GREEN WALLPAPER

by Tanith Lee

O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

—William Shakespeare, Hamlet The spirit, finally, will always conquer the sword.

—Napoleon Bonaparte

Below the equator and above the Tropic of Capricorn, a speck in the widest nowhere of the Atlantic Ocean, built from the tall black debris of an ancient volcano: the island. Too far from Africa, too far to matter—and from Europe as far it seems as hell is from the earth, once one has been cast down into it. Winds that are fevers blow in this place. The humid gray heat shatters only on icy, greasy rain, which smokes as the heat resumes. Yet a colonial town goes on about its business here, and private houses scatter the heights. Hundreds, it is true, have supposedly died of the climate, of the very remoteness. And no one with a choice ever stays long. Yet the island is the possession of a great worldly power, and so tons of soil were long ago deposited and spread, and gardens and woods planted. They grow quite richly now, pasted all over the rough, badly-finished plaster of the black rock. Like green wallpaper.

He has been thinking … or dreaming, he isn’t sure, of that second woman who was his wife. Curious, really. His first wife was several years older than he, the second a lot younger. Some sort of balance in that, maybe. The first wife he had loved and she was barren, and had betrayed him over and over with other men—but in the end she clung to him, was jealous, wanted him—died without him. While the second never wanted him, pretended, was entirely faithful while they were together—as far as he knew, and he would have known if she were not—quickly providing him with a son. But then, when his star fell, and everything crashed about him, she ran away, taking his son with her, robbing him of his child—his future—and now she lies in bed with some nobody of an Austrian officer. She, his empress, who had shared his throne. Just as the first wife had been his empress before.

Yes, a balance, probably.

As in a mathematical problem.

It’s all like that.

He sighs—he sighs often—and hauls himself up from the wooden chair, pushing back from the wooden table. How heavy he feels. Legs, arms. Lack of enough exercise. Lack of—everything.

He walks round the room, once, twice, picking up a few objects, two books, a quill. A small coin someone’s found. Heaven knows, they need any funds they can get.

He is indulging in one of his five-day stints of seclusion. Later, very likely, he’ll call one of them in, dictate a little more of his memoirs. But he finds increasingly, if he is honest, that now the desire to put the record straight is offset by the need—to do nothing.

Nothing!

He, hero, general, king, emperor, once almost master of all Europe. Oh, he could have had the world. It was running toward him as eagerly as he ran with his armies to seize it.

But then …

He feels he has lived a long time. His life seems to stretch back forever, in tumults of battle and pageantry, and in cosy domestic scenes, power and glory and content and grief. But not forward, of course. Never that.

His belly hurts, but it always does. Always did. Confound his body. Men have obeyed him but the machine of his body would seldom fully obey. He had had to break it to his will and now, as sometimes even in the past, it outwits and overcomes him. At last, like all the rest, seeing him fallen, it too creeps forward like a cowardly hyena, to paw and rend.

Some noise outside? What’s that? Marchand, his manservant, calls softly through the door that leads into his private rooms. Apparently the English governor, Lowe, had called again, wanting to speak to him. That ginger-haired, crawling thing. Has he gone? Yes. He says, absently but with a flicker of old firmness, See anything is wiped over, if he’s been near it.

The house is very high up on the bleak tableland among the diseased and arthritic gum trees. Here the winds really blow like trumpets. Another new tree lost its branches in the garden only three nights back. Up here, it’s more difficult to cover over the gray and black with green.

Besides this house—this place—it comprises a cowshed, washhouse, and stable, inadequately cobbled together and ineffectually disguised as being fit for human habitation. The floors break, leaking moisture, stinking of old manure. Rats dance in cupboards, chewing the mahogany that slowly rots anyway, along with all the books, due to the damp. Every day the silver lamp in his bedroom is cleaned, briefly removing a perpetual dull film. The rest of the silver’s gone, of course. He had had to part with it. But it was sold cheaply to the evil Lowe, who would allow no one else in the town to buy it. The town is always full of notices warning the townspeople that none must fraternize with the French enemy on the height. He is legally restricted to a few miles radius that stretches about the “house.” Sometimes he absconds—but no, he hasn’t bothered with that for a long while. He used to ride or walk all day. When his belly prevented him from riding on the Russian campaign, among those mud-and snow-smothered steppes, he strode league after league with his men instead.

He thinks of Moscow, burning. That beautiful domed city put to the torch only to spite him and stop him. They would have seared all Russia off the face of the earth if that had been the only way. He recalls the tsar whom he had charmed and enticed into treaty, like a silly girl into bed.

Outside the gray brightness is fading to gluey grayish blue. The sun must have set. There’s only the evening now to cope with. One more victory, then. One more day tossed onto the rubbish heap of history.

Of course, when first delivered up here, he had thought frequently of some means to escape. The notion of escaping still haunts him, even now, just as it haunts the obnoxious Lowe, who himself sneaks about the area continually. Yet escape is out of the question.

He believes he is resigned to this.

Therefore, only his mind can escape into books and memories, his thoughts, his dreams.

Something moves softly.

Is it a rat, shifting along the bookshelves, or under the camp bed in the adjacent room?

Generally the rats are more bold, noisier.

The two chambers are otherwise empty. The man who lives here has moved out into the dining room, where his fellow exiles have tonight made the effort, all of them, to join him for supper.

It is full night now.

