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

by Bethany Griffin

  We enter the alley behind the unfinished tower. The last time I walked here was with Will, and we saw a dead boy with his well-crafted leather boots and his immaculate white mask. Elliott pulls open a door with broken hinges and ushers me into a dark corridor.

  “Is this building attached to the other?” I ask.

  “The two buildings share a basement.”

  If we had moved here when I was younger, when Finn was alive, the two of us might have explored the building more. Instead, I stood on the roof and thought about jumping.

  Elliott leads me through the empty echoing cellar that connects the unfinished tower to the half-ruined one where I used to live. He takes a match from his pocket and strikes it, using the fleeting light to determine our path. When it burns down to his fingertips, he drops it to the floor.

  “I need to start carrying candles,” I say, mostly to myself. I follow Elliott to a stairway that leads up and connects to the stairs for the main tower. I suppose the elevator will never be repaired, now.

  We are, perhaps, four stories up when we hear a sound from the corridor. Elliott puts his hand on my arm, and then, slowly, one finger to his lips. We tread lightly, trying not to draw attention, as we climb the next set of stairs. Luckily, stairways in the Akkadian Towers don’t creak, even after a fire. When we stop to catch our breath, I raise my eyebrows.

  “Squatters,” he whispers.

  I frown, glancing upward. I hate the idea of anyone living in our old apartment. “They’ll avoid the highest levels,” Elliott reassures me. “The building is unstable, so they’ll want a quick escape route.”

  “Is it safe?”

  “Probably not.” Elliott smiles. I tread more carefully and avoid any spots that look damaged.

  Finally we reach the top floor. The door to my family’s apartment stands partially open. I stop on the threshold. Elliott takes my hand, and with his other he pulls out a small gun, almost exactly like the one he gave me.

  Our footsteps echo against the tile floor. If anyone is here, they will hear us.

  Elliott leads me down the hall but does not stop at Father’s study; he makes no move toward it. I break away from him and slide the door open. The room has been ransacked. The paneling is torn from the wall, the desk is crushed into splinters.

  “There is nothing to see in there,” Elliott says, except he hasn’t entered the room.

  “You did this,” I say, stepping farther into the destruction, away from him. “You came here without me.”

  “There wasn’t enough information in his journal. I thought maybe I’d find more here.”

  I turn. He’s leaning against the doorframe, his face inscrutable. I’ve been waiting for him to bring me here, hoping . . .

  My eyes burn.

  At the back of the study, nothing remains but wooden beams. It used to be covered with a handsome wood paneling that hid shelves upon shelves of glass jars. In the jars are rats, floating in liquid. Several have fallen to the floor and broken, spilling limp dead rats and noxious liquid, which is perhaps what is making my eyes sting.

  “This is where he did it,” I whisper. “This is where he created the Red Death.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “COME AWAY, ARABY,” ELLIOTT SAYS SOFTLY. AND then, more urgently, “I didn’t break those jars. The building must have shifted, or someone else has been here. We should get out of this room.”

  On the floor, I see a brooch in the glass. I bend down—it must have belonged to Mother—but Elliott grabs me.

  “I don’t think you should touch that.”

  He’s right. We step back into the hallway and slam the door behind us. But as ever, it makes no sound.

  We creep through the empty rooms. In the kitchen, Elliott’s boots crush the shards of bone china that have fallen from the cabinet. Through the arched doorway that leads to the dining room, I see that the vase at the center of the table is still filled with roses—all dead.

  I leave Elliott in the kitchen and slip into my bedroom. Crossing the floor in three quick steps, I throw open the door of my closet. No one has pillaged this wealth of whalebone and silk, so I grab a favorite dress, a lovely muted red. In a quick movement I discard the one I’ve been wearing, which is stained and soiled with tunnel debris.

  “Much better,” Elliott says from the doorway.

  I blush deeply and pull the red dress over my head. He steps into the room as I adjust the skirts, pretending that I was not just undressed in front of him. Mother would be mortified.

