The Evil Seed

by Joanne Harris

  Alice was slightly startled. ‘Maybe it’s the hair,’ she said.

  He smiled. ‘Maybe it is,’ he said.

  Alice heaved a sigh of relief when they left, then locked the door and drew the curtains. Even then she knew she would follow them, drawn to them, just as she had been before. She waited a moment for them to leave before letting herself out through the back door, keeping to the shadows, never moving closer than a hundred yards to the two garish neon-lit figures as they half-ran down the narrow streets, casting long arcs of shadow in their wake. Alice was conscious of the scuffling of her shoes on the pavements, of the sounds of her clothes as she brushed walls and archways, but Rafe and Java were utterly silent, never exchanging a word or slackening the pace of their eerie night walk. Breathless and furtive, Alice followed.

  The town centre was empty; windows and doorways were dark blind eyes. A couple of tramps waited on benches by the side of the market square, occasionally dipping into a brown paper bag which contained a bottle of cider and watching the night with incurious eyes. This was their time, the people of the night, when the colleges had locked their gates and the pubs closed their doors and the security men patrolled the shopping precinct to evict the undesirables. That was when the old men came out of hiding, silent, hunched in their tattered overcoats and fingerless gloves.

  Alice hardly noticed them, but their eyes were on her. For a moment she stopped to catch her breath, and as she was about to set off again, she became aware of a presence at her elbow and she turned to see who it was. An old tramp, scrubbily bearded and muffled in a dirty pink scarf, a woollen hat on his greyish-white hair, and carrying the inevitable brown paper bag, had hesitantly moved to her side. Both arms were clamped around the precious bag, and he was watching her intently.

  ‘Excuse me?’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Alice. ‘I don’t have any money.’

  For a moment she thought he was going to say more. His mouth worked, and his rheumy eyes fixed hers with a wild kind of hope.

  Then he turned away again, and once more Alice resumed her pursuit of the two men as they made their way to the Grantchester road.

  Alice was not certain what she had expected: another visit to the church, perhaps, but Java and Rafe did not stay on the road for long. Instead they turned towards the river about a mile before they reached the village, leading Alice down a dark section of street bordered by derelict terraces. There were no street-lamps, and Alice soon lost the two men from view, feeling her way in the darkness along the empty houses. From time to time she caught sight of Rafe’s pale hair or a spark from one of Java’s steel-capped boots in front of her, but apart from that she was blind. Sweat plastered her hair to her face, and there was a tightness in her throat. A snatch of music began to play, inconsequentially, in her mind:

  Strange little girl, where are you going?

  Strange little girl, where are you going?

  Suddenly she heard a sound, shockingly near, and froze. She had come much closer than she had intended in the dark, and she was almost on them. A door opened, metal sparked against metal, and the flame of a cigarette lighter blossomed, bright, in the darkness. Instinctively Alice drew back; Rafe was standing at an open door, one foot on the step, and Java was holding the lighter, a cigarette between his teeth, hands cupped around the flame. A nimbus of light surrounded his head. He looked up as Alice shrank back towards the wall, and although the shadows seemed impenetrable, smiled directly at her.

  ‘Alice,’ he said. ‘Won’t you come in?’

  For an instant, her mind was a total blank. She took a step backwards, and almost fell in her haste to get away. Java’s quiet voice halted her; she imagined his inhuman gaze drawing her back like a fish on a hook.

  ‘You have come such a long way,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you would like a drink before you go? Besides, Virginia is here.’

  At Ginny’s name Alice turned feeling suddenly foolish. Surely no harm could come to her no more than a mile from the town. Besides, if Ginny was here … She shifted her gaze to the door, where Rafe was still standing, a tiny smile touching his lips. If she backed out now, she thought, she might as well give up trying to find out anything else about Ginny or what had happened in Grantchester. She had dared to come this far – surely she could stay a while.

