Full Body Chills - POE: The Fall of The House of Usher (2021)

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

"The Fall of The House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe. Adapted by Jake Weber. 2021.Intro read by Margo Seibert.Poe is an audiochuck production.Instagram: @audiochuckTwitter:  @audiochuckFacebook: /audiochuckllc

Poe is a 2021 audio chuck original made for our friends at SiriusXM. We hope you enjoy this exclusive content re-released for free on Full Body Chills. And for the best experience, we kindly recommend you listen with headphones. A house divided cannot stand, but a house alone is doomed to fall. Stare in through these empty windows. These lifeless eyes shine no more. Walk along these barren halls. Silence calls to shut the door.

This house is dying, sealed away, fading, buried, where it will stay. Look upon its gravestone and you will see the crack that spells their eulogy. In this story, the bonds that link a family name tie the noose around their fame and set in motion the fall of the House of Usher. The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe, adapted by Jake Weber, 2021. It was a dreary day in October when I drove out to Usher's property outside Richmond. The mansion was once one of those grand Virginia estates, but now it was neglected and dilapidated.

As I came up the long driveway, a wave of melancholy washed over me. It was as if the house had the blues and anyone who came here was going to get the blues as well. Not only was the house run down, the land had also been neglected. Overgrown hedges, patches of grass where there once were lush lawns. Where there had once been vitality and verdancy, there were now sagging trees and a dried up lake. It was dispiriting. More than dispiriting, it was depressing.

But there was no getting out of it. I had told Usher I would stay the week and I had to keep my word, however miserable the place. His full name was Roderick Usher, but everyone called him by his surname. I hadn't seen him for years, so it was a surprise when he contacted me out of the blue. He said he hadn't been well and he was having medical and emotional issues, and would I come for a visit to cheer him up? I was his best and only friend, he said. He was speaking from the heart and I was touched,

but it was weird for him to reach out after so long and to spill his guts like that. We were friends as kids, but it was weird for him to reach out after so long and to spill his guts like that. We were friends as kids, but he was always reserved, a shy boy to my tomboy. His family was rich and gave to charity, one of those grand Virginia families that go all the way back to the Revolutionary War, but there were only two of the Usher clan left. Some of these southern families are sprawling dynasties, but the Ushers stayed close to the family plot, and Rodrik and his sister were the last of them. The house was covered in fungi and in bad need of repair.

The stonework was crumbling, the woodwork riddled with termites, and there was a crack that zigzagged across the house and ran along a courtyard that led to stables and then disappeared into a murky lake. I rang the bell and an ancient woman in an apron answered, who was either mute or did not speak English, and led me through the house to Usher. It was strange being back after so long. The interior had not changed, but I had. And the memory of those childhood days, of running through this massive house that once

was bright and cheery and now seemed lifeless made me sad. I was surprised to be moved, but you never know when or how emotion sneaks up on you. In the wide hallway, we passed a middle-aged man who carried an old-fashioned doctor's bag and who wouldn't make eye contact. He didn't look to me like your friendly family physician. He looked shifty and untrustworthy, but I can be judgmental, so I've been told. I did not like the look of him one bit. judgmental, so I've been told. I did not like the look of him one bit. We arrived in a voluminous, loft-like space which was neither airy nor bright. Someone had forgot to incorporate a crucial architectural element. Let's see, what's missing from this room? I know, windows. There were a few, but they were placed so high you couldn't see out of them, like

a chapel. The furniture was as run down as the house, well-made antique pieces that had been neglected, tattered sofas and chairs on wobbly joints. This must be Usher's studio because it was cluttered with instruments. He had always been musically inclined. It ran in the family. And lots of books. Books scattered all over the place.

It was lived in, stuffy and messy. I wanted to open a window, but good luck with that. You would need the fire department to get to one of those. I didn't even see him. He was sleeping on the couch and covered in a blanket. The blanket moved and there he was. He jumped up and gave me a hug. He said how happy he was to see me and thank you for coming, you look great, haven't

changed a bit, the usual stuff, but it was almost manic in its intensity. Was he for real? I mean, we had barely seen each other since we were kids, and he was acting like we were best friends. But he meant it. His warmth was genuine and kind of overwhelming. It was intense. He was intense.

And then all at once, the wind just went out of his sails. He sat on the sofa and went silent. This was a man in anguish, a man in pain. That sort of manic behavior is usually associated with bipolar depression. You are up one second and then down the next. Giant mood swings. And he had changed physically. He was a beautiful man with delicate features. He had always been thin, but now he was emaciated, and his complexion was wan and pallid. His thin lips were still well carved beneath an aquiline nose, but he was not quite square jawed.