The soft rustling, fluttering, comes again. Perhaps a large moth, a bird even …

Something ripples, there—there—under the brownish nankeen that swathes the walls of the bedroom. Or is it only a trick of the half dark? The muslin curtains are undrawn and some kind of outer glow—a lamp, the clouded stars—gives partial light but not enough.

No, after all, the nankeen covering is quite static.

Yet something is here.

And it does move, if only faintly discernably, and that moving being noticed more by the sense of touch, like a quiet breath over the rooms, a sigh, that goes through things—furniture, carpet, a wall.

It looks into the dining room.

Yellow candlelight, and the crowded table surrounded by people with once fine clothes and creased faces, one beautiful woman and one less so, a young boy, a noisy baby now being carried out—men in medals that commemorate triumphs.

The supper looks frugal. Earlier today, at dinner, the meat was rancid again. The governor sees to that.

What looks in looks without eyes. Invisible, and yet not completely so. Somehow a sort of shadow is present that’s cast by nothing in the room, so the beautiful woman suddenly starts, and says a creature is there, is it a lizard? Send it out, kill it—But then the shadow isn’t there, isn’t anywhere, and only one man puts his hand to his cheek, feeling a mild moist breath smooth over it, perfectly clean, except for a little mustiness, perhaps …

Rustum, the servant who has just crossed an outer room, feels something slide over him—now like a weightless silky shawl. His eyes glitter as they follow intuitively what they can’t see. Tonight, should he sleep against his master’s door, as he has so often in the past? No. It will be no use. The elder people from whom Rustum descends, they have names for such things, and know neither a door, nor a man, not even a sword, can keep the demons out. No precaution or act will work.

“Fah! This wine is putrid!” exclaims one of the younger men angrilly. He adds. “Sire, we should slaughter that villainous little fiend Lowe.” “The English would love that, their representitive, my jailer, murdered,” says the one addressed as sire. “What do you think they’d do? They’re faithless.” He’s no longer an emperor, but still he must be called “sire,” although such a title, he has said, means nothing, and never did.

The two women are stiffly arguing in an undertone. Someone shushes them.

The ex-emperor wants his coffee. Then he will want to play chess or cards. Then read them a Greek play or a French play by Racine, talk to them about bygone days. Always it is like this. He keeps them up half or all the night, wears them out, drains them, exhausts them, casts them aside. Even when he dictates the accounts of his life and battles, he can go on and on, pacing the rooms, paying out his acute and finely-tuned phrases, for the classical education of his youth has informed his syntax, just as much as once it did his genius in war. Despite the accent, which he’s never lost. He then can continue in this recital ten hours or more, but his secretaries collapse, fall asleep, faint even. Then he calls in another. Wears them out, drains them. The ex-emperor is a sort of vampire. He’s never known, and would be enraged and would disbelieve, if told. He has seldom— ever?—been able to empathize. For he is the center of the world. From the beginning, until the end. They—all other things—bit players, useful, magnetizing, inadequate.

An invisible shadow now hangs up on the ceiling like a cobweb. It still looks down, attentively watching. Some ebb of its formless form unravels, trails negligently along the floor. And a single rat, sidling from the mahogany sideboard into a space under the planking, slinks aside to avoid all contact.

He’s dreaming … or thinking … the fires of burning Russian villages or the campfires burning in Paris across the Seine, that night at the beginning of the last act of downfall—the city full by then of his foes, and his young empress already fled—Fires. Genius, the fire from heaven—not every brain is equipped to receive it.

He smells a delicious perfume. He knows it—less the unguents with which she would lave herself, and which she would rub into the curly reddish darkness of her hair—than her own personal sweet odor. Oh, yes. He had written to her once—I am hurrying toward you—do not wash. She was one of those rare women who never had an impure smell, not even her breath when first she spoke in the morning—sweet, always sweet, the loveliness only heightened when she refrained from the bath.

Marie-Josèphe. Jos’phine.

He opens his eyes and through the dim dark of the small bedchamber, sees her standing there by the fireplace. She’s dressed in a white gown. It isn’t one of the scandalous gowns that she and some of her cronies used to wear at Malmaison when he was well away, the kind that, when sprayed with water, became transparent; this was the garment of an empress. And on her head, the royal golden wreath he himself had crowned her with. She had worn her diadem for him that night after the coronation, he and she alone.

Jos’phine.

“Here I am,” she says. She is the age she was when first they met, her early thirties. Pearls glimmer in her ears. Her skin is juicy, ravishing. Beautiful woman. The only woman he had ever truly loved—almost that.

“You haven’t missed me at all,” she says.

“Always.”

“Never, once I grew old.”

“Ah, Jos’phine. But now … you’re young again.” “All this while I’ve waited for you. I saw you at Malmaison once, you sat there alone, mourning for me. Don’t you want to be with me now?” “More than I can say.” He sighs. “To lie in your arms. To rest against you.” “Then why won’t you come to me?”

Some element penetrates, hard as a bullet. The old wound in his Achilles tendon—such a blatant emblem—stings. He raises himself on his elbow and feels too the throb of the anguish in his gut and knows he’s wide awake after all.

“What are you?” “I am Jos’phine! Remember the house, and the red geraniums pouring over from their pots, the flowers I brought all the way from Martinique. And the Temple of Love, in the gardens—” He tries, properly, to push up from the bed, and finds it difficult. His head spins, a common ailment in this fever-drenched pest hole the English have sent him to, to make sure he dies.

When finally he gets his feet onto the worn carpet, he turns again and she’s gone.

