Masque of the Red Death (6 page)

“Where is her steam carriage?” My voice sounds even smaller. “It isn’t like she’s never stayed out all night before.”

“Araby, they are saying that the carriage was attacked by bats.”

I want to laugh.

But not really.

April and I were making jokes about bats last night. It would be too coincidental … but then, Father saved humanity and couldn’t save his own son. I don’t discount coincidence. Or ugly, gut-wrenching irony.

“Mother…”

“There were bits of hair in her carriage. You know how people say bats like hair....”

That is what they say, that if you have an elaborate hairdo you will attract the bats. I always envied April’s perfect hair.

“At least you weren’t with her.”

“Yes. I’m pretty lucky.” For once Mother hears the implication and flinches. Does she have survivor guilt, too, or just survivor hatred for the daughter who lived?

I steady myself with a hand on the back of the sofa. The hopeless masses watch us as we pass on our way to the Debauchery Club. Sometimes they have the energy to yell at us or shake their fists. Who is to say that they wouldn’t attack April, a rich girl in a fancy carriage? She was probably drunk. I remember the dark figures who materialized from between the buildings while the young mother gave up the body of her child. The rock, seemingly thrown out of nowhere.

And there was that boy, the one with the blue eyelids. What was in those glasses that he was handing around? Did he drug April? I feel dizzy. Did he drug me?

“Where was the carriage found?” I ask.

“Near a club owned by her uncle.” Mother gives me a look. She’s too much of a lady to use a word like debauchery.

I could lose April, like I lost Finn. I’m weak suddenly, and glad I’m holding the back of the sofa.

“You’re pale. Should I have the cook make you something?” Mother places her hand on my shoulder. Apparently she’ll still touch me if I’m about to collapse onto the floor.

The cook… Will and the children ate their last apples before we left. I can do nothing, in this moment, to help April, but I can help Will. Our cook will be happy to prepare something; she doesn’t think we appreciate her cooking, since none of us ever has much appetite.

“I’m glad you’re home.” Mother isn’t looking at me. I believe her, but I also know that, like me, she’d be happier if Finn were here.

She’d trade her living child for her dead one in a heartbeat.

“I need money for a mask,” I say. “Has the courier returned?”

“Not yet. April’s mother borrowed him. She sent her own courier to all the places April usually goes, and our courier to search the carts, just in case.” There are too many dead to allow everyone the privilege of identifying their loved ones. People die and are carted away.

She can’t look at me. The constant reminders provided by the corpse collectors are one of the reasons she rarely leaves our apartment.

Mother hands me a purse filled with heavy coins.

I sit down because my legs are shaking. I should never have let myself care about frivolous April with her silver eyelids and her evil sense of humor.

I drop the purse of coins onto the table, and it knocks my poetry book to the floor. A slip of paper falls from between the pages.

Meet me in the garden at midnight
.

CHAPTER

SIX

T
HE GARDEN?

Midnight?

An eye has been sketched at the bottom of the note. I glance through one of the inner windows at the overgrown garden, trying to ignore the uncomfortable feeling of being watched.

I run my hands over the book’s scarred leather cover. This book belonged to someone else. Does that mean this message did as well? Did whoever it was meant for already meet whoever wrote it, at midnight in a garden? Perhaps years ago; perhaps both are dead now.

I wish the message could be from Will, but he’s always working at midnight.

Would April leave a message for me? I stare at the handwriting, but it is blocky and unrecognizable.

I walk to the interior window. In the mud, I see something that might be part of a footprint. You wouldn’t see it if you weren’t expecting to.

Drifting through the penthouse, I run my hands over the glass. The windows don’t open. And the door is hidden behind a brick wall.

Hours pass. I wait. Mother taps at my door before she goes to bed.

“They may find her, Araby.” The way she says it exacerbates my fear. I touch the scrap of paper, hoping it means something. I hear Mother sigh and walk across the hall to her own room.

I watch the clock impatiently, and then finally slip out of our apartment.

