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I. 1962
From the smell of rot coming from her mother's body, young Madeline is sure she is dead.
It’s been almost two full days since Madeline and Roderick have last been in their mother’s room. After trying everything and finding no other solution, no help from anyone, God or man, the twins retreated to their shared room and spent the hours lying in bed. Not even Madeline, with her cleverness, can think of a solution other than to call a doctor. But Roderick doesn’t want his mother's wrath, who in turn doesn’t want God's wrath, and Madeline doesn’t want to see Roderick cry again for having to stay locked in that suffocating room, taking care of the woman and listening to her feverish ramblings, so she suggests that they stay together, leave her alone and wait for the next ring of her bell.
And when two full days pass without their mother’s bell ringing, Madeline already knows. Perhaps Roderick knows too but doesn’t dare comment on it; it's Madeline who says; We'd better check on Mom.
Already at the door of the room they smell feces, gases, and disease. When they come across their mother's pale body, they obviously do what needs to be done: there's no other way. They build a coffin out of wood and nails and bury her in their backyard.
There is no way for them to know, of course. There isn’t. In that moment between the life and death of the woman, between that death and the rest of their life, Death herself lands, for the first time, her curious gaze upon the Usher siblings.
Death sees them burying the woman alive, in the irony of not knowing that her heart is still beating, and finds the scene of the deepest grace. Those children, with nothing but pain and fear, burying that pain and that fear underground, not stopping to be certain of anything, building a coffin and digging with their own bare hands. Their own bare hands. And there, in that place, a kind of resurrection.
That night, before going to sleep, and before the shock of finding their mother still alive roaming around the house like a specter, Madeline and her brother take comfort in each other's presence, quietly. The girl thinks less of her mother's death and more of her father's, and imagines with obscene delight what the best way would be for such a man to die. If she had to, she herself would make it happen. Madeline wouldn't care about God's wrath.
Of course, she ends up not having to do anything. When the storm hits, Death, who doesn't like loose ends, walks through the rain to witness the end of Eliza Usher and William Longfellow. She takes them with her, and before leaving, she looks back at the little Usher siblings and comes to love them.
II. 1980
It's funny to think of the things we do after an event that changes our lives forever. In the future, both siblings would remember going to the bar that night, even though the details would become a bit foggy. However, neither of them would remember much of anything of the days that followed: they pass like blurry, moving shadows until the resume of Fortunato's activities on the 4th. After New Year's Eve, Madeline and Roderick come home and blackout. Or rather, Roddy blacks out. Madeline can't bring herself to sleep.
Roderick's empty house. The brothers would live there together for a few days, until Roderick's name appears as a nomination for CEO. They do this out of an unspoken sentimentality, or out of a natural need to be together at that fragile moment. Knowing her brother, Madeline knows that he would go mad in that house, all alone, and she herself finds in Roderick's company a certain comfort, most of the time, though she would never admit it.
So the two of them go together to Roderick's empty house. Just as they did when they went to the company’s New Year’s Eve party, when they took Griswold to the basement, when they slipped rabbit-hearted into the streets, when they shared a drink in a bar with a stranger of strange eyes and wide smiles. Together as they came into the world, and together as they will leave it.
The absence of Annabel Lee and the children, which in these days of wait disturbs Roderick like a man tormented by ghosts, pleases Madeline immensely. It seems more natural for that apartment to house only the both of them, as things were before. Of course, this also brings, at times, a suffocating atmosphere of paranoia; Roderick always the more nervous of the two, Madeline going beyond her limits of patience to calm him down, to help him rationalize things. At that moment she thinks she doesn't even have enough rationalization for herself, let alone for both, so much so that on the second day she sends Roderick to hunt for something to do outside the house and leave her alone for a while. She cools her head better when she is alone, while Roderick feels well in crowds, serving as a clown for some joke, dancing with some woman.
The two never speak about the deal again, smart enough to see it as something better left behind. There is even a kind of embarrassment between the twins, when the subject seems to hover over them, so in the synchrony that only they have, they silently agree to forget. By the third and last day of wait, Roderick may have even attributed the strangeness of that night to the effects of alcohol. Together they fry their heads over the plan, over the future, over the corpse in the basement.
