That’s two Usher kids down, four to go. The news of Camille’s (Kate Siegel) brutal death hits some Ushers harder than others. Roderick (Bruce Greenwood) continues to emphasize that the family needs become “a wall” in the face of this adversity. (He gives a very fiery, but unfeeling, speech about manning your battle stations, which he ripped off from his horrible boss from the ’70s.) Roderick then confronts Victorine (T’Nia Miller) about why her half-sister would be snooping around her lab — he wonders if she is the informant. Instead of confessing that yes, she is lying about the chimpanzees dying during surgery, she instead tells him exactly what he wants to hear: that the study is moving into human trials. It placates her father for a little bit. You know what sets him off again, though? Getting a look at that security footage from the night Camille died. Let’s take a look at what happens during the fourth episode of The Fall of the House of Usher, “The Black Cat.”

Do Madeline and Roderick recognize Verna yet?

The Usher twins get an enhanced picture (if you know, you know) of the security guard at the R.U.E. lab with Camille, and it finally shows Verna’s (Carla Gugino) face (instead of it being covered with that pesky skull mask). The viewers now know she is the same woman as the bartender the siblings rang 1980 in with — but do Roddie and Mads? They both make curious moves after seeing this photo that points to… maybe? Madeline (Mary McDonnell) goes to an abandoned storefront that very much could be that bar from back in the day. She finds boarded-up windows, a spray-painted raven above the door, and a real raven perched above watching her every move. 

Meanwhile, Roderick heads to the basement of the Fortunato building. He looks, let’s call it, perturbed. Then he hears bells jingling from behind the brick wall. And that’s when he starts to actually look worried. Unfortunately for him, he’ll soon have much more to worry about than the haunting sound of bells.

How does Napoleon Usher die?

The lesson here is: Never buy a new cat to replace the one you murdered while blacked out. But that’s exactly what Napoleon (Rahul Kohli) does, and he pays for it dearly. We, of course, know this from the moment he steps into that animal shelter and finds the exact match for Pluto, his boyfriend Julius’ (Daniel Jun) now dead cat (RIP!) because who should be manning the desk? It’s Verna, this time disguised as a perky lover of cats. She says, perhaps ironically, that she has a “soft spot for the short-timers.”

The moment Leo brings the new cat home, it begins to terrorize him. It scratches his eye and leaves dead bloodied animals all over the apartment. But the most unsettling part about it is that no one else seems to see this new cat. Eventually, Leo calls Verna to get rid of it. Things go downhill fast. She tells him the cat is in the walls of the apartment. Suddenly, it jumps on him, tearing at his throat until he almost pops its eye out. Disturbingly, he looks up to see Verna standing there with her eye popped out, licking the blood off her hands. Leo loses it. The video game financier then — and this is not a joke, by the way — grabs Thor’s hammer that’s sitting on his shelf (Chris Hemsworth will get him another, he notes in the middle of his madness) and starts going to town on his walls in order to find this cat. By the time Jules comes home, he finds that his boyfriend has destroyed the place and is still going strong. He tries to stop Leo — he doesn’t hear a cat, and he certainly doesn’t see the dead animals in the bathtub or Verna’s dead body with the cat in the wall — but Leo has lost control. Then, Leo sees the cat perched on the railing of the deck. With Thor’s hammer in hand, he runs full speed at the thing, falling to his death. The cat, or Verna, whatever it is, takes a nice little stroll over his body, just for good measure.

Are other Ushers spiraling?

Oh, you bet. Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan) thinks she spots Verna-as-Candy in the background of one of Bill’s (Matt Biedel) live-stream exercise classes and can’t believe he would break the one rule they have about their sex life. Bill claims he has no idea what she’s talking about — Candy wasn’t there — and he’s worried about Tammy’s insomnia. 

Speaking of marital discord: Pym (Mark Hamill) comes to Freddie (Henry Thomas) with the burner phone they found with Morrie’s (Crystal Balint) belongings at, as Leo lovingly refers to it, “Perry’s puddle cuddle.” While Freddie does everything in his power to deny that it could even possibly belong to his wife, the thought of why she had this –– and why she was with Perry (Sauriyan Sapkota) that night –– consumes him. He gets some cocaine from Leo to help him cope. He then takes a whole bunch of it to psych himself up to try unlocking the phone using Morrie’s finger, and then her face. This tactic doesn’t work. Even if one of those options was the correct way to unlock it, she is, as Freddie puts it, “melted.”

How did Roderick and Dupin meet?

A young Dupin (Malcolm Goodwin), then a Medicare fraud investigator, comes knocking on Roderick’s door to ask him about his signature on a whole bunch of forms. He believes they have been forged so that Fortunato can get people into drug trials without informing patients of the very real side effects; many of these patients have wound up dead, their bodies missing from their graves. Roderick never signed any of these documents — it’s clear that his signature was also forged. Dupin wants to recruit him to build a case against Fortunato, but, worried about getting fired, Roderick turns him down. 

When Frederick confronts Rufus Griswold (Michael Trucco), the Fortunato CEO makes it very clear that Roderick needs to be a team player. This disgusts the good, kind Annabel Lee (Katie Parker) to her core. But Madeline sees it as the exact type of opportunity she was talking about when she told her brother to get on Rufus’s good side –– in order to make moves at the company. She thinks he should do exactly what Rufus says… while also making friends with Dupin. It’ll be interesting to see if and how Roderick can pull off this kind of tightrope walk.

Spine-Tingling Mike Flanagan Series and Films to StreamWatch if you dare.