Seven Rooms and a Clock
Full spoilers ahead, but this is a short story, about twenty-four hundred words, so the plot fits in one breath. A plague called the Red Death is killing a country. Prince Prospero shuts a thousand friends inside an abbey to wait it out. Months later they hold a masked ball in a suite of seven colored rooms, and at midnight a stranger in a corpse mask walks in. The Red Death wins.
The text is Project Gutenberg ebook two one four eight, The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume Two, the Raven Edition, where this is one story among many. I split it into fourteen blocks of text and I will cite them as paragraphs. Every count in this video is my own, made from that text.
Paragraphs One to Three: Locked In
Paragraph one is the plague. The Red Death has devastated the country, and the story says the whole illness, from the first pain to the end, takes only half an hour. Its mark is blood, and the scarlet stains on a victim’s face cut him off from help and sympathy. Poe keeps it brief and moves on.
Paragraph two is the prince’s plan. When his lands are half empty, Prospero picks a thousand healthy, light-hearted friends from his court and retires to one of his abbeys. It has a high wall and gates of iron. The courtiers weld the bolts shut with furnaces and hammers, so that nobody can leave on a sudden impulse of despair.
Inside, the abbey is well stocked, and the story lists the pleasures: buffoons, musicians, ballet-dancers, beauty, wine. The courtiers decide it is folly to grieve or to think, and the outside world can take care of itself. Paragraph three jumps ahead to the fifth or sixth month, and a masked ball.
Rooms One to Six: East to West
Paragraph four is the longest block in the story, four hundred thirty-five words, and it is a floor plan. There are seven rooms, an imperial suite, but not the usual straight line of open doors. There is a sharp turn every twenty or thirty yards, so a guest can see little more than one room at a time.
Start at the eastern end. Room one is blue. Room two is purple. Room three is green. Room four is orange, room five is white, and room six is violet. Each has a tall, narrow Gothic window of stained glass in the same color as the room.
Notice there is no lamp in any of them. The light comes from braziers on tripods in the closed corridor outside each window, shining through the glass. So the color is the light. By my count, all six of these rooms share just fifty-six words, a sentence each for the first three, and one sentence for the last three.
The Seventh Room
Then the story slows down. Room seven is the western room, and it is hung in black velvet on the ceiling, the walls and the carpet. It is the only room where the windows do not match. The panes are scarlet, a deep blood color.
Firelight through those panes on black velvet looks ghastly, the story says, and it gives the faces of anyone who enters such a wild look that few guests are bold enough to step inside. Against the western wall stands a gigantic clock of ebony.
By my count, the three sentences that describe room seven’s decoration are fifty-seven words, more than the six other rooms put together. Add the clock and its chimes, and the western room takes at least three hundred sixty-four words. That is fifteen percent of the whole story, in one room.
The Clock
Paragraph five is the clock. Its pendulum swings with a heavy, dull clang, and each hour it strikes a note so clear, deep and strange that the musicians stop playing and the waltzers stop dancing. The giddiest guests turn pale, and the older ones pass a hand over their brows.
Then the echo dies, and laughter fills the rooms. The musicians whisper to each other that next time they will not be shaken. The story points out that an hour holds three thousand six hundred seconds of the Time that flies, and then the clock strikes again, and the same silence falls.
I counted the word clock, and it appears twelve times in a story where Prospero’s own name appears six. Paragraph seven adds the revelers, whom the narrator calls dreams. At every chime they freeze where they stand, and when it fades the music swells and they come back to life, more merrily than ever.
Midnight
Paragraph eight is midnight, and midnight has twelve strokes. The story says that more thought creeps in when there is more time to think. Before the last echo dies, many guests notice a masked figure that nobody had noticed before.
A whisper goes around, then a murmur, and the story names the feelings in order: disapproval, surprise, terror, horror, disgust. Paragraph nine explains why. At a ball where almost anything is allowed, this costume goes too far. The figure is tall and gaunt, wrapped in grave clothes, with a mask like a stiffened corpse.
Worse, he is dressed as the Red Death itself. His clothes are dabbled in blood and his brow is splashed with scarlet. Prospero shudders, then turns red with rage. In paragraph eleven he asks who dares, orders the stranger seized and unmasked, and says he will hang the man at sunrise from the battlements.
The Walk
Paragraph twelve places the prince in the eastern blue room, as far from the black one as you can get. His voice rings through all seven rooms. His courtiers start toward the stranger, but a nameless awe stops them, and nobody puts out a hand.
So the figure walks. He passes within a yard of the prince while the crowd shrinks back to the walls. Then, at the same slow, measured pace, he goes through the blue room, the purple, the green, the orange, the white, and the violet before anyone moves to stop him.
Then Prospero, enraged and ashamed of his own moment of cowardice, runs through the six rooms with a drawn dagger. Nobody follows. He gets within three or four feet. The figure reaches the end of the velvet room and turns. There is a sharp cry, the dagger drops onto the black carpet, and the prince falls dead.
The Empty Costume
The guests find their courage, rush into the black room, and seize the figure standing in the shadow of the ebony clock. They tear at the grave clothes and the corpse mask, and find nothing inside. There is no body at all.
Paragraph fourteen is short and quiet. The story says the presence of the Red Death is now acknowledged. He came like a thief in the night. One by one the revelers drop in the halls, and each dies in the posture of his fall.
The life of the ebony clock goes out with the last of them. The flames of the tripods die. The story ends on Darkness and Decay and the Red Death holding dominion over all. It never says how the plague got through the walls, and the iron gates are never mentioned again.
The Count
Here is what the text itself counts. The words Red Death appear five times, in paragraphs one, two, nine and twice in fourteen, and every red in the story belongs to that phrase. Blood appears seven times, counting blood-colored and its cousins, and paragraphs one, four, seven, nine and fourteen each have some.
The longest sentence in the story has one hundred thirty-eight words. It is the one about the clock striking. The story averages about twenty-three words a sentence, but the last six, the dying of the revelers, the clock and the flames, average about thirteen.
The narrator says I only twice, in as I have told and as I have painted. No guest and no courtier is named, only Prospero. There is no date, no country and no name for the abbey. We know the prince, the clock, the rooms, and one stranger.
What It Might Mean
The story never says what the rooms stand for. Many readers take the east-to-west line as a life, from a first room to a last, with the clock as time and the prince’s walls as the hope of shutting death out. In my reading that fits, since the stranger walks the same line, but it is a reading, not something the text says.
If your teacher asks, here are three questions I would prepare. Why is room seven the only one whose windows do not match? Why does the clock make the guests pause but never stop the party? And who is under the mask, when the story itself says nobody is?
Before You Go
If you want to read it yourself, the Project Gutenberg text is free, and the link is in the description. The full guide is at book explained dot com. Subscribe, tap like, and tell me in the comments which room you would have stayed in.
