Alias Napoleon

by John Jakes

Jack Morris did not have an imaginative mind. This fact had never bothered him, for once he had bought the Wax Works pitch from an aging carny who had to go to Arizona for his health, he didn’t need imagination. He made a good living as good livings went in his scale of values, and in especially good seasons he even had enough money left over from running expenses for a week-end in a Miami Beach hotel. If Jack Morris had been imaginative, he might have taken a rowboat down the Colorado or gone seal-hunting in the Bering Straits. But he didn’t give a particular damn about such exotic activities. Unimaginatively, he went to Miami Beach which as far as he knew was synonymous with exotic living.

What if Jack Morris had been equipped with an imagination that flourished and rioted with strange schemes and non-prosaic images? Would things have been any different? Perhaps. For instance, on that warm July night, when the carny was staked out on the eastern city limits of Peelsville, Illinois, with plenty of cash in the till from Thursday night and more to come as the marks flooded in tonight, Friday, and best of all, tomorrow, Sunday ... well, for instance, if you take that night....

It’s useless. Jack Morris was Jack Morris. A medium-tall man of thirty-five, married once, now divorced, a carny to the core, with a taste for checked vests, nickel cigars and redheads.

On this particular Friday night, around twilight, with about twenty minutes till the gates opened, Jack Morris was returning to his pitch from supper. By his side, standing only to his waist, strode Major Mite, a salty little character who sported a copy of the Police Gazette in his hip pocket. The carny had been lighted, the bulbs firing the night with a hundred different colors stretched in gleaming chains between the tents. The sawdust smell rose like perfume and people moved in and out of the tents in that hurried stir of excitement before the marks were let onto the lot.

The sky in the west displayed a narrow band of orange light, and the rest of the heavens had long since purpled with here and there a star shining. Jack Morris walked along, hands in his pockets, a cigar in his mouth. Major Mite was whistling a melancholy tune when all of a sudden, Jack Morris said, “For Gods sake!” softly.

“What’s up?” piped Major Mite.

“D’ja see it?” Morris asked.

“What? See what?” complained the Major, his voice rising slightly and his tiny face screwed into a daemonic scowl. Jack Morris decided (unimaginatively) that there was nothing to get so excited about.

“Ah,” he said. “It was just a shooting star, I guess.”

“Is that all?” Major Mite complained loudly.

Morris laughed. “Yeah. Kind of surprised me for a minute, I guess, looking up and seeing it there. Kind of pretty, too. I thought it had a green tail on it,” he added softly, mostly to himself, because he thought Major Mite would probably laugh if he heard it.

Major Mite did hear it, and laughed. “Take it easy, Jack. Shooting stars don’t have green tails. Not the ones that I ever saw!”

They had arrived at the Morris pitch, so Jack stopped by the tent flap. He thought about the shooting star. Funny, he thought. Eyes playing tricks. I could of swore it landed in those trees a couple of miles back. The light went out just before the thing reached the trees. Nuts! Shooting stars don’t have green tails, he thought derisively. Must of been them beans I ate. Have to tell cookie where to get off tomorrow.

“You better lay off the stuff, Jack,” Major Mite declared chirrupingly.

“Sure, sure,” Jack said amiably. “I’ll do that.”

“So long,” called the Major, striding aggressively down the midway toward the sideshow tent.

Jack Morris rolled his cigar around in his fingers and decided he’d better quit goofing off or he wouldn’t have any dough in the till when the night was over. The lights were on in front of his tent, and he glanced in admiration at the lurid sign over the entrance. Chamber of Marvels! Gallery of Famous Folk! The Amazing Wax Works of Dr. Stephanovich, Imported from London, England. Who Dr. Stephanovich was, Jack Morris didn’t know. He also didn’t know whether or not the figures inside the tent had ever been in London, England. He cared less. It was a good pitch.

Morris passed around the tent into his own private top, there putting on his straw hat and his light blue jacket. Then he turned on the lights in the main tent, ducked under the flap and inside. The lighting was subdued, with small floor spots focused up on the faces of the dummies. In the near-gloom, the noises and the strident calliope music of the midway seemed far away. Jack Morris even shivered at the grisly likenesses reproduced in pale yellowish wax. There was Ghengiz Kahn, and a prehistoric man with a blow pipe (empty, of course) and John Dillinger, crouched low, a savage expression on his wax features, a wicked looking (fake) gun in one balled fist. There was Napoleon Bonaparte, hat on head, hand within coat, staring out petulantly from sightless wax eyes. Some half a dozen more, including a Frankenstein monster with green-tinted wax skin. A good pitch....

