The Worm in Every Heart

by Gemma Files

  Blood, from wrist to palm, printing the wall afresh; blood in his throat from his tongue’s bleeding base, painting his spittle red as he hawks and coughs—all civility lost, in a moment’s spasm of pure revulsion—onto the dusty floor.

  Spatter of blood on dust, like a ripe scarlet hieroglyphic: Liquid, horrid, infinitely malleable. Utterly . . . uninterpretable.

  I have set my mark upon you, Citizen.

  Blood at his collar, his nipple. His—

  (—groin.)

  My hook in your flesh. My winding reel.

  Jean-Guy feels it tug him downward, into the maelstrom.

  * * *

  1793. The coach. Prendegrace sits right in front of Jean-Guy, a mere hand’s grasp away, slight and lithe and damnably languid in his rich, red velvet; his hair is drawn back and side-curled, powdered so well that Jean-Guy can’t even tell its original color, let alone use its decided lack of contrast to help him decipher the similarly-pallid features of the face it frames. Except to note that, as though in mocking imitation of Citizen Robespierre, the Chevalier too affects a pair of spectacles with smoked glass lenses . . .

  . . . though, instead of sea-green, these small, blank squares glint a dim—yet unmistakable—shade of scarlet.

  Play for time, Jean-Guy’s brain tells him, meanwhile—imparting its usually good advice with uncharacteristic softness, as though ( if it were to speak any louder) the Chevalier might somehow overhear it. Pretend not to have recognized him. Then work your pistol free, slowly; fire a warning shot, and summon the good Citizens outside . . .

  . . . those same ones you slipped in here to avoid, in the first place . . .

  . . . to aid you in his arrest.

  Almost snorting aloud at the very idea, before he catches himself: That an agent of Jean-Guy’s enviable size and bulk actually need fear the feeble defenses of a ci-devant fop like this one, with his frilled wrists and his neat, red-heeled shoes, their tarnished buckles dull and smeared—on the nearest side, at least—with something which almost looks like . . .

  . . . blood?

  Surely not.

  And yet—

  “You would be Citizen Sansterre, I think,” the Chevalier observes, abruptly.

  Name of God.

  Recovering, Jean-Guy gives a stiff nod. “And you—the traitor, Prendegrace.”

  “And that would be a pistol you reach for, under your collar.”

  “It would.”

  A punch, a kick, a cry for help, the drawing forth of some secret weapon of his own: Jean-Guy braces himself, a match-ready fuse, tensed to the point of near-pain against any of the aforementioned. But the Chevalier merely nods as well, undeterred in the face of Jean-Guy’s honest aggression—his very passivity itself a form of arrogance, a cool and languid aristocratic challenge to the progressively more hot and bothered plebeian world around him. Then leans just a bit forward, at almost the same time: A paralytic blink of virtual non-movement, so subtle as to be hardly worth noting . . . for all that Jean-Guy now finds himself beginning—barely recognizing what he does, let alone why—to match it.

  Leaning in, far too slow to stop himself, to arrest this fall in mid-plunge. Leaning in, as the Chevalier’s red lenses dip, slipping inexorably downward to reveal a pale rim of brow, of lash, of eyesocket. And leaning in yet further, to see—below that—

  —first one eye, then another: Pure but opaque, luridly empty. Eyes without whites (or irises, or pupils), the same blank scarlet tint—from lower lid to upper—as the spectacles which masked them.

  Words in red darkness, pitched almost too low to hear; Jean-Guy must strain to catch them, leaning closer still. Places a trembling hand on the Chevalier’s shoulder, to steady himself, and feels them thrum up through his palm, his arm, his chest, his wildly beating heart: A secret, interior embrace, intimate as plague, squeezing him between the ribs, between the thighs. And . . .

  . . . deeper.

  Before him, the Chevalier’s own hand hovers, clean white palm turned patiently upward. Those long, black-rimmed nails. Those red words, tracing the myriad paths of blood. Suggesting, mildly—

  Then you had best give it to me, Citizen—this pistol of yours. Had you not?

  Because: That would be the right thing to do, really. All things considered.

  Do you not think?

  Yes.

