The Evil Seed

by Joanne Harris

  Robert was almost possessive with me; he talked incessantly while Rosemary said virtually nothing and I mouthed platitudes. I had never felt as remote from him as I did then; he was a minor character in the chequered background of my existence, bled dry of individuality. His facility for talk, which I had once admired, was revealed to me to be the light, pretentious banter of the dilettante; I saw no real intelligence behind his charm, felt ashamed that once I had almost worshipped this man with the unquestioning awe of a high school freshman. What I felt then was the first step in Rosemary’s domination of me; I began for the first time to envy my friend.

  I watched the pair of them go with mixed feelings; but uppermost in my mind was the fact that they were to be married in August, and that if I was to act, I had better act quickly. You see, I had wrestled with my conscience for long enough; I was infatuated, and maybe I fancied that Rosemary was not as happy as she might have been with Robert. Clutching at straws, I imagined her forced into an unwelcome marriage with a man I had seen to be disturbed and unstable; I fancied her falling ill with worry, pining, maybe, for the man who had saved her from the river, and who now seemed too busy to pay any attention to her. I behaved, in fact, like the moonstruck young fool I was. The truth was too simple to be obvious to me: it had been a novelty for me to play the part of the hero; it was a feeling I wanted to experience again.

  And so one night, maybe two weeks later – it must have been near the end of May – I went back there, to the place where she lived, and since then I have lived in hell, reality passing me by in a bright, remote flow, myself a shadow among shadows. I see monsters everywhere and know that they are real, for she has made a monster of me too, in allowing me to know what should have remained unknown, and she mocks me, as well she might, knowing that for all my knowledge I am helpless. No one will believe me, no one will touch me. She remains inviolate.

  I sought her out of my own accord, at dark of night and after having imbibed more courage than was good for me, hoping, perhaps, to find her alone. I had built her up so high in my fancy that I believed that on a single word from me she would abandon Robert and come to me unquestioning. I believed it so desperately that as I came to her door, my face slick with sweat, my glasses slipping down my nose, and my heart fluttering like a bird’s with something other than the steep climb up the stairs, her absence hit me like a blow. The door was locked, all the lights out. I hammered on the door; no answer.

  My disappointment was too much for me to bear; I sank down on the dark landing beside her door. I could not have moved if I had tried, and I knew that if I left the place, I would never have the courage to come there again. Some part of me must have known that it was all folly, that I had betrayed my friend and made myself ridiculous, but I refused to admit it then, and I waited, curled up against the door-jamb, eyes closed. As I waited, despite the discomfort of my position, I must have gone to sleep.

  It was dark, as I said, and I waited for a long time between sleep and wakefulness. Once I was aware, in the haze of my drowsiness, of someone passing me by, stealthily; once I heard clear voices from another world come to me from the stairwell. I do not know how long I waited. The dark pressed upon me, I smelt dust and floor polish and turpentine, and maybe I dreamed. I hoped I dreamed.

  In my dream I awoke to darkness; even the lamp at the bottom of the stairwell had been put out, and the night was cold. I shifted on the wooden floor, pulled my coat further around my shoulders and tried to think. Maybe I already regretted having come in search of Rosemary; maybe I was afraid of whatever it was which had brought me to her door; in either case, the white heat of my ardour had cooled, and at last I considered going home.

  Shaking the stiffness from my cramped limbs, I stood up, feeling foolish. I had failed in everything: as a friend, as a scholar, as a lover. Since I had pulled Rosemary from the river, everything I had ever cared about had fallen apart; and what had I done? I had fallen apart too, slowly, like an old scarecrow, and crawled here to die in front of her door, in front of her ridicule. What on earth had I hoped to achieve? Spleen filled me. Suddenly my anger changed direction, and Rosemary was its target, Rosemary with her lovely face and her strange ways, Rosemary who had been gone all night, Rosemary who was going to marry another man, Rosemary who had brought me here, somehow, and, in a blaze of irrational anger, I turned towards the door and threw myself at it with all my strength. Well, I was not a strong man; I was short of sight and short of breath, so I can only surmise that the reason the door opened then was that it had been unlocked while I slept. Whatever the reason, it burst open and I catapulted into the room, coming to land against an armchair at the far side of the chamber. My glasses fell off as I stumbled, and it took me half a minute or so to find them again in the unfamiliar place, so that it was some time before I was in a fit state to look around.

