If you consider that the place in which we find the seven rooms is a monastery, a place where men are supposed to withdraw from this world to meditate on the next, its rooms appear even stranger. What’s the set-up? Seven rooms, yes, thank you, I believe I just said that. Running east to west, good. In a straight line? No. There’s a sharp turn every twenty or thirty yards, so that you can see only one room at a time. So long as they follow that east to west course, you can lay the rooms out in any form you like. I favor steps, like the ones that lead the condemned man to the chopping block, but that’s just me.

  Hang on, hang on, we’ll get to the colors in a second. We need to stay with the design of the rooms for a little longer. Not everygets this the first time through. There are a pair of windows, Gothic windows, which means what? That they’re long and pointed at the top. The windows are opposite one another, and they look out on, anybody? Not exactly: a chandelier hangs down from the ceiling. It is a kind of light, though. No, a candelabra holds candles. Anyone else? A brazier, yes, there’s a brazier sitting on a tripod outside either window. They’re, how would you describe a brazier? Like a big metal cup, a bowl, that you fill with some kind of fuel and ignite. Wood, charcoal, oil. To be honest, I’m not as interested in the braziers as I am in where they’re located. Outside the windows, right, but where outside the windows? Maybe I should say, What is outside the windows? Corridors, yes, there are corridors to either side of the rooms, and it’s along these that the braziers are stationed. Just like our classroom. Not the tripods, of course, and I guess what’s outside our windows is more a gallery than a corridor, since it’s open to the parking lot on the other side. All right, all right, so I’m stretching a bit, here, but have you noticed, the room has seven windows? One for each color in Prospero’s Abbey. Go ahead, count them.

  So here we are in this strange abbey, one that has a crazy zig-zag suite of rooms with corridors running beside them. You could chalk the location’s details up to anti-Catholic sentiment; there are critics who have argued that anti-Catholic prejudice is the secret engine driving Gothic literature. No, I don’t buy it, not in this case. Sure, there are stained-glass windows, but they’re basically tinted glass. There’s none of the iconography you’d expect if this were anti-Catholic propaganda, no statues or paintings. All we have is that enormous clock in the last room, the mother of all grandfather clocks. Wait a minute . . .

  What about those colors, then? Each of the seven rooms is decorated in a single color that matches the stained glass of its windows. From east to west, we go from blue to purple to green to orange to white to violet to—to the last room, where there’s a slight change. The windows are red, but the room itself is done in black. There seems to be some significance to the color sequence, but what that is—well, this is why we have literature professors, right? (No snickering.) Not to mention, literature students. I’ve read through your responses to the homework assignment, and there were a few interesting ideas as to what those colors might mean. Of course, most of you connected them to times of the day, blue as dawn, black as night, the colors in between morning, noon, early afternoon, that kind of thing. Given the east-west layout, it makes a certain amount of sense. A few more of you picked up on that connection to time in a slightly different way, and related the colors to times of the year, or the stages in a person’s life. In the process, some clever arguments were made. Clever, but not, I’m afraid, too convincing.

  What! What’s wrong! What is it! Are you all—oh, them. Oh for God’s sake. When you screamed like that, I thought—I don’t know what I thought. I thought I’d need a new pair of trousers. Those are a couple of graduate students I’ve enlisted to help me with a little presentation I’ll be putting up shortly. Yes, I can understand how the masks could startle you. They’re just generic white masks; I think they found them downtown somewhere. It was their idea: once I told them what story we would be discussing, they immediately hit on wearing the masks. To tell the truth, I half-expected they’d show up sporting the heads of enormous fanged monsters. Those are relatively benign.

  Yes, I suppose they do resemble the face the Red Death assumes for its costume. No blood splattered on them, though.

  If I could have your attention up here, again. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Where was I? Your homework, yes, thank you. Right, right. Let’s see . . . oh—I know. A couple of you read the colors in more original ways. I made a note of them somewhere—here they are. One person interpreted the colors as different states of mind, beginning with blue as tranquil and ending with black as despair, with stops for jealousy—green, naturally—and passion—white, as in white-hot—along the way. Someone else made the case for the colors as, let me make sure I have the phrasing right, “phases of being.”

