The Evil Seed (18 page)

But before the other man
could say anything to answer or to refute my question, the half-open door swung
open, and in she came, the Blessed Damozel, her glorious hair loose over her
shoulders, slim as a switch in a long dress of black muslin which swirled
around her ankles like smoke. She ignored me totally, and turned to the dark
man.

‘Java, who let him in? I
told you admit no one, especially not Daniel. Why did you let him come?’

The man said something
unidentifiable. Rosemary shook her damp curls impatiently.

‘Can’t you think of
anything else?’

Then she turned towards
me again.

‘Poor Daniel,’ she said,
and, believe me, her smile was everything a man could dream of, loving and
tender and sweet as an angel’s.

‘Poor, stupid Daniel.’

And before I could say
another word, she had opened the bathroom door behind me and pushed me in. I
was taken off-balance; my glasses slipped, I reached to steady myself, shouted
uselessly as I saw her slam the door in my face, fumbled for the door-handle,
found the door jammed from the outside, slipped again, dropped my glasses on
the floor (I heard them rattle against the tiles), fumbled for the light
switch, and with one thing and another adding to my own panic and confusion, it
was a full two minutes before I found the light and realized exactly what it
was that was in the room with me.

It was in the bath. It
was naked, what was left of it, and the white enamel was smeared darkly with
its drying blood, fingerprints and handprints and long formless stains where it
had been pulled to and fro in the bathtub, as if by the greedy hands of
children. It was entirely dismembered; the limbs separated from the trunk like
the hams of a slaughtered pig, repulsive in its whiteness, its bloodiness, its
headless anonymity
…
for the corpse was headless, the severed neck
black and white with blood and bone. And the ewer beside the sink was filled to
the brim with a dark sticky liquid
…
And I realized the source of the
blood I had seen around the mouth of the boy called Rafe, and I understood
which grisly wine he had drunk. An awful panic bloomed in me. I tried to
scream, tried
to
think, fell, spinning, turning, away from the light,
into nothing.

PART THREE

Death and the Maiden

One

MAYBE I DREAMED IT ALL: ON THE DARK DAYS
WHEN I NO longer know man from beast I sometimes wonder whether I dreamed it
all. I seek my answers at the bottom of my glass, but too many are the days
when I look there for comfort and see nothing but the beast grinning at me from
under the surface with death in his eyes. I cannot complain overmuch; they are
good
to
me here, at least, as good as I can expect from these people who
cannot see the demon in their midst.

Kind nurses in clean
white uniforms come and go; some spare a moment of their time for the poor old
drunkard in room 9, and last Tuesday one of them — no more than a child, on her
way to a meeting with her young man, no doubt — brought me a gardenia from her
hair and put it in a glass at the side of my bed. You can’t imagine how
precious that gardenia was to me, how soft and fresh and scented, like a breath
of sanity in the dark circle of my world. For a whole evening I was filled with
a new hope, a certainty that I was not alone, that if I managed to wait
out
the
dawn, with the new light I might at last glimpse God. But when the night came,
and the shadows crawled from out of the corners of my room to squat around my
bed like hungry demons, I broke and reached for my bottle again to find sleep
in its bitter quenching, and, as I slept, I dreamed again.

I awoke from a drugged, animal sleep with
the reek of the circus in my nostrils, and I felt as if I had been buried
alive.

For a moment, I could
remember nothing, then as the memory of what I had seen returned, I gave a cry
and scrabbled to my knees in the dark. I was blind; I could feel stones and
earth beneath my hands, could feel beads of graveyard sweat on my face, could
smell dirt and blood and cheap whisky. I had no idea where I was.

