Glitter & Doom: A Masque of the Red Death Story Read online

“That’s the most intelligent thing I’ve heard you say.”

  As if their relationship had been long enough for him to hear her say anything of consequence.

  “Well then, I don’t think your inventor girlfriend’s hypothetical peril is nearly as great as ours.”

  April peered over the back of the sofa. The wall behind him was made of bricks that had been plastered over. Would they hold some clue to their location? Perhaps they could pry some bricks from the wall and discover . . . something.

  “I don’t have an inventor girlfriend.”

  “So you say.”

  He shook his head angrily.

  But she’d finally captured his attention, so she pushed on. “I’m not interested in stealing her inventions.”

  She could hear something rhythmic. Maybe they were close to the sea, or beneath a factory.

  “Good, because she’s fictitious.”

  April edged herself around to the side of the couch. He was still staring at her, his expression suggesting that she was extremely stupid.

  “I could unlock that manacle on your arm,” she said. “If I wanted. For your information, my education is every bit as good as Elliot’s.”

  “Except that Elliott doesn’t know how to apply fake eyelashes,” he said.

  Exhaustion made her clumsy, so she didn’t sweep across the room as elegantly as she would have liked. But still, she felt sure that she had been more graceful than some girl inventor would have been.

  “Listen,” she said, “and tell me what you hear.” She pulled two pins from her hair. “I’m sure your inventor girlfriend has many interesting ways to use hairpins,” she said as she worked to angle the pin just right. “They probably hold all of her inventions together.”

  “Undoubtedly.” He met her gaze squarely. What had Elliott been thinking when he said that she would intimidate him? Being so close to him made her feel suddenly uncomfortable. And that in itself was strange. Hadn’t she just been kissing a boy earlier tonight? A cuter boy than this . . . .

  The lock snapped open.

  “I think the sound is water,” he said. “The harbor?” His wrist dropped to his lap. He massaged it but made no other move.

  The silence between them stretched. She stood and smoothed her dress.

  “Good luck escaping. And staying free once you’ve escaped. Inventors are very high in demand, I’ve heard. Male or female.”

  “In demand?” His tone was incredulous.

  “From Malcontent, obviously. And Prospero, always.”

  “Oh, I know all about Prospero.”

  April whirled on him, recognition flashing through her mind.

  “You were the boy Elliott dropped the hammer on!”

  “That isn’t important. Malcontent’s men are diseased. They’ve been scraping out an existence in the swamp, like animals. He sees the city—and you—and probably all of your pretty friends as some sort of prize for them.”

  There was no use telling him that she’d already worked that out. Or that she only had one friend, who was pretty but not as pretty as April herself.

  “And you’re regaling him with the difficulties of adhering sparkles to your fake eyelashes.” He didn’t try to hide his disgust.

  April went very still. “Would you rather I told him how easily I can pick a lock with a hairpin? And that once I escape, I’m going to send my brother, who is trained in the art of torture, back down here, and that Elliott will kill him very slowly? That I’m counting the hours until the two of us can stand together and watch him die a second time?”

  DOOM

  KENT ALMOST COULDN’T BELIEVE HOW HE’D gotten stuck in the center of so many different webs. Keeper of secrets, inventor of marvels. Prisoner of a mad man. And now with a beautiful girl before him, coldly furious.

  When he was a child all he had were sounds and impressions. The ticking of the clock above his bed. The voices that proclaimed him practically blind. And his mother, who smelled of softness and tea cakes with sugary icing.

  The gears of the clock, the same one that had kept him company for years, were the first thing he saw clearly. His father strapped the corrective lenses around his face, and for the first time he could make sense of the shapes around him. Looking up he saw the copper gears, the cogs endlessly turning.

  His mother was already gone, an early victim of the plague, and he passed her portrait every day when he descended the stairway of their home. His father may as well have died of the plague or have been a still portrait on the wall. He gave Kent the glasses and then disappeared into a workshop behind the house. It had been a kitchen once, large enough to serve their mansion in a time when people entertained lavishly.

