The Song of Roderick Usher - by DB Sullivan
The Song of Roderick Usher - A Gothic Short Story by DB Sullivan
The chill, prickly air of autumn swept gently across the forested countryside, with sporadic, uneven blusters that swelled up and over the hilltops with a crisp, almost hypnotizing grip, as I meandered feebly along a wooded path amongst the vibrant hues of the seasonal exposition of color. The golden, crimson, orange and butterscotch tint of the withering leaves lent a suggestion of radiant warmth, under the thick, grey cloudcover overhead. A multitude of olfactory sensations presented themselves in grand succession as I continued my slow, tottering journey - the musty, sour smell of decomposing logs and leaves, the astringent terpene of pine pitch, and the heavy, earthy scent of petrichor from recent rains, delighted my mind and comforted my weary soul.
I felt compelled on this day to venture further afoot than was my usual custom of late, as more often than not, the various afflictions of age, rheumatism and decrepitude rendered my navigable world into a meager, and dwindling living space. For reasons unknown, this particular day had invigorated an unusual vivaciousness of spirit and bodily vigor which stirred me to explore well beyond my usual confines of the home I occupied here, now a small island amongst the hills and dales where generations of my forebears lived and worked, loved and died.
Having been captivated by this most unexpected and delightfully energetic exuberance, I fancied myself to seek out a beloved, outlying, hilltop clearing, at which I had spent countless hours engaged in boyhood adventure making and wistful imaginings. From the earliest of childhood escapades that I can still remember, I have been, and remain, enamoured by, and drawn to, tall mountain vistas and the feeling of clarity, and boundless freedom of unobstructed views of the world around me, not just in the physical aspect of terrestrial elevation, but in the mental and cognitive correlates of ascertaining truth, wisdom, and the deep insight of understanding, where the usual human obscurations of egotism and self-centeredness fall away to reveal the foundational relationships between man and nature, between man and himself - that is, the truth of the interconnectedness and interdependency amongst all the flora and fauna of both man and that’s good babe beast within the natural world.
I continued along, gently upwards and through the woods, and all along my plodding path, my mind flitted rapidly to and fro with a countless multitude of feelings, memories, thoughts and suppositions, much like the effervescent bubbling of a boiling cauldron of water, but there was a recurrent node of nagging recollection that seemed to be demanding greater attention within the cacophony of my mentation - that of my experience and remembrance of the final living days of my old friend Roderick Usher. Despite the unmerciful persistence of time, and its degradation that has been wrought upon my faculties, I still remembered with perfect clarity the events of my sojourn to the House of Usher, and on this day, those memories, and all the pertinent lessons that have been revealed through analytical and deliberate studiousness of my recollections, were commanding the foremost of attention in my mind.
At length, I reached my destination, a soft, grassy outpost high atop a ridge that extended from horizon to horizon, where before and below me laid a magnificent valley and its patchwork of farmland parcels amongst the autumn-tinted, forested hills and dales. I stood there for some time, marveling at the supreme distance that I could perceive, far off to where the opposing mountain range was just barely visible behind a wispy, low lying fog. Standing before such a grand and impressive elevation infused me with great ease and contentment, and a deep admiration for the vastness of creation, and the beauty of the landscape - the rolling hills, shining lakes, streams and the seemingly endless beauty of it all.
After a long and satisfying meditative observation of the scene before me, I meandered around the outcropping and gathered a few pieces of fallen wood that I found scattered about, and piled them amongst a few stray rocks in order to light a small bonfire. On the account of the sporadic gusts of wind that buffeted me there, I had struck nearly a dozen of the matches I had previously tucked away in my pocket, before achieving a sufficient combustion and enlargement of the fire that I endeavored to initiate. I tended the small blaze there, on the mountaintop, until it reached some sustainable robustness, and I sat and rested alongside it and enjoyed the comforting warmth that it radiated upon me. About an hour had passed as I sat upon the precipice, with my mind undulating back and forth between excited recollections, and placid contemplation, when I noticed movement coming from the direction of the trail, where ultimately, a figure emerged from the wood, approaching me.
“Grandson!” I called out with a joyful exclamation.
“Come! Sit! Rest!” I beckoned him forward to join me upon my hilltop perch.
After exchanging many sincere pleasantries, and an embrace infused with a deep, abiding love and familial respect, we gathered closer around the modest fire which I had prepared and attempted to make ourselves comfortable amongst the unevenness of the outcropping.