Yes, it’s fever. That’s all it is. A brief delirium. But it was so like her, wanting him to kill himself and hurry to meet her—he must assume that was what the hallucinatory Jos’phine had required. She always wanted him away at first, so she could have her fun with all the others. And then, when he fell in love with his Polish girl, then Jos’phine had wanted to be there with him. And now, in some place beyond the world that could not exist, impatient, she asked: Why aren’t you here?

He shakes his head. Outside stars are blazing in a brief opening of the cloud. He remembers remarking once, “Say what you will of the absence of a creator, but who made all those?” When the candle’s alight, he gets up and goes to inspect the area where the apparition stood. On the floor there seems to be the faintest dusting of white powder—the sort she had used on her face and shoulders—but no, it isn’t anything … loose plaster, no doubt.

Panting, his unhealthy fatness that has little to do with diet making him sweat, he climbs back onto the bed. A stab of infernal agony drives through his belly like a claw. So bad now. He supposes it can only get worse. Tomorrow, to soothe it, he will spend several hours in a scalding bath.

But even now he can fall asleep at will, like an animal. He falls asleep, and dreams of Jos’phine among her self-imported geraniums. His little son, that the other one gave him, the traitorous Austrian woman, runs by her side.

Something floats over him, a cloud that in sleep he does not see. Then the nankeen ripples behind the bed. In the morning, Rustum and Marchand both, coming in, will notice this brownish wall cover has become a little green in tone. Naturally, in this climate, there’s mildew outdoors and in, lichen even, everywhere.

All of his companions here argue continuously among themselves, and some of them come to him raving or whining with complaints. At certain times they have only communicated with each other by means of written notes.

What is all this inanity? His canvas had been the world—now he’s trapped in a nutshell, with these persons who seem unable to understand that his eternal suffering does not need to be augmented by their pettiness. Oh, let them all go, for God’s sake. If there were a God.

He thinks of the other two islands, the rugged, forested country of his early childhood, and the island of his first exile, this one mantled with stone pines, fig trees, shapely crags, walking among whose vineyards he had lamented, This place is very small.

Something must have been listening. If not a God, then some other imbecile tyrant. If Elba was small, what is this tiny dot?

And his mother had been permitted to come to him on Elba, and brought him all her carefully saved money, enabling him to finance a voyage back toward the coast of France.

He thinks of the loyal guard they had let him keep on Elba, shouting for him, and the army he had raised there besides. He thinks of the march back to Paris, and all the troops sent out to impede him, thousands upon thousands of men, and how he had gone out alone before his little force, stood there with cloak thrown back, weaponless, and bellowed: “If you would kill your emperor—here he is.” Which brought those thousands rushing to his side like liberated happy dogs: “Life to the emperor! Life and glory!” He reads a play by Sophocles.

He recalls the coronation, setting the laurel wreath on his own head—he who has been crowned by gold and iron.

The day goes. Eleven o’clock. He can resort to bed. When he wakes about three in the morning, Josephine is there, lying beside him.

He looks into her chestnut eyes.

“Go away,” he says quietly. “I’ll be a ghost soon enough. But I don’t want you yet. And this bed isn’t wide enough for us both.” As she fades, he remembers how her little hound, Fortunate—fortunate indeed it had been, the brute, that he’d never killed it—would constantly get between them, biting him, jealous.

There is no sugar for the breakfast coffee again. He stands looking at the portrait of his Austrian wife and their son, and at his silver alarm clock that had belonged to a mighty Prussian king.

He can hear the two Corsican servants arguing now, in an outer room.

The ship should arrive tomorrow with more books.

At the afternoon dinner he eats in the English soldiers’ barracks. They always welcome him with respect and great politeness, even though he has little English. Soldiers are all the same, once their mettle is proven. And they know the miracles he’s wrought and value him for them. He was a worthy foe. Worthy. The English prince should never have treated him in this way. He’d thrown himself on English mercy—and received none.

He thinks, sitting there in the drab dripping heat, of the ship Bellerophon (harsh name—Bearer of Darts) and how he had won her officers over, and they had seemed to promise him a safe retirement in England.

It’s never occurred to him, and doesn’t now, that after he had sworn to wipe England’s status and future off the face of the world, it was unlikely England would harbor him.

He hears the old revolutionary anthem in his head, the “Marseillaise,” despite the fact he himself had banned the singing of it. It spoke too much, he had said, of violence, and the wrong issues.

Something moves the curtains. A slight breeze. For a moment he sees his own cannon, under his orders, mowing down French citizens in the streets—the rabble—but that, so long ago. Before he became their father, their protector.

His eyes focus on the curtains to blot out memory.

How inventive. The curtains seem to have taken on the shape of his young Austrian empress. She had been quite succulent—one could forget the slight pockmarks on her face. She’ s nicely dressed. Satin shoes. Little buckles.

His eyes are tired and playing tricks, for the figure in the curtain looks solid, pink and ivory, smiling in her playful, spiteful, catlike way.

This damned malaise. Perhaps he can ride off the fever. Even inside the narrow twelve-mile limit of the cordon that legally restricts him.

Yet when they bring out his horse, he sends it back. It looks as feverish and tired, as forlorn and crestfallen, as he. And he notes it’s been bitten by a rat.

The exiled party at the makeshift house on the tableland is now much smaller. They are always leaving him, these loyal adjuncts of his—their health gives way, they’re urgently needed elsewhere. And they, of course, can choose. The one sane reliable physician, O’Meara, has left too, some while ago. The other, inevitably, is useless.

