#poe?

The “Novel Corona Virus” had long devastated the world. No recent pestilence had ever been so widespread, or so frightening in its many metamorphoses. Air was its terror and its medium—spread by a pestilential breath, later to kill by suffocation. There were aches, and fevers, and then loss of taste and smell, and finally failing lungs. The elevated body temperature, the first sign, was the pest ban which shut the victim out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of a long and miserable fortnight or two. At least at first. But the Prince Donnie was smug and oily and unconcerned. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hard-hearted and light-minded friends from among the grifters and sycophants of his circle, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his exclusive country clubs. This was an extensive and very large structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric lack of taste. A strong and lofty fence girdled it in. This fence had gates and a crown of barbed wires. The toadies, having entered, brought guards and weapons and welding arcs with which to seal the gate (but not trained metalworkers, with the result that the plan to weld the gate shut was quickly abandoned). They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within, excepting those who insisted on bringing their private helicopters, the better to retreat to their luxury yachts should anything untoward occur. The club was amply provisioned with such things as the Prince cared for, and naught else. With such precautions the Prince and his followers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. These had always been the cardinal sins, signs of weakness. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons aplenty, there were golf clubs, there were electronics, there were guns, there were comely hired companions, there were various recreational substances prohibited to lesser mortals. All these and security were within. Without was the “Novel Corona Virus”. It was towards the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Donnie entertained his thousand friends at a costume party of the most unusual magnificence. It was an extravagant scene, that unmasked masquerade. But first let me tell of the seven rooms in which it was held. As in many nightclubs, such suites form a dark and disorienting space. Here this was the case, as might have been expected from the prince’s lack of imagination and love of the gaudy. The apartments were so irregularly disposed that the vision embraced but little more than one at a time. There was a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yards, and at each turn a piece of cheap decoration painted gold or an overpriced work of art acquired from a money-laundering scheme. Now in not one of the seven apartments was there any lamp or bulb, amid the profusion of golden ornaments that lay scattered to and fro or suspended from the ceiling. There was no light of any kind emanating from within the suite of chambers. But in lawns that surrounded the party wing, there stood, opposite to each window, a pair of bargain-basement tiki torches that projected their rays through the tinted glass of the windows and so poorly illumined the rooms.

Such was the prince's contractor's foresight and compliance with local building codes.

