16:21 Mar 22 2008
Times Read: 590
This story was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's, The Masque of the Red Death and approaches the story from a different perspective. It is absolutely necessary that you read The Masque of the Red Death before reading this, or very little of it will make any kind of sense at all, so if you have not read it, then click here.
[Note: The main characters full name (Ius Iuris) translates into Justice in Latin.]
"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."--Edgar Allan Poe-
The Masque of the Red Death
The man in front of me coughed once more, expelling from his mouth, wide agape, a large amount of crimson blood, before he sucked in another breath, screwed up his face against the pain, and continued to speak where he had left off.
“You must avenge us, Ius, you must.”
He leaned forward, sobbing and clutching into my white clothing, streaking it with his blood. A month or so before I would have been worried that I would become contaminated, but with the death of the man before me, I would be only one of two still living. The Red Death had taken all. The rich, the poor, the weak, the strong, the young, the old. With the exception of the Prince.
Prince Prospero, the ruler of our little hamlet, had long ago taken every available resource and retreated into his wrought-iron fortress, and into safety. Meanwhile we, his loyal subjects, were left outside the walls to face the horrors of the Red Death on our own.
It was this injustice that I had been asked to remedy, though I hadn’t even the faintest idea of how to go about doing so. I looked away from the man that wasted away in front of me to face the only other survivor, Iugo Iuris, my father. His face was unmarred with the red sores that alighted the face of the old man before me, and the only thing upon his face was rapt sympathy for the man before us.
My father ran a warmed piece of cloth across the old man’s forehead, whispering softly to the man and bringing him once more to peaceful thoughts. The man gave a last gasp, which produced a grotesque scarlet bubble from one of his nostrils, before he finally slumped against the table that sat between he and I, quite clearly dead.
My father heaved a sigh; nothing more. I had no such emotional response. We had seen so much death in the past months that hardly a thing stirred within either of us when we saw such things now. I pushed the man from his seat and took it myself, burying my face within my hands.
“What is there now, father? There is nothing here.”
I voiced my concerns much more freely than I would have otherwise, but it wasn’t as though there was any fear of eavesdropping. My father sighed once more, shaking his head only slightly at the way I dumped the old man’s corpse unceremoniously to the earthen floor of our cottage, and then spoke himself.
“We can not leave, my son. Should we do so, we will only spread our disease and bring our misfortune upon others.”
“But neither of the two of us has been infected.”
My father smiled his signature half-smile, the way he used to smile at me before he ruffled my hair and tell me how proud he was, before all of this happened. Before all the death.
But it was the words that came after his smile that would come to haunt me;
“Aye. Neither of us carries the contagion. Yet.”
***
Three days we had lived on, and the dying words of the old man, and the foreboding words of my father had haunted me undyingly every hour of all three days. We didn’t leave the house, save to throw the old man’s body into the ally behind our cottage once the smell became unbearable.
We had just finished a very meager dinner of soup, which was in fact mostly water mixed with bits of hope, and a single bone that had upon it a few shreds of meat, though what kind of meat it was, I’d much rather not fathom. My father both opened and closed the meal with a prayer, and it made me smile slightly to still see hope painted upon my father’s face. But my smile faded quite quickly thereafter, when my father let loose an unexpected cough, and then stared in horror at the sleeve with which he covered his mouth.
The white fabric upon my father’s arm was dyed a sickening red, and my blood ran quite cold at the sight. I was in shock, and so was my father. The both of us knew this was bound to be our fate, but neither of us had put any thought into how to deal with the situation when it did. I stood quickly and made to help my father to bed, but he pushed me away, gently.
“Nay, son. Allow me my final ours unchained. Let me live before I die, please.”
I nodded silently and tried half-heartedly to return to the watery meal, but I could not. Not in many months had the thought of death haunted me in the slightest, with His foul stench around every corner I grew accustomed to His presence, but now that I heard his knocking upon our door, Fear gripped me like never it had before.
Within five minutes, my father was bleeding from his pores. He wiped it from his brow with his sleeve, as I had seen him to sweat on our long days in the fields, working for that damnable Prince back in those days when Life outnumbered Death, and we could worry about things as trivial as serving someone not ourselves. After fifteen minutes, my father had heeded my advice and moved to his bed to die.
His visage was now so obscured with maroon that I could scarcely tell that it was my father beneath all of the drying blood. It had nearly been half an hour since our meal and his first cough, when he pulled me close to him, struggling for breath, and spoke to me his final words.
“My son…do not leave our town. Do not spread our misfortune to any other, for no once deserves this torture…save for one man…”
And with one final sigh, as if he was finally drifting off to sleep after a long night of nightmares, my father, the only other living person for many, many miles, save once more for that blasted Prince, died before me.
***
It took me an hour or so to work out what my father had meant with his last words, but at last I came to the conclusion I believe I was meant to arrive it. I stood now outside of the looming structure of Prince Prospero’s palace. It was a massive complex, containing anything one living within would ever need, save for a door or window. I ambled slowly around the structure as the evening faded to night around me, partly looking for a way in, and partly killing time.
The moon had nearly reached its peak in the sky as I finally got the sign I was looking for that it was time for me to begin my final act among the living; a unexpected cough of mine yielded blood. I moved quickly to the only way in to the complex I found, a wide-mouthed smokestack for what appeared to be an oven.
Months of near-starvation meant that this opening was hardly an obstacle, and once I had slithered down the stacked stone structure, I indeed found myself in an oven, but I nearly cried aloud when I felt bones crunch beneath my feet. Not that it wasn’t a common sensation for me as of late, I just wasn’t expecting to find any in an oven.
I burst through the stone oven’s door, and I found myself standing in a room of extreme oddity. Around me there were stone pedestals, upon which there were nothing save for white sheets. I identified them as burial shrouds, and moved quickly out of the room to find the inhabitants of the complex. I made my way around, hearing nothing, when at long last, I heard a tune coming from before me, and I moved to a purple-colored window pane to gaze upon the source of the noise.
The sight that greeted me was among the strangest I had ever seen, more people than I had seen at all in the past six months were on the other side of the wall, dancing and enjoying themselves. The injustice of it all was wrought upon my face in my cryptic half smile, as I made my way back to the room I had entered first, and found one of the funeral shrouds. I wiped upon it my face and my skin, streaking it in blood of my own. I then enwrapped myself in it, and, still smiling slightly, made my way back to the revelers.
I wandered all the way through the party once before anyone noticed me at all. I had made my way to a back room, one decorated in demented colors of black and red, and not a single one of the party-goers had afforded me a glance. I made eye contact with one, finally, and laughed a small bit as he pulled the sleeve of the woman next to him, who screamed quietly into her hand. Behind me, an ebony clock struck twelve haunting notes, and I smiled, knowing that before it stuck another hour, the cosmic scales of Justice will have been made right, and I shall finally find rest.
The clock finished its nocturne, the Prince bellowed some words I did not care to listen to, and then all fell silent for what was to be the final time.
And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.--Edgar Allan Poe-
The Masque of the Red Death
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