Alone, however, Madeline sits in the dining room, watching the water droplets from the sink fall, and tries to focus her thoughts, but they always end up going to the woman at the bar, whose name has already escaped her memory, was it something starting with V…?
She thinks about the woman. And though she doesn't remember many details, she decides she believes in the woman more than anyone she's ever met in her entire life, and the more her eyelids weight with sleep and loneliness, the more she does.
She thinks about the deal. But what deal, again? She begins to be certain that she imagined, or dreamed, half of that conversation. She has been having weird dreams lately.
She thinks about the kiss, but what kiss? She barely remembers how it was. She thinks about the fear she felt, the fear Roderick felt, but it seems so foolish now, for some reason. She thinks about the drink, about the taste of it, but all that remains is the feeling of the cold glass on her lips. She thinks about what was said, and it was things about fortunes, about generations, about promises...
She thinks about pleasure, but...
She thinks about the pleasure she felt in accepting the deal and knowing she deserved it. And knowing that she had the power to make it all happen for them, for her and Roddy, with just her words. She remembers the feeling that descended upon her, from head to toe, like vertigo, when at that moment she was a little taller than everyone else in the world; when all that power was offered to her and her brother and no one else; when she felt like she could live forever.
She remembers the pleasure. She remembers the woman, who is all of this, really: the woman who is the bar, the drink, the kiss, the deal, she who is everything that was said and more; who is all that has not been said, that will never be said and that cannot even be put into words. She who is fear, who is pleasure. Who is none of these things. Who is absence, and the second before absence.
Verna, she remembers, and says it once out loud. The sound of her own voice startles her, in the silence of the house, and Madeline wakes up from her trance, thinks she'd better try to sleep. It's late and Roderick is somewhere out there drinking or fucking while she's sitting in the dining room chair watching the drops of water in the sink.
Death remembers Madeline too, but this is obvious, since Death remembers all living things as they, by only being alive, already belong to her in a way. She watches curiously the days that pass after the deal, smells the anxiety and restlessness, yes, but also the pride and the adrenaline and the pleasure of locking a man behind a wall to die slowly, to take his power for themselves. Death doesn’t neglect any work, but finds herself wishing she could linger a little longer with the Usher twins.
As much as she likes to desire (her favorite part of humans), she's also endlessly patient and knows she won't have to wait long to smell the Ushers on a corpse again.
Death adores Roderick. She adores him, for his flesh is so tender, his mind so fragile, but he wears these murderer’s gloves so well anyway, sits so comfortably on his throne anyway, and once he notices it he can't stop, and these kinds of people are always the most delicious for her to take at the end of their story. A slow becoming. There is an immense satisfaction in uprooting these rotting black trees and burying them under the earth, the same earth on which they once stood. And Roderick Usher, who will be a great black, parasitic tree, risen over — how many? Thousands, millions of deaths — will come to a most satisfying end. Exactly what he asked for, even if he fails to understand it.
Madeline, who Death also adores, is different. Her flesh is hard, her mind pure concrete, and she possesses a stomach in the place of her heart, hungry and insatiable. So when the end of her story comes, Death will embrace her like a little piece of her own body that has torn itself loose, roomed through the world, and is finally coming home, for she herself is the hungriest and most insatiable thing in the universe.
The little piece doesn't want to come back: it wants to stroll alone forever, but that's not how things work. And Death, if she were human, would find the struggle that Madeline puts up against her rather romantic, because that devastating determination to live forever is so passionate, and that fear she has of dying is so flattering, and Death would love to see her win, really, for being hungry is different from being possessive. But you can't win or lose a game that doesn't exist in the first place, and in the end she will rest six feet underground alongside her brother.
She will die as angry as she was in the beginning, burying her half-living half-dead mother in the backyard. Not satisfied, but as alive as one can be, the flame always, always burning within her. The closest thing to eternal life. Isn't that better than dying with the flame already out? And it's beautiful, and Death couldn’t love a creature any more than that.