Suddenly Jack Morris heard the tent flap stir. He turned, a bit nervously. The flap was vibrating faintly as if someone had come in off the midway. Morris stared fixedly at the flap for a moment. No one had come in. He heard a strange nearly imperceptible buzzing in his ears, and it seemed to him that he saw a thin veil of smoke floating just inside the flap itself. He looked away, then back. The smoke was no more. What the hell! Jack Morris thought. Either somebody looked in who was smoking a cigarette, or else it was the wind. He started out of the tent just as somebody ran by on the midway shouting, “We’re opening!” Jack Morris hastened outside to get into position behind his spiel booth. He whispered into his microphone, heard the raspy reverberation of his voice in the portable speaker, and peered down the lighted midway to where the first of the marks were pouring eagerly through the gate. Arnie, across the way, was already spinning his wheel, clickety-clickety-clickety, around and around, wetting his lips in expectation. It was a perfectly still, warm night. There was no wind blowing....

“All right ladies and gentlemen step right up and see the famous Wax Works, sights of history to thrill you, to chill you, to fill your heart with wonder amazement and amusement for the price of fifteen cents, one thin dime plus one thin nickel come on step right up here....”

He had a good crowd, a steady flow of customers. The little boy accosted him at just past nine-thirty, coming out of the tent with a group of marks who commented on the exhibits they had just seen. The little boy grabbed Morris’s sleeve belligerently, but his eyes were frightened, though Jack Morris never noticed this.

“Hey, hey, mister,” the boy complained.

“What you want, kid?”

“There’s somebody alive in there.”

“Sure, kid,” Jack Morris laughed. “The more live ones come in, the more I like it.”

The boy was close to tears. He shook his head stoutly. “No, I don’t mean that. I mean there’s somebody alive in one of those statues.”

“Ah, go on,” Jack Morris said good-naturedly. “You’re pulling my leg.”

“No I’m not!” the little boy exclaimed. “I could see him inside that Bone Party guy, or whatever his name was. I could see him looking, I looked at his eyes and he looked right back at me.”

Jack Morris frowned at the little boy. “Kid you’ve had too much....”

“Rooooger!” shrilled a female voice. The voice became a woman who dragged the boy away, but not before he could turn terrified, anguished eyes on Jack Morris, and cry, “He’s alive, in there, in Bone Party, looking out. I saw him....”

Morris sniggered to himself. Crazy kids. Get a bellyache from too much crackerjack and start seeing things....

(Imagination? The little boy had it. How many others who went into the Wax Works that night saw what the little boy saw, and imagined? How many were afraid to say anything about it, to their mothers, to their wives, their children, afraid to be laughed at, ridiculed? How many? No one will ever know. The little boy saw it. The little boy imagined, and spoke it aloud....)

The crowds began to slack off around eleven. At twelve-thirty the lot closed down and Jack Morris turned out the lights in the top and went over to the manager’s trailer for a few games of pinochle and a few beers, the party breaking up at around one-thirty. Flashlight in hand, Jack Morris made his way back to his top accompanied again by Major Mite.

“See any more green stars?” the Major jeered, reeling slightly from an excess of alcohol.

“Ah, cut it out,” Jack Morris said. Then he remembered the little boy. “I got something better than that. A kid was in the pitch tonight who thought the statue of Napoleon was alive ... get that, will you? Alive!”

“Pretty stupid, all right,” the Major agreed. Jack Morris yawned and as the Major flung a last taunt about green stars and vanished down the darkened midway, Morris lifted the front flap of the tent and walked inside, intent on having a last look at the exhibits, as he did every night, to see whether or not any marks had fooled around with the wax figures while he was not watching. His flashlight bored a beam through the darkness ahead of him, and suddenly a wisp of smoke darted through the beam, twisting and twirling in mid-air. Jack Morris gasped. The smoky whorl rotated confusedly in the air for a moment, glimmering with small pin-points of greenish light. Then it darted. That was the only word for it. Morris followed its darting to the right with the flash beam. The light fell upon the childish head of Napoleon Bonaparte.