“I’m thrilled and delighted that you would join me on such a glorious day, my boy. It fills my heart with joy and pride to be able to share such time with you, to watch you grow into such a fine and sharp minded person” I offered effusively.
Under the cloud laden sky and crisp autumn air, nearly two hours had passed in what seemed to be the blink of an eye as we engaged over many threads of conversation about family relations, current affairs and philosophical lessons.
“You truly do possess a keen ability to perceive clearly through the fog of the minds’ folly” I lauded his abilities at great length, and with earnestness. “I have seen how you’ve nurtured that gift and grown it into a formidable strength of mind and character. It gives me great pride to see how you have developed your talents in such a way that bestows goodness and beneficence upon your family and your community. It is a great comfort, for a man of my years, to know that my progeny and those that will come after me, will steward that legacy into new chapters long after I have gone”. My emotions were starting to get the best of me at this point. Being blessed with so many years is a beautiful endowment, but nonetheless heavy with the weight of experience and responsibility, and of regrets and questions unanswered.
“You see, I have something for you. I’ve invited you here today because I have a story to share, and a lesson I must impart to you, a lesson of utmost importance”. My nerves tightened up in large part as I refocused my attention to the matter at hand.
”Oh dear boy, how could I ever recount to you all that I have seen and experienced in these long, astounding and strange years. True! I could fill a thousand volumes or more with the tales of the tumult, the triumphs and tragedies of nearly nine decades of experience and observation. It astounds me to this day what changes have taken place, and the ever-rippling consequences of man’s actions, his faith and his folly. True! I have seen pestilence and disease stricken far and wide across the land. I have seen fighting, wars, and famine. I have seen the rise and fall of kings and demagogues, and the degradation and destruction of sacred vestiges of antiquity. I have witnessed incalculable pain and suffering which man has wrought upon man, and all of its fearsome cruelty by those claiming superiority of lineage or of intellect, or of association. Indeed, there have been a vast number of pitfalls, snags and snares that have flogged mankind, mostly as a consequence of his own misguided, foolhardy arrogance and hubris.”
“Truly, there has been a seemingly limitless torrent of unnecessary and counterproductive self-centeredness and greed. And make no mistake, the destructive and pernicious actions and philosophies which have long plagued mankind are common to each and every one of its myriad branches. BUT! I say with utmost certainty and abject consternation - there has never been a force so insidious, so malignant, and so utterly damnable as that of the ‘magars’.”
The word itself here spoken was enough to strike a cold chill down my spine. The combination of my direct experience, astute observations, critical thinking and a deep reverence for the significance and lessons gleaned from historical events, showed beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the magars, and all that they encompassed in both thought and deed, had been a singular metastatic degradation of vile, abhorrent and corrosive loathesomeness that far surpassed that of any other collective human force that I had ever encountered.
“It was some many years later, after having witnessed similar destruction and fateful ruination of many others that it dawned on me, the significance of what had truly transpired, the calamity of what I had witnessed there in the weeks leading up to and including the final immolation of the House of Usher. You see, I have come to believe quite resolutely, that the demolition of the House of Usher, pertaining not only to the physical dwelling, but my friend Roderick, his sister Madeline, and indeed his entire lineage and all the Ushers who had come before him, sprang from the fact that they had been firmly enmeshed in the pathological grip, and the devilish, destructive evil of the magar. The deterioration of his mental faculties was so great, so twisted and warped into delirium, that he could not grasp the full truth of his pitiful condition, and he could not render in his mind, a true representation of what his sickness arose from, and how it had impacted himself and all the Ushers. He had not the self awareness to understand that his suffering was a result of having his mind been co-opted by the forces of the magars.
The mind, and indeed the body and soul, of those possessed by the foul and unredeemable spirit of the magar tended to exhibit similar expressions of paranoias, delusions, and psychoses which rendered them devoid of clarity, and fully disconnected to the truths and reality of the world around them. A common manifestation of those afflicted by the magar would present itself in stark ravings about invisible beings or entities lurking in shadows, just out of reach or hidden behind doors or underneath bed frames. They would frequently engage in hysterical shouting nonsense about unseen phantasms such as: “They’re coming for me!”, or “I’ll surely be eaten alive!” or “Sinister forces are watching my every move!”. The magar mind would have the wretched souls of their adherents believing such preposterous and asinine fallacies that any rational person of sound mind would look upon them with disgusted bewilderment. Magars would insist that phantasmic entities were devouring dogs and cats, or that they were receiving secret messages from the sun. They were consumed with such hatred and fear, that they were rendered fully incapable of participating constructively within the deliberative expectations of a civil society.