I waited for an instant
for the world to stabilize, then I began to crawl. I was not in a side-street,
that was for certain; my rapidly clearing vision could by now discern a dim
pattern of light and shade on the uneven ground, and what I took to be the
light of a street-lamp was shining through a crack in the darkness somewhere to
my right. It looked as if I was in some kind of building. A shack, I thought as
I crawled, or a derelict farmhouse; maybe an animal shelter. I had probably
staggered there in my drunken stupor to shelter from the cold, and had
collapsed there out of sight. I must have been very drunk; only that could
explain the dreadful clarity of my nightmares, the horrors which had arisen
from the pit of my subconscious to plague my rational mind. I touched the wall
at my left, hoping to pull myself to my feet, but the stone was sweaty and
loathsome to touch, and I shrank away as if from dead flesh. The light was
nearer now, and by its glow I could see the outline of a doorway, a pile of
stones or rubble on one side, a slick, moist wall at the entrance. Beyond the
doorway I could just see a gate of some kind …
spiked metal railings
with an ornamental cast-iron design …
and with a sick jolt which
brought the remnant of the sour whisky I had ingested churning up the narrow
channel of my throat in a bilious flood, I realized where this place was,
realized, as I then thought, the source of my nightmares.

It was a crypt.

As soon as this
realization came to me, I was able to see a dozen hitherto unnoticed details:
the light of the church window outside, the rows of plaques in the damp wall
where the coffins had been slotted like drawers, the remains of a wreath
hanging on the railings like a trophy. Maybe I gave a little moan. It was not
so much the fact of finding myself here which frightened me, than the fear of
insanity, why had I come to this place? Why had my subconscious formulated such
fantasies about Rosemary and her friends? Was I still so shocked by my
discovery of the body in the river that I must needs subject myself to still
more of the same? I stumbled towards the entrance of the crypt, quite sober
now, though my stomach roiled, fell over a stone, half-fell to one knee, put
out my hands to steady myself, slipped
…

My hands met something
soft and wet, cold as mud, but as I looked down I saw that it was not mud. No
mud could have that rainbow gleam, that horrible, yielding softness … And as
I looked down, still, unable to scream or to look away or even to move,
entombed for ever in the hellish timelessness of that moment, I understood that
if this was reality, then I had not dreamed, had not been drunk, had not been
at the mercy of my own subconsciousness, but of something deadlier by far.
Maybe I had known already; maybe I had fled the truth.

But now, with the truth
twelve inches from my face, I could hardly deny it. For it was the body I had
seen in Rosemary’s bathroom, dismembered, bloody, headless, and I was kneeling
above it, embracing it with both hands, my arms buried up to the elbows in the
meat of its shattered ribcage, like a washerwoman over her tub.

Two

CURIOSITY, AND SOMETHING MORE, HAD IMPELLED
HER to go back into Ginny’s room. It was nearly three in the morning; the girl
had not yet returned, and Alice, in spite of her fatigue, could not bear the
thought of sleep. What was wrong with her? she thought. She pushed open the
bedroom door, flipped the light on, looked inside. The bed was still untouched,
the room as neat and impersonal as if it had never been inhabited. Alice went
straight to the wardrobe and opened it, throwing Ginny’s clothes on to the bed
with a kind of fury. Damn you, she thought wildly. There was a secret there,
she knew it, and she also knew she had to find it, find it or choke on her
terrified, suppressed rage. Discarded clothes flew around her as she searched;
a couple of syringes, and some ampoules were scrutinized for a moment, then
tossed aside. Nothing. Alice almost wept in frustration. She was
sure
there
was something to be found, certain with the irrational, compulsive knowledge of
dreams. As she began to replace the clothes where she had found them, folding
jumpers and hanging up dresses, her eye caught the squarish outline of Ginny’s
suitcase half-hidden under the bed. She pounced on it, pulling it out and snapping
it open with a cry of triumph. Inside the case, roughly wrapped in old newspapers,
was a box.

It was about the size of
a church Bible, and it was of some kind of hard wood, bound with metal. There
was a handle with which to carry-it, and though the wood was scratched from
being dragged out of the hole in which it had been placed, it was still easy to
read the inscription on the lid:

KEEP ME SAFE

It took Alice a few
moments to remember where she had seen that inscription, but when it came the
realization was like a redoubling of her terror. The trap closed upon her.

The lock was secure; it
was the wood which finally gave way, the metal coming away from the box like
cardboard as she prised it open. For a moment, Alice paused.

