Masque of the Red Death

  We’ve walked a long way. I struggle to find some sense of direction, to search for any markings on the walls. It smells damp and moldy here.

  “Did Elliott know?”

  “Elliott was worthless. It’s his sister who will help me.” April is still alive? That’s something. If I can find her…

  “Why did you give up on Elliott?”

  “Firstborn sons are always in high demand as sacrifices. Haven’t you read the Bible?”

  “I haven’t.”

  The passage twists, and we follow the curve of the wall.

  “Elliott fell in love with science. It didn’t bother me to kill him. Your father has been keeping the sinners alive through devilry and science. It is time for all of them to die.”

  “You blew up the ship,” I say. “Why?”

  “We needed a grand gesture, to get the people’s attention.”

  He did it for no good reason. I look at him with complete loathing. Like the prince, he is a murderer, and both of them are searching for my father.

  A man approaches from an adjacent tunnel. “Our men aren’t protected from the Red Death,” he tells the reverend. “Not like they are from the contagion. Some of them are dying.”

  The reverend takes his hand from my arm. This could be my only chance to get away from him.

  “Those who are worthy are protected,” the Reverend says. “If they are dying, they aren’t devout enough.” His voice is rising. The other man cowers.

  I dash to the nearest opening, only to discover that it is a stairway that leads down into deeper darkness. It’s warmer in there, and the darkness seems absolute. I feel my way to the bottom of the stairs and realize that the chamber I’ve stumbled upon is filled with people, standing upright, silent, and still. There is a light suddenly, a torch to my left.

  No one is wearing masks.

  The man closest to me has a rash snaking up the left side of his face, like a tattoo of some sort of vine. It is raw and oozing pus.

  I stumble back. They are all infected.

  We are in a vast underground room, a storage area or warehouse. In the flickering light I see that the walls are adorned with carvings that look like religious figures, saints twisted with agony. Statues line the walls. It seems the reverend has spent a good amount of time stripping relics from our abandoned places of worship.

  I make eye contact with a boy who might be a year or two younger than me. His eyes look sad, and he mouths the words, “I’m sorry.”

  Fear rushes through me. I have to get out of here.

  The people are moving now, turning, surrounding me. I gasp. Is it possible for so many people to survive, to be carriers? Were all of them living in the marshes?

  A man has stepped directly in front of me. His eyes are covered with pus.

  He reaches his hand out to touch me.

  “You are completely clean?” he asks, his voice rasping.

  His eyes crawl over my exposed arms and legs. Over my throat where the neckline of this ridiculous dress plunges down.

  “Yes,” I whisper.

  Another man steps forward and pushes the first out of the way. I wince at his oozing hands. The others shift, restless. They are breathing hard, exhaling and inhaling. The air in this room is moist and heavy, and I am surrounded.

  “I’ll let you keep wearing your mask,” one of the men says.

  I want to laugh. I didn’t keep myself sane with a vow. I didn’t reject the caresses and kisses that I desperately wanted from Will to end up here, like this. The knife is in my boot. I whip it out and hold it in front of me, confident. But there are too many of them. And they are armed with knives and cudgels. Some of them have muskets. This is Malcontent’s army. Taking a deep breath, I scream as loudly as I can.

  The circle of bodies shifts. I look for the boy with the sad eyes—maybe he’ll help me. But he is gone.

  I hear a commotion at the top of the stairs.

  “Araby?” It’s April’s voice.

  “It’s the saint’s daughter,” one of the men mutters.

  “April?” My voice is small. It hurts to inhale.

  “Tell her to go away,” a man says as he reaches for me.

  His diseased hands are on my waist, and I imagine the contagion seeping through his skin and running in rivulets down my dress. I only have so much dress; eventually he will touch my skin. I scream again, louder this time.

  Someone grabs me under my arms and pulls me into the crowd. Away from April. Away from the stairs and the clean air above. I want to fight, but I don’t want to touch anyone or anything. I gag. My knife clatters to the floor.

  “Let her go.” The command is obvious, though her voice is quiet. She reminds me of Elliott. “Let her go or you will burn in hell, sooner rather than later.”

  Unexpectedly, the hands fall away. I hit the floor hard.

  “Araby,” April says, “up the stairs, now.” I don’t hesitate.

  She’s standing at the top of the stairs in her silly sequined corset, holding a musket. “Come with me,” she says. “Father will have a safe place for us. For our own good.”

  When we reach him, the reverend, who is smiling, sweeps us into a wider tunnel that has been bricked off on one end and takes the gun from April.

  “You’ve ruined your dress, but your hair looks fabulous,” she says. She laughs. “I am speaking to you, of course, not Father. His hair looks awful.”

  The look he gives her is not loving, or kind.

  “Sit here.” The reverend gestures to a spot on the floor. I see quickly why he has chosen this location. He takes a pair of manacles from his pocket, snaps one side around my wrist and the other to a metal pipe that runs the length of the wall. “Stay put,” he says. Then he chuckles to himself.

  “Don’t hurt her,” April says. “You can always convert her. Think of how impressed the people will be that you’ve converted the scientist’s daughter.”

