Usher Down

Dana, a young woman who used to help the police find dead bodies, is driven off a jogging path by a vision of a demonic scarecrow and caught in raging floodwaters. Lightning rips a tree out of a pond and tears a hole in the earth, and Dana is swept down into a massive cavern. When the firefighters pull her out, she tells them astounding news. There’s a house down there. A big one: the House of Usher, described as fiction by Edgar Allan Poe. The house is enormous, ripped into two separate wings (“like the Titanic”) and covered over by a freak layer of ash and lava. And it’s structurally sound, explorable. “It's the 19th century down there.”