The Worm in Every Heart (10 page)

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 his 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 t
ool
, 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.

This fatal Widow's kiss he's waited for, in vain, for oh so very long—Prendegrace's familiar poison, seeping into Jean-Guy's veins, his heart. Stopping him in his tracks.

All this—blood—

Blood, for all that blood shed. The Revolution's tide, finally stemmed with an offering made from his own body, his own—damned—

—soul.

Prendegrace raises red lips. He wipes them, pauses, coughs again—more wetly, this time. And asks, aloud:

“By your favor, Citizen . . . what year is this, exactly?”

“Year Zero,” Jean-Guy whispers back.

And lets himself go.

I RENT A BASEMENT
apartment in Chinatown. That was one of the terms of my contract. With my kind of hours—8:00 PM to 6:00 or so the next morning—I need a place to sleep undisturbed, insulated from noise or light. My bedroom is a sweaty concrete box with a single, carefully bricked-up window. On those rare occasions when I wake before sunset, I lie there and watch the tiny chinks between mortar and stone widen as the draft leaks in off Spadina, making the dust motes dance. I hear my landlord, Mr. Pang, open his refrigerator door to check that none of the eggs has hatched while he was out. Outside, a crazy woman sorts garbage and sings.

Eventually, I get up. And go to work.

* * *

Sometimes I dream. Then the walls melt in a rush of sand and sickening heat: Dar es ‘alaf, 1991. A radio blares Megadeath as we turn and run, choking on equal parts nerve gas and dope fumes. Screams rise, and crunching, while we tear at the wall of corpses around us with our bare hands, desperate to escape—

—the wave.

A wave of flame. Twenty, thirty, fifty feet high and tiger-bright, guttering milk-blank smoke. It sweeps down, implacable. Over and around and through us. Until we're nothing but ash on the desert wind, blown high and wide, up into an endless sky.

It's always the same.

In the dream, I am never afraid.

In the dream, I
am
the fire.

* * *

At 8:30 PM this evening, the telephone hissed. I caught it up.

“Yes.”

“Where you been?” Battaglia whined.

I assumed it was a rhetorical question. “You know my schedule.”

“Yeah, well—Charlie wants to see you.”

I snagged one black boot, scanning the room for its mate. “That much is obvious.” Rummaging underneath the lip of my bed, I felt the edge of something vinyl, and dragged it free: Success. “When?”

“Right now.”

“Then tell him I'll be late,” I said, and hung up.

Five minutes to change my underwear and wriggle into my bodysuit, five more to the garage, three more on top of that to load my belt and kick-start my bike. Twenty-five minutes later, I braked in front of Myczyk Trash Removal.

Charlie was already inside, waiting for me.

* * *

I opened Charlie's office door without knocking, and found him in his usual spot—behind the desk. Battaglia leant against the left-hand corner, smoking nervously. I gave that game up ten years ago, myself, and have never regretted it since. A filthy habit.

Not to mention dangerous.

“Myczyk.”

“Vosloo.”

We looked each other over. A study in not unpleasant contrasts—big Polish-Italian gangster, little Korean-South African arsonist: Our cultural mosaic at work. And pretty nicely, in his case, except for that scar creasing the left corner of his mouth into a permanent sneer . . .

As if I really had time for that sort of thing, anyway.

“The Spiro job, Vosloo,” Charlie said. “Been some complications.”

Spiro Garments, corner of Church and Queen. Last night. Simple torch job.

“Such as?”

He settled back in his chair. “Such as the stiff in the cellar. Firemen got there first. Now the cops're in on it too, and the press looks hungry—bad publicity, Vosloo.”

I folded my arms. “What can I say? PR's never been my area of expertise.”

Charlie stretched—a predatory gesture. Then again, he could make pouring coffee look predatory. Sure impressed Battaglia, though; he almost dropped a new-lit Camel down the front of his shirt, then burned his fingers trying to catch it before it set his chest-hair on fire.

“Okay,” Charlie concluded, at last. “We'll play it your way. Maybe you didn't know he was there. Maybe you did, but you got carried away. You're an artist, right? But here's the thing, baby—cops trace you, the egg ends up on
my
face.” A pause. “Get it?”

“They won't trace me.”

“Care to take a bet?”

He raised an eyebrow. I simply smiled.

“Why, Charlie. And I always thought you didn't like to lose.”

