Masque of the Red Death (2 page)

If I were honest with myself, I might admit that these few moments are why I come here, week after week. Swirling tattoos cover his arms, climbing up from the collar of his shirt to twist around his throat, the ends hidden by his tousled dark hair. I try not to look at him. He could make me happy. His attention, a hint of admiration in his eyes… I don’t deserve happiness.

“You know the routine. Breathe in here.” He holds out the device. “Are you contagious this week?”

“Not a chance,” I whisper.

“Oh, there’s always a chance. You should be more careful.” He presses the red button so that the handheld device will filter the air expelled from my lungs. There’s a needle in his hands now. I shiver.

“You enjoy this more than you should,” he says softly.

He puts my blood into some sort of machine. It has clockwork parts and a little brass knob, but I’m fairly certain that it doesn’t test anything besides credulity. Yet the serious way he performs his duties always makes me believe that he will know if I’ve contracted anything, and I breathe faster than normal. Nervous.

What will he do if I’m contaminated? Will he look at me with contempt? Kick me out into the street?

This is the only place in the city where we are safe without our masks. At home our servants wear masks so they don’t bring in contamination from the lower city. Here it would be an insult to suggest you need to filter the air. They only let one of us into this little room at a time, though. How can we be sure that other members aren’t secretly fouled by diseases?

“Looks like you’re clean this week, sweetheart. Try to stay that way.” He dismisses me with a wave of his hand. “Oh, and next time you should wear the silver eye stuff. It’d look better on you than it does on your friend.”

As he turns away, I raise my hand toward him without meaning to. If he were standing closer, I would have touched him.

I never touch people.

Not on purpose. Luckily, he doesn’t see my traitorous hand or the expression on my face.

I enter the club through a curtain of silver beads. I imagine sometimes that they make a beautiful sound when I move through them, but I have never heard even the tiniest clink. It’s like the secrecy of this place has seeped into the furnishings.

April hasn’t waited for me. We perpetually lose and find each other in this maze of rooms. She and I enjoy our time here in different ways.

The building is five stories tall, average for this part of town. It was built to house apartments, but now all of the rooms are connected by long hallways and half-open doors.

The only constant, the way that you can tell that you’re still in the club and haven’t wandered into some other building, is that there is a representation of a dragon in every room. Some of them are carved into furnishings, some are displayed in glass cases, but everywhere we are watched by red eyes.

In some rooms Persian carpets cover the floors, and in other rooms they are affixed to the walls, either to muffle sound or to absorb the scent of tobacco or opium smoke. The upper floors house forbidden libraries; one room is filled with books on the occult, and another has volumes detailing sexual acts that I never dreamed existed. I like books, but I tend to gravitate toward the lower floors, where there is music.

I move from room to room. These spaces are always crowded, filled with bodies, muffled conversation, occasional dancing, and even some kissing in dark corners. April and I are far from the only females who have joined this club.

Hours trickle by, and I wilt. The magic isn’t here for me tonight. I can’t get away from the heavy feeling of being me. I want to blend in, to be someone besides myself, someone who is part of something secret and subversive and exciting.

A guy is following me. He’s thin and blond, wearing a too-formal outfit, dark pants, a blue shirt buttoned to the next-to-last button. He doesn’t fit in this room filled with ornate settees, where a girl, accompanied by a violinist, is singing about suicide. He says something to me, but I can’t hear him. I keep walking.

He follows me into the women’s washroom.

Girls stare at their reflections in a dark room filled with mirrors.

I push past them to the chambers behind. A girl tries to jab a high heel into my foot. I jump back, and don’t meet her eyes; don’t want her to see how the sneer makes me wince.

He shuts the door behind us. Doors in this club are well oiled and make no sound when they close. So thick that you can’t hear what happens behind them.

“What do you want?” he asks in an amused voice. His self-assurance makes him seem older than he looks. I’m guessing that he would be a student at the university, if it were still open.

“Oblivion.” It is what I am always looking for.

“What’s a pretty girl like you trying to forget?”

