a rat is sitting on my chest, gnawing at the torn sheets that I’m tied with, but when I wake I am still bound. A crow watches me from the window. But I don’t remember this room ever having a window.
I drift in and out of consciousness. Dr. Winston is a shadow slumped in the corner. Does he know I’m awake? What are they doing to me? Is it the will of the house, or some other diabolical plan?
The pulsating sound of the machinery is a lullaby, but I don’t want to sleep. Rage overwhelms me. I want to be aware, to see, to understand. And still the pumping, the slow drip of my blood, lull me into some sort of trance.
104
MADELINE IS SEVENTEEN
Still in the doctors’ lair, I struggle, and manage to sit up. The bandages are gone and the machinery is quiet. How long have I been trapped here?
“You mustn’t try to leave again,” Dr. Peridue admonishes me.
“Is that why you confined me here?”
He laughs. “Child, we did no such thing.”
I gesture to the machine. It sits, a cold, metallic monstrosity at odds with the simple flowered wallpaper of this room. “I was tied down. You pumped out my blood,” I accuse.
His eyes caress the mechanism. “It’s a thing of beauty, isn’t it? I’ve been testing your blood since you were an infant.”
“To see what’s wrong with me?” I ask. Or to break my will so that I don’t try to escape again?
“To see how you are different. The Usher line is long and aristocratic. My own family has some Usher connections from long ago, distant relations, I believe. It draws us all, in the end. How could you ever want to abandon your heritage?”
This is the most the oldest doctor has ever spoken to me, and I wonder, seeing how frail he looks, if he is garrulous because he is dying, if he wants to impart something of his life to me, his last victim.
“So you were here for the house all along,” I say coldly. “Not for me, or my mother. Not to try to cure us.”
“It is all the same,” he says softly. “She shouldn’t have sent your brother away. That must be what put such mad ideas into your head. That, and your father’s foolishness. Leaving the house. We’ll see that you stay here. Dr. Winston is feeling much more himself. We’ve spoken to him at length and he’s been under pressure, but I’ve determined that he is stable. He will act as your keeper. And once a week, he will bring you back to this room.”
It is Dr. Peridue’s turn to gesture to the machine. He reaches up to caress a nozzle. Though the movement is gentle, the gesture is a threat. He is threatening me with his machine, which even the house cannot control.
105
MADELINE IS SEVENTEEN
“The other doctors have assigned me the task of keeping track of you; therefore I am your keeper, Madeline. You are mine.”
They assigned this to him months ago, when I fainted at the edge of the property. Still, they seem to have left me with him.
Did I ever think that he was young and vibrant and attractive? He has aged in the last months. His eyes are ancient, and vacant as the windows of this house, and he wants to be with me every second of the day.
“I’m going for a walk,” I tell him.
He stands to go with me.
“You don’t have to come,” I say.
But he moves to follow me.
“You can watch me from the windows,” I interrupt quickly, to stop him from telling me, once more, that he is my keeper. It is hateful, hearing it from him in his gloating voice. I must find a way to discover what happened to Emily. To get him to lose control again, in front of the other doctors. Not when we are alone. Never when we are alone.
“I always watch you from the windows,” he says. “Of course I do. I’m your keeper.”
Something falls from a shelf. A book of poetry that was a gift from Roderick. I can’t tell if the house is displeased with me, or with Dr. Winston. Lately, when I place my hand on the woodwork, the emotions that seep into me are confusing. Inconsistent. As if the house is going mad, and where does that leave me?
I walk slowly across the room to get my cape and my scarf. It is chilly outside. Dr. Winston can’t let anything go. “The old doctors want me with you every moment of the day. If you try to leave again, they will blame me.”
I wrap the cape tightly around my shoulders, more as protection against him than against any wind or chill in the air.
“Roderick will be coming home soon,” I tell him. We walk into the corridor. He puts his hand through my arm.
“Who is Roderick?” he asks.
I study him. He is walking carefully, as though trying to keep me from falling. But his odd question seems genuine enough. . . .
“Roderick,” I repeat, thinking he hasn’t heard me clearly. He raises his eyebrows askance. “My brother.”
“You have no brother. You are an only child.”
He’s toying with me, testing me. Trying to make me believe I’m mad, because only a mad girl would love him. He’s the one who is crazy, I tell myself. But this strange taunting bothers me.
I try to turn the corner, but he pulls back, stopping me.
“This is my house,” I tell him. “You have to let me go.”
Why am I arguing with him? Why should I have to?
A dismal throbbing begins behind my eyes. I miss silence. I can’t navigate my world with him constantly beside me, whispering lies.
“I need some fresh air.”
I walk away from him. The side door thumps closed behind me, and for a few moments, I am alone.
106
MADELINE IS SEVENTEEN
I wake up in the dead of night, and I am alone. No matter how hard I try, I can’t sense Roderick.
Dr. Winston’s words echo in my head. “Dr. Peridue told me you were an only child.”
