The Fall of House of Usher deals with the protagonist's arrival to his friend's - Roderick Usher's - house that has been consumed by chaos after Roderick and his sister Madeline, who are the last surviving members of the Usher family, fall ill. The house itself is commodious, ornated by Roderick's paintings, and the protagonist tries to intensify that feeling by comforting his friend. He is soon faced with the somber revelation that Roderick supposes his sister's (and his eventual) demise were caused by the seemingly comfortable house they reside in. In fear of medical exhumation and vociferously agitated by the possibility of his sister's corpse being studied and dissected, Roderick, with the protagonist's help, inters Madeline's body in the family tomb. Later on, as the two surviving residents grow frustrated, their fretting culminates during a storm when a hysterical Roderick enters the protagonist's room; in his attempts to calm his friend down, the protagonists reads him a story of a knight fleeing from a storm and finding himself within a dragon's lodging. However, the two find themselves abhorred when events depicted within the story begin to manifest themselves in reality in the form of eerie sounds; while the protagonist fears it, Roderick confesses that he has been hearing those all week long, and promptly a raging Madeleine storms in to attack her brother, revealing she has been entombed alive. The story concludes with the siblings' real deaths as the protagonist escapes the scene, much like the renegade hero of the story he read fleeing the tempest, and the house cracks apart in two. Despite the plot being convoluted, The Fall of House of Usher is a story that brilliantly demonstrates the range of human emotion ranging from the sensation of impending doom to a nerve-wracking sense of guilt; it is for that reason the story is often seen as Poe's magnum opus.