A pretty girl like me, with my clean fingernails and my unblemished bill of health.

He doesn’t know anything about me.

“Do you have what I want or not?”

He produces a silver syringe.

“I doubt you know what you want,” he mutters in a voice that calls me foolish. An amateur. I ignore a sharp burst of anger, determined to get what I need to defeat it and any other emotion that might try to creep in. I’m not an amateur.

I eye the syringe.

“Busy night?” I ask.

“I don’t usually share.”

I hand him some bills. He barely glances at them before he shoves the money into his pocket. His eyebrows are blond; they make him look perpetually surprised.

I hold out my arm to him. “Do it.”

“Don’t you want to know what’s in this thing?”

“No.”

I didn’t think he could look more surprised. The blond eyebrows intrigue me.

Whatever is in his syringe, it’s cold, and the world blurs around me.

“Where do you want to go?”

“Back to the violinist. I want to hear songs about suicide.”

He laughs.

As we leave the room I trip over the threshold. He puts his hand on my arm.

“I hope you find what you need,” he says, and sounds like he means it.

CHAPTER

TWO

D
ARKNESS.
W
E EAT IN IT, TALK IN IT, WE SLEEP
in humid darkness, wrapped in blankets. There is never really enough light in this basement, not if you truly want to see.

“It’s your move,” my twin brother, Finn, tells me. His voice is soft, no hint of irritation. I know I’m dreaming, but I don’t care. I’ll stay here as long as I can.

“Sorry.” I stare at the squares of the board. There’s no sense studying the pieces; they don’t speak to me. I have no sense of strategy, but I want badly to keep up with him, to offer some meager entertainment by providing a challenge.

“I’ll move the lantern.”

He’s pretending that my problem is simply a lack of illumination. I touch the ivory knight with my fingertip.

Father comes out of his laboratory and takes off his goggles.

“Is anyone ready for lunch?”

We’re always ready for lunch. It breaks up the monotony of our day. We follow him into the kitchen, where cases of preserved goods are stacked to the ceiling. Father pours something into a bowl and puts it into the steam oven.

“I don’t think it’s—” I try to warn him.

There’s a loud crackling explosion, and the gas bulb dangling above us goes dark.

“No point in fixing it, not when I’m so close to a breakthrough.” Father says this pretty much every day.

“I’m having peaches,” Finn says. “Preserved peaches are good cold.” He isn’t angry at Father for taking us underground. For not keeping his promises and for disappearing for days on end to work on god knows what. Finn isn’t even mad at Mother for not wanting to live here with us.

“I love peaches,” I say, because Finn brings out the best in me. Darkness and light, Father calls us.

“I’m so lucky,” our father says. “Blessed with patient children.” His voice is shaking, and in the murky light I think I see tears in his eyes. He is looking past me, at Finn.

There’s a knock at the door, and then it’s shoved inward and a man stands above us, silhouetted by the light shining through a front door that we haven’t stepped through in ages.

“Dr. Worth,” the man says. “My son, he has the contagion, but he hasn’t died.... It’s been over a month.”

He must be wrong. If you get sick you die. Everyone knows this.

“Give me your address,” Father tells the man. “I’ll come later, when their mother is here to mind them.” So Mother is coming for a visit. That will please Finn. The man rattles off his address, his voice low and steady. As if he’s lived through so much horror that nothing can really bother him anymore.

We return to the chessboard with one jar of peaches and two forks.

“It’s still your move,” Finn says. “Araby?”

I glance up at him, to see if he’s irritated yet. Is he really this inhuman, this eternally patient? But I can’t see him. The humidity is so thick, and the lantern is so dim. I strain my eyes. His calm voice resonates, but I can’t quite, can’t quite see....

And that’s when I wake up.

“Oh, God, how’m I supposed to carry you?” April’s voice asks. The cold air hits me and I realize that we’re outside. It’s raining. Out of the club, in open air. I feel myself begin to panic, not because I care, but because I’ve been programmed to fear the airborne contagions. I put my hand up, feel the ridged porcelain surface of my mask, and sigh with relief. I’ve worn this thing so long that I no longer feel it.