  He tried to join his father, curious what he was doing that required such complete secrecy, but the door was bolted shut. Whenever he tried the handle his father’s eyes appeared at the window and he gestured for Kent to move on.

  They still had servants, an elderly manservant and a woman who had once been a housekeeper. They hadn’t been paid since before the plague, but they still lived in the house. They had been asked to keep track of him during the day while his father toiled in the workshop. But they mostly disappeared into various unused rooms of the house, while Kent roamed the streets.

  Eventually he had wandered into a clockmaker’s shop on a hot afternoon, intrigued by the sounds. When he entered the dark storefront, he grew even more fascinated by the tiny tools and clock parts that lay haphazardly on the counter.

  The clockmaker took Kent for an orphan, and offered to take him as an apprentice.

  In the clockmaker’s service Kent continued to comb the streets, searching the pockets of the living or the dead, taking watches for their parts. Looking for metal objects that could be melted down.

  In the evenings the clockmaker taught Kent his craft. With something to occupy him, often he didn’t even go home, just slept in the back of the shop. Perhaps his father missed him, but since the old man hadn’t spoken more than a few words to him in the past year, he doubted it.

  The clockmaker was constantly drawing plans. Something big. Something secret. It didn’t seem like a clock. Kent had a bad feeling about whatever it was, even as it consumed his thoughts. He was eleven years old and uncommonly clever.

  And his fears were confirmed on the day the soldiers burst into the shop, breaking a precious grandfather clock, spilling gears that Kent had worked months to collect across the floor like so much refuse. Prospero’s soldiers were brutal and efficient.

  They took Kent and the clockmaker to the palace, at the edge of the swamp. Kent had trembled the whole carriage ride and the entire endless walk down the aisle between Prospero’s courtiers and the stage. But then Prospero had smiled, and given him a treat, and Kent had relaxed. Perhaps Prospero’s cruelty was just a story told on the streets. That was the last time Kent had ever let himself think something so stupid.

  Yet somehow they had survived. Prospero had let the clockmaker live, though he’d never be the same.

  When they returned to the city, he didn’t go home immediately. He’d stayed with the clockmaker. Fever raged through the man. Kent sat beside him, giving him sips of cool water. Helping, but also memorizing every detail that he muttered in his fever-induced dreams. The secrets that he hadn’t divulged while he was being tortured poured out of him.

  Two weeks later, the clockmaker finally on the path to recovery, Kent stumbled home. A candle lit the front window, but the housekeeper met him at the door, her expression grim.

  His father was dead. Whether of a heart attack, or grief because he’d heard his son had been taken by Prospero, no one could say.

  Kent staggered to his father’s workshop, dazed. Finally, he would see what was inside.

  No clockwork. No explosives. No obvious weapons. But on the table in the center of the room he found a trunk. Inside, wrapped in velvet, were lenses. Dozens of lenses. For spectacles. Goggles. All of them for him.

  At the bottom of the trunk was a letter.r />
  It read simply, It is bad enough, bringing a child into the world that has become riddled with plague. I won’t have my boy saddled with blindness as well. Be careful of these. Do not keep them all in the same place, for our city is prone to disaster and fire.

  Searching the workshop, and then the house, Kent found dozens more lenses. All wrapped in velvet. His father’s lifework had been dedicated to improving Kent’s future, though he had never shown Kent affection. The boy vowed not to become that cold and disconnected from life.

  And yet, inventing allowed him to forget his grief and loneliness. Eventually it consumed all of his waking hours.

  The workshop where his father had spent his days became his sanctuary. And as the years passed, his inventions veered away from clockwork into steam engines and airships. He reconnected with the blond-haired boy who had spared him that day in the palace, the prince’s nephew.

