The Fall (6 page)
Authors: Bethany Griffin
I slide my hand into the pocket of his coat, and find a rabbit's foot. Does the doctor have bad luck? I replace it and slip my hand into the other pocket. This one is empty.
Mother laughs at something Dr. Paul has said, and I jump. My surprise makes me drop the jacket, and it hits the floor with a quiet thump.
I catch my breath. The thud was not from that rabbit's foot, but from something far heavier.
I crouch beside the doctor's bag and wait. When no one comes to investigate, I run my fingers over the lining of his jacket until I find an inside pocket.
A gold pocket watch. It is heavy in my hand, and I can feel the ticking. This is exactly what I need. There is also a small packet of pills. As an afterthought, I rip the seams of the pocket and take the pills as well. He will think that it all fell out somewhere. Maybe he'll search the house, but I am good at hiding things. He will never find it.
I hold the rabbit's foot for several moments. But it was in a different pocket, so taking it may raise his suspicions. Finally I put the mangled paw back into the coat. Dr. Paul is examining my mother. He will need all the luck he can muster.
From Mother's sitting room, I could go straight downstairs, through the kitchen and out a forgotten side door to reach my garden. Sometimes I stop to examine some oddity, to look into unused rooms. But always, the house compels me to keep moving. To explore, but not to stop and think about what I'm seeing. Perhaps it is trying to protect me from the spells that plague Mother whenever she thinks too hard. Today, instead of going to the garden, I find myself back in my bedroom.
I hold the watch in my hands. I know already that it has to be wound every day. There is an inscription inside the watch:
TO OUR BELOVED SON, WE ARE SO PROUD OF YOU
. I press my fingertip against the gold, wondering if I could scour the words away. Dr. Paul is never getting this back.
I put the packet of pills in the back of my desk; I'm not sure whose pain they were meant to ease.
W
aking is slow. I'm not surprised to see my own ceiling above me. This isn't the first time the servants have carried me, unconscious, to my room. Someone even removed my boots. At first I can only move my fingers and toes, but eventually the ability to move returns, and I'm able to rearrange the covers, pulling the blanket to my chin. Roderick is gone, but something nags at me, a faint memory. A need? Curiosity presses at me.
Cassandra thumps her tail on the floor, happy that I'm awake.
From the alcove beside the bed, I remove a tattered sheaf of papers. Lisbeth never dated her entries, and with the bindings gone, it is impossible to be sure which ones were written first. It makes the narrative difficult to piece together, when reading at all is a chore, especially so soon after a fit.
I should ring for some soup, something bracing. Instead, I rewind my pocket watch, set it beside my pillow, and begin to read.
19
F
ROM THE
D
IARY OF
L
ISBETH
U
SHER
T
he Usher curse. It falls upon the house's favorite. And his intended. Rarely, the house focuses its love upon a female child, but the girls, as mates, are often the most afflicted by the curse.
Years ago, Mother invited a preacher from a nearby village to sanctify the house while Mr. Usher was away. He was one of those ministers who stand on street corners and yell at people. A swaggering man, full of beliefs and bravado.
His face turned gray when he entered the house.
“There is something here,” he said, and his voice faded away. “You have invited evil into your midst!”
We watched him from the corners. He shuffled up and down the hallways, refused to spend the night beneath the Usher roof. Mother gave him a charitable donation, and he left.
H
ow I wish he could have done something. Mr. Usher is distracted. Less and less likely to read with me. Less likely to assure me that the curse can be broken.
He has promised, while he's away, to visit a doctor in the city and discuss my symptoms. To bring me medication. Perhaps one of the city doctors will even pay a visit.
I
wake and sit up in bed. Somewhere, in a narrow bed, in a stone building that I recognize from other visions as his school, Roderick stares out an arched window.
The curtains of my own larger window are in shreds. I'll have to ask one of the servants to sew new ones. Again. I go to it and peer through the ghostly green phosphorescence.
Roderick is lonely and afraid. Emotions I know well. Sometimes, when I am lonely, I like this connection between us, but more often it is terrible, being aware of his fears and my own. Together we have more fear than a person should be able to live with.
Repositioning the door to my chamber so that it can't swing all the way shut, I climb back into bed, careful not to step too close to the base of the bed; I have a horror, a half-forgotten memory from some long-ago Usher, of something grabbing my ankles from underneath. I know it's only a story, one of the dreamlike ones that float through the house like moths. But it was so real. . . .
I lie awake for a long time. The clock in the hallway strikes erratically, and shadows whisper their way through the halls.
When I do sleep, finally, I dream of places I have never been and people I have never met. In particular, I keep coming back to the image of a boy, but when I wake I cannot remember his face.
21
F
ROM THE
D
IARY OF
L
ISBETH
U
SHER
I
t was midday when we came to the House of Usher for the first time. Or, more accurately, it would have been midday anyplace else in the world. There, or here, as I should say, for I am writing this from inside the house, it is always near dark and gray.
We traveled from the city, with all of our trunks and boxes of belongings.
“This is going to be marvelous,” Mother assured us. “So much bigger than our old house. So stately. People will know.” She nodded. “They'll know that we are someone. It will make us important, staying in a house such as this.”
The months since Father died had been a great trial to Mother. She was treated poorly by Father's creditors.
“We will never have to fear anything again,” she said, rubbing her hands together. It seemed a greedy gesture, but since Father's death, our house in the city had been cold, and perhaps she was just trying to warm herself.
The house was bigger than I expected, even from Mother's rapt descriptions of its grandeur. The road curved, and I saw it for the first time. It was horrible.
