The Evil Seed

by Joanne Harris

  ‘You killed Elaine,’ I told him as we walked towards the Wolsley. ‘That was her name. Elaine.’

  ‘Who was she, Holmes? Your lady friend?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where does she fit into all this, then?’

  ‘She was a victim,’ I said. ‘Like me.’

  Suddenly, I realized how tired I was. Like a dreamer awakening from a nightmare, I felt drained of everything. Perhaps it was the fact that Rosemary was beyond my grasp, possibly for ever, perhaps it was remembering Elaine’s face as she died.

  At that instant I gave it all up, the glamour, the promise of eternity, the power and the beauty. It hurt to give it up, but the giving was a deliverance.

  ‘I’ll tell you everything,’ I said.

  Two

  HE HAD LEFT Ginny asleep on the sofa, and as he opened the door quietly to let himself out, he glanced back and saw her curled up, her face tucked into the crook of her arm. A sensation of utter protectiveness overwhelmed him. Joe, who was normally as jumpy and ill at ease as an adolescent, whose life was a constant roller-coaster of highs and lows, had experienced only a very few moments of true stability. Asked to define his life, the word ‘comfortable’ wouldn’t even have had a mention. And yet now it seemed to him that all his insecurities had been bled away, that some miraculous transfusion had taken place so that suddenly he felt in control, all tension drained from his body. He went down into the street, the new sense of well-being inside him. He was smiling.

  Two girls in jeans and T-shirts looked at him strangely, almost drawing away, despite the hour and the bright sunlight … one of them, trying later to explain why the memory of the man remained with her even though Cambridge was full of strange people, could only vaguely remember why.

  ‘His eyes were creepy,’ she said at ten o’clock in the Union Bar that evening, voice charmingly slurred after five gin and tonics. In a novel, she might have been able to say: ‘His eyes were like a doorway into another world.’ But in real life she simply got drunk, went to bed with a young man from another college who she didn’t even like, and woke up the next day with a depressive hangover and a vague sense of something lost.

  Joe went on his way without even noticing her, riding the carousel of his thoughts. Absently he rubbed his knuckles, noticing as he looked down that the back of his left hand was dark with bruising.

  It was Alice’s fault. Experimentally he flexed the hand. Damn, it hurt. He wondered whether he had broken any bones. It was his left hand, the one he needed most when he was playing. If Alice had made him bust his left hand … Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen her show much sympathy. In fact, he wasn’t at all sure she hadn’t been glad. Well, he’d get that straight when he saw her, too. He’d promised Ginny he’d square things with Alice, and he would. She’d done enough damage as it was. He might as well square it with her now. Still smiling, he quickened his step.

  *

  Alice picked up the knife, testing its weight. It was a long carving-knife from her kitchen, wooden-handled and singing with sharpness. It made Alice feel almost faint to even think of using it on a person, but by now the worst of the sickness and the shaking had dissipated, to be replaced by a sense of unreality, as if true logic had been replaced by the strange surrealist logic of dreams. Just follow, thought Alice to herself. The knife knew where it was going far better than she did. Like the point of a compass it showed the way, implacably, back to the house in Grantchester.

  Alice swallowed with difficulty, wondering if she dared eat anything, but even at the thought she felt herself gag in nausea, and turned towards the door. There could be no more delaying it, she knew. She had to be in Grantchester before night, when the nightwalkers came.

  She had taken two steps towards the door, was taking a third, when someone knocked.

  Alice froze.

  ‘Dammit, she’s out.’ Joe kicked angrily at the door, twice, but only managed to hurt his foot. He looked at his watch; almost six. Ginny would be waiting for him at home, counting on him; he didn’t want her to be alone in the house when night fell. She was so afraid of the dark.

  But it rankled, it really did, to let Alice win, to go home to Ginny without having done what he promised. Maybe if he … He looked round, saw no one in the street except an old man with a dog. He turned, walked fifty yards or so down the street, then turned into the alley which led round the back of the houses. He was certain she was in there.

  Alice’s garden was quite large, long and overgrown with weeds and trees allowed to run wild. It was easy enough to cut across the neighbour’s garden into hers, easier still to make his way through the tangle of bushes and flowers until he reached her back porch. Joe looked over his shoulder again, and idly tried the back door. It was locked, but he had expected that. He looked at the lock, decided that it was too strong to force. But there was a window. Forcing himself to be calm, he picked up a stone from the path. He lifted it to shoulder height, then tapped it – a tap was all it needed – against the corner of the glass. The window cracked. Gently, so as not to cut himself, he pushed the glass, pressed it until a corner of it loosened. Then he worked at the loose part until it came out of the frame altogether. He laid the piece of glass on the path beside him, began to work on another piece. It came easily this time, and bit by bit he soon managed to free the whole of the pane. One pane was all he needed; it was enough for him to be able to push his arm through the door and unlatch it.

  He looked inside. ‘Alice?’ he called softly. ‘Alice?’

  One

  IN 1948 THE police station in Cambridge was much smaller than it is today; there was one officer on duty that night, and he blinked stupidly as he saw the Inspector and I come in. I suppose that he had heard all about the excitement earlier that night; there was a morgue too, annexed to that little station, and maybe he had seen them bring in Elaine from the ambulance. I imagined her lying, somewhere behind one of those doors, her hair spread out like a mermaid’s on the white enamel. With my new, all-encompassing affection for humans and their world, I smiled at the duty officer.

