When Usher appears at the narrator's door looking "cadaverously wan" and asking, "Have you not seen it?," the narrator is so ill at ease that he welcomes even the ghostly presence of his friend. Usher does not identify the "it" he speaks of, but he throws open the casement window and reveals a raging storm outside — "a tempestuous . . . night . . . singular in its terror and its beauty." Again, these details are the true and authentic trappings of the gothic tale. Night, a storm raging outside while another storm is raging in Usher's heart, and a decaying mansion in which "visible gaseous exhalations . . . enshrouded the mansion" — all these elements contribute to the eerie gothic effect Poe aimed for.
The narrator refuses, however, to allow Usher to gaze out into the storm with its weird electrical phenomena, exaggerated by their reflection in the "rank miasma of the tarn." Protectively, he shuts the window and takes down an antique volume entitled Mad Trist by Sir Launcelot Canning and begins reading aloud. When he comes to the section where the hero forces his way into the entrance of the hermit's dwelling, the narrator says that it "appeared to me that, from some very remote portion of the mansion, there came, indistinctly, to my ears, what might have been, in its exact similarity of character . . . the very cracking and ripping sound" which was described in the antique volume which he is reading to Usher. The narrator continues reading, and when he comes to the description of a dragon being killed and dying with "a shriek so horrid and harsh, and withal so piercing," he pauses because at the exact moment, he hears a "low and apparently distant, but harsh, protracted and most unusual screaming or grating sound" which seems to be the exact counterpart of the scream in the antique volume. He observes Usher, who seems to be rocking from side to side, filled with some unknown terror. Very soon the narrator becomes aware of a distinct sound, "hollow, metallic and clangorous, yet apparently muffled." When he approaches Usher, his friend responds that he has been hearing noises for many days, and yet he has not dared to speak about them. The noises, he believes, come from Lady Madeline: "We have put her living in the tomb!" He heard the first feeble movements a few days ago while she was in the coffin, then he heard the rending of the coffin and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison and then her struggling with the vault and, finally, she is now on the stairs and so close that Usher can hear "the heavy and horrible beating of her heart." With a leap upwards, he shrieks: "Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!" At this moment, with superhuman strength, the antique doors are thrown open and in the half darkness there is revealed "the lofty and enshrouded figure of the Lady Madeline of Usher." There is blood upon her white robes and the evidence of a bitter struggle on every portion of her emaciated frame. With the last of her energy, while she is trembling and reeling, she falls heavily upon her brother, and "in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated."