Their nervousness and agitation could reach an intensity of manic ferocity, and would often be quite inconsolable to any suggestion or demonstration that their experience was that of mere hallucination, rather than that of something tangible or true. Another example would be that of extreme prejudice towards anything that was not entirely familiar to themselves. Roderick Usher displayed this strange malady to a high degree, where he had extreme aversions to the most mundane of sensory perceptions, even towards those which would be considered pleasant or delightful to the unaffected - the delicate aroma of flowers, exotic flavors of food, music, sounds and notes which were not magar-attuned, even the whimsical sight of a rainbow after a rain shower. Each of these examples, and indeed many countless others, showed just how deeply they were affected, how adamantly they feared - anything! - anything that did not align itself to their madness by confirming their suspicions and prejudices. Usher had also been convinced that the physical house that he occupied possessed a sentience of its own, and that his movements and activities within the structure were being observed by a malevolent consciousness The magar infested mind was truly a convoluted and deranged wilderness of rot and decay, and I pitied with the most fervent and wholehearted sincerity, those afflicted by its festering and insidious putrescence.
“And here, I must say, was what I found to be the most unnerving aspect of what I have experienced as a person of sound mind, in my experience with both Roderick Usher and the myriad others possessed by magar spirit, that they could typically, if not briefly, sustain some amounts of quasi clear-minded perceptions of the world and their surroundings, in between their fits of madness and depravity. They exhibited such a whirlwind of unpredictable and fluctuating mental oscillating, that you, the observer, would become so bewildered that one would start to question his own sanity. And with hindsight, it seems to me as though that was the most critical factor in safeguarding one’s self from magar infiltration - the capacity for deep, truthful and critical self-analysis. Stated bluntly, the ability to change one’s perspectives, opinions and awareness of situations with the input of new information was the hallmark of a mind that maintained robust protection from possession. And this essential ability needed to be tended routinely, lest it wither and die, for once one' s faculties had sufficiently languished, the susceptibility to magar seizure would be heightened, and could be quickly consumed past a point of no return”.
“To impress upon you the sheer lunacy of the undulation between their madness and tepid stability is a recollection of nights spent in the company of Roderick Usher. He had summoned me to his abode, by way of a letter, in hopes that I might alleviate his suffering in some modest way, and’ I felt a friendly compulsion to oblige, strange as the request seemed at the time. After some many nights had passed, and I felt myself accustomed to the workings of the house and its peculiar inhabitants, I say truthfully that Usher and I passed many pleasant, if not slightly inexplicable evenings together, engaged in reading some of his favorite books such as the Vigiliae Mortuorum Secundum Chorum Acclesiae Maguntinae, Machiavelli’s Belfagor arcidiavolo, and books about chiromancy, torture and practices of the inquisition in the Directorum of Eymeric and many others. And in these sublime moments, Usher would generate extraordinary enthusiasm about the subject matter and supplant the readings with anecdotes and diatribes that would highlight and augment the concepts and subjects of the volumes. At times, his exuberance was enough to make me question my assessment of his frailty. But then, completely without forewarning, Usher would devolve into a state of neurosis that would manifest in a myriad way. I would find Usher to stare vacantly - unflinchingly - for hours upon end, or become silently entangled into composition of the most terrifying paintings and ghastly abstractions one could imagine. He would be consumed by long and frequent fits of nervous agitation that rendered him frenetic, inconsolate and exasperated. It was after one of these particularly turbulent episodes, that he came just as quickly to his senses, and to my amazement, began a colorful and robust recitation of song.”
“I can not say with any certainty if Usher had learned the song in some capacity through his allegiances, or if perhaps he had learned it during the natural course of his education, but what struck me upon hearing his ballad, was the stark and dreadful irony that he was obviously quite ignorant to the fact that the song itself seemed to describe the grotesque deterioration that he himself was undergoing, and was manifesting itself upon the house as well. Despite his cadaverous appearance, Usher seemed to come quite alive with excitement as he sauntered fluidly and with a charming musicality, recited the verses of his song, a song that bedevils me to this day: “The Haunted Palace”. He began the song thusly”:
I.
In the greenest of our valleys,
By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace —
Radiant palace — reared its head.
In the monarch Thought's dominion —
It stood there!
Never seraph spread a pinion
Over fabric half so fair.