  Actually, that last one’s not bad. Although the writer could be less obtuse; clarity, people, academic writing needs to be clear. Anyway, the gist of the writer’s argument is that each color is supposed to take you through a different state of existence, blue at one end of the spectrum representing innocence, black at the other representing death. Death as a state of being, that’s . . . provocative. Which is not to say it’s correct, but it’s headed in the right direction.

  I know, I know: Which is? The answer requires some explanation. Scratch that. It requires a boatload of explanation. That’s why I have Tweedledee and Tweedledum setting up outside. (Don’t look! They’re almost done.) It’s also why I lowered the screen behind me for the first time this semester. There are some images I want to show you, and they’re best seen in as much detail as possible. If I can remember what the Media Center people told me . . . click this . . . then this . . .

  Voila!

  Matthew Brady’s Portrait of Edgar, taken 1848, his last full year alive. It’s the best-known picture of him; were I to ask you to visualize him, this is what your minds’ eyes would see. That forehead, that marble expanse—yes, his hair does make the top of his head look misshapen, truncated. As far as I know, it wasn’t. The eyes—I suppose everyone comments on the eyes, slightly shadowed under those brows, the lids lowered just enough to suggest a certain detachment, even dreaminess. It’s the mouth I notice, how it tilts up ever-so-slightly at the right corner. It’s hard to see; you have to look closely. A strange mixture of arrogance, even contempt, and something else, something that might be humor, albeit of the bitter variety. It wouldn’t be that much of a challenge to suggest colors for the picture, but somehow, black and white is more fitting, isn’t it? Odd, considering how much color there is in the fiction. I’ve often thought all those old Roger Corman adaptations, the ones Vincent Price starred in—whatever their other faults, one thing they got exactly right was Technicolor, which was the perfect way to film these stories, just saturate the screen with the most vibrant colors you could find.

  I begin with the Portrait as a reminder. This is the man. His hand scraped the pen across the paper, brought the story we’ve been discussing into existence word by word. Not creation ex nihilo, out of nothing, creation . . . if my Latin were better, or existent, I’d have a fancier way to say out of the self, or out of the depths of the self, or—hey—out of the depth that is the self.

  Moving on to my next portrait . . . Anyone?

  I’m impressed. Not many people know this picture. Look closely, though. See it?

  That’s right: it isn’t a painting. It’s a photograph that’s been tweaked to resemble a painting. The portrait it imitates is a posthumous representation of Virginia Clemm, Edgar’s sweetheart and child bride. The girl in the photo? She’ll be happy you called her a girl. That’s my wife, Anna. Yes, I’m married. Why is that so hard to believe? We met many years ago, in a kingdom by the sea. From? “Annabel Lee,” good. No, just Anna; although we did meet in the King of the Sea Arcade, on the Jersey shore. Seriously. She is slightly younger than I am. Four years, thank you very much. You people. For Halloween one year, we dressed up as Edgar and Virginia—pretty much from the start, it’s been a running joke between us. In her case, the resemblance is striking.

  As it so happened, yes we did attend a masquerade as the happy couple. That was where this photo was taken. One of the other guests was a professional photographer. I arranged the shot; he took it, then used a program on his computer to transform it into a painting. The guy was quite pleased with it; apparently it’s on his website. I’m showing it to you because . . . well, because I want to. There’s probably a connection I could draws between masquerade, the suppression of one identity in order to invoke and inhabit another, that displacement, and the events of our story, but that’s putting the car about a mile before the horse. She’ll like that you thought she was a girl, though; that’ll make her night. Those were her cookies, by the way. Are there any left? Not even the sugar cookies? Figures.

  Okay, image number three. If you can name this one, you get an “A” for the class and an autographed picture of the Pope. Put your hand down, you don’t know. How about the rest of you?

  Just us crickets . . .