“For God’s sake....” Jack Morris breathed.

The smoky whorl danced around the head of Napoleon Bonaparte, then seemed to fuse toward and into and through the wax, and Jack Morris could have sworn that the dead eyes of Bonaparte were alive with coruscating bits of greenish fire. Something, Jack Morris knew, was inside that wax figure! He shined the flash beam straight into the eyes and he saw them whirl and dissolve and solidify again with a pattern of winking green lights.

Jack Morris was apprehensive, even a little afraid. No man would have been otherwise. But he was not completely terrified by any means. He took a firm grip on the flash and said rather loudly, “Who are you?”

He thought he heard a laugh. My God, he thought, the laugh was inside my head, too. The little lad was right. But this is nuts, something talking inside my head.

“Come on,” he said, “who are you?”

A name was repeated within his mind, a name that meant nothing to him. The voice was small, cruel, dry and mocking. “I was foolish,” the voice said. “Unaccustomed as I am to these strange surroundings, I didn’t expect you back. I’ve been looking around.”

“What ... what are you doing in Napoleon?” Jack Morris asked. The mind within his mind was a little bit frightening, like the brush of a dead finger across a forehead.

“Looking,” the voice replied.

“Looking?” echoed Morris.

“Looking,” the voice confirmed. “I’ve been looking all evening. This is a good place from which to look. Most of your people can’t see me, or if they can, they won’t say that they can.”

“What are you looking for?” Morris asked. He felt the cold rings of sweat beneath his arms now, and the silence of the dead carny lot, and the night world outside, and for some reason fear seemed to come a little easier, and he could almost hear each drop of sweat roll down his chest like the tick of a clock.

“I’m not looking for anything,” replied the voice in the mind of Jack Morris that came from the head of Napoleon Bonaparte. “I’m studying. I want to get to know your people rather well, before....” Again the small laugh.

“Listen,” Morris blustered. “Who the hell are you?”

“But I already told you!” The name was repeated.

“I don’t understand that. Where are you from?”

This time there came a second name. Jack Morris made an angry gesture with the flashlight. “I don’t speak nothing but English!” he half-shouted.

“Then I suppose I must translate,” replied the voice mockingly. Green fire danced and sparkled within the eyes of Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France and master of the world, standing near Peelsville, Illinois in all his wax-yellow majesty, hat on head, hand within coat....

Mars! shouted Jack Morris. Mars!

“That is correct,” the voice replied.

“I don’t believe you. Damn it, I don’t believe you!”

“That’s no concern of mine,” replied the voice casually.

“How ... how did you get here?”

“In a ship.”

“What kind of a ship?” Jack Morris felt that if he put enough questions to the peculiar dry voice, it would get frightened and go away, or else he would wake up in a couple of minutes. Sure, that was it. One too many beers in the manager’s trailer. Got to quit having so many beers. Beers make you fat, beers work hell with the kidneys. Right now a couple of the boys are lugging you down the midway because you had one too many crappy beers....

In the eyes of Napoleon Bonaparte, green comets.

Jack Morris knew he did not dream. He wiped away the sweat from his forehead with one equally wet palm. It would not be true to say that Jack Morris was not frightened. He was. But the most important motivating factor of the moment was his inward distrust of people not his kind. Mars, eh? A crazy foreign somebody who had to be feared because he was foreign. Jack Morris felt a heightening of temporary courage within him.

“Perhaps you saw my ship,” the voice replied. “Let me see....”

“Hey! What the hell are you doing?” It was as if a cold knife blade were inserted into the gray folds of his brain.

“Merely looking into your mind.” The cold knife went away. “Yes, you saw my ship. You thought it was a falling star, with a green tail. I destroyed it when I landed in the woods not far from here.”

Things were getting too much for Jack Morris. “What the hell do you think you are, coming in and lousing up my show? A lousy little bunch of fog and green stuff, that’s all!” He tried to sound confident, cocky and bold. Inwardly he was quaking with distrust and fear of the foreigner.

“I have power,” the voice replied with cool deadliness.

“I don’t believe it!” Jack Morris shot back.

“Watch!” said the voice. Jack Morris turned his head slightly. He heard a vibrating whirr, a zipping sound, and then a small thud. The blow pipe placed to the lips of the prehistoric man shook gently, and Ghengiz Khan, directly opposite the prehistoric man, had a small round hole in his belly.