  For safety. For—safe-keeping.

  . . . exactly that, yes.

  Such sweet reason. Such deadly reasonableness.

  Jean-Guy feels his mouth drop open as though to protest, but hears only the faint, wet pop of his jaw-hinges relaxing in an idiot yawn; watches, helpless, as he drops the pistol—butt-first—into the Chevalier’s grip. Sees the Chevalier seem to blink, just slightly, in return: All-red no-stare blurred by only the most momentary flicker, milky and brief as some snake’s nictitating membrane.

  And—

  “There, now,” the Chevalier observes, aloud. “That . . . must suit us both . . . so much better.”

  Must it—not?

  A half-formed heave, a last muffled attempt at a thrash, muscles knotted in on themselves like some mad stray cur’s in the foam-flecked final stages of hydrophobia—and then, without warning, the Chevalier is on him. Their mouths seal together, parted lip to bared, bone-needle teeth: blood fills Jean-Guy’s throat, greasing the way as the Chevalier locks fast to his fluttering tongue. His gums burn like ulcers. This is far less a kiss than a suddenly open wound, an artery slashed and left to spurt.

  The pistol falls away, forgotten.

  Venom spikes Jean-Guy’s heart. He chokes down a numbing, stinging mouthful of cold that takes him to the brink of sleep and the edge of climax simultaneously as the Chevalier’s astringent tongue rasps over the inflamed tissues of his mouth, harsh as a cat’s. Finds himself grabbing this whippet-slim thing in his arms by the well-arranged hair, anchoring himself so it can grind them ever more firmly together, and feels a shower of loose powder fall around both their faces like dirty city snow; the Chevalier’s ribbon has come undone, his neat-curled side-locks unraveling like kelp in an icy current. At the same instant, meanwhile, the nearest lapel of his lurid coat peels back—deft as some mountebank’s trick—to reveal the cold white flesh beneath: No pulse visible beneath the one flat pectoral, nipple peak-hard but utterly colorless . . .

  . . . oh yes, yes, yes . . .

  Jean-Guy feels the Chevalier’s hands—clawed now—scrabble at his fly’s buttons, free him to slap upwards in this awful red gloom. Then sees him give one quick double thumb-flick across the groove, the distended, weeping velvet knob, and send fresh scarlet welling up along the urethral fold faster than Jean-Guy can cry out in surprised, horrified pain.

  Name of death and the Devil!

  The Chevalier gives a thin grin of delight at the sight of it. His mouth opens wide as a cat’s in flamen, tasting the slaughterhouse-scented air. Nearly drooling.

  People, Revolution, Supreme Being, please—

  Lips skinning back. Fangs extending. His sleek head dipping low, as though in profane prayer . . .

  . . . oh God, oh Jesus, no . . .

  . . . to sip at it.

  More muffled words rippling up somehow through the femoral knot of Jean-Guy’s groin, even as he gulps bile, his whole righteous world dimming to one pin-prick point of impossible pain, of unspeakable and unnatural ecstasy—as he starts to reel, come blood, black out:

  Ah, Citizen—do not leave me just yet. Not when—

  —we are—

  —so close—

  —to meeting each other, once more.

  * * *

  In 1815, meanwhile—

  —Jean-Guy looks up from the bloody smudge now spreading wide beneath his own splayed fingers to see—that same familiar swatch of wet and shining scarlet resurface, like a grotesque miracle, above his gaping
face. Dumouriez’s death-stain, grown somehow fresh again, as though the wall . . . the room, itself . . . were bleeding.

  Plaster reddens, softens. Collapses inward, paradoxically, as the wall bulges outward. And Jean-Guy watches, frozen, as what lies beneath begins to extrude itself, at long last, through that vile, soaked ruin of chalk-dust, glue and hemoglobin alike—first one hand, then another, one shoulder, then its twin. The whole rest of the torso, still dressed in the same rotten velvet equipage, twisting its deft way out through the sodden, crumbling muck . . . grub-white neck rearing cobra-like, poised to strike . . . grub-white profile turning outward—its lank mane still clotted with calcified powder, its red-glazed glasses hung carelessly askew—to once more cast empty eyes Jean-Guy’s way . . .

