The Evil Seed (10 page)

Repentance: The
Drowning of Ophelia

Alice stared at it for a
long time, this troubling thing from the country of dreams; for it was both
like and unlike any work she had ever done. The colours were hers — there was
paint on her hands, ingrained into her fingernails — the detail was hers, the
tricks of the light. It was the same size as her work of the preceding evening,
the impression of space and clarity was the same, the details swiftly and
surely etched in acrylics over the luminous tints of the inks, God, it must
have taken her hours! She had never in her life worked so swiftly. The
suspicion of drugs came back, more plausibly this time, frightening yet
reassuring. Easier to believe that she had been fed some hallucinogen than to
accept the dreams, the blank in her memory — the picture itself. Unable to keep
away, she looked more closely. Yes, there was something else there, behind the
light, something more disturbing still than the fact that Alice did not
remember the slightest detail of how or when she had painted it; an impression
of — she could not quite put a name to it, but it haunted her. Something in the
strange perspective, deceiving the spectator into thinking that it was
she
who
was underwater, she who was drowning, the roots of the willow tree reaching
down towards her, the figure of the woman some above-world fancy, split into a
million facets of refracted light, face smiling down in to the water, hair
trailing towards her …

Alice pulled away,
fascinated. The illusion of movement was intense. Even as she looked, she
seemed to feel the pull of the undertow, the circular movement of the
composition dragging her down and around …

Had she really done
that? Looking again, the unease changing slowly to awe and delight, she
realized that it was the best thing she had ever done, even better than the
other
Ophelia.
And Alice, looking into her canvas, seemed to see the
vortex of her subconscious spinning further and further downwards, and each level
was like a new and undiscovered world, turning its own axis,
kaleidoscope-changing in a continuous loop of shadow and counter-shadow; and
as she watched, the movement caught her and drew her closer and closer, and
without even knowing it, she began to laugh.

Whatever the spell was,
the phone broke it, its clear trill startling in the empty house, and Alice
jumped nervously. A sudden, dream-memory returned (darkness, a smell of age
and earth, figures leaping and dancing around an open grave), then faded as she
rose to her feet. When she reached the phone, however, it had already stopped
ringing. Alice looked at her watch. It was already past ten.

Ginny!

Still shaking off the
memories of the previous night Alice made her way slowly into the kitchen and put
on the kettle. Davy Crockett was sitting on the fridge, and he jumped down as
soon as he saw Alice, yowling and winding his long furry body round her legs.

‘Just a minute, Dave …
’
murmured Alice. ‘Just let me see if Ginny’s awake.’

She ran quietly up the
stairs, paused to open the window on the landing, then went to knock softly on
Ginny’s door.

‘Ginny? Are you up?’ she
called gently.

No answer.

‘Ginny?’ Louder, this
time.

Still no answer. Alice,
glancing at the clock on the landing, saw that it was nearly ten fifteen.

‘Ginny, are you awake?’ She
tried the handle experimentally; the door opened, and Alice peered into the
bedroom.

The window was open, the
curtains pulled back, allowing the fresh morning air and a faint scent of
wallflowers into the pretty room. The bed was made, the pillows plump and cool,
the primrose coverlet in place; Alice found herself admiring her guest’s neatness.
Suddenly, she felt suspicious. She tweaked the coverlet away to examine the
sheet … it was as she had thought.

The bed had not been
slept in at all. The nightdress on the bedside table had not even been
unfolded. She yanked open the wardrobe. A few dresses hung there, a pullover
was neatly folded over two blouses … shoes at the bottom. And right at the
back, scrunched up in a bundle, she found those torn jeans, the T-shirt, the
purple boots Ginny had been wearing, spattered with mud. Feeling somehow
guilty, Alice pulled the things out. With them came a few other odds and ends:
some muddy trainers; a shiny raincoat; black leather bike jacket; another
T-shirt; some cheap jewellery; a heavy belt with a grinning face for a buckle;
earrings in the shape of skulls; an upside-down cross on a chain. The kind of
lurid, harmless clothes Alice associated with the bands of kids who prowled the
shopping centre at night, pushed as far into the back of the wardrobe as they
would go. And underneath the lot, a plastic bag containing two syringes, one
almost new, the other so worn that the tip had begun to take on a frayed and
feathered look. So that was it, Alice thought. The syringes explained
everything.

