Kelly Creagh - Nevermore

He shrugged. Okaaay, she’d just go ahead and take that as a yes. Now all she needed was a way to get home afterward. She probably could walk home, as long as she thought up a good excuse for being gone.

She turned her attention back to the Complete Works. On the bottom, she noticed a thin silk ribbon, sticking out like a beige tongue. Following her fingers along the top edge, Isobel pried the book open to the marked page. “Dream-Land,” the title read. Isobel skimmed over the first stanza: By a route obscure and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only, Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT, On a black throne reigns upright, I have reached these lands but newly From an ultimate dim ThuleFrom a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, Out of SPACE—out of TIME.

Yeah, well, that made about as much sense as Cracker Jacks.

Isobel flipped forward until she recognized one of the titles that Varen had told her to write down at the library: “The Masque of the Red Death.” She thumbed through the story, counting six pages.

That didn’t seem so bad. She began the first paragraph: The “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.

Isobel glanced up from the page with her eyes only. She stared at Varen from over the top edge of the book while he remained absorbed in his notes. Was he serious? The first paragraph alone was like reading the synopsis of a bad low-budget slasher flick remixed with nineteenth-century flair.

Either that or a physician’s death report. Reluctantly she let her eyes fall back to the story.

But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious.

Isobel’s head popped up. “What does ‘sagacious’ mean?”

“Sagacious,” he said, writing, “adjective describing someone in possession of acute mental faculties. Also describing one who might, in a bookstore, think to get up and locate an actual dictionary instead of asking a billion questions.”

Isobel made a face at him. When his pen paused, she ducked her head down and dove back into the page.

When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts.

They resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within.

She stopped, thinking that must mean that, no matter what side of the door you were on, there would be no checking in or out of the Prospero Hotel. She had to admit that was a little dooming right there, and it made her kind of want to know what happened. How was Poe going to write his peeps out of this if there was no exit? She skimmed to the bottom of the paragraph.

Buffoons . . . improvisatori . . . ballet-dancers . . . musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death.”

Yadda yadda. She turned the page.

“Are you skipping?” he asked.

“Nope,” she lied without missing a beat, “I just read fast.”

It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held. There were seven—an imperial suite.

It was here that Isobel first felt the twinge of an inward pull on her mind. Slowly the words started to get out of the way and let images of courtiers revolve, in slow motion, through her mind’s eye. It was as though she had somehow adapted to the density of the language. Soon the words smudged away from the page, and in their place, she was left with the sensation of gliding through the scene, like she’d become a movie camera, sweeping through the sets of rooms and over the heads of costumed actors.

Each of the seven rooms, she read, had its own color, with tall, Gothic windows to match. First was the blue chamber, then the purple, then the green, the orange, the white, and then the violet. The last chamber, however, was black, with heavy draperies and bloodred windows.

It was in this apartment, also, that there stood against the western wall, a gigantic clock of ebony. Its pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang; and when the minute-hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken, there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical, but of so peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each lapse of an hour, the musicians of the orchestra were constrained to pause, momentarily, in their performance, to hearken to the sound; and thus the waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions; and there was a brief disconcert of the whole gay company; and, while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in confused reverie or meditation. But when the echoes had fully ceased, a light laughter at once pervaded the assembly; the musicians looked at each other and smiled as if at their own nervousness and folly, and made whispering vows, each to the other, that the next chiming of the clock should produce in them no similar emotion; and then, after the lapse of sixty minutes, (which embrace three thousand and six hundred seconds of the Time that flies), there came yet another chiming of the clock, and then were the same disconcert and tremulousness and meditation as before.

Isobel skimmed ahead until she reached midnight in the story. Having seen plenty of horror flicks, she knew enough to expect the major drama to start then. And Poe didn’t disappoint. When the black clock chimed twelve, so began the real freakiness. Left and right, everybody started to flip out over some stranger-danger creep who had come out of nowhere.

The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revelers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood—and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.

Gross, she thought, but also kind of cool. Isobel flipped the page and scanned to the very end, to where Prince Prospero, peeved to the max, started charging through all the chambers.

He bore aloft a drawn dagger, and had approached, in rapid impetuosity, to within three or four feet of the retreating figure, when the latter, having attained the extremity of the velvet apartment, turned suddenly and confronted his pursuer. There was a sharp cry—and the dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet, upon which, instantly afterwards, fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero. Then, summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of the revellers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and, seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave-cerements and corpse-like mask which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form.