Masque of the Red Death Read online

The carriage stops in front of the club. April exclaims over a scratched place on the gold leaf before proceeding to the unmarked door.

  In the deathly quiet of the examination room, I wince at my reflection. I’m quiet and mousy, not the sort of girl who belongs in a place like this.

  “I wasn’t planning to come here tonight,” I mutter.

  “Yet here you are,” he says. He’s noncommittal, neither happy nor sad to see me. Not disapproving. Not exactly.

  Yet his hand seems to linger at my waist as he helps me stand. I would rather stay and talk to him, but he’s already turning to admit another member. It doesn’t matter. No matter how much I want to speak to him, I fear I have nothing worthwhile to say.

  April has noticed the way I look at him.

  “It’s too bad you took that vow of celibacy,” she says as I leave the examination room.

  “It isn’t a vow of celibacy.”

  It is much more than that. It’s the way that I have to live my life. I don’t have a choice.

  “Too bad,” she repeats, tapping her foot in her expensive shoes.

  We walk through the first floor, peering into room after room. April stops to get a drink, and then we walk back through the same rooms, looking into all the corners and even the stairwell. I scan for fair hair. April has blond hair that she lightens with lemon juice in the summer. So I imagine her brother might favor her.

  “Just like Elliott. He probably found someplace more important to be.” She’s downed one drink and is holding a second one. Her cheeks are very pink.

  “Should we look on the other floors? Where do you think he might be?”

  “Top floor, maybe. He’s more attracted to books than he is to women. He’s a disgrace to the family.” She slurs the word disgrace. “The reason he won’t live with us is that he has this calling. He’s a poet, lives in a garret with other artists and writers. They won’t wear their masks. They say it’s okay to die young as long as they record the human condition, record what has happened to us. He writes day and night and takes drugs to try to make himself more aware.”

  She rolls her eyes.

  Is this why April hates poetry? I’m nervous, suddenly, at the prospect of meeting her brother, because nothing could fascinate me more than what she has just said.

  “He said he would be here?”

  “You would like him.” She looks at me for a moment. “And I suspect he’d like you. But you need eyelashes.” She pushes me onto a loveseat beside her and reaches into her bag. “Here.” She smears some glittery stuff on my cheeks. I expect it to be gritty, but it’s light and foamy. This is what our scientists create while Mother Nature tries to kill us all. Then she opens my bag and begins applying fake eyelashes. I’m surprised that her hands are steady enough.

  “Now you’re pretty. Even Elliott will notice—” She stops speaking and drops my bag, spilling red lipstick and a bottle of perfume.

  Two men have paused in the doorway to this room. I go cold. They are members of the club from before the plague, and we are told to avoid them.

  But that’s not who April noticed. She’s staring across the room at a young man who’s leaning against the bar. I know at once that it’s not her brother; the look she gives him is too flirtatious. He walks toward us and she stands up.

  She doesn’t offer to help me pick up the contents of my purse. It isn’t something she would ever think to do.

  She’s smiling, looking up at him from under her eyelashes. When I check, the older gentlemen have passed on.

  And then the young man is in front of us. She offers him her hand before saying over her shoulder to me, “We’re here. Elliott can’t complain. He’ll find us if he wants. We might as well have some fun.”

  Maybe she’s right. It’s why we come here. To forget. To have fun.

  I watch her smile as she pushes back her hair. If our world hadn’t imploded, she’d be married by now, possibly a wife and a mother. Instead she’s out all night with no chaperone. My mother disapproves of this behavior, but she can’t stop April’s wildness.

  And Mother won’t keep me from joining April because April’s family has connections. April claims that her uncle, the prince, is crazy. He lives outside the city in a medieval castle that he had shipped here, stone by stone, from Scotland before the plague hit. He controls everything, including the military. We do what he says. I’m not sure how it happened.

  April’s father was the mayor before, but he died, and now she and her mother live alone in Akkadian Towers Penthouse A. Her mother drinks brandy all day, and April kisses strangers in the Debauchery District. Her new guy hands her a tall glass and then offers me one. I take it but don’t drink. Something about him catches my attention. Not him, exactly, but the way April starts kissing him.

  I’ve never kissed anyone. I made a vow to avoid the things that Finn will never experience. It doesn’t usually bother me. April says that’s because I don’t know what I’m missing, but passion seems very messy.

  April’s eyelids are purple. His are a blue like a bruise. They are kissing with their eyes closed tight, like this connection means something.

  I set my glass on a side table and wander through the club. Restless.

  I see April later, sprawled across a velvet chair. She’s had someone hack off a few more inches of her skirts with scissors, so it’s shorter than when we left the house, and with this ensemble she’s finally crossed the line into indecency.

  Maybe it doesn’t matter. She’s made herself so artificial; it’s okay to wear next to nothing because we aren’t real people any longer.

  The ice has melted in my abandoned glass on the side table. I pick it up, and when she doesn’t acknowledge me, I drink the contents quickly and walk away, up the stairs to a floor with rowdy card games. But I’m not in the mood to be around happiness. To escape, I duck into a quiet room. When my eyes adjust, I see two people at a table, playing chess by candlelight. They aren’t sealed in a humid basement, but my chest constricts anyway.