  The reverend ignores her. And then she says, with complete and absolute certainty, “Elliott loved her.”

  I stop breathing. After everything, how can this be what makes me cry?

  Reverend Malcontent crosses the room in three quick steps, pulls the mask from her face, and throws it to the ground. He brings his foot down on the porcelain and crushes it into the stone floor. April and I stare in complete horror.

  “Now I can be sure you are trusting only in God,” he says.

  I expect him to smash my mask as well, but he ignores me and walks out of the room.

  April puts her hand to her face, frowning … and then she pulls a small mirror from her pocket.

  “Is this lipstick too red?” she asks. I move my head a tiny bit. She must think I mean no. “Good, because one family should only have so many crazies, and I’m not going to compound these sins by wearing lipstick that is too red.”

  I laugh. I can’t help myself.

  “It all comes back to the original crazy, of course. Uncle Prospero. My father wasn’t crazy until his throat was slashed and he was thrown into the body cart. That would drive anyone insane.” She looks at me like she wants me to agree. I nod slowly.

  “He is not the father you remember,” I begin.

  She smooths her hair. “That man lived for five years among those poor rotting people without a mask, and he never got the disease.”

  “Maybe you won’t either.”

  “No,” she says. “I’m pretty sure that I will.” She holds up my father’s journal. “Malcontent values this, so I guess we’d better take it with us.” She places the book in her makeup bag. It’s a testament to the size of the bag that it goes in easily.

  “April—”

  “Shh.” She puts a finger to her lips. From the corridor outside this room comes the sound of marching feet. “His army.”

  “I don’t understand how there can be so many.”

  She shrugs.

  The footsteps gradually fade away.

  “Didn’t he leave guards? Surely—”

  “Fath
er doesn’t think I will leave. Because…” She blinks a couple of times, like she does before she lies to her mother. “Because people are murdering each other in the city and he’s offered me his protection.” She pulls a pin from her hair and kneels in front of me. “Be still. The city is going to burn.” The lock pops open.

  She cocks her head, listening. The echoes of the last footsteps have faded. She pushes the door open, and we stand looking out into the tunnel.

  “Which way?” she asks.

  I look one way and then the other, like a child about to cross the street for the first time.

  Water is swirling around our ankles, dark and cold. The prince is flooding the tunnel, like the reverend predicted.

  “That way,” I say.

  We begin to walk, quickly, against the flowing water. We need to get out of here.

  “Remember when I told you that Elliott liked books better than girls? I didn’t know he’d end up besotted—” Her voice breaks, and she tries to suppress a sob. “He had a place … he was working on some secret project.”

  The mask factory… Kent, who seems involved with everything … the balloon.

  “I know how we’re getting out of the city,” I say. “We should take the next tunnel to the right and then climb up to the street as soon as we can.” My voice sounds sure, but I’m not completely certain of any of this.

  Water rushes down the corridor in a steady flow. We have to lift our feet higher than normal to walk, and it’s exhausting. I suspect this passage isn’t flooding yet because there are lower passages, and the water is finding its way there.

  We pass one perpendicular passage and then another. The water swirls around our ankles. We can keep going this way. It’s probably safer than fighting through the mob on the street.

  “So the Reverend Malcontent plans to send an army of the diseased to take over the city?” I ask.

  “They want stone buildings and running water. You can’t blame them. Though, if you think about it, that’s all going slowly to hell. Crumbling. And the water”—she splashes it against the wall to prove her point—“tastes like swamp muck. Maybe they’ll be happy in their houses in the city. No one else is.”

  The water is freezing cold, and I can’t see much of anything.

  “Was Elliott very upset when he realized that I was gone?” I ask, trying to distract myself from the cold and my horror.

  “He was frantic. He thought one of the prince’s spies had taken you. He threw one of those old men against the wall and knocked over a bookcase.” She sighs. “Don’t feel too terrible. If he’s alive, you’ll be the one who saved him. He saw you in the crowd and started down the gangplank. It’s possible—”

  Her words are interrupted by a splash from behind us. Not water hitting the walls, but something bigger. Is someone following us? April and I hold very still, but I hear nothing, and now the water has risen to our knees.

  “It’s not flowing down to the lower passages fast enough. Do you think we should climb up yet?” April asks.

  “Let’s keep moving until we find a ladder,” I say.

  The floor of the passage rumbles, and as we turn the corner we see a wall of dark water roaring toward us. My face hits bricks, and my mask makes a sound like bones cracking. Elliott’s ring slips down to the edge of my finger. I make a desperate fist because I don’t want to lose it.

  The water settles at our waists, but the current is stronger. A vortex swirls around my body, and I can’t help imagining being sucked into the darkness of the corridors below.

  “Araby!” April points to a ladder. I grab wildly, and when my hand touches metal, I wrap my fist around a rung and hold on, even as the water pushes me into the wall again.

  April climbs quickly. I’m a few rungs below her.

  “Come on, Araby,” she commands.

  But I can’t. I’m frozen, and something is nudging my ankles. Something has crept from a dark, abandoned corner and is swimming in the water beside me.

  A body floats past. Maybe it touched me; maybe that’s what I felt.

