Dance of the Red Death (Masque of the Red Death)

by Griffin, Bethany

  As we continue, my bag feels heavier and heavier. Elliott keeps one hand on his sword, as if he can fight off the disease.

  The road turns, and the river blocks our path. We have to cross a low bridge to enter the city from this direction. It’s built of white stone; cool to the touch, I learn when I reach out for the railing. The water is about a foot lower than usual. It ripples over knees and elbows and faces with the same cheerful sound it makes when flowing over the smooth stones that line the bank.

  I break our prolonged silence to ask, “Do either of you . . . smell something?”

  “It’s death,” Elliott says. “Or, more precisely, the city.”

  I look away, to the buildings that line the shore: a simple white church that is, astoundingly, unscathed by vandalism; some apartment buildings; a house with a corpse hanging from a balcony. He has a sign pinned to his shirt, and I strain to make out the writing. Did he hang himself, or was he a victim of violence? Did he pin the sign to his shirt before tying the noose and jumping from the balcony, or was it attached to him later?

  “Araby?” Elliott breaks my trance. “Come on. We need to find an inn. I’m starving.”

  I am too. Despite the death and decay around us, despite the stench of corpses decomposing in the city streets, I am ravenous.

  We pass to the other side of the bridge, like so many others who have come and gone in this dying city, and there’s no one to notice. The streets are mostly deserted, but I see faces watching us from behind sheer curtains. Men lounge in doorways.

  A man in uniform, a courier perhaps, hurries toward the market. He has a gun but moves nervously.

  Red scythes have been painted on the sides of many buildings. One on a warehouse has a staff that is nearly two stories tall. Elliott frowns. A few blocks away, near an inn, is a heap of something white. Bones?

  “Masks,” Elliott says when we get closer, prodding them with his foot. A nearly intact one falls over the toe of his boot.

  From the corner of my eye, I catch sight of a man with a dark robe. Could Malcontent’s men have found us already? He slides something from his pocket, coming straight toward us. I open my mouth to scream, but Elliott shoves me through the door of an inn. I turn back, but Will puts his hand on my shoulder. Elliott is blocking the door, sword in hand.

  I push Will away, but before I get any farther, Elliott turns, sheathing his blade. “Coward,” Elliott mutters. “He ran when he saw I was armed.”

  I release the breath that I was holding, relieved that we haven’t come to violence in our first few moments back. But Elliott slams his fist down on a wooden table, as angry as I’ve ever seen him.

  “Malcontent’s men don’t have to come close enough to fight. They can sidle up to unarmed people and infect them.” His face is red. “I know how to fight a tyrant. I don’t know how to fight a disease.”

  I struggle for the right words. My father’s life was spent fighting a disease, but of course, he knew more about it than anyone suspected. Except Prospero.

  The inn is crowded, but conversation is muffled. The patrons look tattered, dirty. Will threads his way through and claims a table. We stow our packs underneath.

  When the innkeeper comes over, he’s surprised that we want food. “Most people just want to drink,” he says. “To forget.” He gives us the menu for the day, finishing with a dark “It will cost you.”

  “That won’t be a problem.” Elliott drops a piece of gold onto the table. The innkeeper picks it up to examine it, and when he sees Elliott’s sign on the coin, his demeanor changes. He hurries to the kitchen and brings back a tray, then hovers over Elliott, answering questions about the availability of food. Supplies are low, but people with money are not starving. Most people do not have money.

  “In many areas, the streets are impassable,” the innkeeper adds. “Bodies are everywhere.” I stop eating, but he continues. “No one is sure what happened to the corpse collectors. Some say that the prince stopped paying them.” He looks quickly to Elliott, as if he might have the answer, but Elliott shrugs. “Personally, I think they’re all dead themselves.” He shudders. “Doesn’t matter who they are—if someone can remove the dead from the streets, the city will be theirs.”

  “And once the streets have been cleared of the dead, we’ll have a way to bring in food,” Elliott suggests.

  “Exactly,” the innkeeper beams.

