The Bearer of the Mask

I know not from whence I came except my father, who sent me with a dispatch for Prince Prospero to deliver on the full moon. A percipient and vivacious regent who held dominion over his afflicted land.

The road before me and the near past behind me was all I knew as I galloped on my black stallion, Midnight. My funereal attire whipped in the wind and trailed behind me in a feathered spectral. The roadway diminished forward from forest green to the blackened embers of devastation and fields that lay unkempt, fallow from necessary disregard.

The land quickened to dark despair as I traversed but never slowed through a pestilence mauled village. Funeral pyres burned bright to my left as bodies piled high like small dells with those who had succumbed to the fright that had coursed through this land.

Bells pealed, unseen through the rancid vapors and smoke of mourning. Fearful masked souls hid in the shadows of the embattled village like ghosts and wafted through the streets like a nest of insects disturbed by an unseen force. I feel nothing except the mandate to fulfill my father's warrant.

A rooster crowed the time, and the workers stopped their labor, the mourners stopped their lamentations, and they stared into the foggy void in pause as the cock crowed twice more. The surreal intonations faded into the forest, and they resumed their appointed labors.

The wails of the living pierced the air like sirens of the sea, wanton of relief in misery, and inhaled the flesh-burned air, the remnant of which their departed could partake no more.

Vapors of steam snorted from Midnight's nostrils as we entered a tunnel of tall timbers and met a wagon loaded with carnage to feed the fires of dissolution. The cloth masked teamster’s eyes leered with fright in lethargy at the lowly state of his work in the transport of human decay. I rode on and left him in my arrears to his fate.

****

Into the center of the capital city, I trotted to discover devastation as the city blazed with Prince Prospero's egocentric faux attempt at purification from disease. The taverns, bakeries, butchers, and tailors’ abodes, charred and abandoned, lay in ashes.

Midnight stopped. Men, women, and children hurried like a rodent's den invaded, lost in a maze of tortured obscurity, created by a careless man, with no passage out except the lottery of the blight. A child pointed to me, and her parents stared through me, blind, and stole her away. She looked back, but I turned away to keep my face unseen since I had no message for her.

The tower clock struck noon, and townspeople, travelers, and soldiers all stopped. They eyed in one accord as if a holy relic, the rounded clock-face in the sky as its bells clanged.

Dong, Dong, Dong……. twelve times until a sense of urgency and their collective fear electrified my existence, and the watchers accelerated into motion on the release of the final tone.

A grief-stricken man rebelled in his travails and refused to release the body of his lover to the veiled waggoneer of disposal. Soldiers stripped the corpse away and left the griever prone in the dusty street.

"Damn Prospero and his elitist minions to the fiery pits, they have deserted us to their Abbey in the hills. He has burned us in judgement to hell while they escape to sow their debauchery of privilege," He screamed.

Midnight spurred forward, and we departed the conflagrations of a city and its souls consumed toward my appointment on the full moon with Prince Prospero, the Abandoner.

****

Well into the hills, a troupe of peddlers by the road huddled to the night fire by their wagons. The men, without acknowledgment, despaired not at my arrival nor objected as I stooped to a log by their flame to observe. A slim, pock-faced man, in a plain frock, poked the coals and lamented.

"Half the population has fallen to the scourge of death, another third perished in the fires of preservation and starvation," he said, "The Prince is a gangly coward and has set his demeanor of frivolity above the whole."

A stout man with jowls and body stores to survive a famine nodded his agreement.

"My cousin, a celebrated acrobat, has been imprisoned to entertain the Castellated Abbey while we burn," he said, "my brother, a soldier has reported cries of debauchery, pleasant and horrific from within. They sit on a hill and witness voluptuous passions, lurid dance, and the engorgement of delectable foods while the starving outside the Abbey plead for morsels and safety."

A third man leaned in out of the shadow, closer to the blaze, and gave testimony.

"My neighbor's three daughters, from across the meadow, were conscripted as service maidens. They will be left spent like brood cows to pasture when the nobles are finished. May the heavens curse their condescension to our lowly lives," said a bald man, "and have mercy on all our souls," he said.

"Mercy," said the fourth, and each repeated the one-word prayer and remained silent until they slept.

The burnt sun rose and appeared as a hot cinder in the ashen skies. Two woke, and two had been granted their prayers as the gray-blue pall of their visage and glossy, scarlet-streaked, eyes stared wide into eternity.

The viral purge of the death, distorted mercy, had taken them quickly in the night. I took a remembrance from the bald man, his face, mounted Midnight and rode on.

****

The further I rode, the darker the dome over the land became, and I knew my direction was sure to my goal. The Abbey lay below me in a valley unmistakable with high walls that surrounded a grand fortress. The knights encamped before the gate bore me no malicious or attention as I rode to the massive doors and witnessed the welded bolts. Formidable barriers, sealed to isolate Prospero and his entourage from the misery of the world, appeared impenetrable. I could hear the music and laughter from within the Abbey.