But Alice was concerned
for Joe, Joe who was so trusting and so naive. Joe who had no idea that the
little girl he had fallen for in such a big way had gone off as soon as he had
been out of the house (in the company of someone she seemed to be fairly
intimate with, despite her lack of friends), and had stayed out all night.

It all made sense to
Alice now, even the meeting with the ‘friends’ … Ginny had gone out because
she wanted to find someone to score from, that was all.
And the dreams? Just
dreams, she told herself Just dreams.

Alice felt oddly
reassured. That was something she could understand, a weakness in Ginny which
was wholly explicable, and which revealed the girl’s real insecurity. Alice
began to feel herself warming again towards the girl, so lovely in her borrowed
clothes. She felt she had been insensitive, had seen calculation where there
was only uncertainty, had shown hostility where she should have offered comfort
and understanding. And now Ginny had gone.

Putting the anger aside,
Alice went downstairs and stroked the tortoiseshell cat, which was sitting on
the fridge, poured milk for the others, cut herself some bread and put it under
the grill to toast. The cat jumped on to the side of the cooker, meowed and
sniffed the toast with interest.

Alice picked the cat up
and cuddled her, feeling cat-fur in her nostrils and cat-whiskers in her face.
Through the window the sky looked grey; not a day for going out of doors, she
thought, and she went to the door, picked up the paper which was still lying on
the doormat, and settled down to read it while the bread toasted. She usually
only read the
Cambridge News
for the cinema programme and the plays, and
would in normal circumstances not even have noticed the first page, if she had
not recognized the picture. Under a picture of a middle-aged man, and the
headline LECTURER DIES IN RENTED ROOM SEX SCANDAL, a photograph caught her eye.
At first, she did not realize where she knew the place from. The photograph was
dark and rather blurry; the short paragraph had obviously been a hasty
addition, but she did recognize the picture.

That wall, that gate,
the side of the church there at the left, the outline of one pointed window
along the side of the dark wall … it was Grantchester church, the photograph
taken just alongside the gate which led into the churchyard.

A fleeting memory
crossed her mind again (a girl dancing alongside an open grave … the sound of
digging … mud …
metal …
wood), then faded. The article was
short and simple; the information therein minimal, but disturbing.

GRANTCHESTER
VANDALS WRECK

CEMETERY

Vandals broke into the grounds of
Grantchester churchyard late last night, causing damage to the church, which was
disfigured by graffiti, and to some of the graves.

Police are
investigating the damage, which is reported to be ‘quite extensive’, but are
not prepared to give details at present.

The Revd Martin
Holmes (45), present vicar of Grantchester, describes the vandalism as ‘a petty
and cruel attack on our community’, and lays the blame on ‘student pranksters’.
He has denied the allegations of witnesses that the churchyard has been used in
the past by practitioners of black magic.

Alice re-read the
article, the half-memory growing stronger and stronger. The dream? Had it been
a dream? She remembered the sound of metal against wood, metal against stone.
She remembered hiding in shadows, crossing the field of green wheat. Remembered
mud on her shoes …
She lifted her head, saw her trainers on the
doormat, caked to the laces with graveyard mud …

And remembered
everything.

One

SOMETIMES I WONDER HOW MUCH OF MY LIFE HAS
BEEN dreams, or the dreams of dreams. Maybe I will wake to the teeth of my
fantasy in my throat, or maybe I will simply float away on a river of ether
like Wynken, Blynken and Nod. My nice young doctor came again today and frowned
over my veins. He, too, has teeth which bring dreams. I asked him to stop the
dreams, but he just smiled. For a minute, I thought he was Rosemary.

Ah yes. Rosemary. We
never go far from her, do we? Still, I’ve written my story now; I don’t flatter
myself that she doesn’t know about it, but I think I’ve hit on a way to keep
her at bay for a while. Don’t you know? Yes, I thought you did. That should
keep me safe, don’t you think? Because she’ll be coming soon, I know that.
Coming to bring me back, like Elaine and the others. But I’ll not go to her.
No. Better the dark. Better the dark.