  A glance in the mirror to adjust my hair reminds me how terrible my mask looks, cracked and stained with grime. In my bureau, my spares are packed in cotton. I drop the cracked mask into the drawer, where it lands with a hollow thud.

  “Here.” Before I choose a new one, Elliott hands me a tube of red lipstick. “I think you were wearing this the first time I saw you.”

  “The first time you saw me, you thought I was dead.” But I glide the lipstick on anyway, because it reminds me of the days before, and April. Then I cover it with a new white mask.

  Elliott raises an arm to escort me out, but I remove one more mask from the bureau. This one covers the whole face, and it glitters.

  “This was for one of your uncle’s infamous parties.”

  Elliott takes it from my hands, drops it back into the bureau, and slams the drawer.

  “As long as I have anything to do with it, you’ll never attend one of his parties.”

  He stalks from the room, but I hesitate. Should I tear the gemstones from the mask? In our little band, Elliott controls all the gold. And money often equals power.

  I rip off a few gemstones and pocket them, then grab Mother’s favorite scarf and wrap it around my shoulders.

  “Your father won’t come if he thinks anyone is here. Let’s go to the other apartment.”

  And so we enter Penthouse A, April’s old home. This apartment appears untouched, with chairs upholstered in gold silk still arranged around low glass tables.

  “Where did your mother go?” I ask.

  “As soon as the city became frightening, she ran to Prospero’s protection.”

  The doors to the bedrooms are wide open, and Elliott collects a blanket from his mother’s bed and two bottles of wine from the kitchen before he opens the door to a closet, steps inside, and gestures for me to follow.

  “I’m not sure I want to crawl into a cupboard,” I start to say, but then he pushes the back wall and light filters in. I follow as he walks into the garden where he first recruited me to join his rebellion. This humid, lush, abandoned place is where he and I began.

  “It certainly was easier for you to get into the garden last time than it was for me,” I say, remembering the utility closet on the floor below and the hatch I had to climb through.

  “I was testing your ingenuity. I couldn’t use a party girl who didn’t have the initiative to find and climb a ladder. You know, my uncle murdered the architects who built the Akkadian Towers. He didn’t want anyone to know the building the way he does.”

  “How well do you know it?”

  Elliott’s eyebrows draw together. “Not as well as Prospero. Not as well as I’d like to. The garden is far from the only secret in the Akkadian Towers.”

  I looked into this garden every day from Mother’s comfortable sitting room, but I’ve only been inside that one time in the dark. There are stunted trees lining the fake stream. I recognize the bulbs of spring flowers. This place is ready to bloom.

  But the earth is disturbed in some areas as well. As if by an earthquake.

  Elliott takes a tentative step forward, as if expecting the floor beneath us to move. Vines cover some of the trees, strangling them in this sea of green. After a few steps, he seems confident that the garden is stable enough for the two of us. At least, he makes no move to leave.

  He places the wine and blanket on the low wall, where he was sitting weeks ago when he asked me to join his cause.

  “We might as well be comfortable w
hile we wait for your father.”

  But I’m nervous. On edge after the excitement of rescuing those girls and the discovery that Father may be alive.

  “Walk with me,” Elliott says, and takes my hand. “This was always one of my favorite places. No matter what villainous things he created, Prospero also engineered luxury.”

  He leads me through the garden, past arbors of flowers to a low swing attached to the bough of a weeping willow. “Prospero had to have extra water piped in to keep this old tree alive.” Elliott pats the trunk. “But it still looks healthy.”

  “The tree gets clean water, but the people of the city are dying.” I laugh a little, and then choke.

  Elliott turns his head. There is something about him here, something calm and thoughtful. As if I am seeing a different Elliott. An Elliott who could have been a poet instead of a revolutionary.

  He gestures to the swing, and I sit. The wooden seat is cracked and lined with fungus. All the piped-in water is now trapped in the air, making it heavy and muggy.