It isn’t so much that he has become used to the dreams that seem to arrive even when he is awake, it’s that he doesn’t dislike them. For that reason too, probably, he who talks and writes about every aspect of his all-consuming life and self, doesn’t record them. Exactly as he always refuses to hear, or to tell, a bawdy tale. They must be secret too, then, as relations with a chosen woman. And possibly tinged with something he himself is partially ashamed of. Maybe only his own weakness. He’s old, in his fifties, fat and in pain, sluggish. Bored. He is entitled to a few private dreams.

All of them have come to him now, his women—Jos’phine and Austrian Th’rèse and Maria, his exquisite dovelike Polish mistress—generous and thoughtful as always, since she even brought with her the illusion of a ballroom sparkled with champagne and candlefire. There have been a handful of others … girls from here and there, blondes, brunettes.

He has turned them all off. It goes without saying. Jos’phine with the frankness of familiar habit. Thérèse perhaps unkindly—but then even in the dreams she refused to bring his son to see him. Maria with a tenderness fitted to her patient, undemanding simplicity. The rest only needed a snap of his fingers—sizzle! Gone … They always return anyway.

Only this afternoon, walking into his study, the floor carpeted by new books recently read cover to cover and then cast away, Maria is standing in the bedroom doorway.

“What shall I do about you?” he asks her. “You have a good husband now. Why steal away to see an old fat fellow who has lost everything and is exiled to a rock?” “But I miss you,” she says gently. “Can’t I come to visit you?” A thought strikes him uncomfortably. “Are you sick, Marie? Tell me you’re not dead, like the Empress Jos’phine.” She blushes as if he had made a sudden—wanted amorous—advance. “No, no, my dearest lord. I’m well.” “And your boy?” With her too there had been a son, but too late. All too late.

“He’s well, dear wise one.”

She loves him. It’s clear in her lambent eyes. Poor child.

“I think I hear our son calling you, Marie,” he playfully says, and she turns her lovely head and indeed seems to hear someone call, and then she turns entirely and entirely vanishes.

And then he’s sorry. Before, strictly, he pulls himself up.

He slumps at the wooden table. He is being courted by ghosts both living and dead. A harmless pastime? Or just a persistent fever?

Take medicine then.

Get better.

For there’s still a chance his world may change, his chains struck off, his eagle wings able to open once more to flight—No, old fool. Be still. That’s over and done. Even should the poison-tongued English relent, and witless France come to her senses, what could he do now, shut in this sack of blubber and worn bones? Here’s my true prison—my own flesh.

He walks to the mirror and surveys himself. Once I resembled, closely, the Roman Emperor Augustus. Who now is this scarecrow?

In the mirror too, over his shoulder, he sees Maria lying naked but for an enticing, modest shawl, on his narrow bed.

He shuts his eyes, undoes them. She’s gone. His old enemy Talleyrand sits there instead, swinging his courtly white-stockinged leg, clicking his gold braid, leering and laughing at him.

A flash like cannon shot passes through his blood. He almost runs at Talleyrand, clever, traitorous Talleyrand, to wring his chicken neck.

But he doesn’t. For this Talleyrand isn’t real.

Later there is a storm. And in the flame of the lightning, he sees one by one his family members about the two rooms, his mother, Laetizia, in a chair; his bothers that he made kings, and the one brother, Lucien, he made nothing, posed on silent duty like wet birds; his feckless sisters in their gowns worth thousands of francs, his stepdaughter in her diamonds … His worst enemy, Bernadotte, parades by the bookshelves, and Fouch’ poses, shouting didactically until the lightning punches a hole right through him, and he shatters like a glass.

O’Meara, the physician who left, might have been spoken to about all this. But there’s no one now.

Again he thinks of escape—will these futile thoughts never leave him? How could he do it, unless he were invisible? He smiles drearily. Death will provide the escape route then.

To Marchand, who arrives in the aftermath of the tempest to say another of the newly planted trees has lost a limb, and then peers anxiously at him, he says, “Yes, the pain’s bad tonight. But there we have it. Only Napoleon can overthrow Napoleon.” “Sire—”

“Ssh. Light the candles. The wind blew them out. The dark’s a strange place to inhabit. When I shut my eyes, every mistake I have made marches before me. Whole battalions pass.” “Your noble life, sire, was—”

“A ballad, Marchand. A saga. The hero always dies.”

Something …

…there it goes …

Rippling like a sea wave behind the wallpaper. If anyone troubled, if they noticed, they would take one of his candles from its eagle sconce and go and stare very hard at the badly damp-stained nankeen on the bedroom walls.

It had a Chinese pattern once, now faded to marks like those large insects might construct.

It is very green, nearly the color of the ex-emperor’s old coat. Half close one’s eyes and the impression is of a jungle growing over the material of the nankeen and the plaster. When it moves—seems to move—the idea is very strong of a forest shivering at the passage of a muscular wind, or of some large, predatory creature.

He lies tossing about under the wall. He’s dreaming of circumnavigating the Alps in a torrent of an army, of the iron crown of Lombardy, of a sullen fortress in a desert that would not yield, sitting alone on his horse in the waste of sand while his legions marched away—only he having the courage to gaze at what he was unable to defeat.