There had always been something androgynous about his appearance. And that hair. He had fine, silky hair, but it wouldn't lay flat. It rose in a halo about his head like the tall guy from Simon and Garfunkel. Now it was unkempt and wild, less Garfunkel and more Beethoven. The light behind his eyes had changed, but they were still shockingly bright in the color of Caribbean water. A memorable face, an otherworldly face.

He was nervous now, agitated. He had gone from sociable to sullen, his voice from tremulous with excitement to slurred and guttural, like a drunk. I wondered if he was on something. What had that creepy doctor just given him? He said again about how happy he was to see me and how my visit would be just what the doctor ordered, and he spoke about what ailed him. It was a family condition he said, passed from generation to generation. A nervous condition, a genetic defect.

His senses were so heightened, he could only take the blandest food and tolerate only the softest fabrics. His sense of smell was so acute, he said he couldn't be around perfume. And this room was dark because his eyes had become painfully sensitive to light. Screens were impossible. The blue light cut through him like a knife. He didn't like the piano anymore, only stringed instruments. Acoustic guitar, mandolin, anything with a drum beat went right through him.

He said he was paralyzed with fear, agoraphobic and paranoid. Everything frightens me, especially the house, he said. I'm going mad, and it is killing me. I am literally scared to death. He was projecting some malevolent intent onto the house. It had become his enemy. It was out to destroy him, he said. There were places he didn't dare venture. He only felt safe here in his studio.

It was the only place on the property that did not bring on a panic attack. The man was a red-hot mess. I didn't know where to start with him. I asked if he were alone here. Was there anyone else apart from the woman who showed me in who could help?" Madeline helps, he said. Madeline is here with you, I asked. We're the last of the Ushers, the last of Mohicans. If she dies, it will just be me, and I can't be left alone here without her. Madeline was Usher's twin sister. They called

her Lady, and they had been inseparable as kids. I had heard she had a breakdown and was hospitalized some years back, and that she and Usher's parents died within hours of each other. Did she never marry? Apparently, neither siblings had any significant relationships outside the family. Certainly, ours was not significant. We used to play together as kids, but my life had moved on. But to Usher, it had meant something.

Or maybe he was just so desperately lonely he had sentimentalized our past, reconfigured it into something more than it was. The door opened and there was Madeline, unkempt and thin like her brother with the same haunted expression. I got up to greet her, but she turned away and drifted down the hall in a loose night dress, wild-haired like Mattophilia. Was everyone nuts in this house? Apparently so.

Usher explained that she wasn't in her right mind and so wouldn't have recognized me, and no one knew what to do for her. Medications hadn't helped and the doctors were at a loss. She was often cataleptic, which apparently can be a side effect of schizophrenia. It is a muscular condition where the limbs remain rigid in whatever position they have been placed. It was rare, he said, to see rigid in whatever position they have been placed. It was rare, he said, to see her moving about. She was wasting away.

She had stopped eating, and it was just a matter of time now. This family had all gone insane, and there was nothing anyone could do? It made no sense. Madeleine was clearly anorexic. She was starving herself to death. The following morning, Usher told me she was dead. She had died in her sleep. Talk about timing. He didn't bring her up again, and I certainly wasn't about to.

He slipped into a deep funk, and I did what I could to keep him engaged and lift his spirits, but it was a Sisyphean task. engage and lift his spirits, but it was a Sisyphean task. I gave him my attention as he improvised manically on the guitar, scatting in loud staccato bursts. We painted together, we played chess, we listened to music, but there was not much I could do to ease his pain. He liked a classical composer, Karl Maria von Weber, and in particular, a waltz called Invitation to the Dance. His paintings were terrifying, grotesque, nightmarish dreamscapes. There

is an image by an 18th century painter, Henry Fuseli, that depicts a woman in a flowing white nightgown, passed out and half draped off a chaise lounge. An ape-like gargoyle sits on her stomach and stares directly at us, mad-eyed. A donkey with bulbous cataracts grins at them. It is aptly named The Nightmare. That was the kind of stuff Usher was painting. Gruesome, haunting compositions. Another depicted an underground tunnel with low ceilings and no outlet, its smooth walls

painted white, the space daggered with rays of ghastly light. He read me a poem that he had written, and I quote from it. In green valleys watched over and blessed by angels and seraphs, a stately palace once stood. A sunshine of banners flowed from its rooftops in the sweetest of breezes. Travelers would glimpse a king, swathed in music. Silken dancers salute his wit, his wisdom. But evil came in robes of sorrow and breached the walls of this happy place. And the joy that lived within now rests in shallow graves. Travelers now see shadows and hear sounds of anguish and pain.