  It had taken Kent some months to trust him. Even though Elliott had helped in getting them out of the palace, Kent feared he could still have some loyalty to Prospero, and would steal his inventions or turn him over. But Elliott had given him money, supplied parts, and wanted nothing to do with Prospero. He seemed to genuinely care about the city. Lately he had begun making inquiries about how to build the masks for the poor.

  He’d known that working with Elliott was risky. Inventing was risky. And he was right.

  Somehow he’d ended up imprisoned again, by another madman.

  This time, he was locked up with the most infuriating girl. Elliott’s sister, with her fake eyelashes and glitter smeared above her eyes. Kent could barely look at her.

  People were dying in the city every day, and this girl wasted precious resources. Like air. Here she was, bantering with him about some imaginary girlfriend. As if he had time for such things.

  But then she told him, her voice steady and completely serious, how she planned to watch her father die under Elliott’s sword.

  “You should’ve been an actress,” he said finally.

  “I know.” Her voice was light again. “My mother trained me well. Too bad the plague closed all the theaters.”

  “Too bad,” he repeated, trying to cover his sudden confusion. She was the silliest and the most fearless person he had ever met. The silence stretched between them.

  “So, we’re near the harbor, and I’ve freed you from that manacle,” she prompted. “Are you going to escape?”

  “No,” he said simply.

  “You should. I’d enjoy being rescued.”

  He gave her a smile that he hoped was apologetic.

  “I can’t,” he said. “The Reverend wants me to set a bomb, but he didn’t tell me where, or what he wants me to blow up. I’m far from the only person who can build explosives in the city, as we both know. I have to figure out what he wants me to blow up, so I can tell Elliott. So we can subvert Malcontent’s plans.”

  “I understand,” she said quietly. “But then, what a waste of a good hairpin.”

  And he could see that she understood everything. That he’d carefully balanced the danger to her against the many people who would die if Malcontent had his way. And he’d chosen to stay because he could save the most lives this way.

  He forced himself to stop thinking about the girl before him on the floor. What did Malcontent want him to blow up? What was he missing?

  “I’ll have to put it back on if someone comes, but I don’t consider being able to do this a waste.” He stood, his muscles protesting after sitting for so long on the cold floor. And he paced.

  Just a few nights ago, he’d seen the damage from Malcontent’s bombs. He’d seen a dead child, buried by the rubble, when Elliott took him to examine what was left.

  The traces of the bomb had been negligible. But the despair of the residents of the apartment building behind the church had been overwhelming. The sadness. The expectations that someone would come along and change their miserable lives. Elliott had been perfect, reassuring, comforting. Kent had stood in the background, uncomfortable and mute.

  But he could stop Malcontent from setting another bomb. If the madman wanted Kent, cared enough to have kidnapped him, then he must want something huge. An explosion that the city would remember. Unless it was simply because he’d killed whoever made the last round of bombs.

  His pacing was controlled; he stepped softly so that any guards who were outside wouldn’t hear the movements. He went over the schematics for his fake bomb once again. At the same time, he imagined the city as though he were looking down on it from above, from the magnificent airship that he’d taken out on only a few fledgling flights.

  He and Elliott agreed that for the city to prosper, they had to find other people, had to make contact with other survivors of the plague.

  And suddenly he knew where the bomb was to be set. It was so simple . . . the steamship. The Discovery. Elliott’s first great triumph, talking his uncle into this massive project. And Malcontent wanted to ruin everything.

  Kent didn’t care if Malcontent and Prospero brought each other down. He did care about innocent lives. He sighed. Figuring out where the bomb was to be set wasn’t enough. He’d have to stay. He could build a fake bomb. If he left the Reverend would get a real one.

  “I know where he wants to plant the bomb,” he told April, who was watching him from the couch. “If somehow you do escape, or he lets you go, tell Elliott.”

  With his finger he sketched the schematics on the floor. It left no mark, but he’d remember. Just going through the motions of drawing helped him figure out the design. He’d need clockwork and wires and assorted parts. His bomb would be very convincing, so that the Reverend wouldn’t discover it was fake until it was too late.

