The Evil Seed (8 page)

Suddenly, I was jolted
from my thoughts by a sound: a slow, deep, groaning and creaking sound,
impossibly huge, from the very engines of the earth, as if some ancient
underground forge had been opened anew. A scraping music accompanied it, like
the world’s oldest and most decrepit roundabout. The music’s pace quickened,
became a fairground tune, loud and brash, laboriously out of key. The light had
changed; shadows lay over most of the land, hiding the trees and bushes from
sight, except in a few cases, where a sudden spray of light (green, pink,
electric blue) outlined a stump here, a protruding branch there, into lurid,
swaying relief. Branches? Why had I thought of branches? As the top began to
spin faster, the music to play more rhythmically, I held on to the first solid
object I could grasp. In the semi-darkness, I could feel a hard, rippled
surface, a jingle of bells, the harshness of a horsehair mane … What could be
more natural, on a fairground roundabout, than a roundabout horse? I closed my
eyes (the roundabout was spinning very quickly now, the horse leaping up and
down), but there was no way I could let go of the only solid object in my
world, and I held on with my eyes closed until I began to feel a little better,
a little more steady, and I dared to open them a crack.

It was light again, not
the brightness and clarity of daylight, but a garish kind of fairground light,
vulgar, and spectral at the same time. And in the brightness, I could see that
I was not the only rider on Rosemary’s carousel. There were other horses, red
and white and black and blue, bells at their saddles, long manes flying in the
wind, glass eyes wild and red nostrils flaring.

Robert was there too,
knuckles white against the reins, coat flapping behind him like wings. 1 called
his name, hoping that he would hear me against the deafening music … and he
turned his face towards me.

He was dead, poor
Robert. His face was pale, clown-coloured, and his lips were faintly blue. His
eyes were turned upwards to the whites. As I cried out in horror and pity, the
roundabout lurched, and his head lolled away from me on its broken neck. Then,
I saw that all the horses had a rider; a dead rider. Men, women, some I
recognized, some total strangers. Some grinned at me as we rode alongside each
other; a masked woman blew me a kiss which smelt of carrion. Others slumped
over slit throats and broken backs; one rode backwards, head bent completely
round, like a doll’s. Then a thought overtook me with cold terror as I rode. I
had seen all my roundabout companions save one. One.

A coldness at my back,
like a sudden draught. A sudden, gassy reek, like putrid vegetables. A kind of
touch, horribly intimate, at my shoulder. Turning was an unbearable effort,
like walking underwater. Another touch, at my face.

Cold.

I began to struggle,
vainly trying to avert the predestined. I believe I thrashed my legs, as if in
a pointless attempt to outride my pursuer. I tried to turn again. And this
time, I succeeded.

My scream was lost in a
redoubled burst of the music; my terror ripe as fermented plums. She was
masked, only the mouth and the tip of her nose visible from beneath the velvet,
but I knew who it was. Ophelia, ten days after her drowning, the stench of the
river still on her, mixed with another stench, darker. The slime of the Cam in
her hair, her limbs hunched and misshapen, bloated beneath her white dress. I
had once owned a Japanese print, showing the six stages of decomposition of the
corpse of a young girl left out on a mountainside; I had found it gruesome, but
fascinating, to see how the corpse, in her jewellery, her white burial-robes,
had changed, had swollen, then shrunk
…

‘I am a maid at your
window …’ she croaked at me, and I screamed again, scrabbling at the flanks
of my horse, pushing myself backwards with my fingernails, burning the palms of
my hands, leaving shreds of my skin on the polished wood, my sanity leaving me
in great, sparkling bursts of light, like fireworks (and for a moment, I could
see
them, brighter than any fairground illuminations) as she began to creep
towards me.

‘A maid at your window …’
she went on, relentlessly, ‘to be your Valentine …’ Then her hands met around
my neck, soft and cold, her mouth opened, sending a great cloud of that dark,
graveyard reek towards me, and I fell towards her open mouth, all will gone,
all feeling gone, into the tunnel of blackness which was Rosemary, where even
screams become meaningless.

