New Extraordinary Tales

A man sits by the window of a London coffee-house, convalescing, his mind sharpened like a new blade. He watches the throng, he classifies, he sorts, he devours the passers-by with his eyes—the clerks in shining boots, the swarthy gamblers, the beggars, the prostitutes, the drunkards—until a face emerges from this human river, the face of an old man in which intelligence, cupidity, triumph, and despair can all be read at once. Then he rises, he follows, he runs, he stalks the stranger through the arteries of London, the bazaars, the alleyways, the taverns, all through the night and all the following day, only to understand at last that there is nothing to understand: this man is the man of the crowd, the one who refuses to be alone, and his secret does not permit itself to be read.

Elsewhere, in an ancient, century-laden manor, Egaeus gazes upon his cousin Berenice, once radiant, now ravaged by epilepsy, and his diseased reason fixates upon a paltry, terrible object—Berenice's teeth, those narrow, white teeth, which he begins to covet like ideas. He sinks into this monomaniacal contemplation for hours, for days, while Berenice dies—or seems to die—and is laid in the earth. When he returns to his senses, his garments are caked with mud and blood, a spade leans against the wall, and from an ebony box slipping from his grasp roll thirty-two small, white, ivory-like things across the floor.

Another narrator, this one perfectly lucid, explains with chilling tranquility that he has murdered an old man, not out of hatred, not out of greed, but because the old man's eye—a veiled eye, a vulture's eye—was unbearable to him. He kept watch for seven consecutive nights, opening the chamber door with infinite patience, casting a single, thin ray of light upon that closed eye, waiting. On the eighth night, the eye is open, and he kills, he dismembers, he conceals the pieces beneath the floorboards. When the police arrive, he invites them to sit in the very room, directly above the corpse, and it is there, in the silence, that he begins to hear a low, dull, steady beating, growing ever louder—the heart of the dead man, he believes, the heart beating beneath the planks—until he can no longer endure the noise and, shrieking, confesses everything.

Then there is a man who possessed a black cat, Pluto, whom he loved tenderly and whom he mutilated one drunken evening by gouging out an eye, before hanging it from a tree—not out of anger but out of perversity, because he knew it was wrong. A second black cat appears, almost identical, save for a white splotch on its breast that gradually assumes the shape of a gallows. The man ultimately kills his wife with an axe-blow and walls her up in the cellar. When the police come to search the house, he strikes the wall out of bravado—and from the depths of the tomb rises a howl: the cat, which he has walled up alive with the corpse, betrays him.

William Wilson, for his part, meets a boy at school who bears the same name, the same height, the same face, and who only ever speaks in a whisper. This double follows him to Eton, to Oxford, across Europe, appearing whenever Wilson is about to commit some baseness—cheating at cards, seducing, lying—to unmask him with a murmured word. During a masquerade in Rome, Wilson finally stabs his tormentor, but it is his own bloodied reflection he sees in the mirror, and the voice that speaks to him is no longer a whisper but his own.

Prince Prospero, on the other hand, believes he can barricade himself against the plague. The Red Death ravages the land, and Prospero locks himself away with a thousand courtiers in a fortified abbey, sealed with iron. He throws a sumptuous masquerade ball in seven rooms of different colors, the last of which is draped in black with scarlet stained-glass windows, housing an ebony clock whose chimes make the dancers shudder every hour. At midnight, a figure no one invited appears, draped in a shroud, its face bedabbled with blood—the mask of the Red Death. Prospero rushes toward it with a raised dagger and drops dead. When the courtiers tear away the shroud, there is nothing beneath: no tangible form, nothing. And the dancers die one by one, and the clock stops, and the flames go out, and Darkness and Decay and the Red Death hold illimitable dominion over all.

At the House of Usher, a friend arrives in answer to the summons of Roderick, the last scion of a lineage whose name has never put forth an enduring branch. The mansion stands on the edge of a black tarn, cleft by an imperceptible fissure running from the roof down to the foundations. Roderick is a man whose nerves are frayed, whose senses can no longer abide anything but the faintest light, the most tenuous sounds. His twin sister, Lady Madeline, is dying of a cataleptic malady. When she expires, they place her in a vault beneath the house. For days, Roderick sinks into gloom, staring blankly, listening to something his friend cannot yet perceive. Then, on a stormy night, while the friend reads aloud to drown out the noises of the house, scratchings and grating sounds rise from the depths. The door opens. Madeline stands there, bloodied, in her shroud, and she falls upon her brother, and Roderick dies of terror, and the friend flees into the rain—and behind him, the fissure widens, the house splits in two, and is swallowed by the tarn.

