The Evil Seed (33 page)

They were all there, Rafe
and Java standing on either side of Rosemary; I noticed that Rafe’s face was
bloody, and so was his hair, as if it had dipped in blood as he fed. Zach was
standing at the door, keeping watch. Rosemary was at the window, looking out
into the night; she turned as I came in, and her lovely face was suffused with
triumph.

‘Are you still afraid?’ she
said. ‘Look …’ and she made a sweeping, ballet-like gesture to indicate the
carnage around her. Her eyes were limpid, pitiless; so must Helen have looked
upon the wreckage of Troy. ‘Is there a limit to what we can do?’

‘You raised Elaine.’ It
was all I could say.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I
look after my own.’ I heard a sob from behind me, as Elaine’s breath caught in
her throat.

‘But Elaine is a
romantic,’ said Rosemary. ‘She imagines the peace of sleeping underground. She
wants the unsullied purity of death. The innocence of the grave.’ She laughed. ‘You
make your choice, and so do I. And the chosen stay chosen. For ever.

‘But how?’ I sounded
foolish, a child seeking to comprehend miracles.

She shrugged.

‘It’s childishly simple,’
she said. ‘Even Christ did it, when he said to Lazarus, “Come forth.” All you
have to do is to call, and the chosen will come. Desire invokes, Danny, and we
are the children of desire.’

I didn’t understand what
she meant at the time, I was numb with the aftermath of despair. I simply
accepted what she said as I had accepted everything.

But now, after years of
thought, I think I understand what she meant. Too late to help myself, but not too
late for you, I hope. She was the child of my desire, my dream-lady, my Blessed
Damozel. I thought that after Robert’s death I would be safe from her; I
thought myself strong enough to withstand her call, but here, at the end of
everything, I know better.
I
was the one who wished her back. I think I
recalled her, as she raised Elaine, as she knew I would. In remembering, I
recalled her; what is ‘remember’, except another word for the same thing?

Two

DAMMIT, JOE, YOU GAVE ME A SHOCK. WHAT THE
HELL WERE you playing at?’ Alice had stopped half-way down the stairs, and was
looking at him incredulously. Why had he come in through the back door? she
thought. And hadn’t that door been locked?

Joe simply looked at her
without a word, and Alice recalled with sudden unease the look on his face
earlier that day as he’d crunched his knuckles against the wall. And the back
door
had
been locked, she knew that, remembered checking the garden
before she drew the bolt.

‘Come over here a
minute, Al.’ His voice was eerily normal. ‘I want to talk to you.’

‘Just a minute.’ She
looked around, unease accelerating into panic now, for a means of escape.
Somehow she
knew
that the man at the door wasn’t quite Joe, the way that
when she had painted the Ophelia pictures she hadn’t quite been Alice. Alice
felt her hands begin to tremble again, stilled them with an angry gesture. The
panic was forced deeper, became a dull, controlled ache in the pit of her
stomach.

‘I was having a shower,’
she called brightly. ‘I heard you knock. Just sit down, and I’ll be there in a
min.’

‘Take your time.’ To her
new sensitivity, his voice was a shade too bright. She saw him, suddenly, in
her mind’s eye, standing at the fairground gate like a garish sentinel, a
toffee-apple in one hand, his brown hair sprayed red, and with a band of shadow
over his eyes.

Urgently, she scanned
the landing. The windows were too high to jump from. She would have to use the
stairs, she decided; she would have to talk her way past him. She checked the
weight of the knife, wrapped in a piece of cloth and pushed awkwardly up her
sleeve, and went downstairs to join him.

He was waiting, sitting
in Alice’s armchair, idling with a paperweight, a fist-sized knuckle of white
marble shaped like a surrealist cat. A swatch of hair had fallen over his eyes,
hiding his expression, but he looked up when he heard Alice’s footsteps. She
looked sick, he thought as he took in her pale face, her thin lips, then the
alien rhythm took over again, compellingly, forcing the alien thoughts into his
mind. Joe didn’t try to combat them; to tell the truth it was a good kind of
feeling, a natural high, so to speak. He let the rhythm direct him.

