The Tell-Tale House of Usher Read online

distance of decades, after the hardships and tragedies of those two extraordinary lives, that these events and others yet to be revealed were no mere dreams unless consciousness itself be an illusion.

  I must say some words about the formation and retention of these memories in my brain, as the confusion I found initially in retrieving them led me to seek a system by which they could be rendered more orderly, so that I might have some control and understanding of them. I must also add that this search, by alighting on a particular method of memorization, confirmed the hold architecture had already begun to take on my imaginative and sensual nature.

  At the age of thirteen I discovered an epiphanic Simonides of Keos and his system of architectural memory. He was a Greek poet who singularly survived the collapse of a banqueting hall in fifth-century Thessaly. When asked to give account of those who had perished in the disaster, he found to his amazement that he could remember every last man and where each was situated in the room and thus able to identify the mutilated bodies as they lay in place.

  Likewise, he discovered that by associating a thing he wished to remember with a visual image in his mind and placing that image in a defined space (architecture, in other words) he could easily recall it by metaphysically visiting this construction.

  Man bears the imprint of millennia on the pages of his memory. The mind’s compass guides him through the primal landscapes of his ancestors as he perambulates the modern city. It directs his memorial walks in and around the old homesteads far removed from his present estate.

  So strong is this instinct, that sometimes upon waking, with my eyes still shut, I must take several minutes to locate myself by mentally perusing the volumes of homes I’ve waked in through all my years. Once I have chosen the dwelling, then the room, I must still orient myself within them. To fixate a vibrant image in the retina and deliberately place it in a specific location makes use of this inherent genius of humankind for spatial memory.

  Franklin Place, once the omphalos of the world I shared with Usher, no longer exists as it was, usurped by commercial enterprise but I walk it still in my mind, each door unlocked to me, each home a repository of my memories. There have I built, entirely of my own design, sibling habitations that I may separately house Madeleine and Roderick and preserve the purity of their hearts long after the corruption of their flesh.

  I would eventually make use of Usher House, too, in this manner, for in it is cast every bad dream and evil thought that ever haunted me, so that it only grows in malevolence. And though I would later try to demolish and clear it from my interior spaces, ever does it stand, condemned but firm in my mind, as willfully as it stood in this world, greedily clutching and hoarding every terrifying sensation I know.

  I have reason to be grateful for some memories that I retain, but I can’t help sympathizing with Themistocles, who said of Simonides’ method, “I would rather a technique of forgetting, for I remember what I would rather not remember and cannot forget what I would rather forget.”

  I had constructed great palaces in the recesses of my mind for my friends to inhabit, and it must be said that visually they, brother and sister, were every bit as magnificent as those mnemonic abodes they are now imprisoned in.

  Madeleine had the air of an angel fallen on a cemetery tomb. Her skin left poetic hyperbole wanting – like translucent alabaster more than Parian marble, because the light from within sieved and her radiant soul leaked out, the rays bent at odd angles as through a diamond’s facets. The refraction was cause for gossip – unkind things said, jealousies harbored – among her sex.

  Beneath her skin was a visible lace of blue veins, through which coursed something truer and more thrilling than mere blood – an elixir sucked sweetly through her body by the beating of her heart. Her pupils were black as her hair, black as the raven and very small pouches of bruised skin underneath her eyes gave her a dissipated look that caused an animal reaction in men. But most important to her appeal to the opposite sex – she was beautiful, frail and utterly in need of saving.

  “I am weak in body but strong in mind; my brother is strong in body but weak in his mind. So you see we need each other; we seem to be two halves of a whole,” she confided to me once.

  It was true that Roderick was constitutionally so much stronger than Madeleine, his mind twisted with a high-spiritedness that turned easily to malice. They were both brilliant in their ways; Madeleine with the superior intellect and a feline command of men (from the grave she commands me still) and Roddy with a physical presence and suppleness of movement that won him admiration on the playing field. His stamina and lethargy were epic; he could go days without sleep and then fall into a hibernation so deep he would be lost for as many days again. He also had a distinct artistic sensitivity; he took up pen and paintbrush to good effect.