I try to curl back up. Sleep is difficult for me, and this euphoria is a beautiful thing. Cold rain hits the bottoms of my feet. Where are my shoes?

“You should be careful,” someone says. “It isn’t safe to be out at night.”

“I need to get her home,” April says. The tone of her voice reminds me, not exactly of the first time we met, but of the way she tells the story. She thinks she saved my life. “We have guards. We’ll be perfectly safe.”

If it isn’t one of the guards warning her, then who is she speaking to?

I’m lowered onto the plush seat of April’s carriage.

“Thanks for your help,” she says.

“I doubt it’ll be the last time.” The velvet voice holds a hint of amusement and a hint of something else. He leans over and looks down into my face. My disorientation intensifies when my eyes focus on his. The tattoos, the dark hair. My heart speeds up. I think… I think … can a person’s heart stop if she is only seventeen years old? I suppose that if I do fall apart, my father can put me back together again.

“You were lucky this time, baby doll. It won’t hold out, though. Luck never does.”

Yes. I’m the lucky one. It’s something I never forget.

CHAPTER

THREE

I
REST MY CHEEK AGAINST THE COOLNESS OF
the glass window. I have been here so long that my cheek is frigid, even when I touch it with my already cold fingers. Curled on the window seat, I gaze through the window. But I’m not looking out, I’m looking in. There are two penthouses at the top of Akkadian Towers. We live in Penthouse B. The team of architects who designed this place created a lush garden between the luxuriously appointed apartments. An indoor Eden.

Sick down to my bones, I stare into the thick tropical plant life. I’ve been dry heaving all morning.

My mother enters the room, and though I don’t turn my head to look at her, I know what she is doing. She is wringing her hands, the slender white hands that she soaks in peppermint oil.

A platter sits in front of me. Four types of crackers, fanned out like … well, a fan. I rub the chilled glass bottle of water against my face, leaving trails of icy condensation across my cheekbones and down my neck.

Then a movement in the garden catches my eye. The guy from last night, the one who gave me the silver syringe, is standing with his hands in his pockets, watching me.

But that’s impossible.

When the world got lush and humid and the diseases started multiplying, the Akkadian Towers closed this particular garden, bricked over the doors and sealed everything with mortar.

I sit up, but my stomach doesn’t like the sudden movement. I squeeze my eyes shut.

Expensive perfume gags me.

“Araby?”

Mother puts her hand on my forehead. While we hid in the cellar, she stayed here at the Akkadian Towers to play the piano. Her music calmed the rich people while they figured out if they were dying or not. When they identified someone with the Weeping Sickness, they threw them out into the street. I open my eyes.

“Sweetie…”

I want to curl up in her arms and cling to her, and that makes me feel worse than the drugs that my body is trying to expel.

The world is spinning.

“Why do you do this to yourself?” she whispers. She blows out the candles on the side table and covers me with a quilt. Light comes in through the windows, both from the outside and from the garden, which is empty now.

Some hours later, my father comes into the room. His hair is wild and his mask is pushed up on top of his head.

“I want you to walk with me, Araby,” he says.

He asks me this maybe twice a week. It’s the only time he says my name. I like for him to snap out of his daydreams and remember that he still has a child. He puts on his coat and holds out mine. I squeeze my eyes shut for a moment, ignoring the last vestiges of queasiness, and follow him.

As we step out of the elevator, we are approached by one of Prince Prospero’s guards, hired to keep my father safe. We all know that our scientists are our greatest assets. And our most dangerous weapons. There was a sort of chaos after the prince opened a factory to mass-produce the masks. No one knew how to respond to hope. People painted slogans on the sides of buildings. S
CIENCE HAS TRIUMPHED
. S
CIENCE HAS FAILED.
Always together, the second statement contradicting the first. The same dripping red paint used in drawing scythes on the plague-stricken houses.