Jack Morris stared at the two wax figures for a moment, bewildered. Then the actual terror began to take hold of him. He looked from blow pipe to hole, hole to blow pipe, and back. “I’m crazy,” he whispered, “I’m going nuts.”

“You’re not crazy,” the voice replied. “I merely wanted to show you that I have power.”

“There’s nothing in that blow gun!”

“There’s energy.”

“Energy!” Morris whispered hoarsely. “What the hell is energy?”

“What I control,” replied the voice. “What I can use to make dead matter live and obey my will. See.” And Napoleon Bonaparte nodded his head twice, up and down, slowly, and the green lights did a frenzied dance in the eye sockets.

“I don’t know what energy is,” Jack Morris babbled. He was thoroughly frightened now. “I don’t know what it is.”

The laugh of the voice in his mind sounded brittle and contemptuous. Somehow Jack Morris identified that sound, and it pierced through his mounting terror and held that terror in check for a moment. The voice was laughing, jeering, sneering at him and he didn’t like it.

“What’s so goddamned funny?” he snarled.

“If all your people are as foolish as you,” the voice said, “it will be easy.”

Somehow the ominous emphasis of the word it penetrated the dazed, confused and angry mind of Jack Morris. “What will be easy? What are you talking about?”

“The subjugation of Earth.”

“Sub ... sub....”

“Conquest.”

“Con....”

“We’re taking over.” And it had the cold, dry, final sound of authority. Jack Morris began to chuckle softly. Then he began to laugh. Then he rocked back and forth, howling softly with glee. Come on, boys, wake me up, douse me with some water, I had too many beers. Oh my God, this is rich, this is the funniest damned thing, I guess it must be the DT’s. Come on, boys, I didn’t know you could get DT’s from beers, but throw the bucket on me, I had too many.

The voice buzzed angrily within the mind of Jack Morris. “You don’t believe me? You stupid thing. You don’t believe me? I’ll show you!”

The world shot away, the carny tent and Bonaparte went screaming down a swirling vortex of night and Jack Morris grew swollen, balooned across the world and saw with the thousand, the million eyes of a strange and alien mind. Hundreds, millions of green shooting stars fell down, one after another, and small whorls of smoke fused with toasters and automobile headlights, with motion picture camera lenses and fountain pens, with bed posts and with school books, with department store mannequins and television tubes, eyes, watching, eyes all over the world, eyes of the invader watching, learning, discovering weakness, watching, planning, while in the black spaces far out more green stars gathered and more and more and on earth the eyes watched and observed and remembered and planned and made ready and watched ... and observed ... and remembered ... and....

Jack Morris dropped his flashlight. He pressed his hands against his eyes. He wanted to scream. Then a thought came to him. He had imagination now, the voice and the mind of the alien had filled his mind with imagination, and he saw the world beaten and taken over and....

“You see?” the voice whispered.

“Christ....” Jack Morris said. “Christ....”

The voice had lost its tone of anger now. The coruscating bits of fire in the eyes of Napoleon Bonaparte glittered less fiercely. “It’s unfortunate that you had to discover me,” the voice said, “but I think we can get along. I’ll travel with you in here, and watch, and of course you won’t say anything.” The voice hesitated. “I suppose one mistake is to be expected when there are so many of us trying something so new....”

Beyond the tent walls, Jack Morris knew, lay the world....

“I’ve got to warn them!” he cried hoarsely.

“Stop!” said the voice.

“I’ve got to warn them!” Morris shouted again, forcing his feet to move. The voice buzzed angrily, excitedly and he turned away from Napoleon and stumbled through the darkness toward the tent flap. The fallen flashlight threw grotesque shadows on the leering face of John Dillinger.

“Got to ... got to....” Jack Morris breathed crazily. It seemed miles to the outside, miles, but he had to go, had to get out. The thing had shown him what they were going to do, and unless he, Jack Morris, warned the people....

“Got to....” The breath tore savagely out of his mouth.

“I have power!” said the voice warningly.

“Got to....”

A scream rose to the throat of Jack Morris, remaining there soundless, as the air filled with whirling screaming points of green fire and John Dillinger shot Jack Morris to death.