If the entrance to the garden isn’t on this level, then it must be above or below us. There is a terrace on the roof, and I’ve been up there enough, when I was allowed access to the roof, to know that there are no trapdoors.

I have never been on the floor directly below this one, though. The elevator operator, with his smooth white mask, always brings us straight to the top. But there are stairs.

Our hallway is lit by a flickering gas lamp that is too weak to truly penetrate the gloom, and the stairway at the end of the hall is completely dark. I walk gingerly, placing one foot carefully in front of the other and touching the wall with one hand.

The corridor is filled with doors. These apartments must be considerably smaller than the penthouses above. I try each door gently, so that I don’t alert the occupants, but near the end of the hall I crash into a chair, obviously placed in the hallway for a courier, and it grates loudly against the floor before hitting the wall.

From inside the nearest apartment, someone shouts, “Who’s there?”

And then a door is opening. I expect to see a servant, maybe, or a family, but instead I see several young men in military uniforms.

“What are you doing on this floor?” one of them asks, reaching for me. I step backward before he can touch me. I don’t know if he has mistaken me for someone else, but it is certain that I don’t belong here. A second door opens, revealing another, older, soldier.

“Stop her,” he says.

More doors are opening. The uniforms proclaim that they work for Prince Prospero. Why has he placed so many of his men on the floor directly below ours? On the older man’s lapel, I see a pin. If it weren’t for my hours with April, her attention to style and detail, I would never have noticed it. An open eye.

I hold out the note, as if it will somehow save me.

“‘Meet me at the garden at midnight,’” he reads.

His uniform has many bright decorations, and I’m guessing he is in charge. None of these soldiers have the closed, cruel look of the men I see turning hungry children away from the perimeter of the upper city—but he’s looking at me like he thinks I’m crazy. Then he glances at the slip of paper again, and this time he sees the eye, faint as it is, sketched with pencil at the corner of the sheet.

“Let her through,” he says, and bows to me. “Enjoy your time in the garden.”

He glares up and down the hallway. “Prepare to move to someplace less luxurious in the morning.” Even in the semidarkness the underlings see his expression and slink back into the apartments.

“It’s the last door on the right,” he says to me when he sees I haven’t moved.

The knob on the last door turns easily. I open it and hurry through, glad to be away from the staring men. My mother has warned me repeatedly never to be in a dark corridor, a dark alley, an abandoned room, with even one man. I sigh. Her days of chaperones and fainting females are long gone, but her warnings can still frighten me.

I can tell right away that the room is not large, but I stand in darkness for what feels like hours, waiting for my eyes to adjust. It’s a maintenance closet filled with brooms and buckets and a ladder that is attached to the back wall. I catch my breath. It’s the right height to reach the garden.

The ceiling is covered with gears and pulleys. Crossing the room, I place one hand on a rung, and then both feet. My elegant shoes have no traction, and by the time I’m halfway up, my hands are starting to sweat.

A large circular brass door covers the top of the ladder. I push it, and it moves upward with a loud grating sound while a bit of earth trickles down, hitting my cheek. So this Garden of Eden isn’t fully sealed after all.

My hands make contact with soil, then grass. The air isn’t as thick as I expected from the beads of moisture that pool and roll down the window in my bedroom. It’s muggy but bearable.

A slender tree branch slaps me in the face, and I suppress a scream. I’ve moved from the familiar darkness of the hallway to an unfamiliar darkness that smells of growing things. Vines touch my face and snake around my ankles.

My feet make squelching sounds in the mud, so I stop, straining to listen.

I hear the striking of a match, and my eyes latch on to the sudden flash of orange light. Someone is very near. I smell pungent smoke. Tobacco, perhaps? Taking a tentative step forward, I can make out a shape, long legs, crossed at the ankle. Obviously male.

“Hello?” My voice is embarrassingly tremulous.

“You’re early. I like that.”

“This garden is supposed to be sealed.”

“I grew up in Penthouse A. It would be cruel to keep me from the garden where I played as a boy.”

“You’re April’s brother, Elliott?”

He puts whatever he is smoking to his lips. I watch the brightness where the paper is burning. His movements are unhurried.