Two

‘HOW DO YOU TAKE YOUR COFFEE, GINNY?’ ALICE
BROKE OFF in mid-sentence. The cup she was carrying wobbled, but did not fall.

‘Thank you,’ said Ginny
softly, ‘but I don’t think I’ll have coffee after all. I think I’m going out
for a while.’

‘Oh … ? Oh yes, of
course.’

Alice was so stunned by
Ginny’s transformation that she was unable to say anything, but her mind raced
uselessly on. Was that really Ginny there? She would hardly have recognized
her, she thought, and it was not only her clothes which had changed, but her
whole self, sloughed off to reveal something closer to the bone. She had taken
off the powder-blue dress which had given her such a medieval look. She had
aerosol-sprayed a band of black lacquer across her eyes, like a mask, and her
red hair had been made to stand up around her face like quills. She was wearing
faded jeans (a long tear positioned high on each leg to reveal white skin), and
a T-shirt with the sleeves torn off which sported the picture of a grinning
skull and a flowery DEATH logo. Her boots were of purple suede, laced up to
mid-thigh, and the spiked heels had left little indentations in the pile of
Alice’s living-room carpet, little gaps, like airholes for something which
might be living under there. She looked even younger than before, vulnerable,
somehow, in that lurid adolescent’s garb, still wrenchingly beautiful, but
wiser somehow. Older.

Her eyes danced, a
roller-coaster of troubling, multicoloured lights.

‘There’s a fair,’ she
said, brightly. Even the voice had changed, adopting, instead of the whisper of
a shy child, the slightly nasal, ungrateful intonations of the adolescent girl.

‘Yes?’ said Alice.

‘On Parker’s Piece. It’s
only eleven. It won’t be shutting down till midnight. It won’t take me long to
get there.’

Her eyes were a band of
fractured light behind the spray-paint, glimmering dangerously. She seemed
entirely unconscious of the effect she had created.

‘So when will you be
back?’ said Alice rather coldly.

Ginny shrugged.

‘Not very long. I’m
meeting some friends … don’t bother to wait up, will you?’

‘I’ll leave the door
open.

‘Thank you.’

Her hand was on the
door-handle. Suddenly, Alice felt an abrupt rushing of emotion; anger, anxiety
and reaction against all the things she had been made to feel during the
evening. She reached impulsively for the girl’s arm; held it. The skin felt
cool and smooth.

‘Ginny?’

‘Yes, what is it?’ The
note of mockery was there again, almost
…
almost as if she knew what
was in Alice’s thoughts better than she did herself.

‘Joe … You like him,
don’t you?’

Ginny faced her for a
second, then she ticked her head to one side, like a doll. Behind the grey of
her eyes, the fairground lights cavorted.

‘Joe?’ she said in a
birdlike voice. ‘Who’s Joe?’

Then the door opened,
and she walked off into the night.

Alice paused at the door
for a moment, her emotions a mixture of anger, shame, and an odd feeling of not
fear,
precisely, but unease.

She could not resist the
temptation to peep through the slats of the blinds out into the street. Not a
brief, casual look, such as she might have taken by accident, but a good, long,
calculating stare. She knew what she was looking for, and that thought made her
really
uneasy; it was hard to admit, but she was looking for a glimpse
of those friends; some shred of proof to justify her feeling that Ginny would
be bad for Joe, that she would be somehow
wrong.
She turned away from
the window in disgust, but not before she had seen what she expected, what she
had hoped for. The man was standing beneath a lamp-post, face turned away from
the house, but his silhouette was outlined sharply in the bright orange light,
and Alice saw him well enough. He was tall, long hair drawn back in a ponytail,
long greatcoat with a turned-up collar, motorcycle boots with chains on the
back which winked at Alice from the shadows. As she watched, Alice saw Ginny
half-run towards him, her steps light as a dancers despite those preposterous
boots, and tuck her hand confidingly under his arm. He half-turned towards her,
spoke, touched her shoulder with a strangely intimate gesture, laughed. Alice
heard the faint echo of Ginny’s answering laugh, ringing tinnily in the
deserted street. She clenched her teeth. No, she didn’t like Joe’s Ginny, or
her friends either; there was something disturbing about that man in the
greatcoat, something more than arrogant about the set of his shoulders, the
gaudy winking of the metal on the instep of his boots, the protective way his
arm went around Ginny’s shoulders, almost hiding her from sight. For an
instant, Alice wondered if the girl would be safe with him.