  ‘Don’t be worried,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’

  ‘Be quiet,’ snapped Turner. Then, addressing the other man: ‘Have you contacted the Yard yet?’

  The officer nodded. ‘Yes, sir. Someone’ll be here in about an hour.’

  ‘Good,’ said Turner. ‘Hold the fort for a while. I’m going to take a statement from the suspect.’

  For a lazy instant, I wondered what he meant, then I realized that the suspect was me. The thought made me laugh again. It felt good.

  ‘This way, please,’ said Turner, directing me to the far end of the police station. I was absurdly pleased by his polite tone; everything about him pleased me then. I turned and smiled.

  ‘In here,’ he said. He was near enough for me to see his eyes, cold and grey as nails hammered into his face.

  A little square room, tiled in white, as I had imagined the morgue, with a little table, two chairs and a latrine bucket in the corner. A strong smell of disinfectant hung in the air, reminding me, comically, of the boys’ toilets in the junior school I had attended as a child.

  ‘Sit down.’

  I chose the chair next to the wall, took off my coat and sat on it. Turner sat on the table, looking down at me, his eyes unreadable. The PC who had been with him when he came in had joined us, and was sitting opposite, pen poised over a little pad of paper to write down what I said.

  We waited like that, in silence, for a long time. After a few minutes, I recognized Turner’s technique of allowing the criminal to incriminate himself and, despite myself, I grinned. I wanted to incriminate myself, wanted to rejoin society, even at its lowest level; I had no desire to escape. I felt almost light-headed; there were no more choices to be made, no more decisions, nothing. It had all been done, though, decided for me.

  ‘So, what do you want to know?’ I said.

  ‘Why you did it,’ said Turner. ‘The vagrant woman in the w
eir. Those people in the pub. And what about the body we found in Grantchester churchyard, all cut up into pieces? Was that you, too?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘It wasn’t me, but I was there. It was the others. Rosemary.’

  Turner nodded, although I could not tell by anything he said or any movement he made whether he believed me or not.

  ‘Rosemary?’

  I told him.

  I told him everything I knew or had conjectured about her, exposed her utterly. I betrayed them all. I cleansed myself of them. Inspector Turner showed no sign of reaction at all; he simply listened politely, nodding from time to time as if I were simply corroborating something he already knew. When I had finished, he stood up, and I looked at him expectantly.

  ‘Are you going to arrest them?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m going to get some coffee,’ he said. ‘I think it’s going to be a long night. Maybe by the time I get back, you’ll have thought up a better story than that. I can wait. I like stories.’

  And at that he and his companion left the room, shutting the door behind them.

  I waited, knowing that he would come back soon. After a while, thinking about the coffee, and while I still had some privacy, I went and used the latrine bucket.

  I must have dozed for half an hour or so, when I was awoken by the sound of footsteps. Someone was walking down the passage, their feet making a light pattering sound on the tiles. I remember thinking what a light tread the Inspector had. The footsteps stopped outside the door of the cell; I heard someone fumbling with keys, pulling the latch. I looked idly towards the door as it opened, then froze.

  It was Elaine.

  She was barefoot, her toes blue with cold against the tiles, and she was wearing a kind of hospital robe, stiff white linen, tied at the sides with white ribbons. Her face was even paler than usual. There was blood at the side of her mouth, as if she had fed too greedily, and blood had trickled down the inside of her leg, leaving a broad track of dark-red going up from her ankle out of sight into the robe. Her hair was like seaweed, her eyes brimming. With a shock, I realized that what she was wearing was not a hospital robe at all.

  My system must have shielded me against the shock; it is one thing to believe, academically, in eternal life, and another entirely to watch a dead woman come back from the dead. I gaped, my head reeling, thinking: another ride on Rosemary’s ghost train.

  Elaine beckoned, wordlessly, and until the same happens to you, you will never understand the compulsion of that gesture, its not-to-be-disobeyed power. In a similar way does the statue of the dead commander beckon Don Juan to his last meal. There was no refusing her. I stood up, feeling faint, though by then I was used to horrors, and followed her, without a word, into the corridor. The door leading to the morgue was half-open, and as I passed, I glanced in. It was how I had imagined it: the tiles white in a crude electric light, half a dozen bare slabs for the bodies, the tiny sound of running water, trickling down the gutters by the sides of the room. I followed her into the front of the station, rubbing my eyes. Dark flowers blossomed behind my eyelids.

  The station was a butcher’s shop. Two men lay facedown on the floor in pools of tacky blood; someone, in his struggles, had struck the wall as he fell, stricken, and had left the prints of his hands and his body against the white paint, like grisly negatives. A third was slumped across the desk, his head twisted at an unnatural angle; Anton was sitting on the desk beside him, using a scalpel to cut pieces from his face, as absorbed as a child doing a jigsaw. Stunned as I was, I managed to see all the bodies well enough to realize that none of them was Turner. Somehow, the thought gave me an obscure satisfaction; but I said nothing.

  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.