I traversed the circumference to find a point of weakness and arrived at a body of water. A large lake on the east side of the abbey fed an ancient aqueduct left unprotected, and I discovered my entry point.

As the sun dropped over the horizon, I observed the Castellated Abbey from atop a hill with a vantage point. In two days, on the full moon, I would fulfill my father's bidding.

The human condition disintegrated from its mythical legends of love as I observed a veiled woman beaten as she begged for food. An Archers' arrow pierced a famished child's heart as he scaled the Abbey wall. A sword struck down a cripple who begged for fresh water. The Nobles, unaware in their jovial seclusion, enjoyed a roasted swine while a quintet played light airs. The savory scents of charred fat blended with the decay of the executed tossed into a ditch

****

The appointed day came, and the moon rose full and enhanced excitement in the Abbey Courtyard. Couples appeared in the grand display adorned with colorful masks and costumes of finery.

My descent down the hill to the lake seemed poetic as Midnight's steps matched the tempo of the Chamber music that resonated through the woods. A grand clock thundered the hour, and the music stopped, silent. Eleven peals rang, and the music resumed.

I waded across the lake as a phantom in the night and slipped unawares through the channel opening and into the Abbey. The stolen remembrance of the bald man's red-stained countenance masked my face as I entered the epicurean scene of Prince Prospero's Masquerade ball.

The room, an imperial suite of blue walls, floor, and ceiling with its seminal torch-lit window likened to a sea of new birth. With want of unlimited sensation, the Nobles appeared to float on an ocean of life as music reverberated in surround.

I glided with stiff and solemn movement across the center of the room past waltzing revelers as a spectral would approach a visitor in a cemetery on the darkest of nights. A noblewoman garnished in vivid but gaudy attire gasped as I passed in her view. Plump fingers of accusation pointed to my funeral habit and mask as an offense to their limits of self-perpetuated propriety. Prospero's room of blue accentuated the scarlet horror that dabbled my visage and clothing of the grave.

The Nobles would peer, but not close, and their horrified expressions convicted the costume and its wearer out of bounds. This indiscretion of transporting reality from without the walls was beyond the pale. Already proven cowards, they parted ways before me and queried among themselves, "Who is this?"

The eyes of Prince Prospero, master of this contrived world, fell on me from across the room. His body jerked in astoundment, then his face reddened in anger or terror turned to distaste that one would encroach with such mockery.

"Who dares," he demanded of the courtiers who stood near him, and the musicians stopped, "who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery? Seize him, and unmask him, that we may know whom we have to hang, at sunrise, from the embattlements!" *(The Masque of the Red Death)

A few made feints to detain me, but none would put forth a hand to seize me. I moved forward within a yard of the Prince and in deliberate steps moved through a bent passage of right then left and into the next room of the purple. The second of Prospero's seven suites representing the journey through life. From purple, I strode to green, green to orange, through white into violet and its shadows of darkness.

I approached the far side of the violet room to enter the last suite of black. The ebony cavern featured a blood-red cathedral window that glimmered from torch fire that danced from the exterior. The walls seemed alive as phantom droplets of blood wept from its wounds like those suffered from the pestilence that purged the lands. The pendulum of the great clock in the corner swung in time and pulsed like a beating heart in fear.

Rushed and careless footsteps approached me from behind. Prince Prosperos, embarrassed at his display of momentary cowardice, had become enraged. Alone he rushed, with dagger raised aloft, through the six rooms in pursuit and closed to strike as I entered the black room.

I turned in confrontation, his alarmed eyes met mine, and our minds intersected. I conveyed to him the reality of his truth, the message, an eternal summons from my father, "Reap what you sow," I said.

A sharp cry exploded from him with bulged eyes as the great ebony clock stroked Midnight. Prince Prospero, the regent of the land, fell to the sable carpet, dead. The grand clock vibrated the walls with its deafening message and announced the witching hour.

Dong… Wild despair seized a mob of courtiers, and they rushed into the black apartment as I stood erect and solemn at the base of the clock.

Dong…Their attempt to seize me failed, for my presence was no more as I had returned to my father, my task was complete.

Dong…The rabid men gasped at finding the funeral robe void of any being and the muted flesh of the horrific mask.

Dong… Enraged and dishonorable, they violently loosed the blooded mask against the walls.

Dong…They realized their plight; the death they sought to isolate themselves from had come like a thief in the night.

Dong…In the blood-streaked walls of the black apartment, they fell and died in the position of their despair.

Dong…One by one, the revelers, each and all, quickly fell dead by the scourge from which they had hidden.

Dong…

Dong…

Dong…

Dong…

Dong…

The great clock stopped, the torches expired, and the pestilence of death escaped the land forevermore.

I, the bearer of the mask, like a thief in the night, await my father's command.

**** **** ****

This story inspired by the phantasmic artistry of Edgar Allan Poe, circa 1842