Alice looked at his
upturned face, half-expecting to see the face of the nightwalker behind his
round, academic glasses. For a moment the lenses flashed light from the window
into her eyes, then he grinned, a peculiarly Joe-like expression, at the same
time endearing and rueful.

‘Joe,’ she began in a
shaky voice, ‘I’m in trouble. I … I can’t tell you what it’s all about, but I
need you to promise me something.’

Joe shrugged. ‘Well,
that depends—’

‘No!’ said Alice. ‘You
have to promise. You have to keep away from Ginny tonight. Make some excuse.
Say you’re ill. Just keep away from her, just for tonight. Please.’

Joe frowned uncertainly.
He remembered that he had wanted to talk to Alice about Ginny, but didn’t quite
remember what he had wanted to say.

‘Why?’ he said. ‘Is
there something wrong?’

Alice sighed. ‘I’m not
sure,’ she said. ‘There’s so much I can’t prove, and so much that sounds crazy.
I can’t expect you to believe it all. But I know that Ginny’s friends are
involved. I know that at least one man is dead, and that they had something to
do with it …’ She looked at Joe. ‘I know you don’t want to hear this,’ she
said.

‘Go on,’ said Joe.

And Alice, encouraged by
the fact that he had not lost his temper or refused to hear her story, began to
tell him everything, even more than she had intended to say. She told him about
the paintings, the dream which wasn’t a dream, Daniel’s diary.

‘At first I thought it
must all be a coincidence,’ she said, finding the pace of her narrative now. ‘I
thought I was going crazy, twisting events to suit myself. I
was
jealous
of her, you know, that’s what made me think that what I was finding out couldn’t
be true, but there are just too many things all pointing to the same
conclusion. I have to find out her involvement in this.’

Joe looked at her in
silence for a moment, then he nodded.

‘I see.’ His expression
was blank for a moment, then he let his shoulders sag and took his glasses off
to wipe them.

‘I’ve been a bastard,
haven’t I?’ he said in a subdued tone. ‘I blew up at you this morning, I even
made a hole in your wall. I behaved like a complete prat, and the stupid thing
is, I already knew you were right about those two blokes. I’d seen them before,
and I saw them again today with Ginny. I knew they were selling dope as well,
and she was taking it. Shit, you can’t know somebody like that and not
…
’
He pushed his hair out of his eyes. ‘I just hoped that it wasn’t true, I hoped
I could stop it being true by bawling you out and not listening. I just couldn’t
take the idea that I was being taken for a ride again.’ He paused. ‘I’m sorry,
Al.’ He made an angry little gesture and rubbed his eyes with the back of his
hand.

‘Poor Joe.’ Alice sat on
the arm of the chair and put her arms round him, smelling tobacco from his coat
and the clean smell of his hair. Nostalgia overwhelmed her.

Quietly Joe shifted the
white marble paperweight to his right hand. The rhythm grew stronger inside
him.

Alice saw the movement
of his right hand, and she twisted, instinctively, to the side. The paperweight
missed her head, and smashed into her shoulder. Joe was taken off-balance as
the momentum pitched him out of the chair, and Alice had the time to leap back,
to try and get something in-between them.

She had time to think:
That’s
not Joe.

When suddenly he sprang,
raking at Alice’s face with the hand which held the paperweight. She jumped
back, at the same time kicking out at him with her right foot to keep him at a
distance. She wobbled, almost lost her balance, and in the time it took for her
to regain it he was on her, grabbing her by the hair and lifting the
paperweight to smash her face. Alice kicked again, reaching his shins squarely
this time, taking him by surprise. He loosened his grip and fell backwards,
hitting his head on the angle of the table.

A second later Alice had
scrambled to her feet and was at the door, unlatching it with trembling fingers.

‘Alice! Come back!
Alice!’

But his voice was
already distant — a jumble of words on a rushing wind.

Her eyes were stinging
as the wind rushed her down the streets and alleys towards Grantchester. And maybe
it was Alice’s imagination, but as she made her way across the river to
Rosemary’s house it seemed to her that, with every step she took, that
fairground reek grew stronger: smoke and sweat and roasting peanuts, burnt
sugar and petrol fumes and animals.