Smoke hung in the air between us. When I left, my clothes would stink all night of Battaglia's cheap aftershave (Selsun Blue?), mixed with the lingering reek of struck, sulphur-headed wooden matches.

“Are we done threatening each other now?” I asked.

Charlie narrowed his eyes. “If I wanted to wish you harm, Vocloo, believe me—you'd be harmed already.”

Cute turn of phrase. But I didn't want to disillusion him; life's a scary enough proposition, as it is.

“Fine, then. What
do
you want?”

He shrugged. “Look, I don't have time to deal with this crap—that's what I pay my lawyers for. I got a busy night ahead, and no time to play Sherlock Holmes Junior.”

“So . . . ?”

“So—you do it
for
me. Or you kiss your commission goodbye.”

I glanced over at Battaglia, who quickly looked away, took out a pocket knife, and started trimming his cuticles. I glanced back at Charlie, my own eyes narrowing. “We have a contract,” I reminded him.

Charlie didn't answer.

“A contract,” I repeated. “You shook on it, right in front of me.”

Battaglia began whistling in mid-tune, something that could have been “Camptown Races” on the world's worst day.

“Just remember that,” I said. And left.

* * *

It happens all the time.

I saw a picture, once: Two legs sitting in front of a blank TV set, the skin of their upper thighs fried so crisp it had partially melted to the chair beneath. Nothing else. Just a big pile of ash and a black spot on the ceiling which—on closer examination—turned out to be rendered grease. Investigators later found a tooth, embedded deep in the off-centre of the TV's shattered screen.

They call it spontaneous human combustion.

I used to wonder how it would feel, back then. A stirring in the stomach, like really bad indigestion? A warm breath on the back of your neck? A fine red seed at the base of your spine, suddenly slapped awake, like some fire chakra primed to spark and bloom?

And then . . .

. . . the wave.

Like lava. Like the airless heart of a furnace. Like Ground Zero.

Like love.

* * *

“Maia Vosloo,” Harry Orphan repeated. He rolled my name in his mouth, like a pickled egg. “Long time, lady. Never thought I'd see
you
here.”

“In the Mood Ring?”

“Alive.”

Harry and I had met at Dar ‘es Alaf, before the wave. He'd been covering American women in action, or—as he put it—“The Babes Behind the Bombs.“ I was infantry, which hadn't interested him much until I'd pointed out that if he followed my platoon long enough he was sure to be in line for a few charred civilians, not to mention a nice, juicy prospective “Why Are We in Kuwait?” sob-piece.

Ah, the simple pleasures.

Harry tugged at his wispy beard. I knew what he saw: A tiny woman wrapped scalp to sole in black vinyl, goggles screwed down tight over the slits in her fetishistic full-face mask. A plastic zipper where my smile should be. I run a normal body temperature of one hundred and thirty degrees; in daylight, with my suit on, I can make thermometers explode.

Curiosity notwithstanding, Harry didn't ask about my clothes. Or where I'd been for the last five years. Or whether or not my discharge had been . . . honorable.

I thought I could trust him. For a while.

“Harry,” I said, “I have a problem.”

I sketched in the details, and watched his color fade.

“Oh, Maia. Oh, shit.”

I went on, keeping my tone plausible. “You
know
me, Harry. Nothing if not professional. For murder, I charge extra—and I don't recall my fee being anything out of the ordinary.” I paused. “I've been framed.”

He gulped. “Well, what do you think
I
can do about it?”

“Just a bit of extracurricular research. Access to your terminal at work.”

He bit his lip. “I don't know.”

“If you can't help me, Harry,” I said, softly, “I certainly understand.”

Harry sighed. He bit his lip again, worrying at it. He brushed back his thinning curls with one visibly sweaty palm.

Hurry
up
, I thought.

“Tonight?” He asked, at last.

“That'd be nice.”

He stood up. I joined him, pushing back my chair as he fumbled with his coat. “This place closes at one,” he said. “What say we take a stroll?”

And out we went, across the asphalt, neon reflections running like rain beneath our feet.

* * *

I let Harry struggle with the door's lock for a full minute before I offered to help. “Thanks,” he gasped, and stepped aside. I heard him breathing raggedly, over my left shoulder, as I stooped to examine it. Not exactly complex. I removed a hairpin from my kit—not one of those half-plastic Western ones with its ends tipped in resin, but a true
kanzashi
of solid, blue-honed steel—and thrust it between the tumblers, as far as it would go.

