text: [Themes: A Folly, ghost, dueling, kissing, strong profanity, Edgar Allan Poe, surreal, midnight, nudity, gender-neutral protagonist]
  
  > look around
  Black sable tapestries hang from the ceiling and walls, and black velvet carpets the floor. Scarlet radiance slants through scarlet windowpanes. An ebony grandfather clock tells no time.
  
  In one corner are empty graveclothes.
  
  Clockwise you will look behind a polar bear, and when you glance back toward the past you can see a celebration in the banquet hall where everyone has gathered to drink, feast, and make merry.
  
  > examine the graveclothes
  These blood-speckled bandages reek with disease. It's almost as though someone rotted away wearing them long before they were ever buried.
  
  > Undress
  You disrobe from your jester's motley and feel decidedly less tricksterish. You won't be stealing any kisses now.
  
  > take the graveclothes
  You pinch and lift the graveclothes gingerly. Could a more repulsive costume be imagined?
  
  > wear the graveclothes
  As you shuffle into the graveclothes, a strange malevolence steals over the scenery; or perhaps you yourself have become that strange malevolence. Your fingertips drip with infection.
  
  > Script
  Scene:
  red salon, hourless
  
  fails to express any hour.
  
  Stage directions:
  inventory (i), examine (x), take, drop, talk to
  
  future (f), past (p), clockwise (c),
  counter-clockwise (cc)
  wear, undress, wake up
  infect (when wearing graveclothes)
  
  > P.
  Somehow a rift must have opened, because obese cherubs are pouring through the air onto the banquet-table; or at least, they would be pouring if they were in motion. There are several hundred, faces grimacing and feathered wings shedding red pinions, and in their conglomerate they have impacted the table at one end, sending the other end skyward like a see-saw. Some even appear to be crawling upward along the table as rats would a mast aboard a sinking ship.
  
  This arrangement has naturally relocated the banquet itself into midair, where roasts and cakes and goblets and plates hang with their glazes and their copper sparkling.
  
  When it comes to the diners, most have already departed, although a few remain watching the cherubs with mild interest from seats pushed back against the walls. One lady dressed as a swan is eating angels on horseback, with a champagne flute daintily suspended in her other hand.
  
  A clockwise inclination would direct you into the aftermath, while moving counter-clockwise would steer you toward the cloak room, and in the future yawns the red salon.
  
  > P.
  You gaze into the fountain's murky depths. It is stagnant and red with thickened blood, and unchecked lilies spill over its rim, on which a dead girl is sitting.
  
  In the future you will stand alone in a landscape garden.
  
  > examine girl
  Her skin is peeled away and you can see her crimson muscles stretched and woven on her bones. Her red veins are pumping with blood and her red heart contracting inside her ribcage. Her face is framed with flaming hair. When she looks at you, her eyes are two embers; they burn through you as though you were paper.
  
  > talk to Matilda
  "...oh yes... how lovely... to have someone to talk to... to listen... oh no, I would enjoy it, please... nobody ever listens... just a silly girl, they say... what can a silly girl have to say about anything... but I do have things to say, I do... I have my own dreams... maybe they're silly dreams... a silly girl with silly dreams... they mock me when my back is turned... I know it... but you listen, you listen, you understand me, you know me..."
  
  > Script
  Scene:
  landscape garden, evening
  
  to lamentations from the dead.
  
  Stage directions:
  inventory (i), examine (x), take, drop, talk to
  
  future (f), past (p), clockwise (c),
  counter-clockwise (cc)
  wear, undress, wake up
  infect (when wearing graveclothes)
  
  > talk to Matilda
  "...you may not think you know me... oh, you do... thank you for that... it means... you can't know what it means... my own family aren't this kind... they have responsibilities, they have important things to do... they don't have time... they never hear me when I speak... even when I yell, I scream at them... I feel like a fool... but I'm invisible... sometimes I think that I have always been a ghost... that I was born into this world as a phantom... a silly notion from a silly girl..."
  
  > talk to Matilda
  "...sometimes I knock against the wainscoting... they don't hear me... like I'm a rat behind the wainscoting... that's what they think... only a rat... their own daughter... but they love me, they love me, they do... only it's changed... our lives have changed... the years have changed us like old keys... now we don't fit the locks... doors won't open... I rattle handles... nobody hears... no one listens..."
  
  > talk to Matilda
  "...when I look into this fountain I can see myself... I see the moon in the sky... I can see everything reflected... an underside... to everything... there is another meaning but I've lost it like a coin in the fountain... you don't know what it's like... don't say you do... you'll never know... you shouldn't know... I wouldn't wish this on anybody... this transparency... where you look through your own reflection and you can't see anything... no matter how close you lean to the water..."
  