He said it with such conviction.
I know he was trying to push me over the edge, that he’s constantly taunting me with madness, but knowing doesn’t keep my heart from beating faster and faster.
Is Roderick pushing me out of his mind?
Spots dance before my eyes, no matter if they are opened or closed.
The world wavers.
Dr. Winston has been drugging me.
107
MADELINE IS SEVENTEEN
I tell myself that I must have heard Dr. Winston wrong. Or that he was taunting me when he said he hurt Emily, like when he pretended that Roderick didn’t exist. It must all be lies, designed to confuse me. Dr. Winston was with me when she rode away. She and I had plans together. She wouldn’t have come back to meet with him. Would she?
When Dr. Peridue comes to my room to ask how I’m feeling, I begin to question Dr. Winston loudly, about Emily. If he loses control again, I want the other doctors near. I want them to see that they are wrong; he isn’t better. He might stab me again, or worse. Unfortunately, he is in control of himself today.
“Have you heard from Emily?”
Dr. Winston smiles. “As if the house would let you leave with her now, to live in the city. How foolish.”
I go comple
tely cold. How much does he really know? Every detail? How?
“She was your friend,” I insist. “Has she written to you? Contacted you?”
“No. She wasn’t a true friend, though, was she? She took a set of silver candlesticks when she left. Put them in her bag, all wrapped up with her brown dress, the one that made her look exactly like a governess. And she hated this house. Thought it was haunted. And creepy, and dirty. She didn’t see what we see.”
Dr. Peridue makes no comment of his own but holds out a cup. Something within bubbles and fizzes. I take it from him. The porcelain warms my hands. He nods to Dr. Winston and leaves the room.
I stare out the window, hoping Dr. Winston will go, either to consult with the other doctors, or to do whatever it is he does in the few moments of the day when he isn’t by my side. When he leaves, I will empty the contents of this mug into a vase or urn. But he sits and smiles, too patient. Far too patient.
108
MADELINE IS SEVENTEEN
Despite some successes at fighting off fits, I fell into a catatonic trance in the hall of portraits today. The portraits themselves, the formal paintings of unsmiling Ushers, don’t interest me much anymore, as they always stay the same, except when the servants move them. I’m more intrigued by the dark oil paintings, which sometimes show the future.
My feet scraped across the floor as I walked to the miniature of the house. I had avoided it since I saw Cassandra in it . . . but today I found the nerve to look.
In the forefront of the painting, there was a perfect red rose, untouched by rot or taint.
And in the back, as always, was the House of Usher. But this time the crack, the one that I had seen through the mist with Cassandra, was like a shadow snaking its way up the side of the house and marring the odd symmetry of the many different parts.
There is something here of importance, I told myself. And then I fell.
109
MADELINE IS SEVENTEEN
Tonight is moonless, and it is late. My dressing table is covered with candles of all sizes. I have collected them from throughout the house. Now I have light; my room is ablaze with it.
I take off my dress slowly. Being naked, for me, has always been for the doctors—part of their curiosity, and their cruelty. It has always meant chilly discomfort.
But my room is warm. And I am alone.
It has been months since Roderick left. Weeks in which my only human touch was to have my pulse taken, my temperature gauged, or my blood stolen away. Or Dr. Winston’s grasping hands.
I run my hand over my skin. It is amazingly soft, despite the scars. Scars from injuries I don’t recall.
Shadows move in the hallway. Someone is standing outside my locked door.
I button my dress quickly. Forgotten scars don’t matter as much as avoiding future ones. I turn back to my grandmother’s books. Wind pummels the house, howling in through the cracks and crevices. Cracks and crevices. The house is not invulnerable.
110
MADELINE IS SEVENTEEN
I am cursed. I’ve always known this, but never been quite so aware.
Dr. Winston insists that I lie in bed. I must speak to no one, not even the servants. I must not read. He tells the maids to remove any books they find in my room. For my own good. He forces me to drink the contents of the cups that he brings night after night, and sometimes in the middle of the day.
He claims I am too feeble to get out of bed, advises me to stare at the wall, to think of nothing. I think of ways to kill him.
When I destroy the house, he will be inside and he will die.
When I destroy the house.
This is a new and frightening thought.
Yes, the house is malignant . . . but destroying it?
Lisbeth never made plans on this scale, or if she did, did not record it in her journal. My mother did not think of it, though she at least loved one of her children enough to defy the house and send him away.
I know now that getting away is useless. My life has been spent learning about the house. Father tried to take me away, and I tried to walk away on my own. But now I realize I will never escape, as long as the house is standing. Fleeing takes precious energy. I must find a better way to use the little power I have.
I will bring down the house.
The question is . . . how will I do it?
I’ve put together things that none of the rest of them did, collected tidbits from Lisbeth’s journal, from the books in Grandmother’s room. From the library. I’ve watched the stories play out, night after night, whether I wanted to see them or not.