  The small room was dimly lit by a lamp draped with a green silk scarf, and there were a number of items of furniture neatly positioned around it: two chairs with embroidered cushions, a dressing-table, on which rested bottles and boxes and toiletries, a bed, pictures on the walls, a fur rug on the floor. There was a strange smell in the air, too sweet, like incense, which made my head spin. I remember this now, but, at the time, very little registered in my mind but the two men sitting by the door, one on a chair, the other slumped on the floor, both looking at me with an amused, but savage intensity.

  My first reaction was horror; I had come to the wrong room. I backed away in desperate embarrassment.

  ‘Excuse me – wrong room, sorry …’ but before I reached the door, which was still standing open behind me, another thought struck me, so forcibly that I stopped again and stared at the strange tableau upon which I had just entered.

  Firstly, the young man on the floor was ill. Not just ill, but frighteningly so, his face livid even for that greenish light, his eyes and mouth gaping holes in his face. What was more, he looked hurt; a thin dark trickle of blood embroidered the side of his mouth, disappearing down the side of his throat and into the collar of his shirt. As I stared at him, I realized that he was just a boy, still in his teens, his ragged hair as fair as flax; and from the exhausted way in which he was lying on the ground, he looked to me to be close to unconsciousness. The other man was older, maybe between forty and fifty; black hair allowed to grow long, a dark, heavy coat, features which were at the same time sharp and disturbingly feminine. He too was pale, almost sick-looking, with the consumptive look of one who has exhausted himself with debauchery; and although I judged him to be considerably older than myself, he exhaled something much younger than I had ever been, some primal radiance which transfigured him. As I watched, he covered the boy over, protectively, with his arm, and watched me without a word.

  Maybe it was this gesture which led me to believe that he had hit the boy; maybe I took it for defensiveness – you must remember that I was still as close to being drunk as I ever got, and in those days it took considerably less alcohol to do that than it does today – but I took a step forwards.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Friends,’ said the dark man softly.

  ‘Whose friends?’ I demanded, my voice a little too shrill.

  ‘Well, Rosemary’s, of course,’ he replied. He paused for a moment. ‘And you, of course, are Daniel Holmes.’

  I was rather taken-aback at that.

  ‘How do you know me?’

  ‘We know all Rosemary’s friends,’ said the dark man with a slow smile. ‘Don’t we, Rafe?’ And he smiled down at the flax-haired boy, reaching down to brush his face with one long white finger. The boy did not answer, but turned slightly towards me, and I caught a glimpse of long lashes shadowing a high cheekbone; he too looked oddly androgynous, and in that position he reminded me suddenly, sharply of Rosemary. I wondered for a moment if he could be her brother. I took another step towards them.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. ‘And where’s Rosemary?’

  ‘R
osemary? She’ll be here soon. We’re here to see her.’ He gave a short laugh, as if what he had said amused him.

  It may be difficult for you, in your different time and with your different morals, to understand fully the sense of outrage I felt then, hearing his casual words. Sometimes I find it difficult myself to remember what it was like to be young and principled.

  ‘Rosemary is going to be married in August,’ I said coldly. ‘I don’t think that she should be entertaining friends in her rooms at this time of night. Does she know you’re here?’ The dark man shrugged as if it was not important. I glanced again at the figure collapsed on the floor.

  ‘Is that boy sick? Is he hurt?’

  ‘No.’

  His insolent tone nettled me.

  ‘He looks sick,’ I said, ‘and he’s bleeding. If you don’t tell me what’s going on now, I’ll report you to the police. That boy should be at home in bed. And you, you shouldn’t be here in Rosemary’s room without her knowledge!’

  His tone was flat, almost bored. ‘Rafe’s all right. He’s been drinking, and he’s not used to the stuff yet.’ Idly, with a long, pale index finger, he wiped the trickle of blood from Rafe’s cheek, then, without taking his green eyes from mine, licked the blood from his hand. The gesture was somehow more explicit than any pornography, and I felt myself flushing angrily.

  ‘A boy that age shouldn’t be drinking at all!’ I cried, partly to hide my sense of unease, and I stepped closer to the boy he called Rafe.

  ‘Look. Wake up. Where do you live? I can take you home, if you like. Are you all right?’ I cast a smouldering glance in the direction of the dark man, only to see that he was smiling again.

  Rafe said nothing, but gave a faint moan, and turned his head away petulantly, like a sick child.

  ‘Where do you live?’ I took hold of his shoulder; it felt very cold beneath his thin shirt. Another thought struck me.

  ‘What were you taking?’ I questioned urgently. ‘What was it? What were you drinking?’

  It seemed to me that the boy’s breathing was shallow; that his face was too pale, his skin too cold.

  ‘For God’s sake, what was it?’ I almost screamed. ‘Can’t you see he’s dying?’

  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 stu
mbled 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.