The Tell-Tale
House of Usher
By
Wakefield Stowell
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2012 Wakefield Stowell
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Commencement
The very pages you hold in your hand, reader, are horrors of contamination. For words joined in unholy unions become incantations with the power to strike when spoken and though you may never utter them, you talk in your mind as you read them, in that voice you speak only to yourself and your God. Though no sound escapes your lips, your tongue murmurs in your mouth with the tentative motions of the young in utero, giving names to new evils. Say your prayers if you have them; I have said mine thus – Let these pages absorb all my sins and the sins of Usher as they absorb the ink from my pen and let the ink flow like blood from an opened vein until I am drained of all memory.
When anxieties rattle the windows of my soul, I make not for the medicine cabinet but for the palliatives of the library. An oft-opened book calms my mind with the familiar orders of grammar and the printer's set type. How like bricks the words are in their placement, their cantilever from left to right with such architectural precision, laid end to end in this mortar, this paper of rags gathered by indigents, washed clean of their dirt and poverty.
God spoke the Word, the seed of life. The clay by the hand of God made Man and the clay by the hand of Man makes the brick so that he may build monuments to God. Word for word, brick by brick, page upon page, these walls have been built and something evil, neither of God nor of Man, has been sealed inside.
There is a House in my mind in which my soul is imprisoned. I will not allow the House to see me alone to the grave in the chains forged in its fires. I will have you, reader, know every link of my tethers; I will have you finger them like a Papist his rosary. May your God protect you from the terrors I have known; I am beyond his aid and I call him not.
As the House stands in my mind, so too does a fire rage there. This fever of the brain has boiled my blood; perspiration has breached the pores of my skin, run o'er my brow and salted my eyes with the brine of torment. I long only for snow and its smothering hush, pure snow sucked from winter's banks, rubbed on my burning cheeks. I remember the snows of that particular season, when nature and my own heart still beat in the flush of innocence, just before the corruption to come……
ambiguous signs and marvelous acts
The blood seeped, in little places melting the fresh snow, which failed to cover the stains. The snow continued to fall, flakes of something so pure, perfect and remote, it vexed her to contemplate. The bloody dribs and drabs followed her footfalls as she crossed Boston Common. And though the moon was full and had all day outshone the sun before it set, she was neither menstruous nor wounded; the blood flowed toward her from the ground or, at least, from that direction. It had been a mere few hours earlier that night that suddenly the slightest touch of her fingers to an object or her soles to the ground drew from them fresh, warm blood, droplets that pooled no larger than a penny, when pennies were larger than now.
If science hasn’t yet permitted our transcendence of energy and matter, the black arts have – in this sense Madeleine was an artist; alchemical formulas and assays of objects imbued with spiritual meaning were her youthful obsessions. The Ushers had amassed a collection of relics after the dissolution of the Roman church in England and she would subject these bits of bone and wood and metal to intense study.
When I say that Madeleine led a cursed life, it is not said in a fit of theatrics but merely as a statement of fact, for she showed me the very document, inked with human blood, that had sealed her fate in vellum and wax. She knew evil as something familial – touching and painful as it squeezed into the interstices of her nerves. She knew melancholy, too, for communications from beyond this world are often sad and desperate, post-scripts to last appeals.
So the blood was not something she would fundamentally doubt the reality of, not something that would drive her mad – not yet. The world now bruised and bled easily at her touch and it panicked her, not for fear of demons but rather that it would ruin her linens. She would have cause enough later to be frightened by these first signs of torment in another world and the mortal danger it represented but for now she merely made note of this threat to her truce with normality.
The mistake people often make in their mis-understanding of a supernatural phenomenon, if they don’t dismiss it entirely, is that the spirit wants something specific from the object of its haunting, or that it even has an object to haunt – one might merely be in the way. Both Madeleine and Roderick insisted that much of the spiritual activity that swirled around them was indistinct and meaningless and that ghosts themselves are often confused and without focus. “Like Americans on the Grand Tour,” Roddy had said and so he called them tourists. “Oh, it’s just the tourists stuck in a pensione in the rain – such a bore,” is the sort of thing he’d say when a psychic disturbance caused alarm. Through him and Madeleine, I would experience the tendency of much supernatural phenomena to avoid the tight plotting of melodrama.