  “Would you like to play?” someone asks. He has blond hair that gleams in the candlelit room.

  “No, no, I’m not good at strategy....” Then I recognize him.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  COLD AIR MOVES ACROSS MY FACE. IT FEELS more lived in than the air I’m used to. I’m lying in a bed that’s not my own, shivering.

  Cold means outside. But why would a bed be outside? I snuggle deeper into the blankets. The person beside me shifts. I freeze. Someone is beside me. I’m caught, tangled in blankets, in a strange bed, and I can’t open my eyes.

  I put my hand up to my face. My eyes are glued shut. This has happened before, a bad mix of makeup and eyelash glue. April gave me some cleanser that removes it, but I know I’m not at home, because Akkadian Tower penthouses are never uncomfortably cold.

  My mask is askew.

  And someone is beside me, pressed against me. Closer than another human being has been since Finn and I were young. Being this near anyone floods me with loss. I pull away, and then flinch as my bedmate throws an arm over me. The pain of ripping my eyelids open is fierce but momentary.

  Nothing in this room is familiar. It’s an attic-style dormer with low ceilings and sharp angles. I ease away and realize, with shock, who I am lying next to.

  He’s even prettier with the muted early afternoon light illuminating his high cheekbones. I stare at his closed eyes. I know that they are dark, but a deep blue? Brown? I will him to open them so that I can see. It’s so odd to see him without the club, the lights on the floor, the testing.

  His hair is mussed. I move my hand slightly, wondering if I dare to touch him, to run my fingers through his hair and see how far up his tattoos swirl.

  My reverie is interrupted by a high-pitched giggle.

  The only thing in this room is the bed where we are nestled together and a low couch that looks like it’s had better days. On the couch there are two children.

  They aren’t wearing masks.


  But we’re inside, so maybe the air is safe? I fidget with my mask. I’ve been taught better than to trust a strange filter.

  The girl giggles again, nervously.

  “Are you real?” she asks.

  “Yes.” I blink at her. “Why do you ask?”

  “He’s never brought home a girl,” the boy says. “Never, and you don’t look real. Hair doesn’t come in that color.”

  I put my hand up and try to smooth my hair. April dyed strands of it purple. The color blends beautifully with my dark hair, but I’ve asked her not to dye it again. Purple is the color of the illness, the bruises that appear before the oozing starts.

  The children slip over to the edge of the bed and peer down at me.

  “You look like you’ve been crying.” The girl reaches to touch the smeared makeup around my eyes, and I recoil. I’m not used to having someone without a mask so close to me.

  I sit up, relieved that I am still fully clothed.

  “Don’t wake him,” the little boy says. “He works hard. He stays up all night.”

  “Yes, I know,” I say, because I often see him, working, in the early morning hours.

  I wonder if my parents are worried about me.

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  “I’m Henry,” the little boy says, “and this is Elise.”

  “And how do you know…” I falter, looking down at his sleeping form. “How do you know him?”

  The girl notices something in my voice.

  “You’d like to be his girlfriend,” she says.

  “He”—the boy emphasizes the pronoun—“is our older brother.”

  Their brother chooses this moment to open his eyes and look at me. He’s younger than I guessed. I always thought he might be in his mid-twenties, but I see that he’s closer to my age. Maybe eighteen.

  The little girl leans in and whispers, “His name is Will. It’s short for William.” This time I don’t draw back when she gets close.

  He smiles up at me, a smile of unimaginable sweetness, a smile that I would never have expected from him, with his magical hands and shivery whispers.

  My heart goes all fluttery.

  “You’re alive, then?” he says.

  “Alive?”

  “Deaths are bad for the club. Just a few days ago a girl choked on her own vomit. I didn’t want that to happen to you.”

  My sense of wonder fades. He brought me here for the good of the club. Not to save me. At least, not because he likes me.

  “Are you two bothering our … guest?” he asks the children. They walk toward the doorway, casting glances over their shoulders, turning to stare back at us until he makes an annoyed gesture and they go, giggling, into the next room.

  “Your guest?” I ask as coldly as I can.

  “I don’t know what else to call you. The person I hoped wouldn’t die in my bed? I found you unconscious behind one of the curtains when I was locking up.”

  My shame is followed by a cold wave of anger.

  “You didn’t think you should have taken me to the hospital?”

  He raises a dark eyebrow. “I didn’t have time.”

  He didn’t have time? He found me unconscious, brought me home, but couldn’t be bothered to stop at a hospital or to get me to my father, who could have administered appropriate medical care?

  I glare at him, furious.

  He stares back. I realize that he doesn’t use eyeliner after all; his eyes are that dark and that amazing. And angry.

  “Listen,” he says. “Every second of my day is filled with something that has to be done. Every second. I didn’t take drugs last night, and I didn’t pass out behind a gold brocade curtain, and I don’t have friends who would leave me at a club. Okay?”

  “I could’ve died.”

  “How does that make last night different from any other night?”

  This is unfair, because I rarely go to the club more than twice a week.

  The children reappear in the doorway.