  “Araby, you need to eat,” Will says softly from across the table. His expression reminds me of the way my mother used to watch me. I am free while Mother is a prisoner. I have plenty of food while other people are starving. The guilt makes me feel even less like eating.

  “People are ready for some good news,” the innkeeper intones, looking around the common room. So many are drinking though it isn’t even midday yet, and the air is one of gloom, not the boisterous one of freely flowing wine.

  “I hope that my return to the city is good news,” Elliott says. “I have plans.” He drops his voice, and Will chooses this moment to scold me once again.

  “Araby,” he says in the voice he uses with Elise and Henry. “Eat some bread.” He slides the basket across the table at me. I take it angrily, and when I do, the sleeve of my dress tears loudly enough to draw Elliott’s attention.

  “You need something new,” he says. The innkeeper takes the hint and hurries away.

  It’s heartening that Elliott has found support here, at the first establishment we’ve visited. Perhaps people are still capable of hope. I hope that I will have the same success on my mission of finding Father.

  Moments later, the innkeeper’s wife brings a dress to the table for my inspection. It’s overly large, demure, and has a busy flowered print. I start to say that no, I would never wear this, but then the innkeeper speaks from behind his wife.

  “It belonged to my daughter. She’s been dead for two years now.”

  “Will it do?” Elliott asks.

  I take the dress. It’s even more shapeless than I expected, faded from multiple washings. It looks like a dress sewn for a twelve-year-old. A large twelve-year-old. The innkeeper’s wife has tears in her eyes.

  “Lovely,” I say, wondering if I can repair the damage to my own dress instead. Elliott counts out a few extra coins, but the man won’t take his money.

  “We are glad that you’ve returned,” he says. “My brother was one of Prospero’s former guards. When he defected to your cause, the rebellion gave him something to live for.”

  Elliott nods slowly. “Spread the word. We’ll need a meeting place. . . .”

  “Some of the men have already been gathering here.”

  “Excellent. I’ll return tomorrow, around noon, to rendezvous with whomever you can contact.”

  The innkeeper beams, but his wife looks more skeptical. She has lost her daughter. Nothing Elliott does will change that.

  The innkeeper arranges for one of his workers to drive us across town in an illicit steam carriage. “I would give it to you,” he tells Elliott, “but we use it to fetch supplies, and without transportation . . .”

  “I won’t ask that of you.” Elliott claps the man on the shoulder, seeming for all the world like a ruler already. But I see the way he looks at the carriage when we go outside. It isn’t fancy like April’s, or modified for speed like his old one, but it’s transportation in a city where movement is limited. He won’t take it today, but he doesn’t have to. We’ve all seen that the innkeeper hides it in an abandoned building behind his establishment. He sends a driver and a guard with us. The guard has two guns and stands in the back, on a platform similar to what April’s guards used to occupy.

  “Drive along the river,” Elliott requests. “I want to have a look at the factories.”

  A corpse blocks the street, so the guard gets out and moves it, carefully using a wooden beam that he seems to keep on hand for this exact purpose.

  “Not many carriages for hire, it seems,” Elliott remarks, watching with an air of longing as the driver works the cont
rols.

  “Prince Prospero has been commandeering them,” the man says. “His men take them at gunpoint.”

  “Yet another challenge to moving enough food into the city,” Elliott says.

  We are driving past an entire city block that has burned. Some walls are still intact, even a blackened window. In a partial wall a brick fireplace stands alone, charred and abandoned.

  “Have Prospero’s soldiers tried to take this carriage?” Elliott asks. He’s scanning the buildings that line the river.

  “More than once,” the driver says. “We know a few hiding spots.”

  Elliott grins his approval. “I like a man who can avoid Prospero’s traps,” he says. The taciturn driver nods.

  “Turn ahead,” Elliott says. “We’ll want to approach the university from the upper city.”

  We’ve been gone for less than a week, but I’m seeing the city through fresh eyes. I glance at Will. Once he tried to make me see the beauty of this place, but there is so little left. Everything is dirty, crumbling, gray. A sickly sweet smell pervades everything, and I try not to gag.