What was a box, if not
an opening into the unknown, a doorway into a world of secrets? Alice was quite
sure that she had had enough secrets for the moment, enough of doors. What she
really wanted was to be able to forget all the events of the past few days, to
lie comfortably in bed and go to sleep, with all the secrets back where they
belonged.

But it was too late; she
had already taken the box into the workroom where she could not be disturbed.
She had broken the lock; even if she did not look inside, Ginny would know
Alice had spied on her. She had declared war; she knew it. She could not go
back.

She flipped back the
lid, looked for the first time into the box, and fell headfirst into
Looking-Glass Land.

Her first reaction was
amazement; her first incoherent thought:
My God! It’s a Rossetti!
Trembling,
she reached into the box, drew out a manuscript — and pictures. Delight flooded
her, as she spread the pictures out over the floor of her workroom, eyes
flitting from one to the others as if she were unsure which one to study first.

They were beautiful, but
they were not Rossettis.

There were maybe twenty
of them, watercolours, pen-and-inks, chalk studies, all under twenty by fifteen
inches square, edges ragged as if they had been carelessly trimmed with a
paper-knife, the thick, creamy paper yellowed with age. They were old, old and
lovely, all studies of women, no, of one woman. Head-and-shoulders portraits,
full-length portraits in different poses, nudes, elegantly draped over a couch,
lush in glowing blue velvet, delicately pencilled, leaning against a wall
holding a musical instrument, studies of eyes, lips, hair
…
eyes
closed, toying with a strand of hair, head thrown back, head angled forwards
…
It was some time before Alice was even able to look at them properly, even longer
before her mind began to work normally again. Her next rational thought was:

‘The old devil. He had
no right to immure these in Grantchester chapel. They must be worth a fortune.’
She picked up a picture at random; a delicate pastel in shades of brown and
red. Her first reaction had not been so stupid; it did look like a Rossetti,
although looking at it more closely, she could see that it lacked the
overemphasized lips of a Rossetti. It showed the head and shoulders of a young
woman, head bent at a strange and slightly menacing angle, as if looking back
at someone. The hair was luxuriant, painstakingly textured in differing shades
of red, and pushed to one side so as to expose a rounded and perfect expanse of
bare shoulder. It was dated 1869, and monogrammed in precise, interwoven
letters: W.H.C.

The monogram meant
nothing to Alice, though the style and the date did; she flipped the drawing
over, but apart from a rough sketch on the other side of the picture, could see
no more clues there. She reached for another drawing, a pencil, touched with
brown ink around the eyes and lips. Again, the monogram. Again, a date, this
time 1868. The pictures were a puzzle to Alice. First, they looked genuine:
they were clearly finished works of the first order, Pre-Raphaelite in origin,
though not signed with the initials of any Victorian painter she knew of. There
was some Rossetti there, some Burne-Jones, some Waterhouse, and yet the
pictures were none of these; there was a strength in the lines of those
compositions, a power in the features beside which Rossetti’s pale and wilting
damsels and Burne-Jones’s angelic but weak-featured ladies of legend seemed
slightly ridiculous. These pictures were something different. From sheet after
sheet of the thick yellow paper, her eyes stared out at Alice, taunting, aloof,
enticing, and faintly familiar, in the way that all really classic works of art
can appear …

Familiar.

Alice was jolted out of
her reverie by a thought which was as ludicrous as it was terrifying; of
course
that face was familiar! She had drawn it herself, that same face, the wide
eyes, the lips which were a curving mockery of their own sensuality … She
reached for her file of artwork, fumbled for the string which closed
it
…
tugged. Papers spilled out, faces which were all the same face, hallucinatingly
similar, images laid upon images like reflections along a hall of mirrors, a
hall which reflected not only images, but time. She looked at the pictures for
a long while, her gaze moving from her own portraits to the ones marked WH.C.,
and back, searching vainly for logic. And though there was no logic to be found
there, the facts still stared out at her from the pages which a dead man had
thought important enough to hide for ever in a church wall, and her growing
certainty was a little like hysteria, a little like insanity.