  This awful revenant version of M. the former Chevalier du Prendegrace shakes his half-mummified head, studying Jean-Guy from under dusty lashes. He opens his mouth, delicately—pauses—then coughs out a fine white curl, and frowns at the way his long-dormant lungs wheeze.

  Fastening his blank red gaze on Jean-Guy’s own. Observing:

  “How terribly you’ve changed, Citizen.” A pause. “But then—that is the inevitable fate of the impermanent.”

  “The Devil,” Jean-Guy whispers, forgetting his once-vaunted atheism.

  “La, sir. You do me entirely too much honor.”

  The Chevalier steps forward, bringing a curled and ragged lip of wall along with him; Jean-Guy hears it tear as it comes, like a scab. The sound rings in his ears. He puts up both palms, weakly, as though a simple gesture might really be enough to stave off the—living?—culmination of a half-lifetime’s nightmare visions.

  The Chevalier notices, and gives that sly half-smile: teeth still white, still intact, yet jutting now from his fever-pink gums at slight angles, like a shark’s . . . but could there really be more of them, after all these years? Crop upon crop, stacked up and waiting to be shed after his next feeding, the one which never came?

  They almost seem to glow, translucent as milky glass. Waiting—

  —to be filled.

  “Of course, one does hear things, especially inside the walls,” the Chevalier continues, brushing plaster away with small, fastidious strokes. “For example: That—excepting certain instances of regicide—your vaunted Revolution came to naught, after all. And that, since a Corsican general now rules an empire in the monarchy’s place, old Terrorists such as yourself must therefore count themselves in desperate need of new . . . positions.”

  Upraised palms, wet—and red; his “complaint” come back in force, worse than the discards in Dumouriez’s long-ago corpse-pile. Jean-Guy stands immersed in it, head swirling, skin one whole slick of cold sweat and hot blood admixed—and far more blood than sweat, all told. So much so, he must swallow it in mouthfuls, just to speak. His voice comes out garbled, sludgy, clotted.

  “You . . . ” he says, with difficulty. “You . . . did this . . . to me . . . ”

  “But of course, Citizen Sansterre; sent the girl to the window, tempted you within my reach, and set my mark upon you, as you well know. As I—”

  —told you.

  Or . . . do you not recall?

  Sluiced and veritably streaming with it, inside and out: Palate, nipples, groin. That haematoma on his wrist’s prickling underside, opening like a flower. The Chevalier’s remembered kiss, licking his veins full of cold poison.

  (If I can’t stop this bleeding, it’ll be my death.)

  Numb-tongued: “As you did with Dumouriez.”

  “Exactly so.”

  Raising one clawed hand to touch Jean-Guy’s face, just lightly—a glancing parody of comfort—and send Jean-Guy arching away, cursing, as the mere pressure of the Chevalier’s fingers is enough to draw first a drip, then a gush, of fresh crimson.

  “God damn your ci-devant eyes!”

  “Yes, yes.” Quieter: “But I can make this stop, you know.”

  I. And only I.

  Seduction, then infection, then cure—for a price. Loyalty, ‘till death . . .

  . . . and—after?

  How Prendegrace trapped Dumouriez, no doubt, once upon a long, long time past—or had Dumouriez simply offered himself up to worship at this thing’s red-shod feet, without having to be enticed or duped into such an unequal Devil’s bargain? Coming to Prendegrace’s service gratefully, even gladly—as glad as he would be, eventually, to cut his own throat to save this creature’s no-life, or spray fresh blood across a wet plaster wall to conceal the thing he’d hunted, pimped and died for, safely entombed within?

  And for Jean-Guy, an equally limited range of choices: To bleed out all at once in a moment’s sanguinary torrent and die now, or live as a tool the way Dumouriez did—and die later.

  Minimally protected, perhaps even cherished; easily used, yet . . . just as easily . . .

  . . . discarded.

  “There can be benefits to such an arrangement,” Prendegrace points out, softly.

  “He sacrificed himself for you.”

  “As was required.”

  “As you demanded.”

  The Chevalier raises a delicate brow, sketched in discolored plaster. “I? I demand nothing, Citizen. Only accept—what’s offered me.”