  Abandoned objects litter the road. A child’s hair bow, a wooden soldier, a fine silver flask that someone must have treasured.

  Instead of dwelling on these things, I focus my attention on the buildings. So many are simply shells and ruins, but the city doesn’t feel emptier. Behind a collapsed apartment building we see more tenements, an exposed cellar, as if the layers of the city have been peeled back, revealing more and more. The hole that was once a cellar is now filled with greenish water.

  Elliott pays the driver and salutes both the guard and driver before sending them back across town. We’re on the main avenue, and while stately trees still stand, the stately buildings have collapsed into piles of white rubble behind cracked marble columns.

  Several are completely gutted. Elliott set his old apartment on fire before we left. Perhaps it caught other buildings on fire, too. Windows are smashed and glass gleams from both grassy areas and the streets. The walls of the science building are chipped from gunfire.

  I hear the stream gurgling before we reach it. The sound of running water is soothing amid all the destruction, but the bank is empty. I hadn’t expected Father to just sit here, waiting for me to return. Still, I’m disappointed. Above the stream, where Father used to come feed the fish, is a hand-painted sign. DOWN WITH SCIENCE. THE SCIENTISTS ARE MURDERERS.

  “The scientist is a murderer,” Elliott agrees, but he shuts his mouth when he sees the expression on my face. Will doesn’t say anything.

  “Let’s look inside,” Elliott says, leading us around to the side of the science building. He tests a door, and the lock is broken, so it swings wide. The smell in the hallway is overpowering. I put my hand to my mask, and my eyes begin to water.

  “Is anyone here?” Elliott calls.

  “No one who was even half alive would stay here.” Will chokes out the words. A body is sprawled across the hallway.

  Elliott takes my arm and attempts to pull me outside. “Will can check. He’d recognize—”

  “No.” I won’t allow them to protect me.

  “Let her look,” Will says. “She needs to know.”

  “Besides,” I say, once we’ve stepped over the body and I can think a bit more clearly, “whatever bodies we find . . . Father won’t have died of the Red Death.”

  Will’s dark eyebrows go up. He doesn’t know about the tiny vial that Father gave me, which may, perhaps, save me from the Red Death. If we can find him, maybe he can provide the same medicine for the children. And Will and Elliott.

  We pass several large lecture rooms strewn with blankets and discarded clothing, but everything seems to be abandoned now. Some of the rooms have charts on the walls, with Latin terms that Father would understand, but I don’t.

  Under a chart are some other notices, messages for the people who stayed here. Times and places for meetings. I reach out to touch the scrip about a rendezvous that happened sometime last winter.

  We search all of the rooms. Nothing.

  Elliott sees how disappointed I am. “It was our best place to begin,” he says. “The university is huge, Araby. Hundreds of rental rooms in dormitories. We’ll keep searching, and I know a man who can help us. We’ll check the Akkadian Towers as soon as we can.”

  “We have four days until April returns.” Will’s tone is reassuring. “Plenty of time.”

  We leave the building through the wide double doors of the front entrance. Above them are the words EXPERIMENT ON THE SCIENTIST. SHOW HIM HOW IT FEELS.

  I stare at the words for a long time. Father may not be susceptible to the Red Death, but that doesn’t mean he’s safe. He’ll be doing everything he can to stay hidden from people like the ones who wrote that. He could be anywhere. We might never find him.

  But what if he could find me?

  “Where could I get paint?” I ask.

  “I’m sure Will can find some.” Elliott gives Will a challenging look, perhaps reminding him of his promise to follow orders.

  “I’m good at finding things,” Will agrees. “You want something dark to put your own message on the walls?”

  He can read me too well. I nod.

  “We’ll split up,” Elliott says. “It’s growing late. My acquaintance won’t answer his door after dark. Meet us on the steps of the library in an hour.” Elliott walks away. I don’t like the way he assumes that I will follow. If I go with Will, it might communicate something to Elliott. But I know what Will is doing. Elliott’s visit to this person—who he does not refer to as a friend—is more mysterious.

