The plan was sound. That's the horror of it — the plan was actually sound.
Prince Prospero takes a thousand of his healthiest, wittiest friends into a walled abbey, and then he has the bolts welded shut from the inside, which is the detail that should stop you cold. Not locked. Welded. Nobody in, nobody out, and let the country outside do whatever it is going to do. Food, wine, musicians, dancers, buffoons. Months of it. And it works. It goes on working.
Seven rooms in a row, each one a single colour, blue through purple through orange, and at the end the black chamber nobody much likes, lit through scarlet glass, with an ebony clock in it that strikes the hour so heavily that the orchestra stops playing and the dancers stand still and everybody laughs nervously about it afterward. Every hour. All night. For months.
They had a clock in the room the entire time, counting, and they danced anyway.
And at midnight there is a figure among the maskers dressed as a corpse, spotted with blood, and Prospero — furious, humiliated, absolutely correct that this is in the worst possible taste — goes after it with a dagger through all seven rooms and dies in the black one.
The mask had nothing behind it. There was nobody wearing the costume. It had simply come in.
