Last night I read Poe’s MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, despite having promised not to delve further into the literature of death. The opening paragraph portrayed a world lost to the plague.

“The red death had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal — the madness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease, were incidents of half an hour.”

Prince Prospero sealed his castle against the incursion of the poor. His wealthy and royal guests were entertained by nocturnal soirees of decadency. They felt safe within his walls, but the Red Death suffered no barriers and one evening a spectral creature appeared before the host. The nobleman waved for the musicians to cease their playing and confronted the unwanted intruder.

“”Who dares” — he demanded hoarsely of the courtiers who stood near him — “who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery? Seize him and unmask him — that we may know whom we have to hang, at sunrise, from the battlements!”

Prince Prospero’s attack on the masked figure failed with his flailing death throes.

His guests perished without exception.

“And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, 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 tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”

Death took them all, but not so Covid 19.

The virus’ mortality rate is about 4%.

The 1918 Spanish Flu killed between 10%-25%.

My grandmother Edith might have been infected by the pandemic in Etaples, France, where her sister, Marion, and she were RCME nurses tending to the wounded soldiers of the Western Front.

AIDS killed scores of my friends as well as my baby brother, Michael Charles Smith.

Who will C19 take?

Not me.

I already had it.

I think, but nothing is certain in this world.

Stay safe and I promise not to read anymore plague books.