The Evil Seed (38 page)

With a cry of (rapture) elation I (he) fall
upon her, fragments of her illusory glamour showering me (him) like glass. I
(we) have broken out of the spinning-top at last, like a dragon eating himself
up tail first. She can have no more power over me (us) , I tell myself; I am
free. We are free. I reach out to them over the years, to you, to him, to my
figure reflected back over time like faces in a hall of mirrors. We are Daniel,
you are Daniel, Daniel, young and old, legions marching across the years,
marching across the painted blue sky. In this moment I can see you. I know you.
I reach for your hand, here where all possibilities are true; I take your hand
and give you the power I know we have, the power of light, the light of all
things which die and suffer, all things which love and yearn for the
unattainable. God help me, in this endless, sacred moment I feel redeemed, I
feel
blessed
with all the brave certainty for which I will grieve in
vain in later, darker years. Maybe it is the gas, the hunger, shock, or maybe,
as I choose to believe, the divine re-asserting itself in my soul, but for a brief
longed-for instant, I feel that despite Rosemary I have at last glimpsed God.
As I struggle with the nightwalker, my glasses fall to the floor, my heel
grinds the glass to dust. I feel (the needle in my hand) her bones beneath my
hands, the hollow of her throat give way under the pressure (the syringe
empties, I can feel its response)
.
Her flesh yields reluctantly; for a
moment all illusions are stripped away, and we see her face as it really is,
the childish features cut away to reveal the nightwalker unmasked. In that
instant she speaks to me, promises worlds and lifetimes. But she is weakened,
ebbing like a bloodtide, waning, shrinking. The face of the demon becomes a burning
rose, the cup passes over.

The pressure is unbearable, a single degree
away from death. Alice’s nose is bleeding and her vision is darkening fast. Her
right arm is almost completely paralysed now, and both she and Java are
struggling in a growing puddle of sludge made of blood and dust. Her thoughts
are terrifying, simple patterns, unaware even that they are thoughts. Suddenly
she feels him flinch, his thoughts assailing her with a blast of unexplained
panic, his hands going from her throat. For a second she fears that she will
not be able to move, but she finds that she can. She grabs his knife, and hits
him cleanly once, just below the ribs …

Joe’s mind circles in a broken loop as he
stares in shock at the red-haired girl. In the faint glow from the broken
window she is a jumble of light and shade, hair the faintest nimbus of rose in
a stark and violent monochrome. The syringe is planted in her neck, just below
the jugular, and as he reaches to draw it out, the girl twists round to bite
him, hissing, her eyes rabid crescents of white. She thrashes, snakelike, in
his arms, she rakes his face with her fingernails, hissing in a deep, choked
voice. He falls to his knees with his hands shielding his face.

God the light!!

Something is happening
to Ginny; her face twists and shifts, her image like breaking crystal in the
sunlight.

Joe reels before the
force of the vision, cringing back against the wall. Half-obscured by the
shiftings of the light against his retinas, he is still aware of the figure of
Ginny kneeling on the floor, hissing and raking at the air with her
fingernails, and though he can hardly see her real body, he seems to see behind
the veils of flesh a formless thing, tearing at its own face to reveal something
lightless and pitiless, reaching out its fingers to touch despair into his
heart. He retreats to a foetal position, eyes closed like the door to his mind.
Black flowers bloom behind his eyes, all sensation receding ~ mercifully at the
end of a tunnel of light. Going back to a soundless world, world beyond memory.

(Bye bye.)

(Wait.)

(No no no.)

(I
said wait.)

The voice has authority,
and automatically he obeys, turning in confusion as the accents coalesce into a
figure, a face he does not recognize; a young man about his age with thin, academic
features and old-fashioned half-moon glasses.

(Who are you?)

(Don’t worry about
that, you’ve got to listen to me. I haven’t very much time.)

(What do you want?)

(You have to set fire
to the house, make sure it’s completely destroyed, then you have to burn the
bodies.)

(Ginny, oh Gin—)

(Don’t say her name,
don’t mention her. You have to forget her, no grave no funeral, nothing. Do you
understand?)