“The land he described in his song was the envy of the world. It was a beacon of goodness and truth, and it held the glory of a thousand years of peace and cooperative brotherhood. The inhabitants lived in beauty and in harmony with nature and each other, and built a community where each and every occupant was cared for in shelter, and in food, and every person, young and old, was cherished and given sincere appreciation. And they were wise, dear boy, with wisdom imparted from educating their minds and developing their skills, and the collective understanding that of their many boundless resources, it was their minds, their intellect and perspicacity that endowed them with such brilliance. He continued”:
II.
Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow;
(This — all this — was in the olden
Time long ago)
And every gentle air that dallied,
In that sweet day,
Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,
A winged odor went away.
III.
Wanderers in that happy valley
Through two luminous windows saw
Spirits moving musically
To a lute's well-tunéd law,
Round about a throne, where sitting
(Porphyrogene!)
In state his glory well befitting,
The ruler of the realm was seen.
“There were denizens of the land that were of a certain inherent disposition to be easily lured into the fanatical spell of the magars. They were tempted and entranced by what they saw in the luminous windows - they saw their king! - and they were mesmerized, lulled into a hypnotic complacency, and they, in time, would become most wholeheartedly convinced about their superiority over all things and the unquestionable dominancy of their chosen lord. The afflicted shared a collective delusion of supremacy, and it became commonplace for them to don ruby colored garments as a mark of belonging and a show of allegiance, devotion and subservience to their red king. Legions of followers were assimilated into the clamorous mob, and many of the most fervent adherents became so deeply enmeshed into the idolization of their king that their entire living existence became consumed by the simplistic function of heaping effusive adulation and adoration upon their king, as he described in the fourth verse”:
IV.
And all with pearl and ruby glowing
Was the fair palace door,
Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing,
And sparkling evermore,
A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty
Was but to sing,
In voices of surpassing beauty,
The wit and wisdom of their king.
V.
But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch's high estate;
(Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)
And, round about his home, the glory
That blushed and bloomed
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed.
“The ‘evil things’ of the song were not merely some phantasmagoric demon, or hallucinatory apparition, but were in fact the mental inclinations of the magars themselves. You see, in each and every citizen of the realm, even within you and I, there are internal conflicts and a tension in regards to behaviors and conduct, about clarity of thought, about steadfastness and courage, and of moral propriety. We humans - all of us, being the frail and imperfect beings that we are, struggle with the various tribulations of life, and we wrestle the push and pull of our responses to external commotions and internal upheaval. The evil things were the embodiment of the magars, and the wellspring and the outpouring of their fundamentally dysfunctional mentation were thus: selfishness, dishonesty, aggression, conceit, greed, arrogance, hollow self-righteousness, deceitfulness and inflexibility of thought. Over time, the ‘evil things’ became preeminent in their thinking, and as the song recounts, the glory of olden days was never to return”.
“The minds of the citizenry that had been co-opted by the magars were left in a permanently crippled and deranged condition. Travelers, visitors and regular residents of the land could see them there, through their red viewing windows, where they were not only stuck in time, but lost in their own hallucinatory world which did not exist anywhere outside of their minds. And they moved - all together - with a most hideous, disjointed swell of blind rage and stuporous indifference towards the natural beauty of their surroundings, their kinsfolk and the reality of an inclusive and cooperative existence. Here, exactly as described in the final phrase of the song of Roderick Usher, is exhibited the same paranoia, delirium and insanity that I saw in himself, before the final collapse of his home upon him and its subsequent consumption into the dark, lurid tarn, there in the insufferable gloom, amongst his forest of death and decay”.
“Oh my dear boy, before the onset of night, before my fire is extinguished, with every bit of intensity that I can muster, I must impress upon you with, young man, the most urgent and important lesson from the demise of the Ushers, and that is to guard yourself, at all times and at all costs, from the influence and the corruptive persuasion of the magars. Their siren song has captivated countless poor souls over time, and each and every single one of them has been shamefully dissociated from their pride, their integrity, their rationality and good nature. Take utmost care to avoid the path of pride and arrogance, forsake any overtures by, or association with the magar, lest you suffer the same fate as that of Usher. I have earnestly tried to conduct myself all these years, in such a dignified manner that would maintain the continuity of our familial house, and insulate ourselves, our progeny and posterity from the ravages of the magar mind. The ballad he sang has echoed in my mind with a piercing reverberation to this day, and with care and diligence my boy, you will avoid the fate as sung in the sixth and final verse of the song of Roderick Usher”:
VI.
And travellers now within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows, see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a rapid ghastly river,
Through the pale door,
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh — but smile no more.
Gothic Poetry by DB Sullivan
Copyright ©2026 by D B Sullivan. All rights reserved. This work may not be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.
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