“Yes.”

“Do you know where she is?”

He sighs. “I suspect that our uncle got tired of her making a spectacle of herself and has made her an unwilling guest in his castle.”

“He can’t force her to stay.”

He laughs. “The prince
can
make her stay. He can kill her if he wants, but I don’t think he will.”

“He wouldn’t … you’re sure he won’t…” I can’t say the word kill. “He won’t hurt her?” I move closer, listening to the cadence of his voice, trying to be sure of his identity before I make my guess. “You’re the guy with the syringe.”

“Yes.” He might be sticking out his hand for me to shake, but I can’t see well enough to be sure.

“Blond eyebrows.” I try to remember everything I know about him. He’s a year or two older than April, eighteen or nineteen.

He laughs again, but when he speaks, his voice is completely serious.

“April said we could trust you, so I’m going to.” He takes another drag from his cigarette, leaving me with an impression of long, aristocratic fingers. “Would you like to sit down?”

I put my hand forward until I can feel the wall and then, awkwardly, sit.

“Those soldiers downstairs. Are they connected with you, somehow?”

He coughs twice. “They didn’t bother you? I needed a place to house them, and several floors of this building are abandoned. It seemed a good enough solution.”

“They were wearing Prince Prospero’s uniform.”

“For now.”

“Why do you need soldiers?” I ask.

“Rebellion,” he says. “April and I are planning a rebellion.”

His voice has changed from slightly bored to low and intense. Without meaning to, I lean toward him, too shocked to make even the slightest sound. This is treason.

In this city, people who commit treason are put to death. But he has soldiers.

“A rebellion?” I ask finally. “April is part of this?” How can April be part of a rebellion? She has trouble deciding what dress to wear.

“She has to be a part of it. This rebellion is who we are.” He makes a sudden movement, and even in the dark I can tell he’s agitated. “April and I hid behind a curtain and watched the worthy Prince Prospero slash our father’s throat—”

I gasp.

I can’t help it. I actually put my hand up to my own throat. Because I know … the gush of warm blood… I force the memory away.

“He murdered our father. He claimed lawless citizens broke into the mayor’s office. I was a boy then, and my father wanted peace, so I didn’t fight. I waited. And now we’re going to destroy the prince. I’m going to save the city.”

I try to see his expression, but it’s too dark. Odd that he chose this place for our meeting.

“But other forces have begun to move in the city, and we can’t afford to let anyone else take control. We have to act soon. I asked April to bring you to meet me so I could see for myself how fearless you are.”

I nearly fall off the stone wall. Did April tell him that? He is wrong. I have so much fear. And since last night I’ve become more interested in the future. I’m not the person Elliott thinks I am.

“We couldn’t find you at the club,” I say.

“I was detained.”

“And you didn’t tell me who you were. You left me passed out behind a curtain.”

“I did not. I left to speak to … a friend. And you made it home, while my sister did not.”

“I’m not sure either of us was meant to make it home. There was a boy who gave us drinks....”

“What did he look like? I’ll find him.” Something about the way he says this, with complete confidence, speaks to me. He’s so different from my father, who is quiet and always afraid.

I describe the boy as best I can.

“Probably working for our uncle,” Elliott says. “But if he hurt April, I’ll kill him. So … here we are in this dark, forbidding garden. Will you help me, Araby Worth? I need someone like you. Willing to take risks.”

I stare into the darkness. He can’t see my expression, but I try to keep my face impassive anyway.

“I don’t think I can help you.”

“I can give you drugs,” he says. “Good ones.”

I want to laugh. Yesterday I wanted drugs. Yesterday I needed … my hands are trembling. Maybe I still need them. But his offer eases the pressure. Maybe it’s his voice, disembodied in the humid darkness, or maybe it’s how easy he thinks I am. I think of Henry and Elise, and of course I think about Finn. Can anyone overthrow the prince? Even with an army? Elliott is quiet as he waits for my response.

“I have an idea,” I say. “A suggestion for your new government.”

“Oh?”