The Fall of the House of Usher | Page 8

the decayed trees which
stood around-- above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this
arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn. Its
evidence--the evidence of the sentience--was to be seen, he said, (and I
here started as he spoke,) in the gradual yet certain condensation of an
atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls. The result was
discoverable, he added, in that silent, yet importunate and terrible
influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family,
and which made him what I now saw him--what he was. Such opinions
need no comment, and I will make none.
Our books--the books which, for years, had formed no small portion of
the mental existence of the invalid--were, as might be supposed, in
strict keeping with this character of phantasm. We pored together over
such works as the Ververt et Chartreuse of Gresset; the Belphegor of
Machiavelli; the Heaven and Hell of Swedenborg; the Subterranean
Voyage of Nicholas Klimm by Holberg; the Chiromancy of Robert
Flud, of Jean D'Indagine, and of De la Chambre; the Journey into the
Blue Distance of Tieck; and the City of the Sun by Campanella. One
favourite volume was a small octavo edition of the Directorium
Inquisitorum, by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne; and there were
passages in Pomponius Mela, about the old African Satyrs and
OEgipans, over which Usher would sit dreaming for hours. His chief
delight, however, was found in the perusal of an exceedingly rare and
curious book in quarto Gothic--the manual of a forgotten church--the
Vigiliae Mortuorum Secundum Chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae.

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 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