It was the year 1841, my twenty-first, some months after my uncle’s bank had failed at the tail end of the depression and I’d been forced to return to Boston in straightened, if not exactly difficult circumstances. We had weathered the Panic of 1837 and its aftermath only to succumb as others began again to profit, yet I was grateful for the economic catastrophe: working in the money houses and cotton exchanges of New Orleans with my uncle and father had been for me a remunerative prison sentence but my father supposed cotton to be as good a stuffing as any for the empty spaces between a young man’s ears. The collapse had provided me with the excuse to pursue a scholar’s life at Harvard with the eventual goal of becoming an architect, my true vocation. Returning to Boston on a bracing autumn day from a clime of sweat and slavery, I felt cleansed.
A return to New England would also mean I could re-ignite what had been an intense friendship with Roderick and Madeleine Usher, brother and sister, who had been my boon companions from age 5 to 11, when children are high priests in a religion of secrets. For many years I scarcely believed certain memories of that time, so fantastic were they. I had dismissed them as the faulty perceptions of a still growing brain impressed with so many new images and experiences that were hard to categorize.
We have all, I’m sure, experienced the confusion that can beset us when first waking from a profound sleep, when the external reality and still fresh sensations of our dreams are hopelessly tangled. We can all remember, too, the fanciful nature of children and the waking dreams that make childhood timeless. No doubt the reader will be incredulous of all the mysterious happenings I shall relate.
Once, during a game of hide-and-seek in the woods, I counted aloud with my hands splayed across my face in a show of covering my eyes but I was in fact “peeking”. I saw Madeleine scurry behind a large boulder as Roderick, some twenty yards away, went over the crest of a small hill. With all speed I finished my counting and then made movements indicating I had no idea where they might be before making my way to the rock where Madeleine had hidden. To my great surprise I found Roddy there waiting and as I stood speechless in amazement, I was scared so thoroughly by something at my back that I screamed, running out to the clearing whence I started to find Madeleine sitting on a low-lying branch of a tree. I must say that neither the topography of the forest nor the brief span of time in which this occurred could possibly have allowed for the positions they came to hold.
On another occasion, we had picnicked by a brook and I, depleted by our exercises, had fallen asleep. After a nap of no more than an hour or so, I began to revive and as I fully regained consciousness I was unable to open my eyes – unable to open my eyes as though they were sewn shut! I could hear a devilish, internal laughter and above me the voice of Madeleine incanting some gibberish I could not understand. I panicked and attempted to get up and on my feet only to find that I was pinned down by the brute strength of Roderick. I blacked-out and when I had awoken again, I was dripping in my own perspiration and blood. When I demanded of them what had happened, they told me I’d fallen asleep and had a terrible dream.
There are many such memories of dreams and terrible they may have been but reader, know with certainty now, as I speak from the 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 dwelling) 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 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.
and in his own words, an accounting of his revenge.
The beginning of this tale starts rightly in Egypt during the Napoleonic campaign there at the turn of the century. The great actor Napoleon saw Egypt as the proper stage for his portrayal of Alexander the Great and he lusted after it as any diva does the lime-light and floor-boards of La Scala in Milan. Strategically, he saw a march from Alexandria to Suez as moving in the right direction to thwart the British navy, to break its vessels, thereby blood-letting the heart of the empire and snatching its greatest prize – India!
Human life meant nothing to this vainglorious man and his high esteem among the French is a topic I never broach with them. Allegiance to flag and faith was always provisional for the stubby little “emperor” and why a Frenchman would so passionately embrace him as opposed to any Italian or Corsican, I can’t say.
