Author's Note: This is a shameless work of satire that borrows endlessly from Poe's original, but I simply couldn't resist.

 

The Black Cough had long devastated the country. Never had a disease been so deadly or so insidious. Of all the humours, Phlegm was its seal and its avatar – there were sharp pains, a scalding fever, then profuse coughing that ravaged the lungs without dissolution. The ceaseless coughing was enough to announce the victim, and have him shut away from his fellow men, and though the doctors and healers of the land toiled to save those who could afford their aid, there was no sure way to escape its reaches. The whole seizure and progress of the sickness was silent and invisible, the infected breathing its foul vapours for many days before the slightest discomfort by which time it was too late to prevent the miasma from permeating all around them.

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But Prince Prepostero was happy and dauntless. He mocked the advice of his finest doctors and told his people that to wear masks about their faces would restrict their freedom. When half of the population was afflicted, he gathered his courtiers and his patrons from all across the land and summoned them to his presence in one of his castellated mansions. This was a vast and magnificent structure, a creation of the prince's eccentric and questionable taste: a great and beautiful wall encircled it, with gates of iron. The patrons, having entered it, sealed the bolts shut and left riflemen to guard the entrance. They resolved to allow no means of ingress to the plague beyond the walls. The mansion was amply provisioned, and with such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to the contagion. The outside world could take care of itself. In the mean time it would be folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all of the means of distraction. Within the walls there was beauty, there was beer, there was a constant banquet of fast food. Without was the Black Cough.

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In the sixth month of his seclusion, while the pestilence still raged, Prince Prepostero entertained his thousand sycophants with a party of unusual decadence. The guests were instructed to wear their most splendid and luxurious gowns, from only the most esteemed of designers, for there was nothing the prince respected but wealth, but all were barred from wearing a mask.

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It was a most extravagant scene, made all the more bizarre by the arrangement of the rooms. Many such palaces house Imperial suites, but within the prince's glittering palace of perfect white stone and polished glass, between the twisting labyrinth of walnut-panelled corridors, lay five rooms each furnished with such a spectacular array of gold and velvet that they were all but consumed by it. The walls were a monument to the prince's pride, every room covered with portraits and the most flattering records of his successes. The first of these rooms was painted red, with red drapes across the ruddy stained glass windows and red velvet swathed across the furniture. The second was pure white. The third blue. The fourth was intended to be gold but to complement the golden bathroom fittings, orange was decided. Thus a gaudy scene was created. The fifth and final room, however, was black, with thick black drapes drawn shut across the blood-red window. The effect was so ghastly that few had the courage to enter, with many choosing instead to ignore black in favour of white or blue.

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It was in this most shunned of rooms that a tall clock of pure ebony was placed against the western wall. Its heavy pendulum swung back and forth with a monotonous clang, and when the minute hand finished its cycle around the face, the hour was struck with a tone from its brazen lungs that was clear and deep and musical, but of such a loud and peculiar note that the musicians were compelled to pause, momentarily, in their performance, and thus the whole company of revellers would cease their dancing and their conversations, put down their extra large fries, and listen. While the chimes still rang, even the loudest and stubbornest of voices was compelled to quiet, and many were observed to furrow their brows as if in confusion; and the musicians would glance between one another with nervous smiles and whisper vows that at the next hour they would continue their playing, only to fall silent again as the clock announced the next hour.

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In spite of this, it was a happy and raucous affair. Revellers wound through the rooms like the brightly flowered vines of some fantastical plant, writhing in dance and motion. Always they thronged around Prince Prepostero. In him all of the garish colours of the rooms was reflected, his overlarge suit in a deep blue, his shirt pristine white, his tie blood red, his hair dyed the same yellow of the golden ornaments, and his skin tanned so deeply that only the vibrancy of the orange room could match it. His tastes were peculiar. His eye for pretty women was well observed and many had remarked upon his disregard for mere fashion and aesthetics. His plans were for the bold, for excess, for displays unimaginable wealth. There were many who would have called him mad. His followers scoffed at such claims. To them, his words were ingenious, his plans necessary, his zeal commendable. To them, he was a hero.

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As long as the musicians continued to play, these followers flowed around the glittering fixtures in wild and exotic fancies, their clothes thick with the scent of the oil that had cooked their food and their short fingers sticky with sweet sauces, leaving trails of molasses against their silver goblets. But in that darkened westward chamber, there were now none of the revellers. Those who had been caught in the moments when the clock's toll still echoed there had been struck with such a sense of doubt and concern that they hurried to join the crowds in those brighter, more comforting rooms.

 

As such, the revel whirled on until at length the clock sang of midnight and, as before, the music ceased and, as its twelve chimes echoed from the westward chamber through the hushed rooms, there were some within the blush of the red room who perceived the presence of a masked figure. Rumour of this new arrival rippled whisperingly among the guests, and as the last tone of the twelfth hour echoed to silence, there arose a great murmur of disapproval which swiftly turned to horror, then terror, then disgust.

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In such a group there was little that would arouse such emotions, but all present had the intense feeling that within the shape and bearing of the stranger there was no propriety or humour. The figure was tall and gaunt, enshrouded entirely in the vestments of the grave. The mere fact this stranger was concealed behind a mask would be means enough for such a company's derision, but the mask itself so closely resembled the countenance of a corpse that even the closest scrutiny could not detect a cheat. Even this might have been tolerated by the crowd, were it not for the approximation this mummer had created of the Black Cough. Across the rigid mouth of the mask was draped a further covering, splattered wet with blood and spittle. Beads of fluid glistened upon its stiffened brow, and flecked all through its shroud, like the saline stains of sweat caused by that infernal fever.

 

When this horrible vision met the eyes of Prince Prepostero as it slowly stalked through the company, he convulsed in what could be disgust or terror. His brow reddened, his eyes screwed into narrow beads and his lips curled into a sneer.

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“Who dares insult our freedom with this mockery?” he demanded in a hoarse shout to his followers. “Get him out of here! Get him out! Do you know what we used to do to people like that in the old days? Believe me, he'd leave on a stretcher, let me tell you.”

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It was in the red room, the eastern-most room, than the prince stood as he spoke, surrounded by many rapidly paling courtiers. At first there was a sudden rush towards the mysterious phantom, as the prince's followers rushed to carry out his orders and remove the intruder. But each was struck with a nameless awe that so overwhelmed them that none dared put out a hand to touch this ghastly spectre and, thus unimpeded, the figure continued its slow progress. As though on impulse, the vast assembly of revellers shrank back against the portraits on the walls of each room, allowing the stranger's solemn, measured step to take him inexorably through the red room, to the white, to the blue, and even to the orange without a single attempt to arrest him.

 

Maddened with rage and infuriated by his demands being ignored, Prince Prepostero snatched a pistol from one of his advisors and after the stranger, holding his weapon aloft. In the doorway to the blackened room, he stopped still, pistol pointing into the darkness. But before he could fire, there was a sharp cry. Prince Prepostero fell prostrate upon the velvet carpet, dead.

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Overcome with shock and fury, a number of his followers drew the courage to rush over the threshold into the black room and to seize the figure standing still and silent in the shadow of the ebony clock. As they wrenched the mask away, there was a gasp of unutterable horror, as there was nothing behind it but a void, no tangible form at all.

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And now was acknowledged the presence of the Black Cough, he came among them like a breath,. Each and every one of the courtiers fell coughing and pained, their blood and spittle bedewing the walls, realising too late that neither their claims of the pestilence being survivable nor their bluster about their own physical prowess could save them. And darkness and decay and the Black Cough held illimitable dominion over all.