The Worm in Every Heart (9 page)

And after their task was done, eyewitnesses record, these good Christian knights filled the pits with Greek fire—leaving the bodies to burn, as they rode away.

Much as, during your own famous Days of September,
a familiar voice seems to murmur at Jean-Guy's ear,
three hundred and seventy-eight of those prisoners awaiting trial at the Conciergie were set upon by an angry horde of good patriots like yourself, and hacked limb from limb in the street.

Eyes closed, Jean-Guy recalls a gaggle of women running by—red-handed, reeling drunk—with clusters of ears adorning their open, fichu-less bodices. Fellow Citizens clapping and cheering from the drawn-up benches as a man wrings the Princess de Lamballe's still-beating heart dry over a goblet, then takes a long swig of the result, toasting the health of the Revolution in pale aristo blood. All those guiding lights of Liberty: ugly Georges Danton, passionate Camille Desmoulins . . .

. . . Maximilien Robespierre in his Incorruptible's coat of sea-green silk, nearsighted cat's eyes narrowed against the world through spectacles with smoked-glass lenses—the kind one might wear, even today, to protect oneself while observing an eclipse.

Le Famille Prend-de-grace, moving to block out the sun; a barren new planet, passing restless through a dark new sky. And their arms, taken at the same time—an axe argent et gules, over a carrion field, gules seulement.

A blood-stained weapon, suspended—with no visible means of support—above a field red with severed heads.

We could not have been more suited to each other, you and I. Could we—

—Citizen?

* * *

1793: Blood and filth, and the distant rumble of passing carts—the hot mist turns to sizzling rain, as new waves of stench eddy and shift around them. Dumouriez rounds the corner into the Row of the Armed Man, and La Hire and Jean-Guy exchange a telling glance: the plan of attack, as previously determined. La Hire will take the back way, past where the prostitute lurks, while Jean-Guy waits under a convenient awning—to keep his powder dry—until he hears their signal, using the time between to prime his pistol.

They give Dumouriez a few minutes' lead, then rise as one.

* * *

Crimson-stained sweat, memories swarming like maggots in his brain. Yet more on the clan Prendegrace, a red-tinged stream of sinister trivia—

Their motto: Nous souvienz le tous. “We remember everything.”

Their hereditary post at court: Attendant on the king's bedchamber, a function discontinued sometime during the reign of Henri de Navarre, for historically obscure reasons.

The rumour: That during the massacre of Saint Barthelme's Night, one—usually unnamed—Prendegrace was observed pledging then-King Charles IX's honor with a handful of Protestant flesh.

Prendegrace. “Those who have received God's grace.”

Receive.

Or—is it—
take
God's grace . . .

. . . for themselves?

Jean-Guy feels himself start to reel, and rams his fist against the apartment wall for support. Then feels it lurch and pulse in answer under his knuckles, as though his own hammering heart were buried beneath that yellowed plaster.

* * *

Pistol thrust beneath his coat's lapel, Jean-Guy steps towards Dumouriez's door—only to find his way blocked by a sudden influx of armed and shouting fellow Citizens. Yet another protest whipped up from general dissatisfaction and street-corner demagoguery, bound for nowhere in particular, less concerned with destruction than with noise and display; routine “patriotic” magic transforming empty space into chaos-bent rabble, with no legerdemain or invocation required.

Across the way, he spots La Hire crushed up against the candle-maker's door, but makes sure to let his gaze slip by without a hint of recognition as the stinking human tide . . . none of them probably feeling particularly favorable, at this very moment, toward any representative of the Committee who—as they keep on chanting—
have stole our blood to make their bread . . .

(a convenient bit of symbolic symmetry, that)

. . . sweeps him rapidly back past the whore, the garbage, the cafe, the Row itself, and out into the cobbled street beyond.

Jean-Guy feels his ankle turn as it meets the gutter; he stumbles, then rights himself. Calling out, above the crowd's din—

“Citizens, I . . . ” No answer. Louder: “Listen, Citizens—I have no quarrel with you; I have business in there . . . ” And, louder still: “Citizens!
Let . . . me . . . pass!”

But: No answer, again, from any of the nearest mob-members—neither that huge, obviously drunken man with the pike, trailing tricolor streamers, or those two women trying to fill their aprons with loose stones while ignoring the screaming babies strapped to their backs. Not even from that dazed young man who seems to have once—however mistakenly—thought himself to be their leader, now dragged hither and yon at the violent behest of his “followers” with his pale eyes rolling in their sockets, his gangly limbs barely still attached to his shaking body . . .

The price of easy oratory
,
Jean-Guy thinks, sourly. Cheap words, hasty actions; a whole desperate roster of very real ideals—and hungers—played on for the mere sake of a moment's notoriety, applause, power—

—our Revolution's ruin, in a nutshell.

And then . . .

. . . a shadow falls over him, soft and dark as the merest night-borne whisper—but one which will lie paradoxically heavy across his unsuspecting shoulders, nevertheless, for long years afterward. His destiny approaching through the mud, on muffled wheels.

A red-hung coach, nudging at him—almost silently—from behind.

Perfect
.

He shoulders past the pikeman, between the women, drawing curses and blows; gives back a few of his own, as he clambers onto the coach's running-board and hooks its nearest door open. Rummages in his pocket for his tricolor badge, and brandishes it in the face of the coach's sole occupant, growling—

“I commandeer this coach in the name of the Committee for Public Safety!”

Sliding quick into the seat opposite as the padded door shuts suddenly, yet soundlessly, beside him. And that indistinct figure across from him leans forward, equally sudden—a mere red-on-white-on-red silhouette, in the curtained windows' dull glare—to murmur:

“The Committee? Why, my coach is yours, then . . . ”

. . . Citizen
.

Jean-Guy looks up, dazzled. And notices, at last, the Prendegrace arms which hang just above him, embroidered on the curtains' underside—silver on red, red on red, outlined in fire by the sun which filters weakly through their thick, enshrouding velvet weave.

* * *

1815. Jean-Guy feels new wetness trace its way down his arm, soaking the cuff of his sleeve red: His war-wound, broken open once more, in sympathetic proximity to . . . what? His own tattered scraps of memory, slipping and sliding like phlegm on glass? This foul, haunted house, where Dumouriez—like some Tropic trap-door spider—traded on his master's aristocratic name to entice the easiest fresh prey he could find into his web, then fattened them up (however briefly) before using them to slake M. le Chevalier's deviant familial appetites?

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.