Then I stood up again, and kicked the door in.

Harry's editor's office was cramped, and smelt of mouldy pizza. I'd expected as much. The
Nova Express
was nobody's
New York Times
, just an underground rag with (fairly) new management that'd finally made the long plunge into a haze of recycled, high-yellow tabloid headlines: Two-headed feti, cannibalism, miracle cancer cures. They'd paid big bucks for Harry, though, mainly because he always knew just the right angle for a celebrity car crash, or a particularly gory industrial accident.

“What was the name of that building, again?”

“Spiro Garments,” I repeated, absently. A faded centrefold hung above the filing cabinet; she looked vaguely familiar to me. Closer examination placed her as my third-to-last landlady, the one whose house I'd had to take out after she broke my lease.

“Uh huh.” Tapping ensued, then stopped. Harry peered at the screen, pale yellow letters reversed and flashing across his lenses.

“That's weird,” he said.

“What?”

He beckoned me over. A copy of the structure in question's original bill of sale appeared onscreen, signed by one Albert Spiro. Harry scrolled down to show a will, recording the warehouse's passage from Spiro—now dead—to one Giancarlo Stada.“

“Stada—”

“—witnessed the first deed, and collected on the second,” Harry agreed. “Now look at this.”

More tapping.

Stada
, I thought. I'd heard it before, though in what context eluded me.

“Bingo,” Harry breathed.

Three articles, all set at Spiro Garments. Two were dated 1946. SHOOT-OUT IN CHURCH, FIVE DEAD. Ernst Vandecker had been arrested in the basement of St. Joseph of Arimathea's after killing most of his gang and a pair of cops. AUSCHWEISS DIAMONDS STILL SOUGHT, read the second. Vandecker's loot, for which he got a hundred and ten minimum with no parole, hadn't been found yet. The last piece was an obituary-sized announcement from 1952. St. Joseph's, bought by Stada, was going to be demolished to make way for a warehouse.

Stada.

Harry shook his head. “Dead end, Maia.”

But Ulrich would know who he was.

“Maybe not,” I said.

Then I heard footsteps.

Light, slow, and measured. Accompanied by a racing blur of heartbeats, a collective wheeze of imposed silence. Two, or more likely three. Probably armed. Definitely dangerous.

Outside the door.

“Get down,” I hissed, pushing Harry under the desk.

“What the—?”

The first shot popped over my head with a hiss-crunch of breaking glass, defacing the centrefold behind me. I palmed a smoke grenade and pulled the pin, lobbing it hard through what was left of the editor's splintered name. The door bulged inward as it blew, and a boiling blue cloud filled the room. One gunman screamed as he caught some shrapnel in his leg and stumbled, snapping cartilage. Another shot erased the computer's blinking screen.

“Window!” Harry gasped, teeth phosphorescent in the glare.

I nodded.

He threw the chair against the glass, then struggled to rip away the wire grating beyond. I stepped forward into the heart of the smoke and paused, listening.

Just two men after all. One was already down, holding his knee. The other whirled, aiming for where my head should be. I kicked him in the stomach. He staggered, then lunged—

—to catch my glove.

His nails snagged it, ripping it.

Oh, nonononono.

“I really wouldn't do that, if I were you,” I said, reasonably enough. He just snarled. I sighed, and shrugged.

“Have it your way, then.”

And the rip grew wider, peeling back. Peeling
open
like the crack of an unlocked door. Still wider. Until, at last, the skin began to show.

“What the hell—?”

He flinched back, light spilling up at him.

Too late.

My hand tightened on his, flesh scalding at my touch. He gasped, too surprised to scream. Because something was coming, spiraling up inside me, spilling out around me. Ground zero for the wave, arched fifty feet high. Shimmering.

And hot.

Harry looked back, already half-thrust to safety, and froze—so I pivoted and kicked him the rest of the way through.

“Lady—” my hired gun said, or started to. But the dust motes burst aflame, all at once, and seared his throat to silence.

I put a finger to his lips.

“Sssh,” I said. “It'll be over before you know it.”

He threw up his hands, pleading, and the room went white.

* * *

It was raining steadily now. Police cars screamed by as I dragged Harry through the alley, clambering over piles of old magazines and split garbage bags. He paused, mouth open, at the curb to watch me scrape a crushed tomato from my bootheel, simultaneously suturing my rip (
fire in the hole, Vosloo; bank it quick
) with some electrician's tape from my backpack.