  “Let’s get some breakfast,” he says for their benefit, though the words seem to be addressed to me. They scamper away and he climbs out of bed. He’s still wearing the same fitted shirt and pants that he wore last night.

  “Will,” I try his name out tentatively.

  “Don’t talk about the way you live, not in front of Elise. She doesn’t know any women besides our elderly neighbor, so she’s bound to be fascinated by you.”

  He means me at the club. He doesn’t know anything else. But maybe that’s all there is.

  He leads me into the kitchen. Both windows are covered with an array of blankets that appear to have been nailed over the opening. Light still filters in, giving the illusion of a muted stained-glass window. The room feels soft and oddly pleasant. On the table there are six apples. Will unwraps half a loaf of bread and begins to slice it with a large knife. The children pull out a single chair and climb onto it.

  “Sit by us,” Elise says. I sit gingerly in an empty chair.

  “My name is Araby,” I tell her. Maybe he really doesn’t know my name or who I am.

  Will smiles.

  “Do you take care of them?”

  “Yes. Our mother died three years ago.” He picks up one of the apples and then sets it in front of Henry.

  “Will, that’s all the food we have until tomorrow.” Elise’s eyes are too big for her face.

  I try to calculate how much food that is for each of them, how many bites. It isn’t much. He toasts the bread over some sort of burner.

  “The air is safe?” I put my hand to my mask; it feels odd being the only person in the room whose face is covered.

  “No,” Will says. “Keep the mask on. I’d hate to have saved you, just for you to die from unfiltered air.”

  I glance at the children, their bare faces. The air in the lower city is said to be thick with disease.

  Will cracks an egg into a small pan and holds it over the burner.

  “So you live here and raise two children?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it difficult?”

  He laughs. “Yes, it is.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “The usual way. My family survived the plague, so things seemed okay. I was hanging around down in the district when things really started there. I found myself drawn to girls with unusually colored hair who went to clubs wearing black corsets. Girls who stared into their drinks with vacant eyes, mourning the world that they had lost.”

  “That’s sort of poetic,” I say.

  “It was foolish.” He smiles. “But I got a job, started saving money. Then my father died and my mother got sick. I had to pay for the apartment, had to find money for medicine and food. I caught the attention of the prince. He owns the Debauchery Club.”

  The prince owns almost everything.

  Will pushes his hair back from his face.

  “Sometimes we had enough for food. Sometimes we didn’t. I seem to be well suited to working at the Debauchery Club. A neighbor watches the kids at night while I’m working. She doesn’t charge much to have them sleep in her spare bed. I have to be home before sunrise, because she works as a cook for some rich family.”

  Some rich family. Like mine. For all I know, his neighbor could be our cook.

  “I used to leave them, when I was fifteen or sixteen, because I couldn’t think what else to do. But I’m more careful now.”

  Leaving children is dangerous. If the authorities find a child alone, they are required to take that child, and he or she is never given back.

  Will hands me a slice of toasted bread. I don’t want to eat their food, they have so little of it, but it seems impolite not to accept. So I adjust my mask to the side, the way we do when we are in a place where there might be germs, and nibble at my bread.

  Henry is holding a tiny brass toy lovingly.

  “Is it a toy steam carriage?” I ask.

  “Yes. I have an airship, too,” he says proudly.

  “I have a friend who ma
kes clever toys for him,” Will says.

  “You can wind it, and it really works!”

  As charming as they are, the children make me nervous with their searching eyes and their rapid movements.

  “Do they go to school?”

  Will puts a plate with some eggs in front of me.

  “I’m hoping they can go next year.”

  We eat slowly. I tear my bread into three pieces and give most of it to the children. The eggs make me feel much better, more alive. The sun is sneaking in around the window coverings, and Will looks completely exhausted. I want to touch his tousled hair, push it back from his face. He sees me watching him, and his lips do that little half smile. I almost expect him to use an inappropriate endearment like he does at the club.

  “Is Araby your girlfriend?” Elise asks.

  Will chokes and then says, “No.” So quickly that it feels like a slap in the face.

  When the little ones aren’t looking, he raises one eyebrow at me. He knows that he’s insulted me. For just a moment, he’s the Debauchery District guy, and not this surprising domestic creature.

  When he described the girls who attracted him, he might as well have held a mirror to me. But I don’t know if he still likes … the sort of girl that he thinks I am. He said it like it was something silly, some childhood fancy that passed. His lips twist again, and I realize that he’s amused.

  “Here’s your bag.” He puts the purse on the table and stifles a yawn. The shadows under his eyes only make him more impossibly handsome.

  “You look tired.”

  “I usually sleep later than this. You’ve disrupted our little household. Luckily I have all afternoon to rest.”

  All afternoon?

  “But how will I get home?” The sharpness to my question comes from fear.

  “I’ve been working out that little problem in my mind since the moment I rescued you. I’m going to have to walk you home on the way to work this evening.”

  “But I can’t stay here all day.” My mother will be wringing her hands, and my father might come out of his lab looking for me.

  “This area isn’t safe for someone walking alone, especially someone like you.”

  “I won’t be alone. You will be with me.”