  ‘Do come in,’ said Java. For a second time Alice was conscious of an undeniable attraction to him, an almost unbearable awareness of the beauty of the man, of the flawlessness of his angular features, an admiration of the grace with which he stood, that poetry of movement indicating that here was a creature entirely self-possessed, content to be himself and prey to none of the anxieties and insecurities of normal people. He radiated a glamour which was almost irresistible. Alice found herself smiling in response, and before she even knew it she was through the door and in the house.

  By the cigarette lighter’s hesitant flame Alice found that she had entered a lobby, where a number of stained and yellowed cards still bore the names of former residents. Beyond that a narrow staircase led to the upper floor. Rafe led the way with the light, and Java followed behind in silence. They passed several doors until they reached the right one; Rafe opened it and went in. Alice looked round. A spirit lamp lit the room casting monstrous shadows against the walls. The room itself was filthy, with wooden boxes covered in blankets to serve as seats, and the remains of several meals littering the floor. A table stood in the centre, with newspapers to cover it, and a dozen or so empty bottles winking green and white in the lamplight. There was a smell of mould and dust, and a sweet under-smell, like incense. Ginny was sitting on an old sofa in the corner of the room, legs crossed, face turned up towards Alice with a peculiar insolence.

  ‘So it’s you,’ she said without interest. ‘Is Joe here?’

  Alice shook her head. ‘He was looking for you. He was worried.’

  Ginny shrugged. ‘So you came to find me. How nice. Now what do you want?’

  ‘To learn, of course. To know what we do in here.’ Java laughed lightly, touching the nape of Alice’s neck with thrilling, icy fingers. Rafe came a step closer, a cross-shaped earring dangling hypnotically … the sense of unreality was so overwhelming that Alice even forgot to feel afraid.

  ‘I …’ She realized that she had no idea what to say; feeling eerily light-headed, she gave a low laugh. A hand came up, with dreamlike slowness, to wipe her damp forehead; for a moment the arc of its motion seemed to fill the world. Java’s arm crept round her waist, cold and intimate, and she caught another breath of the sweet circus smell which clung to him. She must be very tired, she thought for a second, she was sure her eyes had closed of their own accord. Her head tilted back like a sleepy child’s, her eyes beginning to close again …

  A voice jerked her back to reality.

  ‘Not here!’ said Ginny sharply. ‘Don’t you two have any sense?’

  Alice started, aware for the first time that she had been half asleep in Java’s arms, her face almost touching his.

  ‘Soft,’ he whispered against her hair, not releasing his grip.

  Ginny sprang up from her reclining position on the couch.

  ‘I said not here.’

  Alice felt Java stiffen against her, but his voice was still coaxing, seductive.

  ‘Wait for me.’ He released Alice; still disorientated, she allowed herself to be propelled towards the little door at her back. Before she knew it she had been pushed through, the door shut after her. Voices drifted towards her through the wood.

  Whatever glamour had possessed her in the other room left her abruptly as soon as she was alone. A fear which was not only a fear of the dark came crashing down upon her. She tried the door, but it had been locked. She considered shouting to the others, but shivered at the very thought. Claustrophobia overwhelmed her momentarily and she flailed out at the encroaching dark; then, forcing herself to be calm, she began to feel along the walls to gauge the size and shape of the room.

  It was barely larger tha
n a cupboard; maybe six by eight feet, that was all, and she guessed from the tiles along one side that it had once been a bathroom. All fittings were now gone, however, and the only furniture was a stool by the door. In the half-minute in which she had been in the room her eyes had had time to accustom themselves partially to the darkness, and she could just distinguish a thin silver scratch of light around the door-frame, etching a narrow line of brightness on to the tiles. And beside that she imagined she could see a patch of shadow which was darker than the rest – something like a hole in the wall.

  In a second she was on her hands and knees, exploring the hole; the bath had been ripped out of the wall, which itself was only plasterboard, and the wall was broken right the way to the other side. If only she could get her head and shoulders through … she thought she might. If the hole was only a little bit wider … On impulse she picked up the stool and jabbed at the rotten plaster. Something gave with a crumbling sound, and the air was suddenly filled with mouldering dust. She jabbed again. A voice from the other side of the door:

  ‘Alice?’