Dancing ghosts hurl themselves out the doors and fill the streets. They laugh without smiling at those they meet. A big bundle of joy, right? Usher had particular ideas about the sentience of inanimate objects such as his house and also vegetables. Vegetables apparently had souls. And he subscribed to chaos theory, which he explained relates to dynamic systems that operate in random states of disorder, but which are governed by a systematic feedback

loop that is intricately bound up in its origins. Your guess is as good as mine on that one. Usher believed the house was a living organism. The fungi that blanketed the exterior, the dried-up lake, the dead trees were all symptomatic of a dying ecosystem, of which the house was a part and which was infecting and destroying his physical and mental well-being. The dying house and dying Usher, also I suppose the dead Lady Madeleine, were one and the same.

He'd originally told me his condition was due to a genetic defect, but I wasn't about to argue the point. Usher finally brought up the subject of his dead sister, whose corpse, to my horror, was apparently still on the property. Usher did not want an autopsy. He believed because of the mystery surrounding her mental condition, doctors would insist on cracking open her skull and dissecting her brain, which he couldn't bear.

There was a catacomb in the cellar where the family were buried, and he wanted to intern her there. Her death had to be kept a secret, he said. He led me to her coffin, she had been placed in one, thank God. Usher had been a complete mess, leaving the sanctuary of his studio, and it was with no small effort we got the coffin down to the basement.

There, Usher dragged open a massive iron door that screeched in protest, and we walked into a pitch-black cellar, the air thick and oppressive and as cold as a meat locker. Deep inside, we placed mad lady Madeline to her eternal rest. Usher wanted one last look at his twin sister. He unfastened a series of latches on the coffin and swung it open. There she was, her limbs in what I assume to be rigor mortis, fastened a series of latches on the coffin and swung it open. There she was, her limbs in what I assumed to be rigor mortis, but I remembered. Usher had told me about that muscular condition that could lock her limbs in any position

they had been placed. Her eyes were closed, and her corpse wore a thin smile. She seemed to be grinning at us, like that donkey in the painting by Fuseli. In the oblique light, her cheeks looked almost rosy. Usher wanted a moment, and I gave them their privacy. After a spell, he bent in and kissed her on the lips and gently closed the lid, latching and securing the coffin, and we made our way out of the cellar and back to his studio. I wanted to leave. I was beginning to feel I was losing my own grip on reality. But Usher said he needed me now more than ever, and could I stay a few more

days? How could I say no? All the light had gone from his eyes. I felt terrible for him. Before he'd had moments, manic though they were, when his energy would pick up, when his voice would get that tremor of excitement and he'd babble in energetic bursts or pick up the guitar and pluck at it violently. But now he stared off into the middle distance or listened intently to imaginary sounds, eyes darting. There was a conversation he kept trying to start, something he needed to get off his chest, a confession he had to make, he said. But he would always stop himself

and look off again with that thousand-yard stare you see in soldiers returning from battle. I was starting to freak out. I wasn't sleeping well, and my nerves were frayed. Perhaps there was something about this house that infected the psyche. The stress here was intense. I didn't feel myself. But I couldn't just leave him here to die alone because that was the direction things were going.

He was the shell of a man. But how long was I expected to sit by his side? Was there really no one apart from the mute housekeeper? I asked about the doctor. Should we call him back? He said that he came at night now. Usher hadn't wanted him cutting into our time together. He wanted as much of me as he could get so

he'd arrange for him to come after I'd gone to bed. What is he giving you? I asked. A cocktail of supplements, he said, to keep up my strength. Does he inject them, I asked? Yes, said Usher, and he comes again in the morning. Can I see? I asked. And Usher rolled up a sleeve. There were track marks the length of his arm.

And the other? He rolled up his other sleeve, and sure enough, his other arm had them also. It isn't what you're thinking, he said. What am I thinking, he said. What am I thinking, I asked. That I'm a junkie. Whatever he was, it wasn't good. If he was an addict, he was not shooting up

with the frequency one would expect. We had been inseparable during the day, but who knows? He may have been shooting up or snorting in the bathroom. Junkies are sneaky. That night, it was raining heavily and I couldn't sleep. Through the lashing rain, I thought I heard someone moaning. Was Usher crying? I went downstairs and headed towards his studio when a voice called me back.

Usher was sitting in a chair I had just passed. This guy disappeared into furniture like a cat. Have you seen it? He asked. Seen what? I said. Come here and sit. There was a look in his eye I hadn't seen.

Something wicked behind it. I sat in his chair and he walked towards French doors that looked over a balcony. He threw them open and a gust of wind nearly knocked him over. He stood there with the rain pelting in on him. The clouds were low and ominous and a light show was dancing over the lake, something phantasmagoric. I got up and went to him. Come in, I said. You're gonna catch your death of a cold. Come on, Usher. What do you think it is? He asked.

It's something to do with the algae. Algae are gaseous, and the storm is turning it up." He shook his head. "'Those are the spirits,' he said. "'They are the evil spirits that encase this house, and this house encases us.' "'That's great. Otherwise I'd be as wet as you. Come on, let's get you warmed up,' I said." I closed the doors and wrapped my arm

around his shivering waist and led him back towards his studio. I'm going to reach you to get your mind off things. Do you need your injection? I asked. He shook his head and we made our way through the dark house as the storm battered the bizarre house of Usher. The book he chose was a fairy tale we knew as kids.

