Pulling Down The House of Usher: Manuscript Found In a Prim Bottle

Location: Madeline Usher's Writing Desk

My Dear Edgar,

I write these words in haste before the doom that has befallen the House of Usher overtakes me.

I arrived in reply to Roderick Usher's urgent summons. And to think that this mansion was a vital, if troubled, place but a year ago. There remained no more than the shell of a ruined home when I made my uneasy way across the causeway!  And, like the shattered head of Shelley's poem, round its wreck the lone and level sands stretched far away into the primordial distance, an empty horizon of blue as though I were far above the earth.

After I plucked up my courage, I made my way into the House and ascended to the pitiful remains of the second story, where I found quill, ink, and paper to write this letter. Shattered bits of furnishings and structure dotted the landscape. What had become of the Ushers?  The family's parrot, an African Grey or perhaps Norwegian Blue, it being hard to discern in the fading light, greeted me.


"Awk! Run for cover! Run for cover! Blimey! Guv'nah Linden gets the island soon! He raised the rent! No more prims! Awk! Run for cover!"

Fed some strange hope by this warning, as well as by the bird's clever manner, I implored it, "Where are my friends, Roderick and Madeline? Shall I see them again in this wretched house?"

"Nevermore! Nevermore! S'blood run for it! Try OpenSim! Try OpenSim! Awk!"

In despair I looked for a way out, but an angel of destruction followed at my heels. I realized the fate of the upper stories of The House of Usher. As I explored, I began to hear the noises of stone grinding upon stone, and as I looked on, the last standing walls began to fall! Oh, the sound of breaking leaded glass, the heritage of the Ushers for many centuries, ground into dust! Oh, the rending of the floors to reveal the awful horror of the crypts below!

Then, a spirit came and made a dire warning.


"Traveler, flee this cursed place. My doom is to tarry here until the last prim has been taken and the curse placed upon this land by the Lindens enacted in full. You have a future before you, until the dreadful and dolorous day of doom, when you too shall rot in the hungry earth! Flee, fool, flee the Reaper for he is at your back this very instant! Flee!"

In some ghoul-haunted hysteria from the works of Byron, I stumbled into the crumbling and rat-specked remains of the Ushers' ancient crypts, hoping to find surcease from the incredible destruction above.

But there was to be no rest for my tormented spirit, alas!  The devastation of the House and all its heritage continued apace, stone by stone they crumbled and vanished into the deep places of the world, as if some cavalier god were putting them back into a cosmic inventory of loss of suffering.

Oh me! Oh Usher! But wait...

A flask of laudanum! I drank deeply, as the House continued its awful decomposition. Amid the swirling debris from happier days, I swooned as the drug eased my nerves...and my last vision of Usher was of Roderick and Madeline, silhouetted against a nightmare sky.

Shall I never awake from this delirium?  Make haste, Edgar, for I fear I am entombed with phantoms.

Your Most Humble and Obedient Servant,

Ignatius Onomatopoeia, Esq.