Among the hordes of camp followers needed to supply a modern army of conquest – the guns, the butter, the whores – there were those retained to magnify the glory (and glory Napoleon meant to have with such vast sweep and power that the bluster would fill the sails of his fleet and propel it back to France,) of the undertaking – namely artists, botanists, biologists, engineers, mathematicians, etc. and one linguist, M. Alexandre Seullinard. His studies in Coptic, his broad surveys of the Semitic and Cushitic languages left him as able as any man then living to understand the spoken language of the Middle Kingdom and it was to him I would write of our urgent need of his skills.
And why had we this need? As so many needs are, ours was ignited by alcohol. It caught fire in the dregs of a superb bottle of cognac one late night after cards at Ushers'. The liquor had made us, four young men and the three most emancipated young women of Boston, merry and mischievous, no one more so than Roderick, who always seemed to magnify the mood by a factor of ten. In addition to Roddy, Madeleine and I, we were Archibald McKennon, Benjamin Parr, Lucretia Tudor and Annabel Lee. We chattered away lazily, our backs on the rugs of the floor and our feet on the chairs, or our legs swinging on the arms of couches and our backs propped against our companions and somehow the talk came to focus on the contents of my father's warehouse, which had become something of a growing fascination among our set since my return from New Orleans (with much general speculation having started years earlier.) As I recalled for them the inventory and the exact placement of each object within, patience was cast aside that night and the group was all insistence that with all haste I must take all of them – what a singular beast a crowd soon becomes – immediately to the location for their close inspection of the goods. The warehouse was out in Milton some ten miles away from Franklin Place. It had once been the property of a wealthy merchant back in colonial days, a Loyalist who was tarred and feathered and accidentally (so it was claimed) murdered by the patriots of all the surrounding towns and whose ghost is said to haunt the site still.
The mention of a ghost sent everyone out of their supine positions and up into their coats and cloaks with giddy hysterics; I was merely dragged along in their wake as they made for the stables to ready a coach for travel. Madeleine, ever wise even in her cups, alone of the group elected to stay in exactly the same position she had occupied for nearly an hour and begged off making the trip. As I was dragged by my right arm from the parlor I gazed longingly at this young woman sitting entranced on a couch of French Empire style, it's lion paws clawing at the rugs and the glow from the fire giving its silk upholstery some animation, so that the effect of the scene was of a Hindoo princess in the embrace of a becalmed tiger, stroking its pelt as she looked deep into the flames with those glistening jewels that were her eyes. Here was the greater mystery for me – the greatest mystery I would ever know. Madeleine would always entice me far more than the trinkets of my father's collection ever could.
The ride through city streets out to the periphery on such a mild Spring morn during the earliest, darkest hours of the day was exhilarating, thanks to Roderick in the driver's seat. His wildness was of a piece with the horses - manes flying, eyes red and watering, the reins in his hands the nerves through which he communicated his will. If one were to look into the eyes of the two beasts pulling us careening into the dark one might wonder if they were running towards our destination or away from Roderick. That might then lead one, as it did me, to wonder – from whom or what was Roderick running?
Our arrival in Milton occasioned no party of greeting, which the alcohol and great speed of our carriage had led us to half expect. Our party wanted a reward for its victory over the monotony of existence and would find it among the treasures to be discovered. The absence of celebrants reminded us that every triumph over ennui was always and ever temporary.
I bade my companions wait in the carriage so that I might not compromise the security of my father's property. We had developed a system of leaving the keys to the warehouse in a locked safe, which I was now making for. The hiding place of the safe was the second layer in the defense of the dusty treasures within, the first being a Mr. Hopp, caretaker of several buildings devoted to storage. He was aroused by our carriage and looked askance as I explained our harmless little adventure. He retorted with the observations, quite perceptive ones, that my father would not approve of such an excursion that aimed to disturb the family dust and that, alas, there was nothing he could do if I, my father's heir and trusted aid, was bent on disturbance. He made further observations on the ungodliness of the hour and the surliness of his mood. He need hardly have mentioned either.
