In spite of all things, the masqueraders continue their gaiety and revelry. Here, note Poe's description: The guests have donned costumes that are often grotesque; there is "much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm"; there are "arabesque figures" and "madman fashions." Poe describes the party in terms of "delirious fancies" and as "beautiful . . . wanton . . . bizarre . . . terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust." These descriptions are reminiscent of orgies which are described in other great Romantic works (in Goethe's Faust, Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Byron's Childe Harold, for example). Furthermore, because the maskers are so bizarre themselves, when the mask of the "Red Death" appears, it is shocking. The reader discovers that this "guest" is even more fantastic and strange than all the other guests. He is horrendous by comparison. Significantly, the appearance of the "Red Death" at midnight is propitious and symbolic. This is the end of the day and, by analogy, the end of life. His appearance strikes a note of "terror, of horror, and of disgust." The figure is "shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave." His mask is that of a corpse which, we gather, died from the Red Death and to create more horror, his entire outfit is sprinkled with blood and "all the features of the face were besprinkled with the scarlet horror." Again, the reader should note how effectively Poe, by his choice of words, captures man's universal fear of death and its horrors.
When Prince Prospero sees the stranger, he is indignant at such an intrusion. (It would almost be too simplistic to say that all people are indignant at the intrusion of death on their lives.) The prince immediately instructs the stranger to be seized, but all are universally frightened to seize this Red Death. Infuriated, the prince draws a dagger and rushes 'hurriedly through the six chambers," but as he approaches the figure, his dagger stops, and he falls dead upon the black carpet. The other revelers fall upon the black "mummer" but to their "unutterable horror," they find nothing under the shrouds or behind the corpse-like mask. One by one, all of them drop dead. The "Red Death," Poe tells us, holds "illimitable dominion over all."
