feared a disturbance of civic order and Christian polity if the details had been disseminated. I will endeavour, for the first time, to lay bare the catastrophic chain of events that the citizens of Boston saw only the shadows of.
And it is toward these shadows of corruption I must skulk, for I have committed myself to the task of preserving, by way of these writings, the memory of Roderick and Madeleine Usher and yet the difficulty of the work, once engaged, rivals that of the tomb maker as he scribes and chisels a precise date and the name of his only child into the stone – finito!
Super-natural interventions have made and re-made me unfit for this world and the balm of commiseration is denied me, for once you have developed an intimacy with ghosts and demons, you have undone those ties that make for easy conviviality with mortals. While Roderick and Madeleine were alive, my life was filled with the chatter and clamor of other worlds and now that they are gone, there is only the quietude of that which we call “reality”.
I am the only living combatant in a war that has withdrawn from me. I have survived my wounds and now I battle the peace. It is this that gives me some recognition from the more damaged veterans of the recent Southern war, who invariably see something in me they mistake for shared experience in the fight to preserve the union. I did serve during the war here in Massachusetts inspecting fortifications and overseeing constructions necessary for the war effort – far from the battles that spilled the blood of too many promising young men.
One would think me fearless after all I have witnessed and survived but I am as wary of the dark as any child gripped by nursery room terrors. I am fear’s instrument; it plucks my flesh, fingers my organs, tuning them easily and frequently to the right pitch of terror.
If fear were nothing but this visceral agitation, merely a complex of symptoms, could we then call out the name of the offending organ and through an act of will quiet it? Still the fast-beating heart? Quench the scintillating nerves? Inflate the constricting lungs? Quell the sudden evacuation of the bowels?
What are the constituents of fear?
We wish to avoid at all costs the humiliation of being reduced to raw meat by the blade, the bullet, the fist, of being stricken from the rolls of matter by the worms and maggots of decay. Yet the very hours of the day are weapons and words make points of entry whose wounds ever presage fatality.
Isolation is the first aim of the torturer and I feel it acutely. How utterly alone we are in the dungeons and cells of our torment. It is this separation from humanity in general, but from Madeleine in particular that I feared and it came to pass. She knew my demons – literally had them over for tea on one occasion – but she is gone. Now the demons are invisibly mum and I resent this too, for they have names and the personalities that names confer but they are once again figments of imaginative memory and I am so far cast-out even they snub me.
It will not seem so strange, this abrupt severing of contact with the spirit world after the death of Madeleine and Roderick, when one realizes that passage from one world to another can be extremely difficult – is – extremely difficult. Entry and escape is won by a rare alignment of talent, timing, skill, will, keys and codes. Human souls may act as vehicles for this passage; generations of tormented Usher souls were trafficked that evil might be loosed upon the world.
It is no small part of demons’ fury that their existence is valued only insofar as they are useful to more powerful beings that set them on our world to savage mortal men. Yet to restrict them to such generalities won’t do. They are as variable as our own race of men and some yearn for liberty as slaves without a Mr. Lincoln to free them. To make the passage is a sign of surpassing effort on the part of a being in another world but for them to master the crossing, they have to exert themselves as much as we do in attempting something novel and they may not be entirely successful. Years of practice make a master, for beings in other worlds as much as for mortals here in our own.
Many spirits, of course, are the remnants of mortals that have been unable to fully leave this world and search only for a way out. I know not the fate of Madeleine’s and Roderick’s souls. Has she found peace at last? Or have her difficulties only worsened?
I have waited in vain for her communiqué. She has not summoned me but I can’t rid myself of the conviction that she needs me still.
What will greet me on the other side – a god of light and love or the beast of horns and cloven hooves? Greater excitements or just a yawning void?
As narrator of these events I may have already failed you, reader. I have set a doomed young woman on a bloody traipse through the snows only to lose sight of her. I have tantalized with the unnatural powers of two beautiful children, only to speed them to their deaths in a blaze of fire and brimstone. I have traced the lines of fine architectural perspectives, peopled them with otherworldly beings, only to have walked away from them beyond the vanishing point.
Again I falter and I find myself, in order to relieve the pressures these memories exert on me, drifting with some amusement to the adventures of Hatotep, Egyptian mummy and all around sporting fellow, who wore death as a very bad illness but not, ultimately, a fatal one.
The Tale of Hatotep
and in his own words, an accounting of his revenge.