I returned to the carriage with the several keys that would open the several doors that we had to pass through to enter the storage room proper. Many of the items were still in their boxes so that the immediate effect of entering the room was not so gratifying.
For me to be in that room again after so many years was like stepping back into my father's heartbreak. These objects were neglected as a result of the failure of my father’s vision, or rather, I should say, the failure of that of the good people of Boston. His vision was bold and far-sighted. He saw a great institution run by the city and dedicated to the fine arts and the great civilizations for the betterment of the citizens, using as model the collection of the Louvre Palace. To that end he began collecting objects of significance, sending agents across Europe and the Americas searching for them.
It was a grand effort, but most who took to the idea did so with thoughts of feeding high culture to a sow, plumping it for market, then holding their hats at its posterior as it excreted specie of gold. The excrement of Culture is Money – or is it the other way round? The high mind rarely has its ear to the ground and it was money, the wrong kind, that pained my father's pure heart; no circus barker was he and rather than compromise his vision, he locked his collection away that it might pass this low point of American civilization and await a future generation more enlightened.
We were hardly that generation, drunk and on the prowl for cheap thrills in the wee hours. As we lit more lamps and began to move about, the light caught glimpses of strange objects and the excitement rose. We located the shrunken heads, one of which bore an uncanny resemblance to a local Episcopalian minister and we opened a crate containing an Archaic Greek marble of a youth with his blank oriental eyes and sensuous mouth, that looked like no one any of us had ever met or even glimpsed but like someone we would have wanted to observe in the flesh at his games with discus or javelin.
Above all else though, it was the Egyptian mummy that had raised a stir from the group when I had given my recitation of the store house inventory a mere two hours before. Within twenty minutes of arriving, we found our way to it, a series of boxes within boxes, and four canopic jars containing the previously interred's viscera, all beautifully decorated with hieroglyphs and pictographs. They had been indecipherable once but now those mysteries have begun to reveal themselves. Mr. Seullinard had done full sketches of all that had been painted and carved on the surface of the objects protecting the mummy and when at last, years later, the Rosetta stone began to set this ancient writing free, he had written us with a rough translation. We had then gone to the warehouse and opened the case containing the mummy and said hello to Hatotep, for such was the name of the leather and bone artifact, formerly know as a human being, which lay within.
"Let's bring him back for a drink – the poor fellow must be dry as a bone. Roddy, you still have that port I bought you for Christmas; why don't we break it open for our friend here?"
"Oh, we must, absolutely. He shall be toasted and fawned over at Chez Usher."
"No," I said, aware that Roddy and I were now in a test of will and he would always prevail in such a match. "We can't just run off into the night with the mummy."
"Of course we can, Eddie."
"Roderick, please. I can't take this off the premises."
"Well, you can't do it alone but we've four others here with us, so it should be easy as pie."
"Roddy, don't be difficult."
"I want it Edmund." He stared at me with such intensity that I felt him boring into my brain, poking about in it until he found just what he wanted and then I felt such a pressure in a particular area deep within the grey matter.
"You're hurting me, Roddy."
"I'm not touching you, Eddie."
"Please stop."
"I don't know what you mean but of course, as you wish, consider me stopped but I want the mummy! We are bringing him back to the house."
And there was the end of it, no less humiliating for being the predicted and only possible conclusion. The mummy was loaded onto the top of the carriage by the intoxicated party and I spent a very anxious, furious ride back to Boston, fearing at any moment to see the coffins above dashed to the ground in a splintery mess.
"Madeleine, look what the black cat brought in," Roddy announced as he slammed open the front door and we all tumbled in with the momentum of the caskets' dead weight.
"Oh, Roderick, let the dead lie. Haven't you learned?" Madeleine's distress was quickly overcome when she focused attention on soothing my obviously wrecked ego as the others carried the mummy up to the second floor.
