Roderick Usher sends a letter to an old friend, urgently requesting his company to help ease a nervous illness.

The narrator rides through a bleak, depressing landscape and arrives at the gloomy, decrepit House of Usher.

A valet escorts the narrator through dark passages filled with ancient armor and tapestries into Usher's studio.

The narrator finds Usher pale and ghastly, his mood swinging rapidly between ecstasy and deep despair.

Usher describes his acute nervous condition and his constant, overwhelming fear that something terrible will befall him.

The narrator briefly glimpses Madeline Usher walking silently through a far corner of the room without acknowledging him.

The narrator and Usher spend several days together reading, painting, and listening to music in an attempt to lift Usher's spirits.

Usher recites his poem 'The Haunted Palace,' which the narrator interprets as Usher's awareness of his own mental decline.

Usher announces that Madeline has died and that her body will be temporarily stored in a vault beneath the house.

Usher and the narrator carry Madeline's coffin to a small, damp, dungeon-like vault deep beneath the house.

Usher's condition deteriorates sharply in the days following Madeline's burial, and his erratic behavior begins to unsettle the narrator.

During a stormy night, the narrator reads the tale of 'The Mad Trist' aloud in an attempt to calm the terrified Usher.

Strange sounds rise from deep within the house, eerily matching the violent events being described in 'The Mad Trist.'

Madeline bursts through the doors in a bloody nightgown and collapses upon Usher in her final death agonies, killing him.

The narrator flees the house and watches the entire structure crack apart and sink beneath the black waters of the tarn.

The narrator answers a desperate letter from childhood friend Roderick Usher and arrives at the crumbling House of Usher to find him gripped by a worsening nervous illness. During his stay, the narrator briefly encounters the ghostly Madeline Usher and spends days trying to lift Usher's spirits through art, music, and reading. When Madeline apparently dies, the two men seal her body in a vault beneath the house, and Usher's condition plunges into something far more disturbing. On a stormy night, the narrator reads the tale of 'The Mad Trist' aloud to calm Usher, only to hear the story's violent events echoed by mysterious sounds rising from within the house. Madeline suddenly appears, alive and bloodied, and her final death agonies bring her crashing down upon Usher, killing him. The horrified narrator flees and watches the House of Usher crack apart and disappear beneath the black waters of the tarn.

The headline events from the narrator's arrival to the fall of the house.

The narrator observes the House of Usher and its surrounding tarn existing in a state of extreme, oppressive decay.

A servant takes the narrator's horse while a silent valet leads him wordlessly through the dark interior of the estate.

The narrator passes the Usher family physician leaving the house and notices the doctor's strange expression of cunning and perplexity.

Usher reveals that he has not ventured beyond his small set of rooms in years, confining himself entirely within them.

Madeline's mysterious wasting disease, which baffles her physicians, has produced progressive weakness and episodes of bodily rigidity.

Usher's abstract paintings depict vast underground spaces lit by a sourceless, eerie glow that deeply unsettles the narrator.

Usher plays the guitar with wild, frenzied inspiration, producing improvised music that seems driven by forces beyond his control.

Usher reveals his conviction that all plant life possesses sentience and deliberate intent, far beyond what reason can explain.

The narrator notices that the vault where Madeline's coffin is placed is located directly beneath his own sleeping quarters.

Before screwing down the coffin lid, the narrator observes Madeline's flushed cheeks and faint smile, as though she could be alive.

Usher's increasingly erratic and distracted behavior in the days after the burial makes it impossible for the narrator to sleep.

Usher arrives at the narrator's door late at night carrying a lamp and asks anxiously whether the narrator has seen 'it.'

The narrator reads the passage where Ethelred slays the dragon in 'The Mad Trist' while horrible shrieks echo from within the house.

The shield falls with a clang in 'The Mad Trist' and a matching metallic crash echoes from somewhere deep in the house.

A flash of intense, unnatural light briefly blinds the fleeing narrator as the crumbling House of Usher disappears beneath the tarn.

Before even meeting Usher, the narrator registers the overwhelming decay of the estate — the crumbling stonework, the dark tarn, the suspicious family physician leaving the house, and the eerie silence of the servants. During his stay, he observes Usher's disturbing abstract paintings and frenzied guitar playing, and hears Usher's unusual theory that plants possess sentient intent. The interment of Madeline is attended by a series of unsettling secondary details, including the vault's position directly beneath the narrator's room and Madeline's unnervingly lifelike appearance inside the coffin. After the burial, the narrator's own sleep is destroyed by inexplicable terror, and Usher's late-night appearance with a lamp and a haunted question only deepens the dread. The reading of 'The Mad Trist' builds to its own climax as each sound from the story is mirrored inside the house, culminating in a crashing shield and a final blinding flash of light as the structure collapses.

The atmosphere, secondary details, and mounting dread surrounding the main events.

The narrator resolves to accept Usher's unusual letter and travel to the remote house despite his own unease about the visit.

The narrator is overwhelmed by an insufferable feeling of gloom upon first glimpsing the house that no rational explanation can account for.

The narrator notes that the Usher family has maintained a single, unbroken bloodline for generations, producing no collateral branches.

After days of effort, the narrator gradually realizes that his companionship is making no difference and that Usher cannot be helped.

Usher insists that the house's decaying stones, fungi, and tarn waters have developed a sentient force that controls his fate.

Usher explains that Madeline's illness can render her body so rigidly cataleptic that she may appear entirely dead.

Usher discloses that Madeline and he are twins who have always shared a profound and almost supernatural mutual sensibility.

After days of close company, the narrator feels his own rational perspective beginning to blur dangerously under Usher's paranoid influence.

Usher throws open the window draperies during the storm to reveal a strange luminous cloud hovering unnaturally around the house.

The narrator pulls the draperies shut and insists the eerie glow is merely an electrical or gaseous phenomenon from the tarn.

In 'The Mad Trist,' the knight Ethelred forces his way into the hermit's dwelling only to find a dragon guarding a golden palace.

Usher suddenly confesses that he has been hearing sounds of Madeline moving within the sealed vault for many days.

Usher cries out that he knew Madeline had been buried alive yet was far too terrified to speak or take action.

Both twins die together as Madeline's final agonies bring her collapsing upon Usher, and the two fall dead on the floor.

The hairline crack the narrator noticed in the house's facade upon arrival widens into a full rupture that swallows the structure whole.

The story's turning points begin with the narrator's inexplicable dread upon first approaching the house and his discovery that the Usher family's centuries of single-line descent have produced a doomed and diseased lineage. Despite his best efforts, the narrator gradually realizes he is helpless to improve Usher's condition, while Usher's conviction that the house itself governs his fate deepens into something indistinguishable from madness. The twin revelation gives new and chilling significance to Madeline's cataleptic illness, and after her burial the narrator's own grip on rationality begins to slip under Usher's influence. On the stormy night of the climax, Usher's confession — that he has known for days Madeline was alive in the vault but could not bring himself to act — is the story's most devastating revelation. Both twins die together in the room, and the house, which the narrator noticed was already cracked upon his very first arrival, finally tears itself apart and is swallowed by the tarn.

The key revelations, decisions, and emotional shifts that drive the tragedy forward.