The Worm in Every Heart

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.