  Another voice, unintelligible but commanding. Alice needed only that. Head first she dived for the hole and pushed her way through the damp plasterboard, eyes watering, face caked with dust. She grabbed a piece of loose wood and used it to clear away the debris before her as she emerged into blackness. She took two reckless steps and half-fell down the stairs; grabbing hold of the banister, she used it to guide her as she limped, at an agonizingly slow pace, down the stairs and into the street. Once she heard voices quite close behind her, bolted in panic, and almost fell, but somehow she reached the ground floor in spite of her panic, and within a minute was racing down the Grantchester road, mouth dry, her heart a drum, her shadow a demon at her tail. She did not slacken her pace, her feet skimming the pavements as she fled back to her safe, warm house, slamming the door behind her. Only then did she allow herself the luxury of exhaustion; and later, as she sat in front of the fire trying to analyse what had happened she felt that slow, certain terror come upon her again, not the primitive terror she had felt in the dark of the derelict house, or the superstitious fear of the beautiful strangers who were Ginny’s friends, but something far older and heavier. Her cheeks burned as if with the imprint of Java’s touch, and as she looked at herself in the bathroom mirror she noticed that she was flushed and feverish-looking, with a strangeness in her eyes. She splashed cold water on her burning cheeks, then undressed and showered quickly, scrubbing her body with a kind of fervent anger which temporarily blocked the fear. But even as she scrubbed and splashed she remained conscious of that persistent feeling, a strange, unfocused desire … But for what? She did not know.

  One

  DREAMS AGAIN; MORE dreams. She walks them like a general walking a battlefield of her own making, the screams of the dying a hymn to her glory and her pride. Sometimes I try to write, sometimes I just drink gin and sit in the light. My books tell me many things, but never how to combat her, how to destroy her and her satellites. I am alone, as I was from the beginning. My walls are lined with books and pictures; her face stares out from every one, her names are written everywhere. I know her now; know her now for what she is.

  Her face looks out from Grimm’s fairy tales, from Dante, from Shakespeare and the Apocrypha, from all countries and times when she has walked and fed, been feared and loved. I pray for deliverance, but hear only the howling of the pit below me, my words dead Latin in my withered mouth, the crucifix turning to blood on my lips. God is not home today. He walks with Rosemary.

  *

  It was a long time before I saw her again, after I came across them that time in the rain. Robert avoided me, as I avoided him, ashamed maybe of his betrayal, but more likely too much ensnared by Rosemary to care about old friends. I plunged back into The Blessed Damozel, little knowing the truth of what I wrote, and time passed. Summer came and went in a blink, wet and cheerless, and I huddled in my cold room, cut-off gloves on my numb hands, and tried to lose myself in my work. I visited galleries, libraries, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford where so many of Rossetti’s lovely pencil drawings are exhibited, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge where his Girl at a Lattice and his Mary Magdalene and Millais’ Bridesmaid all lie hidden in basement archives. Rosemary’s face blurred into wistful regret, fused with the beauty of those other women, and though I did not forget her (who would?), there were times when I wondered whether she had not been a dream; and I made up for my longing with hours of unceasing work.