All was restored to a state of equilibrium only when the caskets were laid atop a billiard table and we were once more lounging on the carpets and couches of the Usher drawing rooms, a spent force for excitations; yawns were frequent between tea sips and biscuit bites. "To bed!" was now the cry. We had all planned an overnight stay at Ushers' and we were shown to our beds gratefully. As we all had our separate engagements the next day, we agreed to reconvene the following night for the unwrapping of Hatotep.
The frequent unearthing of mummified remains in Egypt had rendered them mere commodities, an ingredient in a pigment known as Caput Mortuum – Death's Head – or just simply Mummy Brown, still available today and prized by some artists of the renaissance but avoided by others familiar with its fugitive qualities. So it was not altogether unusual for mummies, though not usually complete in their decorated caskets and ancillary jars of vital organs, to be shipped to France and then for one to be chosen among a baker’s dozen as a token of appreciation for some service done by my father for the benefit of M. Seullinard.
During the Middle-Ages, due to an error in translation from the Arabic, it was thought that mummies contained bitumen, considered a healing agent and they were therefore ground into powder and sold by apothecaries.
Furthermore, it was the rage in England in particular and the Continent in general, for the well-to-do to purchase mummies for a night's entertainment by unwrapping them and observing the nut-meat inside the shell. Education with a frisson of death and the after-world focuses one's attention as well as a demi-tasse of strong Algerian coffee.
Unconcerned by a redundancy of stimulants we had our Algerian coffee preceded by a light but sumptuous meal in which we kept our imbibing within the confines of reason, though unable to completely abstain due to the considerable wait for the stroke of midnight, by unanimous agreement the proper hour for commencement of the mummy's undressing. All the company were in an ecstasy of shivers as we conspired with the night in our ghoulish labors.
I insisted that some scientific rigor be applied to the task and that notes should be taken. Annabel Lee enthusiastically volunteered to keep the record both in script and pictures. Her widely known artistic talents and attention to detail made her more capable of that than anyone present and I gratefully accepted her offer.
We first removed the mummy out of the large box it had been shipped from France in, disposing of a vast quantity of straw and wood shavings. The original outer case was an elegant rectangle of Lebanon Cedar, three times long as it was deep; it's pictograms and hieroglyphics were carved in shallow relief and painted with greens, blues, blacks, whites and reds only somewhat faded. Out of this box we removed another, also of cedar, with its still vibrant colors intact. It conformed to the human anatomy within, being rounded at the head and shoulders and from these tapered down to the feet that protruded out from the plane of the body. The decoration all over its surface was of the highest quality and aesthetic appeal and I chastised my father internally for having locked away treasures such as this that would have given immense pleasure to those with the privilege to see them in a proper setting, if only we'd been allowed to.
Having lifted this casket from the outer case, we were able to see that the rich decoration continued down the sides, all looking as though it had been applied the day before. We opened the casket and were greeted with the bright mask of gilded cartonnage, a material of papyrus and plaster, similar I think, to papier-mâché. There were also several gilded cartouches-like placards resting on top of the mummy's shroud.
We lifted off these lovely gilded items and finally removed the mummy himself from the last casket
We had hoped to unravel the linen bandages wrapped around the body without cutting or tearing them but the intricacy of the wrapping and the incredible volume of linen used to accomplish it made us less fastidious in this regard after some several minutes of searching for the true end (from the embalmer's viewpoint, but the beginning from ours), of the linen strips. We thus began cutting the trusses that bound the forearms together over the hips, forcing the hands, which were holding a small papyrus roll, together over the pubic area.
Though the outer-most bandages were dis-colored, those below surface were clean, remarkably supple, though a little crisp from the resin they'd been coated with and of a very fine weave. In between them we found slips of papyrus at various intervals, little prayers for the soul's immortality and small figurine deities of blue-green faience, some five in number, as we got closer to the corpus itself.