When she tries to sleep, alone still, Madeline is unable to.
She gets up from the couch and fetches a glass of water. Walking through the house, her mind goes to the man behind the brick wall and wonders if he could already be called a corpse, if death had already taken him. She wonders if she would have to wait much longer to get what she wanted. She wouldn't mind waiting a little more, for she's as patient as a mortal can be; but the stomach in her chest throbs, throbs, throbs.
She lies down on the couch again and her mind wanders to...
The woman at the bar, with black hair. With curious eyes. She smelled like wet earth. What a strange detail to remember days later, but that's what Madeline remembers most, at that moment, isn't it strange?
There's something else in her memory that smells like wet earth, but Madeline can't quite put her finger on it.
Then she thinks about the couch where she is lying and imagines the most comfortable bed her future fortune could buy.
And then she doesn't think about much else, and smells wet earth, and brandy.
She tosses and turns in the sheets, tries this or that position, folds and unfolds the pillow.
Without thinking too much about the gesture, she brings her hand to her crotch as she has done many times before going to sleep. She takes in the half-empty sensation of the movement of her hand and the crescent burning between her legs, her mind neither here nor there. She begins to lose the woman's face, which becomes more and more blurry with each passing second, and wishes to forget the frustration of forgetting. Wishes to remember the victory. She thinks of victory with her two fingers.
Death, who can't participate, even if she would like to, just sits at the foot of the sofa and observes the scene, already imagining what Madeline's face will look like in the future when her time comes, even if she doesn't have to imagine it, even if she already knows. Isn't it sad sometimes to already know things?, you might wonder. Not ever being surprised?
Even now it's possible to sniff out the trail of bodies that Madeline will leave behind her, and oh how she wears death between her fingers so well, so confidently even now being so young and inexperienced. Death herself feels a little timid, or something equivalent; perhaps the equivalent of timidness to death is an orgasm.
Madeline climaxes thinking of a feeling she doesn't know, that she doesn't understand what it is or where it comes from; the ecstasy so brief of twisting and breaking Death’s neck. Which is curious, since she hasn't done that yet. And with that, finally falls asleep.
Death can't help but have favorites, and so we mustn’t judge her when she plants a kiss on each of Madeline's eyelids to try to guarantee her at least a peaceful sleep. It turns out not to be that peaceful, but it is beautiful. She dreams of a boat trip over a vast, silent black sea.
The day before he is appointed CEO, Roderick taps his fingers rhythmically at the dinner table while Madeline prepares dinner for the two of them. It's nothing spectacular, but it's something their mom used to make, and she thinks it could help comfort Roderick a bit.
After their mother died, they lived together for a few more years until Roderick got married, and Madeline ended up getting a job stable enough to live on her own — at that time, no matter how equally they shared the household chores, Madeline almost always ended up cooking, which she hated, and always made it clear that she hated it, but did it anyway. Perhaps there is something to be said here, deep roots of old gender dynamics. For every dinner she prepared, she swore a new oath to never end up like her mother, wearing herself out with two jobs, as mother and employee, in the shadows of a cruel and powerful man, slowly falling ill, a weak victim. Madeline always feels the bitterness of these dynamics on the back of her tongue, she always has, since she was a child.
But her head is so overloaded with boredom and wait these days that she barely notices the taste. On that occasion, Madeline even feels satisfaction in cooking a dish that her mother used to make, for a change, knowing that soon, if all went well, she might never have to cook for herself again.
Roderick pokes at his food. If it's bad, just admit it, says Madeline, and Roddy says no, it's fine, he's just not hungry. Madeline isn't too hungry either, but she takes a bite or two before suggesting that the two of them go over the plan again. The plan that has been gone over countless times, that they already know by heart. But it's reassuring to recall. At least that's what Madeline thinks: always so thorough.
I think we've prepared enough, and I don't think anything is going to happen, I think it's fine, says her brother.
So why are you so restless, Madeline asks, and he says he doesn't know exactly why, that he's scared, that's all. Like the day they buried their mother, his sister thinks, and understands, but doesn't speak it.