PART FOUR

Beata Virginia

One

SHE FOUND A PLACE FOR US TO HIDE; IN THE
APARTMENT she had used before she married Robert. It was quite large, with two
bedrooms, a bathroom, a little kitchen and a living-room, and she had continued
to pay the rent because it was a good place for her to stay when she didn’t
want to be seen by him.

Not that poor Robert
ever asked any questions; when she went out she told him she was going to see a
friend, almost challenging him to make something of it, but he accepted what
she said without a word.

Rosemary left us in the
flat, gave one of the spare keys to me, and the other to Zach, and went home.
It had been a long night, and she meant to go and get a shower, and sleep. For
myself, sleep was beyond me. I tried for an hour or so to persuade Elaine to
talk, but she would do nothing but cry, curled up on the sofa with her face
hidden in her hands. I abandoned hope of ever getting a clear account of what
had happened from her, so I indulged in a solitary game of chess (left hand
against right), drank most of a bottle of red wine Zach had left me, and tried
to make sense of what had happened that night.

Perhaps even then, I had
some hope of proving to myself that there was a logical explanation for
everything. Elaine had not been dead, merely stunned. Inspector Turner had
missed her heartbeat as he felt in the thick coat she had been wearing. It must
seem strange to you that I tried to disbelieve it, I the man who had witnessed
so many dark miracles that by now I must have been immune to them. But I was
not. Perhaps even then, I hoped to awaken from the nightmare, to prove to the
ever-optimistic doubter within me that there was an explanation for all of the
past few months. I was insane. I was ill, perhaps terminally so; maybe I had a
brain tumour which gave me delusions. Somehow, the thought of death did not
alarm me as once it might have done. It was the thought of life, yes, of
that
kind of life, which made me shudder.

The thing which
convinced me of the reality of what I had seen was its very simplicity. If I
had had to invent a resurrection my mind would have formulated something
complicated; there would have been rituals, invocations, magic, science,
anything but the bleak simplicity of this monstrous act. If there had been
something there for me to analyse I would have felt secure; I could have
believed in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster, brought to life by science, I
could believe in secret amulets and magical potions, in words of power and holy
signs, but not in this. My mind rebelled.

Despairing at last of
either sleep or quietude, I decided to go for a short walk, thinking the night
air might calm my thoughts. Even the knowledge that by now the carnage at the
police station must have been discovered did not deter me; I found that I
really did not care whether I was arrested or not. I took my coat and hat,
opened the door to the apartment and locked it again behind me. I saw no one as
I went down the stairs and into the street; although the dawn was beginning to
show, threadlike, on the horizon, it was still too early for any idle
passers-by to be abroad. I was about to cross the street, making my way to the
river, when a small movement caught my eye, from the alcove at the side of the
building, where the dustbins were kept. My heart jumped, but I told myself that
it could only be a dog, nosing for scraps among the rubbish.

The movement came again,
a kind of fitful scrabbling among the bins, too big to be a dog. I took three
steps forwards, blinking into the darkness. The figure pressed itself further
into the shadows, as if it were trying to sink into the brick wall of the
alcove. It was a man.

‘Hey, you,’ I called. ‘Who
are you? Come out.’

The man did not reply,
but I caught a little sound from his lips, a kind of wordless plea.

‘Come out!’ I stepped
forwards again, overcome by curiosity, and saw him lift grimy hands towards me
in supplication.

‘Leave me alone.’ His
voice was little more than a whisper. There was something in it that I
recognized, and I squinted at the man with a new interest.

‘Who are you?’

He turned his face
towards me, pale above the crumpled suit. For a minute I blinked, unable to
put a name to the familiar face, then I recoiled, even though the man was in no
condition to do me harm.

‘Turner!’ I said, and he
cringed away. The man’s icy poise was broken for ever, his face a mass of tics
and twitches. He was evidently in deep shock.

‘I won’t hurt you,’ I
said, reaching out a hand. He pulled away with a little cry but I followed him
into the alcove.