The current doctor believes this once omni-powerful man is a liar, who pretends, for politically manipulative reasons, to pains in his belly and teeth. The doctor treats all symptoms with bitter and useless things dissolved in water. But unlike damp, clean water too is scarce here. The governor—always he—has made sure of that.

But this sick, tossing man can always sleep, deeply.

Something …

… flows out of the green on the wall.

Now it’s beside the bed, positioned there, still rippling faintly, an image like that of a breeze over a lake. One couldn’t say it stood on the floor. It simply is.

Formless and translucent and much less green than the stain it’s brought out on the wall. There’s a light herbal smell, rather like scythed grass, or wet trampled ferns.

Presumably the preliminary contacts, although inconclusive and so unfulfilled, have strengthened it, for it was invisible before, and limited in revelation to that sense of a thick cool breath or a piece of silk or an obscure shadow. Even where he has seen it directly, they haven’t yet touched.

It’s also fed, lightly, on all the others in the house. This had made them extra fractious, draining them, affecting their well-being. Just as he has done, if it comes to that. But remember, hundreds have died here of those fevers and ailments that haunt the island. The apparition is itself a sort of fever that preys on human things, or on animal ones when nothing else is available. Its existence began as the plants grew upon the barren rock. It was brought close to the present victim when he had his garden made, just out there against the house, and when he tended and watered it so assiduously. Ever since, this has looked in at his windows, slid in at his walls. Had it needed to be invited? Then he has invited it. His need, his hunger calls out to its own. Hundreds have died through both of them, because of the ex-emperor on his inadequate camp bed, and because of the demon that quivers beside him.

Like attracts like. Vampire lures vampire. It isn’t always essential to draw them in with voluble welcome across a threshold. Recognition is one of the most potent introductions.

A lizard runs abruptly down the farthest wall. It squeezes through a crack in the planking beneath the carpet, and has escaped. But the shimmering greenness has taken of the lizard no notice whatsoever. It bends lower toward the fallen emperor, drinking his dreams, feeding superficially and deliberately, for the best dish is now, without doubt, already being prepared.

The life of a happy man, this man had said, is a silver sky, spoiled only by a few black stars. An unhappy man’s life is like the ordinary sky all men see by night—black, with only the spreads of silver stars to mark his separated moments of joy.

The strangest thing … opening his eyes he sees the sky of dawn beyond the window. It’s shining clear and brilliantly silver just before the rising of the sun—and a handful of little black clouds litter it, scarcely visible, like dim black stars.

Then a figure moves between him and the window.

“Good morning, sire,” says the young man who sits on the end of his bed. The young man’s mouth quirks with an ironic smile, amused, but it’s not a face for humor especially, more priestly and stern, although very handsome, the thick, dark hair not yellowishly powdered today, but hanging silkenly to his collar, his blue-black eyes intent and steady as those of a trained gunner—not suprising, for he had been such a gunner.

For a few seconds the ex-emperor does not know him. Or rather mistakes him first for several others in turn—friends of his youth, his brothers—even an enemy he can’t name. Recognition then doesn’t always provide the instant introduction.

Yet they are eye to eye.

I to I.

The young man is his younger self.

He speaks quite tenderly. “You didn’t want any of the others I showed you, did you? You want only you. And so, he is here.”

Every one of the few left here know now the man who was their emperor is sick—to death. Even Governor Lowe is sure, and rushes to the house, and desires very imperiously and repeatedly to see the captive, for how else can the staunch and suspicious governor be certain the prisoner hasn’t escaped? The governor becomes quite certain, in fact, and takes to his heels when the prisoner bellows at him, unseen, from behind his locked door.

“So,” he says to the apparition on the end of the bed. But it isn’t an apparition. More convincing than any perfume, he can smell its youthful and healthy body, and the freshness of the clean linen he had always insisted on, as once he could. “So, you can haunt me at daybreak too, then.” “I’ll always haunt you. I am you.”

“No. No, you are not. You called me sire.” “Courtesy. Until you grew used to what you saw.” He’s silent. The other, the younger him, turns and points out of the window. The sun is coming up, the silver sky giving way to gold.

“From the east,” says the other. “The sun, beloved of the bee and the eagle, and the Lion of Leo, our birth sign. Think of the East. Do you remember?” He sighs. He sighs so much. “Yes.”

“Egypt, the gateway. That campaign which, if wholly successful, would have split England from her Eastern empire. Then on to the lands of fable—Arabia, Persia, India. Your goal, our goal. The same road that was taken by the mighty Alexander of the Greeks. He almost conquered and ruled all the known world. As we did, almost, our much larger world. Is this not true?” “Perhaps,” he says. “But there was too much to do. The farther I went, the more I had achieved, the more complex and petty the ramifications. Surrounded by fools and foes … No, I’m my own worst foe. And if you are myself, you phantom, then maybe you are that worst foe, externalized.” But the man sitting on the end of the bed shakes his head so the shiny feathers of his young hair fly.

“Think of it this way,” says the younger man, “as you grew in knowledge, expertise, and power, as your genius was burnished and jeweled by experience, time trampled you and you aged. Me you left behind—a genius also—but untaught by that experience, unleavened.” “If you were left behind, it wasn’t ever my choice. All men age. I before my hour, I believe. I’ve lived life more than most certainly, lived enough life perhaps for two men. What am I? Fifty-one years. Then in truth I must be one hundred and two. Small wonder I should look and feel it.” His stomach gripes, agonizingly as always now. His other self watches with a curious apparent mixture of concern and impatience. “It was all that fasting and famishing in our youth,” he murmurs, as the face of the older man gradually clears. “That will upset all the mechanism of a body. The fat on you comes from that, too. We were poor and starved for years. Then we ate. Such things never work out.” “Yes, yes, I’m fat enough. Soon I’ll be bone thin.” “So you resign yourself—ourself—to death.” “I can do no other. I always scorned to take my own life unless all hope was gone. I traveled through Russia with a black bag of poison around my neck, ready. Now life and hope depart together.” Outside the door a soft scratch, and Marchand clears his throat.