  It’s just as well; I don’t have that picture of the Pope anymore. This gentleman is Prosper Vauglais. Or so he claimed. There’s a lot about this guy no one’s exactly sure of, like when he was born, or where, or when and where he died. He showed up in Paris in the late eighteen-teens and caused something of a stir. For one winter, he appeared at several of the less reputable salons and a couple of the, I wouldn’t go so far as to say more reputable—maybe less disreputable ones.

  His “deal?” His deal, as you put it, was that he claimed to have been among the quarter of a million soldiers under Napoleon Bonaparte’s personal command when, in June of 1812, the Emperor decided to invade Russia. Some of you may remember from your European history classes, this was a very bad idea. The worst. Roughly a tenth of Napoleon’s forces survived the campaign; I want to say the number who limped back into France was something like twenty-two thousand. In and of itself, being a member of that group is nothing to sneeze at. For Vauglais, though, it was only the beginning. During the more-or-less running battles the French army fought as it retreated from what had been Moscow, Vauglais was separated from his fellows, struck on the head by a Cossack’s sword and left for dead in a snow bank. When he came to, he was alone, and a storm had blown up. Prosper had no idea where he was; he assumed still Russia, which wasn’t too encouraging. Any Russian peasants or what have you who came across French soldiers, even those trying to surrender, tended to hack them to death with farm implements first and ask questions later. So when Prosper strikes out in what he hopes is the approximate direction of France, he isn’t what you’d call terribly optimistic.

  Nor is his pessimism misplaced. Within a day, he’s lost, frozen and starving, wandering around the inside of a blizzard like you read about, white-out conditions, shrieking wind, unbearable cold. The blow to his head isn’t helping matters, either. His vision keeps going in and out of focus. Sometimes he feels so nauseated he can barely stand, let alone continue walking. Once in a while, he’ll see a light shining in the window of a farmhouse, but he gives these a wide berth. Another day, and he’ll be closer to death than he was even at the worst battles he saw—than he was when that saber connected with his skull. His skin, which has been numb since not long after he started his trek, has gone from pale to white to this kind of blue-gray, and it’s hardened, as if there’s a crust of ice on it. He can’t feel his pulse through it. His breath, which had been venting from his nose and mouth in long white clouds, seems to have slowed to a trickle, if that. He can’t see anything; although, with the storm continuing around him, maybe that isn’t so strange. He’s not cold anymore—or, it’s not that he isn’t cold so much as it is that the cold isn’t torturing him the way it was. At some point, the cold moved inside him, took up residence just beneath his heart, and once that happened, that transition was accomplished, the temperature outside became of much less concern.

  There’s a moment—while Vauglais is staggering around like you do when you’re trying to walk in knee-high snow without snowshoes, pulling each foot free, swiveling it forward, crashing it through the snow in front of you, then repeating the process with your other foot—there’s a moment when he realizes he’s dead. He isn’t sure when it happened. Some time in the last day or so. It isn’t that he thinks he’s in some kind of afterlife, that he’s wandering around a frozen hell. No, he know he’s still stuck somewhere in western Russia. It’s just that, now he’s dead. He isn’t sure why he’s stopped moving. He considers doing so, giving his a chance to catch up to his apprehension of it, but decides against it. For one thing, he isn’t sure it would work, and suppose while he’s standing in place, waiting to fall over, someone finds him, one of those peasants, or a group of Russian soldiers? Granted, if he’s already dead, they can’t hurt him, but the prospect of being cut to pieces while still conscious is rather horrifying. And for another thing, Prosper isn’t ready to quit walking. So he keeps moving forward. Dimly, the way you might hear a noise when you’re fast asleep, he’s aware that he isn’t particularly upset at finding himself dead and yet moving, but after recent events, maybe that isn’t so surprising.