A prisoner of the Inquisition awakens in pitch darkness. He gropes his way, measures his dungeon, and discovers a yawning pit in the center of the cell—a plunge into the void from which only chance has spared him. Then his torturers change their method: they bind him to a wooden framework, and above him a steel pendulum descends, swinging down, its crescent blade drawing an inch closer to his chest with every sweep. He feels the wind of the blade, he feels the steel graze his garment. He smears his bonds with the food left by his jailers, and the rats gnaw them away, freeing him the very instant the blade touches his chest. But the iron walls begin to glow red, closing in, forcing him toward the pit. Just as he is about to topple into the abyss, an outstretched hand catches his arm—the French army has entered Toledo.

Hop-Frog, the crippled dwarf and jester to a cruel king, is forced to drink wine that drives him mad. When the king throws his goblet into the face of Trippetta, the little dancer whom the dwarf loves, a grating sound issues from Hop-Frog's throat—a grinding of teeth that the king mistakes for the screech of a parrot. The dwarf proposes a diversion for the masquerade: the king and his seven ministers shall be disguised as orangutans, coated in tar and flax, and chained together. In the midst of the ball, he hoists them by their chain to the ceiling, holds his torch to them, and the tar catches fire. Eight corpses swing in the flames. Hop-Frog climbs to the ceiling, vanishes through the skylight, and is never seen again.

Montresor has sworn vengeance upon Fortunato, who has inflicted a thousand injuries upon him. One evening during the carnival season, he lures him into his family's catacombs under the pretense of having him taste some Amontillado. Fortunato, drunk, the bells of his motley jingling in the subterranean depths, follows Montresor ever deeper among the bones. In the recesses of the deepest crypt, Montresor chains him to the wall and begins to mason up the entrance, stone by stone. The bells still jingle behind the masonry, then a laugh, then silence. For half a century, no mortal has disturbed those bones.

Two spirits reunite after death and converse. Monos recounts to Una what he experienced while dying: the senses blending, taste becoming smell, light becoming sound, and then a sixth sense arising from these ruins—the pure perception of Time, an inner beating that measures eternity. He describes the decomposition in the coffin, the consciousness that slowly dissolves into the place, the identity that fades away until nothing remains but Place and Time, supreme autocrats of the void. Eiros recounts to Charmion the end of the world: a comet whose nucleus extracted the nitrogen from the atmosphere, turning the air into pure oxygen, and the entire Earth caught fire in a single instant of total conflagration.

A wanderer contemplates a tiny island in the middle of a rivulet. The western extremity blazes with sunlight, flowers, and butterflies; the eastern end is plunged in shadow, with small mounds that resemble graves. He watches a Fay navigating around the island in a fragile canoe, passing from light into darkness, and with each revolution her shadow detaches from her and drowns in the black water. She makes the circuit again and again, growing ever paler, ever more indistinct, until the sun disappears and the Fay, now the ghost of her former self, enters the darkness never to emerge again.

A wounded man takes refuge for the night in an abandoned château. He lights a candelabrum and discovers, in a niche, the oval portrait of a young woman possessing a beauty so lifelike it strikes him with terror. He reads the history of this portrait in a small volume: the painter had married this maiden and made her pose for weeks on end, so absorbed in his work he failed to see she was withering away as the canvas came to life. When he applied the final brushstroke and cried out that it was Life itself, he turned to his model: she was dead.

Lastly, a narrator explains with a philosopher's precision that there exists in man a primordial force he calls perversity—not the desire for evil out of self-interest, but the desire for evil simply because it is evil, the irresistible impulse to do that which we know we ought not to do. It is this force that draws one to the edge of the precipice, that makes one delay the urgent task, that wrests the confession from the murderer. And this man, who has killed with a poisoned candle, who has enjoyed perfect security for years, catches himself one day muttering in the street the very words that condemn him—and he runs, and he screams, and he confesses, and here he sits, in his cell, in chains, awaiting the hangman.