Where the younger self is, a smoky flicker appears in the air. He has vanished, yet even as the door opens, the ex-emperor hears his own young voice whisper at his ear, “Tonight, put out the chessboard. I’ll play a game with you.” Marchand, troubled, for he thinks he’s heard his master not only talking to himself, but muttering answers, advances into the room with a little hot water and the accessories kept for shaving.

And his master looks very ill this morning, Marchand thinks. The yellowish tone of his skin seems heightened by the horrible glowing mossy shade of the wallpaper, and the heartless brilliance of the morning sky.

That evening after supper, he doesn’t want to dictate or debate any reminiscences. Nor to read aloud the play by Racine he had placed nearby. He smooths the play regretfully. Its soul-searching drama calls to him even as he moves away.

In the bedroom he stands in his red slippers. Night covers the imprisoning island, flecked, in only a very few areas, by silver stars.

Instead of getting into bed, he goes back into the outer room where he has arranged the chessboard with its array of fierce figures.

How childish to put this out, expecting a phantom to join him. Then, oddly, with the same little ironic quirk of a smile his own other self earlier displayed, he sets a glass of the thin wine on either side the table, and lugs the other chair into position.

Something laughs, up in the ceiling.

He knows the laugh. His own.

Turning, he’s just in time to see the green mist that blooms against the dirty brown wallpaper, and how it lightly opens, like a curtain, and out of it, and down, as if descending a brief stair, unerringly runs the short and slender form that long ago was his.

Dreadfully—it startles and shames him—the ex-emperor’s eyes expand with tears.

He blinks them back.

But the eyes of his other self are wet also.

The other self holds out its hand.

Frowning now, he clasps it. The hand is warm—strong, calloused as he—anyone—would expect, from swords and guns and reins—and as real.

They sit down. Both raise their glass at the same instant, and both drink. Both view the board carefully.

“Tonight,” says his other self, almost flirting, “I shall be Russia.” “Then what am I?”

“Napoleon,” says the other self. “What else need you be? Life to you, Emperor! Play to win.” Yes, it is a flirt, this thing. I am you it says, then courts him. Despite its words of being left behind without his learning, perhaps his experience is already being drunk down by it out of the air.

They play.

The pieces slide and click across the squares. Hours melt like candlewax from the clock.

Neither can win. How could they? They employ the same strategies. Ah yes, it has learned.

“You see after all,” admits the young man, nearly shy but not unwilling. “Now I’ve gained your mature cunning.” “And I’ve lost all my edge.”

“Here it is, your edge. It is me.” How young or old precisely is the other? The ex-emperor considers him judicially. He doesn’t need the other to say to him, as soon he does, “Do you remember Toulon?” it merely confirms the idea his younger self is approximately twenty-three or twenty-four.

“After Toulon, the beginning of your ascent to power,” says the ex-emperor rather drily.

“While yours collapses and ends.”

“All things end.”

“Not all. Of course, not all.”

He considers this. Then looking at the board, suddenly he sees the younger man has left him an opening—perhaps left it purposely—or not. He makes his move and wins the hours-long game.

“So you’ve taken Russia,” gravely announces the young man. “Soon you can claim the East as well. Not only a united Europe, but a united earth. An end then to all war. The wings of the eagle will cover everything and keep it safe.” “Hush, it’s lost, that great game. Soon I’ll be dead.” The other says disdainfully, “You’re not dying. You will live on. True, in vicious pain, in cruel frustration and unhappiness, losing gradually not only yourself, but every faculty you still command—no longer able to ride, then no longer able to walk, no longer able to think—a fat old grasshopper all withered up in this prison cell atop the tiniest islet in the world. Do you believe by now you shouldn’t already be dead? The English jailer has tried enough, and always, to starve and wound and break and so kill you. In spite of your weakness and despair and the rat that gnaws in your guts, you have the constitution of a lion. Yes, you’ll live. Another five, ten, fifteen years. On and on into increasing debility and old age—without teeth or sight or sense—until, as you say, finally you die and crumble to dust. But it’s far away. A long and arduous road to reach your grave.” He smiles, bitterly. “If I’m to live, I have no choice. I’d trusted this misery was almost over.” “It can be,” says the other, flippant. And abruptly standing up—he’s gone.

“Come back, you rogue—you devil—” he catches himself calling it to return. And sighs again.

There is the smell in the room of newly cut greenery, and he recalls the oily scent of broken geraniums by the Temple of Love at Malmaison.

But Jos’phine won’t visit him again. It was true, he hadn’t wanted her, or any of his women. Nor his enemies. His son he had wanted. He’d thought possibly this haunt or demon, whatever it was, might have presented his son to him. If only once. But also now it’s too late for that. It knows it has fascinated him entirely in this one shape.

Even though he thinks this he doesn’t believe in the demon, which is perhaps why he isn’t afraid of it. Naturally he has played the chess game against himself, and drunk both thimbles of vinegary wine.