  I don’t have to hurry to catch up with Elliott. He’s only taken three steps around the corner and stopped. Our way is blocked by a pile of freshly dead bodies.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I’VE SEEN DEAD BODIES NEARLY EVERY DAY SINCE the first plague started, but never so many at once. They are heaped together, lying all intertwined. I gag like Will did in the science building and force myself not to be sick. The carefully tended lawn, once so vibrant and green, is totally obscured. Most of the bodies are in shrouds, but some untended corpses lie around the periphery. Red tears stain their cheeks. One is holding a bouquet of wilting flowers. Did she bring her loved ones here, and then die herself?

  This disease leaves you little time to mourn. Little time to live with guilt and loneliness. People are dying so quickly.

  I want to shield myself from the awfulness, but I can’t stop looking. Puddles surround the corpses. Soon this rainwater will mix with the groundwater, spreading further contamination. The innkeeper was right—whoever can rid the city of these bodies will be a hero. It is the first step in saving the city.

  “Step away,” Elliott says, even as he goes closer. He doesn’t check to see if I’ve obeyed, and I don’t. Taking a vial of liquid from his pocket, he pours something over the nearest victim and then lights a match. As he drops it, he takes a quick step backward. Despite the recent rain, the corpse catches fire immediately. The blaze is very hot, hotter than any fire I’ve ever encountered, and the smell is terrible. Elliott’s face is illuminated by the blaze. He looks radiant.

  “If I can mix enough of this compound, find enough men, I can begin to clear some of the streets.”

  He empties two more vials over the heap, lights another match, and soon most of the bodies are burning.

  What he’s doing is terrible in its own way. Cremation is better than leaving the bodies here, it must be. But one of the women who died here was blonde, and when her hair begins to burn, all I can see is April’s face. I crumple to my knees, tears streaming down my cheeks. We have to find a way to save her. I won’t let her end up like this.

  Elliott doesn’t comment, and I’m glad. I collect myself and stand. “Where next?”

  “This way.”

  We walk, gingerly, around the burning bodies, to a main avenue lined with tall, cramped buildings where students used to live. Rows of identical doors face a paved courtyard
. Elliott’s gaze darts everywhere, searching all of the alleys and shadowy nooks. A wise precaution, since men in dark robes seem to appear wherever we are. I watch over my shoulder as Elliott raps on a door.

  “The man who lives here knows a good deal about the university and what is happening here. He also garners information from throughout the city.”

  “If Father has been seen . . .”

  “He’ll know.”

  “What should I do?” I ask.

  “Listen. This man . . . doesn’t have much reason to like me.”

  He pounds on the door again, harder. When we hear slow footsteps from inside, Elliott shifts from one foot to the other. A completely unexpected emotion crosses his face. He’s nervous.

  The door begins to open, and for a moment I see my father standing on the threshold. But of course the person inside the apartment isn’t my father, just an older gentleman with a white beard.

  “The prince’s nephew,” the man says, sounding neither surprised nor pleased. But Elliott braces himself, throwing his shoulders back before he pushes me into the room and closes the door behind us.

  The room is sparsely furnished with a cheap desk, a couple of rickety chairs, and a doorway leading to what might be a bedroom, or possibly a kitchen.

  I study the occupant’s lined face, but he hardly seems threatening. What makes Elliott so nervous?

  “So you’re following your uncle’s footsteps, taking over cities?” he asks.

  Elliott nods. This is the first time since we’ve reentered the city that he hasn’t seemed proud of his role.

  “Have you abandoned your writing? I’d always hoped to read your account of the day you and I met. But then I heard you’d burned everything you left.”

  “As usual, you heard correctly. I’m . . . fighting for the city. Things will be better when I’m in control.” His usual arrogance is starting to seep back in.

  “Your uncle did train you to continue his work.”

  “We both know what my uncle did,” Elliott says. “Let’s go downstairs.”