BETTER SAFE THAN ZOMBIE

OZTS 20 | Animal

I was aware that I was dreaming.

Even so, I continued to dance with him. Our clothes brushed against each other, my skirts flaring as we swept across the floor. We were awash in blue, from the stained glass of the tall but narrow Gothic windows to the furnished ornaments and tapestries. It was the most magnificent masquerade ball I have ever been invited to, and I was dancing with its prince.

"Are you enjoying yourself?" he murmured into my ear.

I laughed and threw my head back in exuberance as he twirled me around. "Is it not obvious, Prospero?"

He grinned as his eyes twinkled from behind the mask. "You look beautiful today. Your eyes especially seems vividly bluer in this room."

I smiled and allowed him to haul me back in his arms. "That's why I chose the easternmost room," I breathed into the bare skin of his neck, which I noticed with some satisfaction shivered with goose bumps.

The heavy tolling of a clock suddenly rang across the room, and in unison the crowd went silent and the orchestra stopped playing. It was the gigantic ebony clock of the seventh room, which chimed at every hour. The sound was deep and musical, but held a peculiar note that disconcerted everyone. Without it, the masquerade would have gone in its glitter and luster unimpeded, dancing in the dream-like decorations and fantasies of the wanton Prospero had so expertly weaved.

As the echoes of the clock died, a half-subdued laughter floated amongst the crowd, and the music and the laughter returned and swelled yet again. But even though Prospero resumed his dance with me, an uneasy feeling snaked across my body and tightened across the joy that suffused me only a few minutes ago, restraining my ability to enjoy the ball.

I remembered the seventh room, the one at the westernmost side of the palace. It was the only room that the guests had avoided because of its ominous ambience, and the only room that clashed with its decorations. The other six rooms had stained windows that corresponded with its adornment, whether they be in blue, green, orange, white or purple. But the seventh room had windows of scarlet - a deep blood color - despite it being shrouded with black tapestries. And now it was midnight, the boundary between light and dark, and I felt fear slither across my spine.

Prospero must have noticed my distress. "What's wrong?" he asked me, worry sketched across his face.

But then my eyes had gone wide, away from the concerned face of Prospero but to the new figure behind him, who had elicited from the crowd the same shocked cries and gasps of terror.

Prospero's concern transformed into confusion, and he turned his head to follow my gaze. His body convulsed as his eyes landed on the masked man, from his tall and gaunt body that rose above the crowd, to the costume that imitated the trappings of the grave, up until to the mask he wore that resembled that of a stiffened corpse. But all that could still be forgiven, except the newcomer had come in the vestige of the Red Death, the horror that we had come here to escape. The intruder was covered in blood, like the scarlet windows of the seventh room, and his eyes were colored like raw meat from behind his mask.

We all shrank back except Prospero, who confronted him, although his fear wafted clear in the air.

"Who dares," he demanded in a hoarse voice, betraying his own cowardice, "Who dares to insult us with this mockery? Unmask your face, stranger!"

And the stranger did as he was told, although it wasn't his face that he unmasked - it was his lips, and it opened a gaping hole in his face, showing us an abyss of darkness, a bottomless pit that brought forth a torrent of words that invaded the whole room.