It's a story about a drunken knight in a forest who breaks into a hermit's lair to escape a tempestuous storm like the one raging outside. The knight's name is Ethelred, and he doesn't like the look of this little hermit, so he smashes his head in with a mace, which is this ball and chain operation attached to a handle that you club people to death with. It was particularly popular among bloodthirsty gladiators in the Roman Colosseum. So, Ethelred bashes in the brains of the hermit

with this mace and, since he's shit-faced, decides to bust up the hermit's home for good measure. Ethelred is not a good drunk. This is a quote from the story. He uplifted his mace outright and with flows made quickly room in the plankings of the door. This goon is smashing in the door. He so cracked at, ripped, and tore all as that the noise of the dry and hollow sounding

wood alarmed and reverberated throughout the forest. Translation? This goon is making a lot of noise. Here things got weird, as if they were not weird enough to begin with. As I was reading this passage out loud, I heard the sound I was describing come from inside the house. The rain was hammering down, but I am sure I heard something. This old house was constantly creaking in complaints, so it could have been anything. I asked Usher if he heard it. He nodded but shrugged it off and gestured for me to continue reading.

So I did. In the story, Ethelred beats down an interior door in the hermit's home, and lo and behold, there is a dragon behind it, hissing and flame-throwing in his general direction. This dragon's job, it would appear, is to stand guard over a hill of gold that sits on a bed of silver. On the wall behind the dragon is a sign that reads, Who entereth herein, a conqueror hath been,

Who slayeth the dragon, the shield he shall win. This is Ethelred's lucky day. All he has to do is kill this fire-breathing monster, and he gets to take home a fancy shield and all this gold. No problem. Ethelred and his mace whack the dragon upside the head, and the dragon collapses with an ear-piercing scream.

And just that moment, I heard an ear-piercing scream from somewhere in the house. There was no mistaking it. Usher heard it also. He pulled up his chair so it faced the door and began rocking back and forth, lips trembling, muttering something. His head was dropped on his chest, but his eyes were open. What's going on with you, Usher? I asked. What was that scream? Go on reading, he said. Did you hear that scream? I heard it finish the story, he ordered.

I went on reading and Usher went on muttering. What happens next in the story is Ethelred climbs over the corpse of the dragon and up the hill of gold to get the shield, but before he reaches it, it jumps off the wall and lands at his feet with a loud clatter. No sooner had the words passed my lips when a hollow, metallic clanging sound reverberated through the house. I rose to my feet but Usher stayed seated and continued his rocking motion. I knelt in front of him and took his shoulders in my hands.

His whole body shuddered, and a sickly smile creased his face. What's going on, I asked. Did you hear it? Yeah, I heard it, Usher. What's going on? I've been hearing it ever since we put her there," he said. Since we closed her coffin, I've been trying to tell you, but I didn't dare. I'm so scared, I'm so very scared.

What did you want to tell me, Usher? That she was alive. Who was alive? Madeline was alive when we put her in the tomb. I told you how acute my hearing is. I've been listening to her move inside the coffin, trying to get out. Edelred breaks open the hermit's door just as she breaks open the coffin. The dragon's dying screams are hers. The clanging of the shield is her throwing things over on her way up. She's coming to take me with her. She'll be here in a second, just a few more seconds and she'll be at the door."

There was terror in Usher's eyes as he stood to face the door, which blew open in a gust of wind. Madeleine of Usher had thrown open the windows and now stood in the doorway, wet from the rain and bloody from her struggle to free herself from the coffin. She trembled unsteady on her feet. Then she moaned and lurched into Usher's arms and they kissed and not in a brotherly sisterly way. They kissed like they meant it. Then they screamed in agony and Usher fell backwards with Madeline in his arms. They were both dead before they hit the ground. I ran then. I ran for my life. I threw my things together and rushed for the front door,

the house straining and creaking all around me. Louder now, louder than ever. louder now, louder than ever. As I got to my car, the ground began to tremble and a rumble emanated from the black waters of the lake. The crack that led from there and ran the length of the courtyard and zigzagged up the facade of the house opened into a fissure. The roof split and a blood red moon was visible through the gap.

I got in my car and drove as fast as I could from this dreadful place. In the rearview mirror I saw the mansion collapse into a hill of rubble, a stone mausoleum for the last of the ushers. Then, released by this seismic event, the lake rose from a hidden reservoir and flooded the property, swallowing up the rubble and leaving only fragments, fragments of what had once been the great house of Usher. Poe is an audio Chuck original. This episode was read to you by Ashley Flowers. So what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?