Roddy was being uncharacteristically patient and good through the entire process and was obviously as transfixed as we all were at the many little discoveries. Each object and method of removal was noted in Annabel's sketch-book, which would soon be violently tossed to the ground by her sheer horror at what was to come.
Finally we reached the human skin and cut away the remainder of linen covering him, leaving the body itself in place atop the remaining material he rested on. The skin was quite black, gaining tones of brown with repeated viewing. The skin glimmered softly as though burnished; where bones pushed against the skin, highlights of a pewter tinge could be seen. Over the incision in the left abdomen, from which the internal organs were removed, was a solid gold disc bearing the horus eye.
We gazed in silence at the corroded flesh, contemplating our own like futures. Roderick spoke first.
"Imagine, this was once a man who made love, who revered his gods," he said as he stroked the forehead tenderly.
"What kind of lover do you suppose he was? Did he make the ladies cry?" Lucretia wondered. "I shall kiss him and see." Before our protests could be registered - they were in any case nearly drowned out by the fervent and voluble encouragement of Roderick – she had done so. Almost immediately, a strange look came upon her face.
"I felt something," she said.
"LOVE!" we all exclaimed in unison.
"Ah, the hot son of Egypt melts the Wenham iceberg," Benjamin melodramatically opined.
Lucretia, heiress to a fortune built on the mercurial backs of ice cubes cut from New English lakes and shipped across the globe as far as Calcutta, was notoriously finicky and stubborn when it came to the male sex.
"I always said it would take you thousands of years to marry and now you've covered that ground in mere minutes," he finished.
"The fickle Lucretia, who has spurned all my advances, finds a mate," said Archibald.
"Well, you should feel better Archie, clearly she prefers the company of older gentlemen," Roderick added.
Then the most extraordinary thing happened – a single muffled cough escaped the mouth of Hatotep. Gasps filled the stale air close around the mummy. Astounded and speechless we looked at him and each other with eyes and mouths agape.
"What was that?"
“Is this your parlor trick, Eddie?" Ben demanded to know. "A brilliant one if it is but you’ve scared the hell out of me and now we’re primed for the debunking – before I go out of my head."
"Surely there is some natural explanation," Annabel said.
Then, in what must have been less than a minute, a great inhalation followed by an even greater exhalation passed through the mummy's mouth. His right arm moved; he brought hand to skull and then scratched it as though he was quite puzzled!
Utter pandemonium struck the room. We clutched our hair, rubbed our eyes, bit into our digits till they drew blood but not even the most severe of corporeal self-inflictions we could mete-out would change the circumstance of a thirty-five hundred year old man with simple but still evolving needs who was quite capable of attending to them himself. And then he began mumbling. We were now the agonists of a play in which the skull soliloquized to Hamlet.
I had a sick feeling in the vicinity of my solar plexus, as though my internal organs were re-arranging themselves. In my head I felt a burning tingle that convinced me I was experiencing the onset of insanity. That my colleagues confirmed all that I was seeing and hearing gave me no comfort, as two of them I considered already a bit around the bend and one, Roderick, I now feared suddenly as though he had a black hand in this business, that perhaps he had contrived these things for the purpose of driving me mad. All the strange instances and frights I’d experienced with him as a child now were recalled to me and I was nauseated at the recollection.
“Roderick, make it stop,” I said, the accusation burning my throat.
“I don’t like your tone, Edmund. This is not my doing.”
“You know about these things – make it stop!”
“Calm yourself, Eddie. Once you’ve recovered, I think you’ll agree this is an unprecedented opportunity to speak with a distinguished personage of over three thousand years in age; a man whom Cleopatra would have considered one of the ancient ones and he is now our guest."
“I don’t know that I want to speak to him and how would he know what I’m saying to him? Or do you think he’s picked up English during his long entombment?”
"Eddie, please," Madeleine intervened as she took my arm in hers and led me away from the group. She brought me out into the parlour at the front of the house and we sat down facing one another and our fear.
"It's not Roderick's doing per se. These things happen despite our own wishes, despite all our entreaties."