  Footsteps sounded in the corridor outside.

  “Quick, go back to your corner,” April said.

  Kent scurried over to the wall. Putting his wrist back in the manacle took all of his will power. But before he closed the lock a servant came in with food. The man gave April a long, considering look before putting down the tray, but he didn’t even glance Kent’s way before he left. Kent let the manacle drop back down to the floor.

  “Malcontent—your father—could have found another pretty girl. Any pretty girl.” He stopped, feeling his face flushing. “I’m not saying there are girls who are prettier than you.”

  “No, you’re much smarter than that,” she said. But the retort had no energy. She looked away and tucked a stray hair behind her ear. The makeup had mostly worn off her face, but to Kent, she still shone. “Elliott would understand. You weren’t raised in the palace. I’ve been in this family long enough to know that it will mean more when my father sacrifices me. It will show complete devotion to his cause.”

  She sat on the couch and stared at the tray of food. The way she was sitting, he forced himself to look away, though he didn’t really want to. She didn’t wear enough clothing. It was scandalous.

  “Why didn’t you try to escape when the door was open?”

  “Maybe I can learn something useful, too” she said. “For Elliott’s cause.”

  “No. If you get the chance, you go,” Kent told her. “I’ll stay. I’ll learn everything. I’ll tell Elliott.”

  “You?” Her voice went up half an octave. “How’re you going to learn any secrets? You don’t even have any eyelashes to bat. At least not as far as I can tell. Come closer.” She beckoned.

  Instead he stayed where he was.

  “I burned them off during an experiment,” he said, resisting the urge to reach up and touch his eyelids. The accident had been months ago. Had the lashes grown back in? He couldn’t remember and hadn’t checked. It seemed like they should . . . . He shook his head, dispelling whatever madness she had planted there. “There are ways to get information without batting eyelashes,” he said. “Listening. Observation. Logic.”

  “I’m sure that all works very well for you.” She smirked. “Now let me see your eyes.”

  He shook his head, but he
didn’t know whether he was answering her or marveling at her. She had lived in Prospero’s court, and survived. She knew how to enjoy life, in a city where everyone else had lifeless eyes. She could teach him things. And that frightened him.

  “If I can see you, then you can see my eyes,” he said, hedging.

  “Through those awful lenses.”

  She would hate the green lenses he used when he was welding. His lips quirked slightly and she took that for encouragement, standing and coming toward him. Before he knew it, she’d cornered him. He sprang to his feet and she reached up, but he caught her wrist.

  “Stop.” It came out more forcefully than either of them expected, and her face fell. As if he’d called her ugly. Would she understand what it was like to be nearly blind? To be vulnerable? Did she know how precious these lenses were? How impossible it would be to recreate them?

  He searched for the right words to tell her, but before he could find his voice, footsteps approached once more in the hallway. April fled back across the room, perching at the edge of the couch. Resigned, he placed the manacle around his wrist, though he hid his wrist in his lap, waiting to fasten it until he saw who came through the door. If it was the servant again . . . leering at April . . . but it was the Reverend himself. He was followed by two servants. Kent clicked the manacle closed. Barely moments later the Reverend gestured to one of the servants, who crossed the room and unlocked it.

  The man was obviously contagious, with a weeping sore on his arm. Kent stared at it, fascinated by the purple of the bruise, the green infection. It was terrible. And yet, he had to fight the urge to ask the man questions. What were his symptoms? How long had he been ill?

  The other guards were also infected. April was pressing her hands to her white mask, as if holding it against her face would make it more effective.

  “Are you ready to create my explosion?” Malcontent asked. “I want it to be seen throughout the city. An arc of fire and perhaps. . . . ” He smiled at Kent, his grin feral and free of any mask. “Perhaps a smokestack flying into the air. I want to compete with my brother’s fireworks.”