The Evil Seed (15 page)

‘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
than 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 onto 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.

I wiped my mouth
gingerly on a handful of the coarse, gritty grass of the river-bank, and stood
up, legs weak and head spinning. I shouted: ‘Help! Police!’; began to stumble
and slide my way back along the muddy bank towards the bridge. There was a man
standing on the bridge, looking my way; a tall man, slightly hunched, collar
turned up against the damp. He did not walk away, but seemed to wait for me,
his very presence a comfort to my shock and fear. Tears of gratitude filled my
eyes; I reached out towards him.

‘Thank God!’ I cried
fervently. ‘There’s a body there by the weir.’ I stumbled towards him, one knee
printed with mud as I fell, tears in my eyes. Through their mist, the man
seemed vaguely familiar. For an instant, I felt his eyes meet mine, though the
expression on his face was still unclear. A tiny sound escaped his lips, a
white hand twitched and withdrew into the pocket of his coat … then, with a
single movement, he turned away and ran, in long, jerky strides, away from me,
away from the bridge, and disappeared through a gateway out of my sight.

I must have cried out
loud, because, just then, a group of students rounded the corner, laughing and
talking, and in an instant I was surrounded by friendly, sympathetic faces,
hands touching mine, arms around my shoulders.