"But Roderick wanted this. I didn't want them to take it. I pleaded with him not to do it. He was hurting me."
"He is a bully, sometimes, Edmund. Did he hit you?" Something in her eyes made me wonder…
"No, he didn't touch me but Madeleine, has he ever hit you?"
"No, he's never touched me." She darkened as she said this and continued after a pause, "He's never hit me, ever."
"He stared at me so intently, as though he penetrated my skull and I felt acute pain in a very particular area of my brain – deep inside."
"I see," she said as she looked from my eyes to the floor.
"What is that power he has? I'm not imagining it. Where does it come from?"
"Honestly, Eddie, I don't know where our powers come from. We've never understood it, either one of us. I mean, we've never understood it beyond the curse. Clearly, the act that brought forth the curse is the original sin. He is shadowed by something. In his moods we see the shadows wash over and away from him like the tides. He is claimed and must be redeemed, frequently redeemed. That is why I stay close to him."
"Claimed?"
"I don't know any more than you do, Edmund, really, I don't. That is all I was told – by the spirit of a drunkard. Claimed by a Tinker, he said, one of the Tinkers. All my questions have never been answered. What does that signify? What is a Tinker in that sense? I thought it might be nonsense but one nod of a demon's head when I'd asked did he know of such a thing convinced me that it is real enough in some other existence, elsewhere. It is hard to think of Roddy as a pitiful creature, he has such animal vitality but there are many things to pity him for. He needs kindness – and not to be crossed. One must surrender to him in such a way that he feels sated, purged of exigencies and then one can recover lost ground," she said with a flush of crimson in her cheeks. Some ground, I thought, can never be regained.
"How could I cross him with that stiletto of pain he drove through my skull? I was helpless. But I'll be damned if I'll be kind to him after subjecting me to that."
"No more mention of being damned, Eddie, I couldn't bear it if you were and it does happen, as quickly as drawing a breath." She then teased me with a theatrical suck of air through her mouth and gave me a coquettish smile. Damnation had never seemed so alluring.
We rejoined the others who had still not regrouped around the mummy. Cautiously we re-formed our circle around him; he was now mumbling softly without cease.
"He appears to be talking but what on earth could he be saying?"
"He seems a bit feeble-minded to me."
"Well! – That is harsh. What sort of a presentation do you suppose you would give three thousand years after your prime? And what would you have to say after sleeping several millennia?"
"I think I'd be a bit groggy and soft in the head after waking from such a sound sleep. I'm sure that's what's ailing our friend here."
"The ancient Egyptians were unaware of the brain's importance; during the embalming process they removed it with long hooks that they worked up the nose, then they threw it away. Ipso Facto, we are faced with the distinct possibility that our mummy has been rendered imbecilic. We are entertaining a moron."
"Let's not be so hasty, Archie."
"Well, if he has no tongue but can speak; if he has no lung but can breathe, don't you think it possible he might think like a philosopher even without a brain?" I asked.
It was odd to be communing with the supernatural yet for comprehension to be quashed by the thrum of this ancient tongue, incomprehensible for it’s befuddled mumbling – due to centuries of disuse, or the continued ramblings of a feeble-minded bore? It would be just our luck to have stumbled upon a mummy with a living soul and re-animated (though tattered and dusty,) flesh who had not much to say – eternally.
In that vicious way human beings have, we had already dismissed the poor fellow before he’d had a chance to explain himself and his shabby appearance and we were already wondering how we might shut him up!
Having watched what was left of his lips moving for twenty minutes, we left Hatotep to his mumbling and re-located to the front parlour. We looked at each other with astonished faces.
"Whatever are we going to do?" Lucretia wondered. Roderick and Madeleine both had been notably quiet during this adventure; re-animation of the dead being a good deal less novel for them. Roderick looked upon us with some amusement and not a word spoken.
"Well, Roddy, you look pleased with yourself," Benjamin noted.