I considered running away, even if I had to jump from the carriage, but Mother expects me to behave like a young lady. And so, even in the grip of terror I felt at my first glimpse of the House of Usher, I did not shame her.
She tried to maintain her optimism, but as we approached the house her face lost its rosy color, and her hand fluttered at the collar of her dress.
“The house appears to have fallen into some disrepair.” Her voice was little more than a whisper.
“It's looking at us,” my younger sister said. “I think it wants to eat us.” This might've been amusing; many of the things she says are.
But Mother fainted dead away, and nothing we could do would revive her.
I
t is time to leave the house and explore. Not my gardens, but the front of the house, the grand entrance. Lisbeth described it, but for the life of me, I cannot remember looking upon it. A coldness sweeps over me. Cassandra barks once, and then pads after me. Her presence calms me, though my hands are shaking.
“I am going outside.” The housekeeper makes a sign against evil as I walk past. She doesn't say anything. I wasn't expecting her to.
Lisbeth's description made me want to look upon the entrance. The house is waiting, as it so often does. I need to see what Lisbeth saw, to help make sense of her horror as she came to the House of Usher. The outside air is so cold that I can see my breath.
A walkway runs along the side of the house, around the tarn. Cassandra falls into step behind me.
I proceed to the front of the house and look up. It's a glance, really, and then I'm staring at my boots. I can't look directly at the front of the house. My head is driven down, as if someone is behind me, pushing me. I try to raise my eyes, but they burn and begin to water.
I have to piece the thing together in my head like a jigsaw puzzle. It is dark, a sort of gray color, faded stone. There is a great front door, and a causeway that has been built to replace the drawbridge. There are the windows, the roofs, each one taller than the last, a stone gargoyle.
My eyes are forced away.
Mother told me once that no matter how brave you think you are, how sure you are of your faith or your convictions or of the rules of science and nature, you can barely glance at the House of Usher. Your eyes won't let you take it in.
She was right. And when my weak eyes slide to the ground, they are assaulted by the stinking, rotting tarn, black and lurid. Some long-ago Usher tried to drain it. He drowned and is buried below the house, not in the vault with the rest of the Ushers, but in a sort of coffin that was sunk into the water. At least that's what someone wrote in a ledger in the library. I do not disbelieve it.
Did I ever think that the house was benevolent? That it was warm?
Its windows are like eyes. A sort of electricity buzzes in the air, moving across my skin. What does it want? Why have I been pushed to come here? Does it expect me to be frightened? Amazed? I am, but maybe not in the way that the house intends.
Looking up again, I see a face, achingly familiar, through an attic window. A ghost?
The stones are crumbling, though none have fallen. The house is so stark, so massive and unnatural against this landscape. Not so in the back. Over the years I've nurtured plants from the very stones, have used the crumbling stones and the many cracks and crevices to support vines. Perhaps it is time to start on the front of the house. I hum softly, a habit when I think thoughts that might anger the house.
Cassandra puts her nose into my hand and breaks my concentration. I find that I have moved forward. The toes of my boots are nearly touching the fetid water.
23
F
ROM THE
D
IARY OF
L
ISBETH
U
SHER
I
've come to believe that everything is a distraction. I realize that I must find answers, but then a fit comes upon me and I am unable to read. I find an interesting passage in the library, something that might relate to the curse or the history of the house, and my sister shows up, with two servants and a tea set. She says she wants to play at being grand ladies. I know she's bored here. Mother says she is too old for a governess, and yet she is still very young. Too old for games, not ready to decide what to do with her life.
The same things about the house that horrify me fascinate her. The ancient weapons that line the entranceway, the morbid oil paintings, the crypt.
Sometimes she cocks her head as if she is listening to voices or seeing something in the corners, beyond heavy dust that shimmers in the air.
Even Mr. Usher is a distraction, with his white smile, the slight half-formed dimple that makes him seem dashing, somehow. He's sworn to help me, but he loses focus, begins pacing and reading, tracing the family's lineage on great sheets of paper that cover the tables in all of the parlors.
What is it that I'm not supposed to find, and will I recognize it when I find it?
“Y
our husband is ill,” Dr. Peridue tells Mother.
I crouch outside her sitting room, listening.
“He hasn't opened his eyes for three days.” Dr. Peridue sounds angry, as if Father's illness is an affront to him.
“His trances can last for weeks.” Mother is calm.
“And his arm is broken.”
An audible intake of breath tells me that Mother is surprised.
“His arm is broken?”
“Was he doing something strenuous? Lifting something?” Dr. Paul asks.
“He was helping Madeline with her reading and writing,” Mother says. “It is difficult for her, but he has so much patience. For her.” Her voice drips bitterness. Over the last months, since Roderick left, Father has roused himself from his apathy. He has been spending a few hours with me in the evenings.
Dr. Paul's ledger creaks as he opens it, probably realizing he should be recording the conversation, particularly if Father
is
dying. Which I don't believe. The house won't let it happen.
“He wouldn't have broken his arm teaching her how to write,” he says.
Mother gives him a wry smile. She and I both know that the house was showing its displeasure. Because when we practice writing, he tells me secrets. He writes down the things that he cannot say, because of his illness. And if I try, sometimes I can read Father's messages.
I love that he pays attention to me, but I'm not sure I can believe the secrets he shares. He whispers that the house will harm me, but how could my house hurt me? It loves me like a parent . . . more, because it's always with me. It wouldn't hurt Father if he would listen to it.