(I—)

(It’s terribly
important. You have to forget her. If you don’t do as I say you’ll call her
back.)

(…
I)

Alice stumbled and
almost fell and in the strange flickering light she thought she saw a figure
standing in the room, a young man in an overcoat, grey eyes obscured by thick
glasses, thinning hair hidden by a brown felt hat, but when she regained her
balance he had gone, and there was only Joe, lying on the floor beside Ginny’s
body. The broken syringe lay beside her, but she could see the mark it had
made, the bruise and the single drop of blood on the white throat. She took
Ginny’s wrist in trembling fingers, searched for the pulse, but found nothing.
Just the rushing nothingness of the sea in an empty shell.

Beside her, something
moved slightly, and she heard a sound, half-sigh, half-groan.

‘Ginnyyyy …’

In an instant she was on
her knees beside him, pulling him up. ‘Joe? Are you OK?’

‘Al?’ He sat up
abruptly, and Alice thought she could
feel
the fever in his body through
his clothes. She guessed that he might be in shock.

‘Where’s Gin?’ He stood
up, still with that false briskness, and Alice wondered at how strangely
normal
his voice seemed. She supposed that she too was in shock, but for now the
sensation was almost pleasant. Even the blood, which was still trickling
sluggishly down her arm and the whole of her left side, seemed to belong to someone
else.

‘Ginny’s dead.’ Her
voice felt remote, as if she had just come out of anaesthetic.

‘What?’ He was hardly
paying attention. He patted the dead girl’s face gently. ‘Gin. Wake up. Come
on, Gin. She’s fainted. There was something in the air. Drugged incense or
something. I passed out, too. Ginny!’

‘She’s dead,’ said Alice
quietly.

‘Gin? Wake up, Gin.’

‘Joe. I said she’s dead.
You injected her with the syringe she gave you for me. She meant you to kill me
all along.’

‘No!’ He shook her, more
violently this time. ‘Ginny!’ He turned to Alice. ‘She’s not breathing. We need
an ambulance. Ginny!’ He began to try to pump air into the girl’s lifeless body
by force, almost sobbing with the effort.

‘Ginny! Wake up!’

‘It’s no good. Whatever
was in that syringe wasn’t a tranquillizer. She wanted me out of the way.’

‘No!’
He was
crying now, still pumping at the girl’s body. ‘Wait! Ginny! I love you!’

And
it
wasn’t the
blood, or the shock, or even the relief of thinking it was all over. It was
hearing him say that to Ginny, to Rosemary, even after everything that had
happened, that made her lose control. Everything strong in her collapsed, and
with that last ‘I love you ‘in her memory’s ear (so much sharper than reality),
Alice began to throw up.

Some time later she found Turner’s petrol
and guessed its use. For all its damp, the house burned fairly well.

One

THE RADIO’S ON SOMEWHERE IN THE BUILDING; I
CAN HEAR it playing weird dream-notes through the walls, some kind of modern
music, I suppose. I don’t much like the modern scene; I expect it’s because I’m
too much of a purist. I never even liked jazz. But somehow, these notes, odd,
semi-discordant resonances rarefied into almost nothing through the thickness
of the walls … they compel me, somehow, I can hear the voice of the singer,
low, almost atonal, a kind of lament; I can even hear the words:

Remember me,
for I am not gone away.

I am in the
air you breathe—

I am in every part of you.

No, I never heard that.
I must be making that up.

Remember me
when shines the sun;

I am glass—

The sun shines through me.

How strange, that my
subconscious should speak to me through rock music.

Remember me
when comes the night;

I’ll haunt your dreams.

Two

IT IS RAINING, AND THE TINY SOUNDS OF THE
RAIN AGAINST the window tick against the glass like time going by. Alice
remembers the cup of tea by her elbow and tastes it; it is cold. Moggy is
sitting on her knee, paws tucked neatly under her body. Alice forces her eyes
back into focus and re-reads the letter, crumpled by the weight of the cat.
There are cat hairs clinging to the smooth paper. The hairs are brindled, like
the cat. For a minute or two, the hairs are more clear than the writing.

