This is the memory palace, I'm Nate de Mayo. Something different this time, early for Halloween.

A reading of a story from 1846, now newly relevant, here is the mask of the red death from Edgar Allan Poe.

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 redness and the horror of blood.

There were sharp pains and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores with the solution.

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 the incidents of half an hour.

But the prince prospere was happy and don'tless and segacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to the presence a thousand hail and light-hearted friends from among the knights and names of his court.

And with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castelated abysses.

This was an extensive and magnificent structure. The creation of the prince's own eccentric yet agust taste.

A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates vired. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and messy hammers and welded the bolts.

They resolved to leave means either of ingress nor egress, to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amplified.

With such precautions, the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself.

In the meantime, it was folly to grieve or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatory, there were ballet dancers, there were musicians, there was beauty, there was wine. All these in security were within.

Without was the red death. It was toward the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion.

And while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a mass ball of the most unusual magnificence.

It was of the leptuous scene that masquerade. But first let me tell you of the rooms in which it was held. There were seven, an imperial suite.

In many palaces however, such suites form along and straight vista, while the folding doors slide back nearly to the walls on either hand, so that the view of the whole extent is scarcely impeded.

Here the case was different. As might have been expected from the dukes love of the bazaar. 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 20 or 30 yards, and it each turned a novel effect.

To the right and left in the middle of each wall, a tall and narrow gothic window looked out upon a close quarter which pursued the windings of the suite.

These windows were of stained glass whose color varied in accordance with the prevailing hue of the decorations of the chamber into which it opened.

That at the eastern extremity was hung, for example, in blue, and vividly blue or its windows.

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