  Elliott wraps his hands around my waist and pulls me toward him. Then he slides one hand to my back, while still holding me against him with the other, like he knows what he is supposed to do—push me away from him so the swing can ascend—but he doesn’t want me to glide away from him.

  Eventually he lets go, and the movement of the swing feels unnaturally slow, as if this moment might last forever. The moisture in the air settles on my skin, but instead of seeming clammy, it feels like fine silk.

  When I swing back to him, he catches my shoulders, his hands trailing over the bare skin, delicately tracing my still-healing wound.

  “Elliott.” I shift, and he wraps his arms around me and pulls me off the swing. We tumble to the ground, laughing. I reach out and brush the tiny blue flowers in the grass.

  “The same color as your hair,” he says. “What was April thinking?”

  But I don’t want to think about April, not now. I don’t want to think of anything that’s happening outside these glass walls. No matter what, when we leave this place, people will die. We will find Father, or I will go with Malcontent. Elliott will overthrow Prospero, or not. So I lead Elliott back over to the wall where we left our things.

  He spreads the blanket beneath a bower of leaves and opens the bottle of wine.

  “I don’t have glasses.” He is not apologetic. “We’ll have to drink from the bottle.” He takes a long drink and then passes the bottle to me. It’s better wine than what we’ve been able to buy from the market.

  “This is—” I begin.

  “Magical.” Elliott finishes my sentence. I’m not sure it’s what I would have said, but I don’t correct him. “Will you will wear this?” He holds out his hand, and the diamond ring, the one that I traded yesterday, lies in the palm of his hand. It still sparkles, even after all it has been through.

  I don’t ask how he retrieved it. We are the children of murderers, abandoned by our fathers. We do things others wouldn’t dream of. But here in this garden, we can forget.

  So I take off my mask and kiss him.

  And he kisses me back. All of his intensity and all of my own yearning seem to twine between us.

  The ring falls from my hand to the earth.

  “I love you,” Elliott whispers into my neck, and I don’t know what to say, but then I don’t have to say anything, because he kisses me again. When I open my eyes a moment later, I think there’s a slow anger burning in his. Yet he’s still kissing me.

  And then, abruptly, he stops. A shadow falls over us.

  “Araby?” Father’s voice is hoarse.

  I jolt up immediately, readjusting my dress.

  Father presses his lips together. He looks tired but the same as ever. His hair is mussed, and there are ink stains on his hands. A wave of love for him overwhelms me, and I throw my arms around him. He smells of cedar wood and tobacco.

  Though he might’ve been shocked at finding me tangled up with Elliott, he pulls me close. Perhaps he didn’t think he’d ever see me, ever embrace me, again, either.

  “Dr. Worth.” Elliott is standing now too, and his voice is cold but unsurprised. He is perfectly composed. He knew Father would come here, to the garden. That he would find us.

  He set it—me—up.

  Like today after April and I rescued those children, Elliott is staking some sort of claim. The diamond ring is still lying in the dirt, and I leave it there.

  Father ignores him and brushes my hair from my face. His eyes are filled with tears.

  “I was afraid that you were in the explosion, but then I saw your messages.”

  The explosion—oh, God. He told me to leave on the steamship with Elliott, but I never boarded because Will gave me to Malcontent.

  “I want you to pretend you never met me. Become someone else,” Father continues. His eyes are more haunted than I’ve ever seen. He knows that I know, about the disease, everything. He’s ashamed.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” I respond slowly. There is no doubt, now, that he’s guilty. “I couldn’t, but you have to explain. I need to hear it from you.”

  He doesn’t answer. Some childish part of me still hoped that he would proclaim his innocence, and somehow I would find it in me to believe him.

  The silence stretches out. I’ve come all this way, and he answers me with silence.

  But I didn’t come back to the city just to ask him this. I came to save April.

  “April is dying from the Weeping Sickness. Will you help her? Can you?”