And then, she turned
away from the window, her cheeks flushing, for impossible though she knew it to
be, it had seemed to her during that instant that the man had turned, too far
away for her to see his face, and had stared at the house. Only for a moment,
mind you, and there was no way, thought Alice, no way at all that he could have
seen her, let alone known that she was watching him, but all the same … she
was sure he had
known
she was there, that his eyes had sought her out as
she hid behind the blinds … that he had seen her and, seeing her, had smiled.

Alice turned on to her left side and tried
to blank out her mind. Tried to sleep. Images filled the darkness of her closed
eyelids, images, faces, voices, glimpses of her paintings and unformed ideas
for others. A snatch of music throbbed somewhere on the fringes of sleep, a
rhythm and a lyric:

One
day you see a strange little girl look at you

One day you see a strange little girl feeling blue

She’d run to the town one day

leaving home and her country fair

Just beware when you’re there

Strange little
girl
…

Alice shook her head on
the hot pillow, shifted position again.

Damn.

She flicked on the
bedside lamp with abrupt impatience, reached for a book. Maybe half an hour’s
reading would do it. Her hand paused on the paperback’s cover, reached out
again, paused. Froze. There it was again, a sound, like whispering. Voices.
Alice sat up in bed, alert to any sound, then relaxed. It’s nothing, she
thought. It’s just Ginny back from the fair. For an instant, there was nothing;
then the whispering began again, soft and unpleasantly intimate, coming from Ginny’s
room.

Ginny’s friends of that
evening?

The thought appalled
Alice; the memory of Ginny’s appearance, her dreamlike conversation, the way
she and her unknown friend had disappeared into the dark without a sound …
these things all convinced Alice that there was something wrong going on, and,
knowing that, there was nothing, absolutely
nothing,
she repeated
inwardly, which was going to persuade her to get out of bed and interfere. Who
Ginny invited back was none of her business. She certainly wasn’t going to make
a fool of herself by going to find out. After all, it might even be Joe. She
would make sure Ginny and her belongings were out of the house by the end of
that week, without fail, and then she would be free of her. The voices came
again, more than two, maybe three or four. Alice knew she would have recognized
Joe’s voice if she had heard it.

Almost angrily, she
turned her head on the pillow and tried to ignore the whispering. A snatch of
music, half imagined:

One
day you see a strange little girl look at you

One day you see a strange little girl feeling blue

Strange little
girl
…

Dammit. Why couldn’t she
leave it alone? It wasn’t any of her business. She wasn’t going to interfere.

Her train of thought
stopped abruptly as she realized that, despite everything, she had thrown back
the covers and had got up. Worse still, she recognized within herself a feeling
that she
was
going to interfere, that she was not going to be happy
until she had left the safety of her bedroom and had sneaked a look into Ginny’s
room, just to know, she told herself, just to see. She pulled on her jeans and
a T-shirt, careful of the occasionally creaking boards, padded to the door in
her bare feet. Still the stealthy, almost mocking undertone of the voices, at
the edge of sound, elusive and tantalizing. A soft
Shhhhhhhh
as the door
opened over the thick pile of the carpet, then the steps, each one an endless
held-breath-long over the landing, muscles aching and the carpet sinking into
the soles of her feet like pine-needles as Alice edged her way along the
impossible distance of the landing towards Ginny’s room. Under Ginny’s door, a
spray of light. As she came closer, the voices blossomed in the darkness, huge
and formless as flowers of smoke. Their sense eluded her, the sounds amplified
by the straining of her ears into booming, giddying syllables. Here and there,
a word found its way into her comprehension, menacing and full of secret
meanings.

A man’s voice:
‘She …
when she sleeps … the picture
…
know … think she
…
the
picture…’