This colorful and ill-lit space produced a multitude of gaudy and fantastic appearances. But in the western chamber, upholstered in black velvet and lit by scarlet windows, the effect of the fire-light that streamed upon the dark walls through the blood-tinted panes, was ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look upon the countenances of those who entered, that there were few of the company bold enough to set foot within its precincts at all. And, considering the color of human veins, none of the party-goers saw much of a point to a room of that color anyway. It was in this room, also, that there stood against the western wall, a gigantic clock of ebony. It was arranged with taste inversely proportional to its expense. Its pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang; and when the minute-hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken, there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical, but of so peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each lapse of an hour, the DJ was forced to acknowledge the passage of time, wishing fervently for the sweet release of death or at least a smoke break; and there was a brief disconcert of the whole company, as those disconcerted by the sound expressed annoyance, and the remainder of the company mocked them out of cruelty. But when the echoes had fully ceased, a bragging laughter at once pervaded the assembly; the DJ took another drink and turned the volume slightly louder, avowing that the next chiming of the clock should be its last; and then, after the lapse of sixty minutes, (which embrace three thousand and six hundred seconds of the Time that flies,) there came yet another chiming of the clock, and then were the same disconcert and tremulousness and casual mockery as before. But, in spite of these things, it was a Very Straight and expensive party. The tastes of the prince were peculiar. He had no eye for colors and effects. He embraced the decora of mere fashion beyond the most strained definition of “taste.” His plans were bold and gaudy, and his conceptions glowed with barbaric luster. There are many who would have thought him mad. His followers cared not. He had directed, in great part, the movable embellishments of the seven chambers, upon occasion of this great fête; and it was his own guiding lack of taste which had given character to the partiers’ costumes. Be sure they were grotesque. There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm—much of what has been since seen in “Hernani.”*  There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There was little of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust. To and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams. And these—the dreams—writhed in and about taking hue from the rooms, and causing the wild music of the DJ to seem as the echo of their steps. And, anon, there strikes the ebony clock which stands in the hall of the black velvet. And then, for a moment, the annoyances of the previous hour repeat. But the echoes of the chime die away—they have endured but an instant—and a shrill, mocking laughter floats after them as they depart. And now again the music pulses, and the dreams live, and writhe to and fro, taking hue from the many tinted windows through which stream the rays of the ineffectual tiki torches. But to the chamber which lies most westwardly of the seven, none venture—forsaking that damn clock and the red lighting for the wanton delights of all the other rooms. But these other rooms were densely crowded, and in them beat feverishly the heart of life. And the party went whirlingly on, until at length there commenced the sounding of midnight upon the clock. And then the music ceased, as I have told; and the gyrations of the dancers were paused; and there was an uneasy cessation of all things as before. But now there were twelve strokes to be sounded by the bell of the clock; and thus it happened, perhaps, that before the last echoes of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual before. And the rumor of this new presence having spread itself whisperingly around, there arose at length from the whole company a buzz, or murmur, expressive of disapproval and surprise—then, finally, of terror, of horror, and of disgust. In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted, it may well be supposed that no ordinary appearance could have excited such sensation. In truth, the licentious license of the night was nearly unlimited; but the figure in question had out-Heroded Herod, and gone beyond the bounds of even the prince’s own lack of decorum. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made. The whole company, indeed, seemed now deeply to feel that in the costume and behavior of the stranger neither wit nor propriety existed. The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in personal protective equipment. The mask which concealed the visage was marked “N-95” on one side. This could not be endured by the mad partiers around. But the figure had gone so far as to assume the visage of A Person Taking the Novel Corona Virus Seriously. When the eyes of the Prince Donnie fell upon this frightful image (which, with a slow and solemn movement, as if more fully to sustain its role, stalked to and fro among the partiers) he was seen to be convulsed, in the first moment with a strong shudder either of terror or distaste; but, in the next, his brow reddened with rage. “Who,”—he demanded hoarsely of the toadies who stood near him—“who has a mask at my club. No respect! No respect. That's what wrong with people. They see me and my friends, they see we're great, and they want to be all 'oh no you're not great because of COVID!'.There's this thing, you know, totally a hoax, this fake thing called the Novel Corona Virus, and they want to say I'm not great because of the fake COVID hoax. It's fake. LOCK HIM UP!” It was in the eastern chamber in which stood the Prince Donnie as he uttered these words. They were noted by few, as the prince blustered with volume but did not enunciate, and his companions were far from sober. And so, there were found none who put forth hand to seize the Masked Person so that, unimpeded, he passed within a yard of the prince’s person; and he made his way uninterruptedly, from one room to the next, six in all, before a decided movement had been made to arrest him. It was then, however, that the Prince Donnie, maddening with rage and the shame of his own lifelong cowardice, rushed hurriedly through the six chambers, while none followed him on account of a deadly terror that had seized upon them all. He had grabbed from somewhere, likely the security detail, a police baton, and had approached with what for him passed for rapidity, the Masked Person on the threshold of the western chamber. There was a sharp cry—and the baton dropped with a dull thunk upon the sable carpet, upon which, instantly afterwards, fell prostrate in death the Prince Donnie. Then, summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of the partiers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and, seizing the Masked Person, whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the personal protective equipment, which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form. And now was acknowledged the presence of the Novel Corona Virus. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the partiers in the close and ventilated halls of the county club, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the torches expired. And Darkness and Decay and the latest mutation of the Novel Corona Virus held illimitable dominion over all.