  Father’s brow furrows. “You know there is nothing that can be done.” His tone is completely without hope.

  And this is somehow worse than everything that came before. Because if he can help April, he can undo a little of the evil he has done. In his journal, I saw a man twisted by remorse, but also a man willing to make excuses for his own deeds. A weak man. I want my father to be strong. To save the day.

  I grip Father’s sleeve. “But the rumors. You had something that you threw away when Finn died. April is dying because of me. We have to help her!”

  “If there had been a way, would Finn have died?” The way he says my brother’s name is just one more stab in my heart.

  “So that’s it?” I say in a low voice. “After Finn died, you stopped working on cures and just created ways to kill more people?”

  Father stumbles back, away from me, his face completely white.

  “It’s all the prince let me do,” he says, with the same lost look I’ve seen him wear for years. I turn away so he can’t see how it infuriates me. Elliott doesn’t need to see how weak my father is. Elliott is an expert at exploiting weakness.

  As if to make some sort of amends, Father puts his hand on my shoulder. He takes a tiny vial from an inside pocket. “You did drink yours?”

  I nod. “It protects against the Red Death?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  “Give some to Elliott,” I say. And then, because he’s still my father, I add, “Please.”

  Father squares his shoulders. He told me to go with Elliott, but he’s never approved of our friendship. Elliott crosses his arms over his chest and smirks.

  “You don’t love her,” Father says.

  But Elliott said he did. Just moments ago. And I never responded. That’s not the sort of thing he’s likely to ignore.

  Father rolls the vial back and forth between his thumb and forefinger, as if considering.

  “Give him the vial,” I say. “Whether you like him or not, Elliott is doing some good for the city.”

  Father hands Elliott the vial. “Drink half.”

  He does so without a word. I take it out of his hand and cork the vial before tucking it into my pocket. “I’ll need another, too,” I tell Father. That will be enough for Henry, Elise, and Will.

  Father takes a second vial from his vest pocket, and I snatch it. Elliott keeps that slight mocking smile on his face, but I see the anger in his eyes. He knows that this vial is for Will. The gesture
may be innocent, an attempt to protect a friend, the children. But it’s too soon after ignoring his declaration of love. I care for him. But I don’t love him.

  His eyes narrow, and something between us changes.

  We can’t stay here. If Father can’t help April, then my course has been chosen for me. I press my mask to my face and hold out Elliott’s, for him to put on. In return, he holds out the diamond ring.

  I take it, but I won’t wear it. I drop it into my pocket.

  Elliott gives a sharp, ugly laugh, as if my gesture confirms everything he’s been thinking. I look into his eyes, trying to understand, but he’s closed off to me now.

  “I’ll come with you to your friend,” Father says. “If nothing else, I have an ointment that will soothe her—”

  “That’s what we wanted,” Elliott cuts in. “To soothe my sister. As she dies.” Elliott lights a cigarette as Father retrieves his small doctor bag.

  “I’m sorry that she caught the disease,” Father says. “There are ways to prevent the spread. A white powder.” We’re making our way back through the garden as he speaks. “Prospero wouldn’t let us manufacture enough of the vaccine, but it exists. But after you catch either of them . . . there isn’t much you can do.”

  “I need to know everything about the powder,” Elliott says. “How to make it, how to distribute it. You’ll help me?”

  Father sighs. “It’s better than watching the world fall to ruin, I suppose. Something to occupy our time while people destroy what’s left of the city.”

  I hate his disillusionment. Father’s face has become so lined in the last few weeks. Despite my anger and disappointment, I want to smooth the concern from his face.

  He is about to say something else when the metal hatch nearby shudders. Someone is trying to enter the garden through the maintenance closet below.

  Father hurries to it and twists a lever, locking them out and sealing us in. He doesn’t know about the door leading in from Penthouse A. “Come quickly,” he says. “It must be Malcontent. His men have been searching for me. We can break a window and escape through one of the apartments.”