A Sin City Party

Miss Eden did not expect to find herself at a private New York party while visiting the city’s poor, but it seemed fate had grasped her and dragged her to this place. The local charity had received a cursory invitation, and seeing as she was the youngest and best-educated temperance worker in the borough, she was volunteered to go.

As she mounted the steps of the Golden Goose Hotel—a place she considered to be as foul as Gomorrah—she felt that she was slightly out of place. The hotel interior was lit like a lighthouse, and anything that was not a light was a golden surface which reflected it. In contrast, she was laden with a heavy coat of a dark brown hue, under which she wore a conservative, high-necked dress, true and proper to the times.

As her dark figure trespassed through this maze of light, she repeated something that her pastor had told her before the trip: “all that glitters is not gold.” Eventually she came to the designated room and gave a timid knock. At a breakneck speed the door seemed to swing inward on its own, and she stepped into the room.

What she found inside was a paradise of sin and debauchery. The room itself was as decadent as the rest of the hotel. Golden lace ran and jumped in intoxicating patterns along the walls. The crystals of the overhanging chandelier drew in her reflecting face and shattered it into thousands of pieces. The faces all showed different parts of her hidden soul: her terror, her confusion, her surprising delight. Quickly she snatched a glass of—hopefully—water, then retreated to a colossal velvet chair. She turned her attention to the other seven members of the party.

The most dominant figure was a young girl adorned in purple and peacock feathers. When walking, she thrust each foot forward as if each step was immensely important. Miss Eden mainly observed how much skin this exhibitionist was flaunting—certainly something that she personally would never dream of.

The next man wore a red three-piece suit. His eyes burned with fire and seemed to threaten violence wherever they turned. On his lapel, a red lion pin roared from his chest.

The next woman she observed was adorned in jade and had a great python pendant coiled around her neck, its enormous emerald eyes envying everything in its sight.

The next man was a toad. His silk suit was weighed down with silver chains, pocket watches, and an ornate studded monocle. Every time he opened his mouth, she could see his yellow smile. From his conversation she gathered that he was a great oil magnate.

She witnessed another woman in a robin’s-egg-blue dress, who was asleep—or dead, as she had little idea of what was in the terrible cocktail concoctions that everyone seemed to be drinking—and reclined on an ornate sofa with an enormous back. So large, in fact, that it transformed the woman into some sort of upturned snail.

There was only one member of the gathering looking at her. Miss Eden then corrected herself and noted that this man, dressed in a loud pink color, was not just eyeing her, his goat-like eyes settling on, sizing up, and moving on to each member of the party. She concluded from his stares that he was a truly the lowest a human can be: a womanizer.

Her stomach then interrupted her thought as she discovered the buffet table. A cornucopia of tantalizingly repulsive hors d’oeuvres. Her stomach than promptly withdrew its appeals when she saw the hulking man sitting at the table, stuffing his orange face with anything edible. His inhalation of the cuisine reminded her of the pigs in the slaughterhouses of Chicago before they were themselves eaten.

After examining her surroundings and company, Miss Eden came to a shuddering conclusion; a conclusion that had been shouting out at her from the depths of her Christian soul as soon as she entered the room.

She was in the company of demons.

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