  Madeleine had been off in her fraction; she and Roderick formed each a third of a triumvirate completed by the family manse, Usher House, up in the hinterlands of Newbury, north of Boston. It had once been bordered by productive farmland, though the squires of Usher had never been farmers, but the tarn had been allowed to spread in the middle of the last century and by the time my friends and I had been born, all was a swampy wasteland, the genius loci being one of decay and terror. The house’s fabric was the same as any other building but it was animate. It was made of brick but the brick was mortared with malevolence. It was framed with wood whose fibers had sipped poison from stagnant pools. Iron held its doors and windows but the strap-work clung to them like smothering vines that bore fruits of corrosion and the dead weight of the manor’s stones mingled with the rotted corpses of Usher ancestors forming the foundation and the crypt one in the other.

  Of the house I will speak more later, for its place in my tales is foundational, actually and figuratively. Where it does not play a central role, it looms, where it takes an active part in the narrative, it dominates; it vanquishes and never loses. Roddy and Madeleine feared the house, yet returned to it as faithfully and determinedly as aquatic creatures that swim for thousands of miles, through time out of memory, to a specific beach to spawn and die. In the end that’s just what they did. In the end their fear was justified, for its claim on them was murderous and all that was left of the Ushers on this earth it would consume in a burnt offering unto Satan. I was there that night. I was singed by those flames. That house in life was desolate and in memoriam remains so. I was never again to know an emotion that desolation couldn’t hollow.

  Upon my return from New Orleans, the Ushers received me not in that heap of evil construction but in their town home in central Boston. Franklin Place presented a remarkable, if then unfashionable, collection of elegant, spare edifices built by Charles Bulfinch. As commerce it had been a too-slow success, impoverishing the artist but as architecture it was a triumph, an en suite of urban finery, calibrated to appease the puritan by rendering the Greco-Roman details so thinly as to make of them mere ciphers.

  The defining features of this acreage were the crescent of attached houses to the south and the tapered garden in the middle of Franklin Street. Inspired in form by the great crescent rows of England, the funding structure for the construction of Tontine Crescent, as such it came to be known, was conceived as a tontine association, which sells stock to select investors and then disperses as an annuity the original investment and profits to stockholders after a number of years. As death dwindles the partnership, the survivors’ stake increases. A scheme popular in Europe it was said as an enticement, neglecting the fact that the Inquisition had been a scheme once popular in Europe, too.

  I don’t wonder that such a system, whereby the partners profit upon the deaths of their fellows, should be slow to subscribe shareholders, as it would seem to be an invitation to skullduggery and premature mortality. As stated, pecuniary interest in the project lagged, eventually leading to ruin for Mr. Bulfinch.

  The crescent was fronted on the north side opposite by four double houses (the central-most being the Usher dwel
ling) with little bits of gardens at their entrances. At its south-east end three Bulfinch buildings clustered around the corner of Franklin and Federal Streets, two of which, the Boston Theatre and Holy Cross Church, must be admired as jewels of innovation when one considers that theatrical performances were banned in Boston until 1793 (the very year of the theatre’s opening) and that the Roman Catholic mass, itself merely a higher degree of theatrical performance, was regarded as heresy by the local theocracy.

  The third Bulfinch design, innocuously known as Federal Street Church, was one of the first in America of the revived Gothic still sweeping the fashion in Britain at that time. Behind that ecclesiastical mask of arches, (Ogee and Lancet,) agents of corruption plotted and set to motion such evil scenes as even the gargoyles of the old world hadn’t witnessed. Some readers will remember the taint of scandal that brought down The Reverend Horsham but do so with only vague knowledge of the case and no grasp of details. These were deliberate omissions in the public record, the true nature of his crimes and depravity were so confounding as to perplex and mystify those officials charged with the case, who