The Mask of the Red Death: Alternate Ending

The ball was doing fine, and it was only the ominous sound that came, every hour on the dot, by the ebony grandfather clock that clashed with the delightful time the royals were having.

That is, until 12:00 pm. The clock gave its loudest yet. Everything and everyone went silent, deathly so.

As the sound of the clock died down, they almost chuckled at their own surprise. But, what chuckles had started to build, died away just as quickly, as they started to hear the most peculiar sound.

Was it, perhaps, one of the doors, heavy on its hinges, groaning as it opened?

No.

The sound kept repeating, and overlapping it's self. In the dead silence of the house hold, it almost made everyone there want to hear the sound of the clock again, for it would have been a baby's lullaby, compared to this sound of groaning and cracking.

If you listened closer still, you could make of the sound of flesh hitting the ground.

All of a sudden, there was a scream. It was off somewhere else in the building, and it was not the scream of one, but the scream of two.

They herd the sound of rushed footsteps coming, along with the sound of doors opening, banging on the walls and making the floors vibrate with the force of it. Finally, one of the doors to the hall opened.

Two royals, a man and a women, burst in, looks of horrified terror on their faces.

"The Dead!" the man cried, gasping in a breath as he did so. "The Dead!" he cried again.

And then, right before their eyes, the man fell at his wife's feet, dead, his eyes rolled in the back of his head. His wife screamed and knelt down to him, pleading him to wake up.

But everyone had stopped looking at them, for something else had their eyes.

Just down the hall, you could see people, their skin a grayish blue, with horrendous splotches of red. Some chunks of their skin were missing, as if rotted away, torn or even bitten off. Some were even missing limbs. Were still losing limbs- and insides too, as the flesh of their stomachs became too weak to hold in some of their organs.

The people watched as the dead advanced, reaching out to them, groaning as they limped or crawled along, their mouths held slack, eyes all but deep sockets with white, deflated orbs, rolled in the back of their skulls.

Finally, they reached the door where the women held her dead husband.

They fell on her, gathering around her. You could hear her piercing scream for miles outside of the walls of the great castle.

Then, all was silent again.

The dead got up and revealed the women, pail from fear and her sudden demise, her skin- not yet the grayish blue of the others, but almost a snow white- torn, and missing chunks. At first, she was still, then she twitched. She got up, groaning, then join the rest of her ilk.

The first to react was a women in the middle of the crowd. Her scream shattered the glass of silence. Everyone ran for their lives, pushing any and everyone out of the way.

And where was the Prince in all of this?

Why, he was in the black room with red tinted windows, laying in his bed of death, his laugh deep and dark, his red eyes that of an evil conqueror.

"All is mine! All is under my control now!"



AN: Hello... ^_^ Just like to say, I hope you liked the story, and thank you for reading it. I'd love to hear what you have to say about it- so long as it's good, if it's bad, well... why would someone like something bad? XD But, if you have anything bad to say, I don't mind.
Anyway. This is my story, but I do NOT own Mask of the Red Death, nor do I own the picture. If you want, you can also find this story on fanfiction.net, with my account name being CrimsonLuna. It has the same name there as on here, though I must warn you, that one needs work. It has spelling errors, and I've tweaked with this one a bit more to add something that I realized was missing. I'll go back to the fanfiction.net one and repost it as this one, but it's still there for you. ^_^