I pace back and forth across my room. They’ve taken all the books, even the ones I might use to hold my door in place. Instead I fold the rug.
Long ago, Roderick and I found a book, the one that said the house used to sit beside the sea. The author believed that there was a chalice, and that object was connected to the consciousness of the house.
But they were all wrong. The house was distracting them. Why would it give anyone a key to its destruction?
There are no magical objects in the house. There is the house itself, conscious and evil, the ineffective ghosts, and me.
And my oldest ancestor, buried in the dungeon. The great foundation stone is his tombstone, moved here from wherever the house was before. The entire house crouches around it, protecting it, so it must be important. The root of everything that the House of Usher is.
The house has forged me. Dr. Winston sees me as his victim, but he is wrong. I do not fear pain. I live through pain every day.
There is nothing that truly frightens me. Not anymore.
If the original Usher’s gravestone is destroyed, will the house be able to stand?
A great vicious crack is rending the House of Usher, slowly destroying it. It might take a hundred years. Perhaps fifty, with my tenacious vines speeding the destruction. Or I could bring the house down much, much faster.
If only I can find the proper tools.
111
MADELINE IS SEVENTEEN
The gardener’s shed sits behind the house, hidden by trees.
I heave the rotted door open and look inside. The shed holds rusted shears, a few spades, a long-handled shovel, and other rusting tools. In the corner I find a great mallet, a sledgehammer, with a head of steel. The wood handle is slimy, but the steel is bright.
It is too heavy for me to carry more than a short distance, and I have to devise some way of getting it into the house without the house realizing what I am doing.
I need pocket watches. Every pocket watch I’ve ever acquired over the years . . . and even then, will they be enough to distract the house from my intentions?
112
MADELINE IS SEVENTEEN
Carrying a brightly patterned picnic blanket, I walk outside. When did it become spring? I thought winter would go on forever, austere and unrelenting, but green shoots are bursting out of the earth. I wander into the dead forest. Five paces in, ten. At twenty paces, the air changes. The air here is lighter. Mushrooms peer out from between the exposed roots of the trees. Worms slither in and out of the dark earth.
A tombstone stands in what used to be a clearing; weeds and saplings have grown up over the years. I clear it with my hand. LISBETH USHER, BELOVED SISTER OF ANNABEL, it says. I feel myself swaying. She didn’t get away. She didn’t escape. It makes my own course of action clearer. The house won’t release any of us. Not while it stands.
Lisbeth Usher. She looked in the wrong places. She put her hope in the library. The secret is not there; I’ve looked. She put her faith in Charles Usher. My father. But I will not put my faith in anyone.
Dr. Winston finds me. I try to look surprised and a little upset, as if I wasn’t waiting for him.
I spread the picnic blanket quickly. His mad eyes pass over the bright, busy pattern and focus on my drab gray.
We are, both of us, trying to find something. He thinks we are searching for the same thing. For a moment, my surety wavers
. The house wouldn’t send him on a useless search . . . but then I remember Grandmother’s books, filled with hints about ancient artifacts. She’s the one who has sent him chasing through the rooms. The house doesn’t care.
“Madeline.” He takes a seat beside me in the grass, as if we are great friends. “Do you remember when I came to the house, and you were in the garden?”
I fake a smile for him, waiting for the question.
“You had an urn, Madeline. I said that I thought it was some sort of burial urn, and it glittered oddly. I have been thinking about it, and I suspect some sort of metal—gold, perhaps—was melted down and mixed with whatever pottery clay was used, before it was fired.”
He thinks the urn was recast from the lost Usher goblet. It’s a good enough guess and will occupy at least a little of his time.
“I remember,” I say. “It was useful for carrying water from the well, as the water from the spring is black.”
“Yes,” he says. So very impatient, always moving, agitated, as if he no longer feels comfortable in his own skin. “Yes. Where is it? In the gardener’s shed, perhaps?”
Fear washes over me. Not the gardener’s shed, which is my destination. Why would he think it was there?
“The servants took it,” I say in a soft voice, as if this is a secret. He leans close, eager to hear. “They said it was a relic of the house. They polished it and put it in one of the front rooms. I saw it there just recently.” Just enough detail to make him believe.
He squeezes my hand. “Are you feeling well? I need to go inside for just a few moments, but only if you feel well enough for me to leave you.”
“I feel well,” I reassure him.
It will take him hours to search through the front rooms. Still, it will be best if I hurry, just in case he returns.
I rush to the gardener’s shed. In my arms I carry the picnic blanket, brightly patterned and garish as ever. I have a pocket watch in each of my pockets. Wrapping the sledgehammer in fabric, I heave it into the house. Cook sees me and stops working to stare, so instead of taking it down the endless stairs to the vault, I stow it in an alcove. My arms tremble from the exertion. It is heavier than I expected. Heavy enough to smash stone, if I am strong enough to wield it.
The Fall Page 17