  > examine the fountain
  Brimming with blood, this fountain festers like an open sore in the world.
  
  > talk to Matilda
  "...even now I can still feel that hand on my head... pushing me down... holding me there... a human touch... a word... a glance... can mean so many things... but what does anyone else know about love... without having been there, without having been me... when we walked outside onto the lawn... and we could see the stars... the fountain in the night... and when we sat here together and I said..."
  
  > talk to Matilda
  "...oh yes... how lovely... to have someone to talk to... to listen... oh no, I would enjoy it, please... nobody ever listens... just a silly girl, they say... what can a silly girl have to say about anything... but I do have things to say, I do... I have my own dreams... maybe they're silly dreams... a silly girl with silly dreams... they mock me when my back is turned... I know it... but you listen, you listen, you understand me, you know me..."
  
  > Undress
  You peel away the blood-speckled graveclothes and the world feels less malevolent. You won't be infecting anyone now.
  
  > wear the pig
  You hunch your shoulders together and crawl into the pig carcass. Now the sky is no longer a limit.
  
  > fly
  You rise into the night sky and the garden and the palace and the world diminish underneath your hooves until they appear small enough to step on, but you don't step on them. You fly higher and higher until the atmosphere thins into nothing. Shooting stars are brushing past your cheeks. You can see little planets in the distance hanging like humid nightblue fruit dependent from the heaventree.
  
  But your goal is not that far away. You fly upward toward the moon until you are flying downward toward the moon, and then you alight on its lunar surface.
  Moon
  A cratered wasteland. Soft cheese squishes underneath your weight and smoke rises from foreboding chasms cleft into the glowing camembert.
  
  Before you a great beast is sprawled, slaughtered. It has been dead for eons and its form has decomposed to the bare bone. It is larger than any other animal, some colossus from legend, its death-grip encapsulating a lunar mountain over which it has collapsed.
  
  > Undress
  You clamber out from the pig carcass. Now the sky is once more is the limit.
  
  > talk to the giant
  This beast has probably been dead for more millennia than humankind has known the spoken word. Its bones aren't going to shake off the dust and have a conversation anytime soon.
  
  > wear the clothes
  You're already wearing the graveclothes.
  
  > Infect beast
  It's always moontime here. Midnight doesn't figure into moontime.
  
  > wear the pig
  You hunch your shoulders together and crawl into the pig carcass (after removing the graveclothes). Now the sky is no longer a limit.
  
  > fly
  You rise into the night sky and the moon diminishes underneath your hooves. As you fly higher you find yourself flying lower, breaking back into the world's atmosphere.
  
  This re-entry stings a little, but sooner than later it's over and you've returned to that wretched masquerade party.
  
  > look
  You are standing alone on a long manicured lawn bordered by cypress trees, whose moon-cast shadows divide the grass into neat quadrants as though it were a rugby field.
  
  Below the lawn, further into the past, there is a great and gurgling fountain, and in the future you can see the palace windows alive with candlelight and merriment.
  
  > Future
  The palace doors stand open, but no one has arrived yet.
  
  A landscape garden stretches away into the past.
  
  In the future, guests will deposit their cloaks in the cloak room.
  
  > wear motley
  You don your jester's motley (after removing the pig carcass) and potential pranks inspire you. Everything in this wide world is kissable.
  
  > Kiss giant
  You shiver at the thought.
  
  > Kiss moon
  What a creamy and marvelous flavor! No earthly camembert compares.
  
  > Inventory
  You are carrying graveclothes, a pig carcass, a vorpal blade, a rapier, and a playscript, and you are wearing motley.
  
  > Kiss rapier
  You consider kissing the countess's rapier, but the farther you keep it away from your head, the safer you'll probably feel.
  
  > Kiss vorpal
  You press your lips against the vorpal blade. It is sharp and cold and clean like some instrument sanitized for surgery. You can taste its sharpness and its sharpness is cutting cleanly and coldly your lips, your tongue, your skin, your bone. Even the blood running down your throat is clean and cold. The blade is passing through you, or perhaps you are passing through it, but in either case it has opened the world. That world is peeling away on either side, sliced vertically like an opening through a curtain, until you can see dark leaves overhead and smell dark earth and hear branches bending and snapping.
  You are in a dark woodland clearing, the vorpal blade shining in your hand although the forest light is weak. It must be shining from within. Against your back you can feel bark. You are resting against a tumtum tree. At some distance there is a sundial, old and mossy and hourless in the gloom, standing solitary on a grass plot riddled with abandoned burrows.
  
  You are not alone in the forest. Something is whiffling among the trees and you struggle to recall a warning someone gave you about this situation, but your uffish thoughts cannot remember the words. You have the vague sensation that you ought to be at home, preparing to broil your dinner, rather than waiting out here for whatever is advancing through the trees.
  