  I wrote hundreds of pages on technique, learning how the Pre-Raphaelites created their luminous effects by painting only with pure colours on a wet white background, or how Rossetti used red and green lead for flesh tones, knowing that he used impermanent colours which would fade and be lost with time, but not caring, as if the creation of beauty alone interested him. Perhaps he too was afraid of immortality. I studied their models – those strange tragic enchantresses: Lizzie Siddall and Jane Morris and Maria Zambaco – until I knew every aspect of their faces and histories. They were artists in their own right, most of them, fascinating and untouchable, serene and troubling. They peopled my fantasies, walking my dreams with Rosemary. I explored their influences, the poets they loved, Mallory and Tennyson and Keats. I re-read Grimm’s fairy tales, Greek and Roman mythology, explored the dark side of the fantasy world from which they came, discovered the works of Jung, adapting all that I read to my newly emerging theories. I lost touch with most of my friends, cancelled many of my classes, made myself a virtual recluse in my lodging, saw the first version of The Blessed Damozel almost finished with midwinter … worked on. I earned extra money by writing articles for the university art publications, things more of fiction than fact; lurid, self-indulgent works which now had little to do with technique and everything to do with a kind of Gothic craving for the sensations which my austere and scholarly life denied me. I interspersed my descriptions and essays with fairy stories which grew ever blacker and stranger as the year bled into the next, and I kept writing, throughout those months which led up to her death in August and Robert’s in the winter of 1948. I existed in limbo until the spring, and although time had for the most part ceased to have any great meaning for me, it must have been a year after I first pulled Rosemary from the river that I found myself there again, early in the morning, on my way to my favourite gallery, my overcoat tightly drawn across my shoulders, my nose red and watery with the cold I had dragged with me almost constantly since the winter, eyes streaming behind lenses which seemed to have become even thicker and heavier as time passed. A stray thought escaped my memory, insubstantial as the steam which puffed from my nostrils; a girl in white, pale face, dark eyes, dark open mouth … and for a moment, I almost thought I saw her, just a little further down the river, saw the curve of a bare arm, took a clump of weed to be the tangle of her hair … I blinked and wiped the lenses of my glasses with a clumsy one-handed movement.

  There was something there, caught in the rubbish at the head of the weir; a bundle of rags, perhaps, or a floating log … The similarity to that day in April threw the hallucination into sharp, surreal perspective, and I actually saw the limp body with eyesight far too sharp to be my own, saw a drifting arm, the line of a neck lolling gently into the dark water …

  It was too much; I had to see.

  I jumped down on to the river-bank (there were punts moored there, but no one had used them since July), lowered myself gingerly on to the muddy tow-path, hobbled down to the water. The weir was bloated to overwhelming size, and the stink from it was palpable; it was the smell of slime and mud, salt and decay, and all the rubbish of summer dragged beneath the water by the undertow to dark and muddy oblivion. And as I squinted at the pale bundle caught in the rushing greenish flow, I saw her; no mistaking the shape of the arm, the movement of the hair, the clothes …

  ‘Rosemary?’ I whispered.

  But it was not Rosemary. The woman I had found by Magdalene Bridge was old; the hair was greying, wispy,
the arm which had caught my attention by its whiteness was short and sturdy, even in death, the trunk stiff and twice as thick as Rosemary’s slender figure. That the woman was dead could not be doubted; the exposed flesh was like lime, greenish-white and bloodless, the clothes half torn from the body, allowing a glimpse of a leg and some dirty underwear. I felt a sudden ache of pity for the poor woman, pitilessly exposed by death in all the harsh light of an April morning; pity, not horror. In a way, I was glad I found her; that one stab of pity I felt for her then was the only caring thought given to her in her strange and loveless passing. Later, with the police, came the horror and the disgust, but then I could almost have imagined her as Ophelia, trapped by the weeds in her muddy dignity, face still and pale, turned downwards to fathom the depths of the secret Cam. And there my imaginings ceased abruptly. For a sudden, perverse twitch of the living water loosened the weeds which held her, and the body rolled bonelessly over like a tired old whore, and I saw her.

  Only for an instant; the moment after, I was on my knees in the long wet grass, coughing and retching, slime drooling from my mouth, my glasses slipping from a face which was suddenly, despite the chill, slick with sweat. I told you I was no hero; I vomited until my throat was tight, and all the while my skin was hot and my hands were shaking with terror … not that she would rise after me and touch me, poor woman (though the time would come when I was ready to believe in such things), but that the thing which had fed upon her might.

  I never saw her face.

  That, at least, will never be there to haunt my dreams; for that I am grateful. But as for the rest of her pitiful violated body … the thought of it, so long ago, blots out the horror of a war in the space of a memory. There was no blood. Only ropes of intestine and bone and a dreadful black-lined hole which had been her chest cavity, and was mostly empty. Oh yes, something had fed.