He lies down on the bed. Sleeps. Dreamless, now.

“Do you remember Toulon? Mondovi, Mantua, Alexandria, Austerlitz?” Yes, he remembers.

The demon returns, returns. They relive the campaigns, the chess pieces becoming whole armies. Once more he dashes forward into battle, skilled, braver than lions, risking all and taking all. Careless too sometimes, determined, as if, stripped of weapons, still he would bite his way through the enemy ranks—The demon isn’t real.

It is a fever dream.

They talk of Corsica, his birthplace. He sees it appear before him—a mirage—the tree-covered heights, the polished shores—“You didn’t want your women, not even your mother—not even your son—oh, be honest. It’s this you want. Your past. And me. You want me that is yourself and your youth, when you grew upward into the light of victory.

The demon is correct.

He watches it—himself—narrowly. And so makes more mistakes at the chess—loses at Toulon, loses at Austerlitz—“Once you allowed me to win,” he tells the demon. “Our first game.” But the demon checkmates him without answering, leans across the wooden table and, casting its own convincing shadow, clasps his hand, warmly, strongly, once more.

“I can tell you how to win.” He sits back then and the creature lets him go. It speaks softly in his own inventive, fluent French, accented always with Italian.

“You must tell them you’re dying.”

“I do so. I am.”

“That’s good. But I’ve watched you. You must say it with more conviction. Make out your will.” “A wise thought. I shall, God help me.” The spasm in his belly rears and racks him and he doubles over in a cold thick sweat, retching once or twice. The demon waits politely for some while, until the agony withdraws.

“Yes. It will be easy,” the sick man grates.

The demon replies, “Easier than you know. You have only to give me yourself, and then I shall be yours.” He straightens. Wipes his face. Through the door he glimpses the unnerving wallpaper.

“You want my soul,” he suggests.

“Souls! You don’t believe in them. This is a bargain of the flesh. I have all your youth, and now all of your wisdom. What you would want therefore is to be me. And I—” the whisper falls like drops of water in his ears, “what I want is the renewal of my self, through the vitality of your remarkable blood.” The older man lets out a long, hoarse laugh.

“My blood’s rotten. I have the canker in my guts, like my father before me.” “Nothing of the sort. Your blood is of the best. Why else should I want it? I’ve supped all these years off the vital fluid of worthless men, or off the gore of rats and reptiles. But you—you tempted me. The blood of a hero and a genius.” The old man watches his adversary now. The old man’s eyes, though bloodshot, and the whites a little discolored, are still dark. They seem to see at last very well what the thing is that appears to be himself, and that has learned to speak in his voice. How peculiar, the mouth—his own—avid now as his had never been, no, even in the throes of great rage or passion, and the young eyes themselves glittering like those of a rabid fox.

“You’ll drink my blood then.”

“I don’t drink.” Disdainful. “I absorb.” The human phrase somehow disturbingly apt, even on that fox tongue. “Some are simple to drain. Not you. Without you allowing it, I can do little.” Avid. He sees it is avid, and it permits him to see, through every non-corporeal atom, the avidity made concrete by its seeming physicality. As a man lets a woman see his lust, knowing it will move her, when she is attracted.

Yet, Without you allowing it …

After all a threshold, over which this fiend must be specifically invited.

“I say again,” says the old man, gray from the bout of pain, but ever steady eyed, “if you have my blood, I’ll die.” “No. You will become what you see before you, your former self. The world will lie at your feet again. When you’re strong enough to seize it.” He lowers his eyes. The vampire can probably see him thinking. It would seem, however, not what he thinks. For he knows it lies, of course. The exchange will result in strength for it, and an end for himself.

In the window, a hint of morning.

“How long,” asks the old man, “will the process take?” “Not long.”

He rises, clumsily. The pain has left an afterglow of scalded horror. He’s tired. It takes too much, this long road.

“I shall make my will,” he says again to the thing across the table. “Come back when it’s done. Then you can have what you want. Understand me, I don’t believe in your bargain. But I’ve done enough. They took my means of a swift death from me, along with all my power and possessions. You then shall replace the little black knot of poison I carry for such a while. You shall be my suicide. As before, only torture and death stand waiting for me. No Roman could do more, or less, than I. Come back when I’ve seen to my will.” He watches it gleam suddenly through all the solid and human flesh and life it’s put on to woo him. Will that disguise adhere, if wanted? But it fades anyway, smiling its fox smile. In its excitement, it has forgotten a moment only to resemble him.

Fighting exhaustion and pain he makes the will, filling the testament with lies, recriminations, accusations, and tricks. This takes days. He dispenses fortunes that maybe will never be honorably extended to the beneficiaries. These riches include hidden stashes of francs, gold, quicksilver, his hair, and his silver lamp, which he leaves to his mother in Rome. Unshaven, he lies spent on the bed. One of the remaining companions comes sometimes and reads newspapers to him. He gives his gold snuffbox to the untrusted doctor, with a demand for a prompt postmortem autopsy. It seems the ex-emperor actively wishes his body cut open, disemboweled—as if to be sure it can never reengage itself.

At close, regular intervals, the stomach spasms convulse him. Between them he dreams, and tells those in the room Jos’phine was with him, but wouldn’t embrace him. She had instead assured him that soon they would no longer be parted.

Not long, then. Not long before death sucks him down. Behind the bed, a backdrop, that wallpaper must always have been so green, and with the strange marks on it, which must be a pattern, surely.