  And then there’s a noise from above, and a face looks down, silhouetted in a circle of afternoon light.

  “Hey there, you need to get out!” a boy’s high-pitched voice calls.

  I stare up, surprised.

  The large metal screws that hold this ladder in place must have come loose, and the ladder makes a horrible discordant squeal as the metal twists. I can feel it bending beneath my feet even as I reach for the next rung.

  We will only make it to the top if one of us takes the boy’s hand. But he is diseased. And we both know never to touch someone who is diseased. Pus drips from a sore on his arm and drops into the water. I can see the fear on April’s face, revulsion bordering on panic.

  She has no mask to protect her, and he’s clearly part of her father’s army. He’s one of the enemy.

  I don’t want to take his hand either.

  The left side of the ladder pulls from the wall with a loud screech.

  Closing my eyes, I reach up past April. The ladder is moving now, shaking with the current, but the boy has both of my hands. Something tears through my shoulder. It could be the metal of the ladder, spearing me as it rips away from the wall. It could be a crocodile, ready to devour me.

  April wraps her arms around my waist.

  Our only hope is this boy. We are so heavy with our wet skirts, we will drag him down with us....

  But he is surprisingly strong. He pulls me to street level, and I let go of his hand, clawing at the cement around the mouth of the tunnel. I’m on the sidewalk, and April is beside me. A corpse is close enough that if I reach out I could touch it. A man’s body, with blood on his cheeks.

  I turn to warn April so she won’t look directly at it. Seeing her without a mask, surrounded by corpses, makes me want to cry. How did this happen to us?

  April grabs my shoulder, and I almost scream with the pain. “Oh, God, you’re bleeding all over. This is going to scar.” She whimpers. “You’re never going to be able to wear a backless dress again.”

  Suddenly we hear screaming from inside one of the buildings. I struggle to my feet and put my hand out to April.

  “Thank you,” I say to the boy. He has a gently sweet face, and he’s young. I realize that he’s the boy from below, in the tunnel. “You saved our lives.”

  He’s staring at my mask. I put my hand to it. The main part is intact, but I feel a cracked place on the inside.

  “I didn’t know,” he says, staring at his hands. He thought we were diseased, like him. “You’re hurt,” he says. A sore beneath his eye bursts, and pus runs unchecked down his face. April makes a sound.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “We don’t cover the sores because fabric makes them itch.”

  “So you aren’t dying?” April asks him. “You’re one of the lucky ones....” She trails off. Who knows if the lucky ones are the people who live or the ones who die quickly? April and I lean against each other. My shoulder is burning.

  “I’ve had it since I was nine,” he says. “In the last year it’s gotten worse.”

  “Does it hurt?” April asks.

  I want to tell her to leave him alone. She’s never been the least bit interested before. Musket fire echoes from the buildings on either side of the street before he can answer her.

  “We have to go,” April says.

  The boy watches us.

  “Do you have someplace to go?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “Our homes out in the marsh were destroyed. I don’t want to go back in there.” He gestures to the tunnels.

  I wipe at my arm, surprised when I see that my hand is dripping blood.

  “Araby, it’s deep. We have to find something.” April sounds distressed.

  She tears at her skirt, but it’s made of stiff pieces of lace. Lace isn’t going to staunch the bleeding. “We need something to use as a bandage.”

  My dress is made from emerald-green mesh, and the idea of pressing it to t
he wound, which throbs and burns at the same time, is unthinkable. The dead man’s shirt might be absorbent enough to use as a bandage. But his clothing is probably crawling with germs. The boy has a cotton sash wrapped around his waist. He unties it slowly.

  “You can use this if you want.” He holds it out, offering it to me. April looks at the sash for a long moment.

  “April, I don’t feel so well.” My hands are shaking.

  “Stay with us, Araby,” she says as the world wavers around me. And then she presses the cloth against the heat of the wound.

  She puts her arms around me and drags me toward a heavy wooden door. The boy pushes it open, and we all stumble into a dim room, April still pressing the sash against the gash in my back.

  “I can tie that,” he says. “If you don’t mind me touching you.”

  “I don’t mind....” I falter. “I don’t want to die.” In my mind I’m back in the garden at the top of the Akkadian Towers, and I’m saying it to Elliott. Or maybe in the balloon, saying it to Will. I don’t want to die.

  “What’s your name?” I ask the boy.

  “Thom,” he says. I nod and sway on my feet as I do.

  A burning smell hangs in the air.

  “She’s going to pass out,” the boy says. But I don’t think I will.

  “Here.” April hands me her flask. I drink everything, and then it falls from my fingers, clinking against the tiles.

  “Enough sitting around,” I hear myself say. “Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SIX

  APRIL PICKS UP THE FLASK. I’M GLAD, BECAUSE I feel too dizzy. I would have left it on the ground.

  Then she completely shocks me. She turns to Thom and asks, “Do you want to come with us?”

  “What are you doing?” I whisper to her.

  “We can’t just leave him here,” she says.

  I stare at her, and she blinks a couple of times, as if the afternoon sunlight is too bright.

  “He can’t be more than twelve years old. We can’t leave him alone. If we decide he’s too contagious, we can leave him someplace safe.”