  Nothing is clear anymore, but someone is supposed to kill
  something, at any rate. And yet now that you think about it,
  nothing was ever clear in the first place.
  
  Its eyes are aflame and it burbles as it comes, its jaws biting, its claws catching. At least this creature isn't a countess.
  
  > wear the pig
  You hunch your shoulders together and crawl into the pig carcass (after removing your motley). Now the sky is no longer a limit.
  
  > fly
  You rise into the night sky and the moon diminishes underneath your hooves. As you fly higher you find yourself flying lower, breaking back into the world's atmosphere.
  
  This re-entry stings a little, but sooner than later it's over and you've returned to that wretched masquerade party.
  Landscape Garden
  You are standing alone on a long manicured lawn bordered by cypress trees, whose moon-cast shadows divide the grass into neat quadrants as though it were a rugby field.
  
  Below the lawn, further into the past, there is a great and gurgling fountain, and in the future you can see the palace windows alive with candlelight and merriment.
  
  > examine the fountain
  Disaster seems to dog these masquerade parties. Last time it was Matilda that they found drowned in the fountain with her hair streaming around the water-lilies. Nobody could discover how it happened. This time it will be you that they find dead on the lawn, and everyone will know how it happened.
  
  > wear motley
  You don your jester's motley (after removing the pig carcass) and potential pranks inspire you. Everything in this wide world is kissable.
  
  > Kiss fountain
  The gurgling fountain is in the past.
  
  > wear the clothes
  As you shuffle into the graveclothes (after removing your motley), a strange malevolence steals over the scenery; or perhaps you yourself have become that strange malevolence. Your fingertips drip with infection.
  
  > wake
  You open your eyes.
  On the Stroke
  How did you ever get into this predicament? A rumor, a glove thrown down onto a dance-floor? Now you're standing in the moonlight and your knees are knocking together, although you hope that no one notices. You're still dressed for a masquerade and nothing feels quite real. Perhaps it isn't real... and all you need to do is wake up from
  this nightmare.
  
  The scene is set: landscape garden.
  
  The cast: your second, Ferdinand, handing your weapon over; your rival's second, Onegin, handing her weapon over; and your
  rival -- the countess.
  
  "En garde!" the countess cries.
  I beg your pardon?
  
  > Script
  Scene:
  landscape garden, midnight
  
  in which the corpse...
  and the countess...
  
  Stage directions:
  inventory (i), examine (x)
  attack, wake up
  infect (when wearing graveclothes)
  
  The countess is suddenly there, only inches away, and her cutlass slices through your kielbasa and sinks promptly into your neck with a horrible crunch. Those were vertebrae, weren't they?
  
  Bringing a sausage to a swordfight was the last mistake you'll ever make.
  On the Stroke
  How did you ever get into this predicament? A rumor, a glove thrown down onto a dance-floor? Now you're standing in the moonlight and your knees are knocking together, although you hope that no one notices. You're still dressed for a masquerade and nothing feels quite real. Perhaps it isn't real... and all you need to do is wake up from
  this nightmare.
  
  The scene is set: landscape garden.
  
  The cast: your second, Ferdinand, handing your weapon over; your rival's second, Onegin, handing her weapon over; and your
  rival -- the countess.
  
  "En garde!" the countess cries.
  
  > Infect
  What do you want to infect?
  
  > Infect countess
  You raise your arm toward the countess. That's enough.
  
  She drops her cutlass on the lawn.
  
  After a moment, blood wells from under her domino mask, scarlet rivers running down her cheeks. She lifts a hand to pull the mask away but it doesn't come away. It is stuck, and when she pulls harder there is a ripping sound. She cannot see what she has done, but around her eyes the skin has erupted with bubbling lesions like frog-eggs or caviar.
  Now she is screaming. She sees her bloody hands. She knows that she is horribly broken. Meanwhile more blood is pouring from her every pore, drenching her gown, drenching the grass around her. Her body is melting into blood, her shape dissolving into it, until she is a shrieking heap upon the ground
  
  Her shrieks are in the wind. Around the garden cypresses rustle and the fountain plashes as both seconds fall, bleeding with her. It is a comprehensive plague.
  
  In the palace guests are falling too. Their shadows are erratic in the candlelit windows. You cannot picture them as real people. They are puppets and their strings have just been cut. It is a pandemonium, but it will all be over soon enough. It will end when the last reveler falls in the blood-bedewed halls, when the last screams are carried away by the breeze, when the candles blink out one by one as they gutter in wax.
  
  And then darkness and decay and the Red Death will hold illimitable dominion over all.