One more glass of whisky
against the dreams.

What did I write last
night? I meant to tell you about Robert, and of how he was ensnared, but
instead I a find that in a whole evening I wrote nothing but my dreams, as if I
did not have enough of them already, as if I needed to multiply the madnesses
which assail me in every part of my life. I go to Grantchester still, you know;
they let me go, because they think it does me good. Not to see her (I see her
every night), but to make sure that she is still there. If she came back, I
would know it. I know I would. But she is powerless to hurt. She is laid to
rest at last. But sometimes I see her, feel her, deep in the dark earth,
moving. Maybe she sucks life from her shroud, like the witches of old. But I
have faith. Faith is the answer. I tell myself that when she comes to me: I
look the other way and pray.

All I need is Faith.

Maybe it was Faith which
saved me then; I know that I was infatuated by her, bewitched by her every
movement. Do not blame me; I was a fool, but she was so lovely! She was a
prism, a sunbeam, a dancing bolt of lightning. I remember that first meal I
spent with her; the sunlight like needfire in her hair, motes of light and dust
circling her face like an aura. I was shy at first: staring tongue-tied at her
over my untouched supper, she eating delicately, cat-like in little, precise
bites, her teeth leaving tiny, even indentations in the piece of bread by her
plate, the small sounds of her spoon against Mrs Brown’s best china plate
magnified, like an eye through a lens, in the troubled air. I did not think to
speak; I think I stared, foolishly smiling, unaware that she too was watching
me from beneath her demure eyelashes, that she was
seeing
everything a through
the veil of her mockery. Nothing escaped her. Not Robert. Not I.

I’m sure she spoke
first; over a dish of fruit, piled high. Apples, peaches, oranges … some
parts of Cambridge had stayed almost untouched by the rationing; I think Mrs
Brown prided herself on the way she supplied her ‘young men’ with the kind of
food they would have found difficult to find even in the best restaurants. I
reached for the dish to offer it to Rosemary just as she reached for it herself
… my hand slipped clumsily and brushed hers. I drew it away, blushing with a
muttered apology. Her hand was cool, like a child’s.

‘Oh, excuse me, miss …’
I stammered.

Rosemary gave me a shy
smile.

‘You don’t even know my
name, do you?’ she said. My confusion increased. I mumbled something totally
unintelligible.

‘It’s Rosemary,’ she
said. ‘For remembrance, you know.’

‘It’s a beautiful name,’
I said foolishly.

‘And yours?’ she said. ‘I
know I can’t even begin to thank you for what you did, but at least tell me
your name.’ Her smile lit up the room again with its brightness. ‘Maybe it
should be Lancelot,’ she said, with a touch of mockery. ‘Or maybe Galahad.’

I was not an
accomplished flirt; in fact, I was uniformly dull. I shook my head.

‘No, Holmes. Daniel
Holmes.’ I wrestled with my shyness again for a moment. ‘I’m so glad. I mean …’

‘Rosemary. Please call
me Rosemary.’

‘Rosem … rose …’ I
gave a nervous laugh.

‘And I am feeling
better,’ she continued. ‘Thanks to you, Daniel. How brave you must be, to
tackle the complete unknown like that, to leap in the river after me … And
you don’t know me at all, do you? I could be anyone. Anything.’

‘I don’t care,’ I said,
braver now. ‘You’re marvellous, like a poem—

Her
arms across her breast she laid;

She was more fair than words can say;

Barefooted came the beggar maid

Before the king
Cophetua.

‘A poet!’ cried
Rosemary, clapping her hands.

‘No, no,’ I blushed. ‘That
was Tennyson.’

She smiled, more sadly
now, it seemed to me. She turned her face away into the sunlight, a rogue sunbeam
lighting up the transparency of one of her irises into a crescent of brightness.

‘I can hardly believe it
now,’ she said softly. ‘That I wanted to die, I mean. But it’s only a reprieve,
you know. One day there will be no Daniel Holmes to save me and make me feel
whole again; there will only be the river, waiting its time. Soon, I’ll have to
leave, and you’ll forget me.