A phrase catches her
eye, holds it almost magically;

‘Something inside me still
remembers
…’

‘and I’ll never
forget her!

‘Never.’

She brushes the paper,
absently, begins to read again; she knows the words almost by heart, but still
she re-reads them, as if to discover some undisclosed secret in the
close-written lines.

Dear Alice,

I
have arranged the funeral in Grantchester for the 21 May.
Nothing elaborate, but I wanted to make sure that she wasn’t just forgotten.

I’d like you to come. First, I think it would do you good, and would
get you to see things in a proper perspective. Second, I need to talk to you.
I can’t believe what you told me last time; I can’t and won’t believe it of
her. I love Ginny and she loved me. I think she was disturbed; I’m willing to
believe she was an addict, and after the result of the inquest I believe you
are right in thinking that she intended to give you a drug overdose. Perhaps
she even knew it was an overdose. At least none of that had to come out in
court; they all assumed that she’d done it herself In as much as I can feel
gratitude in any of this rotten business, I’m grateful for that; because I know
she was innocent. As for the rest, I’m convinced that what I thought I saw in
the house was an hallucination caused by drugs; it’s the only explanation I can
accept. It would be better for you if you’d accept it, too.

I don’t know what I’ll do without her; I’m writing this to you and
wondering when I’ll start feeling the pain
—
in a way, the most terrible
grief would be better than this. I’ve left the band; I found I couldn’t take
any interest in what was going on any more, and I didn’t think it was fair on
the others to drag them down just when they were beginning to get somewhere.
Maybe I’ll get going again some day; I don’t know, but every time I pick up my
guitar I just keep remembering Ginny.

I need you, Alice. You’re the only person who knew her that I can
talk to. I need to know all about her, to make her live again for me. Don’t try
to make me forget her; I can’t. Something inside me still remembers and I’ll
never forget her. Never. She can live again, in me, in my thoughts and dreams.
God, sometimes I feel her so close that I can almost touch her. Please come to
the funeral; no one else will. I’ve ordered white flowers.

Alice stops reading.

In her mind’s eye she
sees a carnival wheel, still and black against the white sky. She walks across
the deserted fairground towards it, as it looms dragon-like above her. For a
moment she glimpses the intricacies of its inner workings, red with rust and
black with oil, hears the voices of birds calling in the still pale air. Then a
sound, faint and whispery at first, then beginning to gather momentum …
the
sound of the beast’s intestines at work. A grating, creaking sound, a grinding
of metal on rust, metal on metal. A sound like the machinery that turns the
world on its axis like a roundabout, keeps the blue sky’s circle in place.
Slowly, but with the inevitability of Fate, or Faith, the wheels begin to turn.

Epilogue

I HELD OUT FOR AS LONG AS I COULD; IT TOOK
ME THIS long to realize that after all, this was where I needed to be. It’s
quiet here, tranquil; every day a new kind of serenity. I sit at the window and
comb my hair into the sunlight, like Mariana, and I wonder whether death will
come today. It comes to me in the mornings, almost gently, with the sun, and
somehow with its coming I begin to understand Daniel better than ever before.
We remember, Daniel and I: we remember and we know that it’s only a question of
waiting. A wheel turns, a clock ticks, a girl rides a roundabout through a carousel
of dreams to come full circle again under the same sky which turned for Daniel’s
little train in his spinning-top all those years ago.

I haven’t seen Joe in a
long time; now that I come to think about it, didn’t I see something in his
eyes, that last visit, something bright and desperate. Something almost like
hope?

Poor Joe. Of course he
recalled her; I remember him at the funeral (yes, I was there, trying to prove
to myself that we had won), dry-eyed and somehow unfocused, his little bunch
of lily of the valley clutched so tightly in his hands that the knuckles showed
white under the skin; and sometimes his hands shifted slightly, nervously, and
I saw the marks his fingers had left on the delicate leaves, bruising them into
transparency. No one else came; no friends, not the family she had said she
had; no one, and yet all Grantchester seemed to welcome her back, mutely, with
the ease of long understanding.