They go over the plan anyway, and it's perfect, and everything up to that point has been perfect, and Madeline forgets her fear, again feels the intoxicating vertigo of being on top of the world, looking down on the edge, waiting.
And she smiles. Like a teenager eagerly awaiting a date. Roderick smiles too, but it's a shaky smile, so his sister, knowing him well, fetches a cheap whiskey from the kitchen drawer and pours two fingers for each of them. As they toast, Madeline thinks about Death toasting to their future, feels a shiver run down her spine. Roderick remembers nothing but the body behind the wall in Fortunato's basement.
Only when activities resume in Fortunato is Roderick able to relax. He's nominated for CEO right away, of course, and things fall into place from there, and they love to think that it was all thanks to them when it wasn't, actually, not everything.
And they forget, over time, about the deal, as one forgets that one day they are going to die, so they can bear the weight of living. But that sensation they felt on the New Year’s Eve of 1980 never went away, for neither of them. Vertigo. That is, at least until the splash to the ground.
III. 2023
Towards her final years, Madeline thinks herself so, so close to having the eternal life she has dreamed of. It's almost impressive how little she's wavered in her goal after so many years: impassive as ever. Resilient. Her nephews and nieces so much like her in eagerness and insistence, but not as strong as her. Madness has courted them so easily, and it will be slow for their aunt, it will need a little more time.
But it doesn't matter how long it takes. Masks, compasses, cages, mirrors. Eternal life. None of that really matters.
No matter how hard she tried to be a god, Madeline could never get rid of her human flesh, of her beating heart: what is the point of the search for the eternal life of the soul, if the flesh is the only thing that’s true? If all that exists is your human body, grown with your brother’s, built by the same nutrients, born from the same womb?
Before he died, Roderick is finally able to contemplate the magnitude of what he had done. Or, at least, that's what Death thinks. Of course, it's too much for someone with an Usher's money to fully comprehend anyone's suffering: it is necessary to show the countless bodies piling up one over the other, a visual aid, the materialization of the consequences of all that fortune.
As much as the sight terrifies him, as much as Roderick watched his children die in violent ways, as much as the ghosts of his mind drove him insane, it's hard to say, still, whether he regrets it or not. Perhaps, if given the chance, he would have done it all over again.
No matter. There is no lesson to be learned here: there is no vengeance or moral punishment. These are only the consequences of an agreement, there, perfectly exposed so that there are no doubts or loose ends. Death does love a tight ending.
Madeline, on the other hand, well, she dies without much remorse, without fully connecting the deaths to her actions, since she has always assumed that there is an impenetrable barrier between her and the rest of the world. So there was no attempt to expose any bodies, nothing as theatrical as it was for Roderick, no, nothing like that.
Instead, death takes her back to the house where she first laid eyes on the Usher siblings, and when Madeline walks through the door, she smells her mother's half-rotten body, rain-soaked earth, and brandy. Death thinks about the impenetrable barrier, and if Madeline could have, perhaps one day, regretted having built it, wished things were different. She thinks of Madeline's twin brother and tries to search somewhere for a reality where she has truly let him in, and another where she has said she loves him without any pretense, and another where she has managed to kill him and realized how a part of her was gone forever.
Empires falling, impenetrable barriers. Roderick, who in another life would have been a poet. Death manages to draw, from Madeline, a single tear.
In his last moments, Roderick exchanges stories with the detective in ways that Death finds adorable, because it is so similar to her own inclination to ramble on. Maybe Roderick is also a little piece of her torn loose. Maybe. But she already knows the whole story, so she doesn't pay much attention, and instead counts the hours on her fingers until Madeline shows up, so that Death can finally collect her payment.
It's a small relief to see Madeline die screaming, clinging furiously to her brother. It's still possible to hurt her heart; she is still capable of feeling anger for being betrayed by the only mortal she has ever trusted in her entire life.
But Death does agree with Roderick; sapphires are perfect for her. Her Cleopatra.
The house comes crashing down upon them, and that is that. No loose ends.