  “Because you aristos deign to do nothing for yourselves.”

  “Oh, no doubt. But then, that’s why I chose you: For being so much more able than I, in every regard. Why I envied and coveted your strength, your vital idealism. Your . . . ”

  . . . life.

  Jean-Guy feels the monster’s gaze rove up and down, appraisingly—reading him, as it were, like—

  Hoarse: “A . . . map.”

  The Chevalier sighs, and shakes his head.

  “A pretty pastime, once. But your body no longer invites such pleasantries, more’s the pity; you have grown somewhat more—opaque—with age, I think.”

  Taking one further step forward, as Jean-Guy recoils; watching Jean-Guy slip in his own blood, go down on one knee, hand scrabbling helplessly for purchase against that ragged hole where the wall once was.

  “What are you?” He asks. Wincing, angrily, as he hears his own voice crack with an undignified mixture of hatred, fear—

  (—longing?)

  The Chevalier pauses, mid-step. And replies, after a long moment:

  “Ah. Yet this would be the one question we none of us may answer, Citizen Sansterre—not even myself, who knows only that I was born this way, whatever way that might be . . . ”

  Leaning closer still. Whispering. Words dimming to blood-thrum, and lower, as the sentence draws to its long-sought, inevitable close—

  “ . . . just as you were born, like everyone else I meet in this terrible world of ours, to bear my mark—”

  —or be my prey.

  With Jean-Guy’s sight narrowing to embrace nothing but those empty eyes, that mouth, those teeth: his disease made flesh, made terminal. His destiny, buried too deep to touch or think of, ‘till it dug itself free once more.

  But—

  —I am not just this, damn you, he thinks, as though in equally silent, desperate reply—not just your prey, your pawn, your tool. I was someone, grown and bred entirely apart from your influence: I had history, hopes, dreams. I loved my father, and hated his greed; loved my mother, and hated her enslavement. Loved and hated what I saw of them both in myself: My born freedom, my slave’s skin. I allied myself with a Cause that talked of freedom, only to drown itself in blood. But I am more than that, more than anything that came out of that . . . more than just this one event, the worst—and most defining—moment of my life. This one encounter with . . .

  . . . you.

  Stuck in the same yearning, dreadful moment through twelve whole years of real life—even when he was working his land, loving his wife, mourning her, mourning the children whose hope died with her. Running hi
s father’s plantation, adjudicating disputes, approving marriages, attending christenings; watching La Hire decline and fall, being drunk at his funeral, at the Bal, at his own wedding . . .

  . . . only to be drawn back here, at last, like some recalcitrant cur to his hidden master’s call. To be reclaimed, over near-incalculable distances of time and space, as though he were some piece of property, some tool, some merest creeping—

  —slave.

  Marked, as yours. By you. For you.

  But—this was the entire point of “my” Revolution, Jean-Guy remembers, suddenly. That all men were slaves, no matter their estate, so long as kings and their laws ruled unchecked. And that we should all, all of us, no matter how low or high—or mixed—our birth either rise up, take what was ours, live free . . .

  . . . or die.

  Die quick. Die clean. Make your last stand now, Citizen, while you still have the strength to do it—

  —or never.

  “It occurs to me,” the Chevalier says, slowly, “that . . . after all this . . . we still do not know each other’s given name.”

  Whatever else, Jean-Guy promises himself, with one last coherent thought, I will not allow myself to beg.

  A spark to oil, this last heart’s flare: he turns for the door, lurching up, only to find the Chevalier upon him, bending him backwards by the hair.

  Ah, do not leave me, Citizen.

  But: “I will,” Jean-Guy snarls, liquid, in return. And hears the Chevalier’s laugh ring in his ear through a fresh gout of blood, distant as some underwater glass bell. That voice replying aloud, as well as—otherwise—

  “Ohhhh . . . I think not.”

  I have set my mark upon you.

  My mark. Mine.

  That voice in his ear, his blood. That smell. His traitor’s body, opening wide to its sanguine, siren’s song. That unforgettable red halo of silent lassitude settling over him like a bell jar once more, sealing them together: Predator, prey, potential codependents.