Read Online The Fall by Bethany Griffin - Free Book Online Page B

ather leans toward me. Before him is a canvas. He’s sketched out the Usher crest in meticulous detail and is mixing red and yellow paint for the dragons. He stirs the paint round and round, the colors of sunset encapsulated in a ceramic bowl.
    He calls this room his studio. It has wide windows that let in a little light for painting, and beside us sits a grand piano with a metronome that clicks back and forth, one two, one two, over and over.
    â€œThe house is seductive,” Father says. “It reads our deepest desires.”
    But if that’s true, then why was Roderick sent away?
    Father laughs softly, still mixing the paint. “It doesn’t always give us our desires, Madeline,” he says, as though I asked the question aloud. Did I?
    â€œAnd sometimes . . .” He glances at the doorway. Mother is resting across the hall. “What we desired so much doesn’t turn out to truly fulfill us.” Is that why he’s speaking so low? Because he’s insulting Mother? “You must learn to question,” he continues. “I know you are young, but you must not accept anything at face value.”
    The paint in his bowl is the color of rust. Like the hinges on the doors and shutters of the gardener’s cottage.
    Does he mean that I should question everything? Including what he’s saying right now? He must see the confusion on my face.
    â€œNot what I say,” he clarifies. “You must be ready to trust me. On a moment’s notice. Any moment.”
    I’m distracted from his words by a movement at the corner of my eye. A ghost.
    Father laughs. “They aren’t important. Long-dead Ushers, they have no effect on the world around them. The house brings them back. It never shows us the ghosts of our dead loved ones. Perhaps because it doesn’t wish to drive us completely mad.” He blinks, refocuses. “The ghosts aren’t important. What is important is that you trust me, and are ready to go.”
    â€œFather, were you reading my mind?”
    â€œOf course not,” he says too quickly, as he splatters paint across the canvas, completely obscuring his intricate drawings in a blob of rusty near-red.

31
M ADELINE I S F IFTEEN
    I n her journal, Lisbeth Usher claims that her beloved Mr. Usher kept his mad sister in the attics. I have never truly explored the attics where the nurseries are. Mother was afraid we would catch the maladies of former generations of Usher children and never allowed us up here. Though Roderick and I disobeyed her and crept up a few brief times.
    The house was built over generations, with additions from various Ushers. The nurseries are nearly the highest part of the house. The doctors occupy the adjacent tower.
    When Dr. Peridue offered to live in the house, Father agreed, so the doctor would always be available for Mother. The house is big enough for an army of doctors. I tiptoe up one of the staircases, avoiding their quarters.
    The machine they keep going at all times, day and night, pumps endlessly, audible even from the stairs.
    I pass the last of the doctors’ rooms and step into the nurseries. There are wide windows that face south, and big open rooms filled with dolls missing hair and other broken bits of childhood. A wooden rocking horse with a mane made of white thread stands in the corner. It only has one eye.
    Low ceilings give the huge rooms a cavernous feel, full of shadows with open doorways through which you can see more rooms, and more still, like a house of mirrors, except instead of reflections, it’s some warped version of reality, more rooms than could possibly exist, even in a house this huge.
    I step over a headless doll. Blocks are strewn across the floor, as if a child might be returning to finish his castle. A broken toy drum lies in the corner; a drumstick has been thrust through the leather membrane.
    A spider the size of my hand scurries across the room and into the mouth of a doll