  Time passes; how much, he can’t say. The blizzard doesn’t lift, but it thins, enough for Vauglais to make out trees, evergreens. He’s in a forest, a pretty dense one, from what he can see, which may explain why the storm has lessened. The trees are—there’s something odd about the trees. For as close together as they are, they seem to be in almost perfect rows, running away into the snow on either side of him. In and of itself, maybe that isn’t strange. Could be, he’s wandered into some kind of huge formal garden. But there’s more to it. When he looks at any particular tree, he sees, not so much bark and needles as black, black lines like the strokes of a paintbrush, or the scratches of a pen, forming the approximation of an evergreen. It’s as if he’s seeing a sketch of a tree, an artist’s estimate. The black lines appear to be moving, almost too quickly for him to notice; it’s as if he’s witnessing them being drawn and re-drawn. Prosper has a sudden vision of himself from high above, a small, dark spot in the midst of long rows of black on white, a stray bit of punctuation loose among the lines of an unimaginable text.

  Eventually, Vauglais reaches the edge of the forest. Ahead, there’s a building, the title to this page he’s been traversing. The blizzard has kicked up again, so he can’t see much, but he has the impression of a long, low structure, possibly stone. It could be a stable, could be something else. Although there are no religious symbols evident, Prosper has an intuition the place is a monastery. He should turn right or left, avoid the building—the Russian clergy haven’t taken any more kindly to the French invaders than the Russian people—instead, he raises one stiff leg and strikes off towards it. It isn’t that he’s compelled to do so, that he’s in the grip of a power that he can’t resist, or that he’s decided to embrace the inevitable, surrender to death. He isn’t even especially curious about the stone structure. Forward is just a way to go, and he does.

  As he draws closer, Vauglais notices that the building isn’t becoming any easier to distinguish. If anything, it’s more indistinct, harder to make out. If the trees behind him were rough drawing, this place is little more than a scribble, a jumble of lines whose form is as much in the eye of the beholder as anything. When a figure in a heavy coat and hat separates from the structure and begins to trudge in his direction, it’s as if a piece of the place has broken off. Prosper can’t see the man’s face, all of which except the eyes is hidden by the folds of a heavy scarf, but he lifts one mittened hand and gestures for Vauglais to follow him inside, which the Frenchman does.

  And . . . no one knows what happens next.

  What do I mean? I’m sorry: wasn’t I speaking English? No one knows what happened inside the stone monastery. Prosper writes a fairly detailed account of the events leading up to that point, which is where the story I’m telling you comes from, but when the narrative reaches this moment, it breaks off with Vauglais’s declaration that he’s told us as much as he can. End of story.

  All right, yes, there are hints of what took place during the five years he was at the Abbey. That was what he called the building, the Abbey. Every so often, Prosper would allude to his experiences in it, and sometimes, someone would note his remarks in a letter or diary. From combing through these kinds of documents, it’s possible to assemble and collate Vauglais’s comments into a glimpse of his life with the Fraternity. Again, his name. There were maybe seven of them, or seven after he arrived, or there were supposed to be seven. He referred to “Brother Red,” once; to “The White Brother” at another time. Were the others named Blue, Purple, Green, Orange, and Violet? We can’t say; although, as an assumption, it isn’t completely unreasonable. They spent their days in pursuit of something Vauglais called The Great Work; he also referred to it as The Transumption. This seems to have involved generous amounts of quiet meditation combined with the study of certain religious texts—Prosper doesn’t name them, but they may have included some Gnostic writings.

  The Gnostics? I don’t suppose you would have heard of them. How many of you actually got to church? As I feared. What would Sr. Mary Mary say? The Gnostics were a religious sect who sprang up around the same time as the early Christians. I guess they would have described themselves as the true Christians, the ones who understood what Jesus’s teachings were really about. They shared sacred writings with the more orthodox Christians, but they had their own books, too. They were all about gnosis, knowledge, especially of the self. For them, the secret to what lay outside the self was what lay inside the self. The physical world was evil, a wellspring of illusions and delusions. Gnostics tended to retreat to the desert, lead lives of contemplation. Unlike the mainstream Christians, they weren’t much on formal organization; that, and the fact that those Christians did everything in their power to shunt the Gnostics and their teachings to the margins and beyond, branding some of their ideas as heretical, helps explain why they pretty much vanished from the religious scene.