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Daily · Classics

The Masque of the Red Death

Edgar Allan Poe · short story, 1842·11 min in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
The 30‑second version11 min → 50 sec
  • Prospero walls a thousand friends inside a fortified abbey. He picks a thousand hale companions and has the courtiers weld the iron gates shut behind them: "They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within."
  • The masquerade runs through seven color-coded rooms. Blue, purple, green, orange, white, and violet chambers lead to a seventh room hung in black velvet with blood-red windowpanes, the one room "few of the company" dare enter.
  • An ebony clock silences the party every hour. Each time it strikes, the orchestra stops and "the giddiest grew pale," and the room only relaxes into laughter once the sound dies away.
  • A costumed stranger arrives dressed as the plague itself. The figure is "shrouded from head to foot," wears a corpse-like mask, and has vesture "dabbled in blood," enough to draw a murmur of "terror, of horror, and of disgust" from a crowd that thought nothing could shock it.
  • Prospero chases the figure with a dagger and drops dead. He pursues the stranger through six rooms into the black chamber; "there was a sharp cry, and the dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet," and Prospero falls dead before he lands a blow.
  • The costume turns out to have nobody inside it. Revelers rush the black room and find the grave clothes "untenanted by any tangible form"; one by one they drop dead where they stand, and the story ends: "Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all."
Summarized by FreeSummarizer.com

•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it stages denial as architecture, seven sealed rooms and a hammered-shut gate, then lets the thing being kept out arrive dressed exactly like the thing itself.

A prince locks a thousand nobles inside a walled abbey to outrun a plague, and the plague walks in anyway, dressed for the party.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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