"That's my usual state, Ben. I'm merely a bit more pleased with myself at initiating what has turned out to be more of an adventure than I'd bargained for. I think we should maintain our calm and allow it to play itself out. I for one am going back to check on our friend and see if I can't communicate with him."
We agreed that this was a reasonable course of action and once more rather comically we moved en masse back to the billiard room to open dialogue with the ancient one.
"Hatotep," Roderick said loudly in the same manner one speaks to the elderly and infirm. To our further amazement, at the sound of his name, Hatotep stopped mumbling and craned his neck to look at Roddy.
"Well, old boy, you can hear me. Let me introduce myself. You are Hatotep," he said pointing to our friend, "and I am Roderick," he added pointing to his own chest. He then began pointing to each of us in turn while calling out our names in a voice that the deafest of simpleton's could have understood.
"Hattie my friend," he repeated, "I am Roderick. Raw-der-ick." The mummy then tried to form this exotic name on his lips with some success. This was then repeated with all. It was to be the limit of what he could comprehend but it was astonishing! He cogitated and talked, not necessarily in that order. His speech became louder and more animated and we began to perceive the being within; of note was his dry sense of humor, or so we gathered from the timeless and universal gestures of the professional wit – the arched brow, the simpering pout, a tight, economical smile, a retraction and enlargement of the ears and dilation of the auditory canal that indicated a heightened attentiveness to “news”.
We were all overjoyed and somewhat horrified at this turn of events and I immediately thought of M. Seullinard as the only person who could help us truly communicate with Hatotep and wrote to him that very evening. We decided that he must have a companion at all times so as not leave him lonely. In the weeks before our translator arrived we by turns would listen and laugh with our friend though we couldn't understand a syllable of what he was saying. He prattled on in the face of our incomprehension and we listened, nodding our heads and smiling like imbecile's ourselves.
It was all remarkable enough but we couldn't help wondering; after millennia of dormancy, what had caused the re-animation of Hatotep?
And now once again, enter the French, as represented by one M. Seullinard, linguist and Egyptologist extraordinaire.
So many slanders are committed in the Anglophone world against the French that I feel I must champion the good sense, warmth and humor of our French friends. Perhaps in the days of the ancien regime a cold, crystalline wit predominated but I have found as much commonality with the French as with any English I’ve known, or for that matter, any of my own countrymen, though the Parisians may be considered a separate entity from the “French” and not necessarily in possession of those aforesaid qualities.
In addition to those French friends and business associates secured by the family’s connections to New Orleans and Europe, an older, deeper bond remained fast – the affection of my grandfather for the Marquis de Lafayette and other members of the French contingent whose gallantry helped secure victory in our revolt against English tyranny. I well remember assembling with my family as a young boy to greet the Marquis on his triumphant return to America in ’24. How proud and grateful we all were for the privilege.
It was a mere four weeks and some days after I posted the letter that M. Seullinard arrived on our shores; he had been sunk in a bout of ennui, otherwise known as old-age, and was revivified by our promise of a fantastic mystery that only he could help unlock. I had employed all the literary devices in order to seduce Seullinard to our project without tugging too hard at the shroud of enticing mystery I had laid delicately upon the words of my perfectly correct French sentences.
I'd told him that the mummy he had shipped all those years ago to my father and the still-born Boston Museum he had hoped to establish, had now, under closer inspection, revealed ancient mysteries so profound and disturbing as to constitute a new avenue of study heretofore un-dreamed of. I had appealed to his scientific curiosity and professional pride and he had answered by immediately booking passage on the next ship bound for our corner of the Americas. With nothing between him and the ocean but an acre’s yield of lumber, his own mind was as pleasurably agitated as the waters of the Atlantic were placid. A strong, easy wind made for a particularly speedy passage and by the time he dis-barked on our shores, he was in a state of un-containable excitement. This happy emotion would only increase when we introduced him to Hatotep, a character as sensational as any to be found in a penny dreadful.
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