“What a vast time … you’ve made me wait,” the sick man says.

“And you, what a time I have waited for you.” There it is, bending over him, himself, the other, twenty-three, twenty-four. The other murmurs, “Are you prepared?” “One last—tell me, how is it I must allow you this? Couldn’t you have taken my blood otherwise?” “I’ve said. With others. Weaklings. Not you—a worthy adversary. I’ve tasted your ichor in superficial sips, from your dreams, memories …” “From my thoughts?”

“Not those. Your kind of strength shuts doors. Only your longings—and even there I misjudged, didn’t I, until I knew you better. But now I shall feast on you. Are you afraid?” “No. I always had a curious nature. Mathematics, the sciences, intrigue me. This too has a sort of mathematic, so I believe.” The thing that wears his shape bends closer and closer. The sick man, scenting skin, linen starch, hair, sensing its warmth, again notes how well it has made itself to please him. In further proof, his own young hair brushes the sick man’s face. And at this instant he feels the essence of his blood begin to drift away from his veins and heart and brain, unhurtful and terrible, into the substance of the demon. He sees the creature too, lit with a kind of bloom, like a plant well watered, and how its eyes—his own eyes—bulge and fixate. It gives a strangled moan. Delight? Satisfaction? Then he hears it shriek, far off as a gull above the tableland. Yet the words are clear. “It burns! Your blood—it burns!” The sick man, not quite so sick as he’s pretended, puts up his arms as if to clasp a beloved son, and seizes the vampire by the waist. He finds he is still strong enough to surprise himself—to surprise both his selves. He hauls it down on top of him. It thrashes, but already something’s amiss with it and with its timeless procedure.

He gives it no space either to draw back or to recover. He sinks his own sore teeth into its throat, mauling and biting, snapping through until he can taste the blood of it—green as sap, boiling and slippery, not unpleasant, like herbs or medicine, or geranium leaves in a salad—The vampire is thrashing and screaming on the bed. Something has occurred. As the emperor, swallowing one ultimate mouthful of green wine, rolls aside, letting the creature go, he beholds how the vampire has been altered.

It’s bloated, and changed both shape and color. It is no longer that film which floated from behind the wall, nor is it any longer in the form of the young and handsome man who had operated the guns at Toulon. Now, flopping over onto its back, it is a swollen man-fish dragged, engorged with fever and internal venoms, from some awful sea, sallow and fat-bellied and broken, the sunken face old before its time, the dark eyes bloodshot and the whites liverishly yellow.

Yes. Still the vampire is himself, but now his aged recent ruined self. Nevertheless, still fleshly, and if not warm to the touch, more clammy, yet able to be touched, and handled.

His blood. His ichor.

He had seen men in the desert as they marched, days without water, forcing gallons between their lips at some oasis and then foaming at the mouth, vomiting, dying. The vampire had waited so long for his blood, only sipping. Then taking it fast and in such quantity, greedy, thirsty—too much. It burns!

It kills.

The creature, poisoned by the power of light that lingers still in every hero, even those who make mistakes and grow old. Only Napoleon can conquer Napoleon.

The emperor stands by the bed, shaking back the lush silken hair that hangs to his collar.

In every muscle, artery, and bone, he feels the shining sap of the vampire bounding and coursing in a wonderful mad ride, metamorphosing him back through time, making him young again, perhaps forever. What, from him has poisoned the fiend, has, from the fiend, done the hero only perfect good.

Center of the universe—how could he ever properly have credited he could die? He was immortal.

But the palpitating lump of apparently human wreckage on the bed rasps from its rattled throat, “You knew—you knew—” petulant as a child.

He replies. There is space for it, now. “Not certainly. But it was worth the risk. I built my life on such risks. And on charming my adversaries. Then. But now …” He pauses, wonderingly. “I am a private citizen of the world. No island can contain me, only the earth herself—” The young man stands there, his head lifted. Everything beckons to him. Will his life be like his former life? Or quite different? God knew. “My God,” he says, turning to the window, “look at the stars!” And vanishes into thin air.

The bargain, although it has not transpired as intended, is fulfilled, it seems.

Moments later, one of the ex-emperor’s attendants rushes into the room, having heard weird distant cries he had, at first, taken for those of a night bird.

As he runs forward, the dying remnant on the bed leaps upright and grips him so tightly, astonishingly, that the attendant can’t even shout for assistance. But the doctor, hearing wild thuds, presently intrudes and pries the man from the invalid’s uncannily strong grasp.

The ex-emperor collapses back on the bed. Behind him the wallpaper stays an intransigently faded green.

He survives only another day, while rain smashes against the cowshed house and greenish mist streams through every one of the wet, noisesome rooms. Sometimes he seems to crave drink, but can swallow nothing. That evening another tree is uprooted by the wind.

Late the following day, as the sun sets wearily into the Atlantic, they find the heart of the ex-emperor has also gone down into the dark.

Bribed by the gold snuffbox, and surrounded by witnesses, the doctor cuts deeply into the body cavity of the corpse, exposing and removing certain organs. If anything has lived in this body, undeniably it can no longer do so.

The verdict as to the cause of death is variable and inconclusive. It will remain a topic of debate for at least two centuries.

Long after the body, buried on the fever-blighted island of St. Helena, is disinterred and rehoused, with some ceremony, inside a tomb of sable and crystal, in the heart of France.

Napoleon, they say with sad irony, is once more in Paris.

Is he?

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