The Evil Seed (9 page)

Another:
‘Some quiet
place …
’

Ginny’s voice, above the
rest and more audible, its vagueness gone. With her friends, Ginny’s voice was
clear and commanding:

‘Be quiet. I don’t want
to run the risk of him suspecting. It was a mistake …’ (The voice blurred
again as she turned away from the door.) ‘Give me time. I remember everything
now.’

Alice felt her head
spinning with the strain of standing there, channels of blackness all around
her. A sudden, idiotic desire to laugh seized her, and she chuckled nervously
to herself in the shadows.

What had she expected?
Black magic? Green men from Mars? Nervous laughter choked her, and she began to
feel ridiculous as well as afraid. So what if Ginny was entertaining? Most
likely all they were doing was smoking joints or something, where they knew
they wouldn’t be interrupted. It was really no business of hers. Joe could and
would look after himself. Alice didn’t want to know. Footsteps on the other
side of the door, a voice, clear with proximity.

‘Enough talk … too
much time wasted … waited … long time … find it … do what … should
have been done … ready … find it and get rid of it … not safe for it to
still be there … one day someone … might know who …

Ginny’s voice, crisp and
carrying: ‘No need to worry. Poor Daniel is already dead and done for. He just
doesn’t know it yet.’

And then the door
opened.

From the crack behind
the hinges of the darkened bathroom Alice saw the flowering of light across the
stair carpet, saw the three figures cross the lighted stretch, saw shapes: a
wedge of light on an upturned cheekbone, a flare of red and purple from the
braiding on someone’s coat, a cold spark from the chain on a motorcycle boot …
then the light snapped off abruptly, and their steps were only subtle
shiftings in the darkness, their whispering the sound of dust against dust.

‘Mustn’t wake her
…
door latched … simple enough
…
sleeps like the dead …’
(Laughter, light as cobwebs.)’… Back before light … child’s play
…
’

‘Suspects … remember …
picture … find it and get rid…’

Down the stairs …
Shh
…
Shh
…
Shh
…
Shh
… as the skirts of a
long greatcoat brushed the carpet. Alice opened the door of the bathroom a
crack wider. There was no light. Somewhere a little beyond the stairwell she
detected, or thought she detected, the tiny gleam of a street-lamp through
drawn curtains. The door opened wider. Her feet made tiny sounds against the
floor, but she took careful steps, avoiding the squeaky board, holding on to
the banister to stabilize her own descent into the well. A ripple of sound
pushed its way into the blackness towards her; she heard the click of the
latch. A bar of light extended into the dark house, probed, flickered and
finally withdrew.

Alice was alone again.

Her steps were light;
she ran downstairs in the darkness, parted the curtains an inch
…
they
were already half-way down the street, figures long as shadows, steps even and
purposeful. Alice’s foot bumped into her shoes as she moved back from the
window. Without thinking anything, she slipped them on. The latch almost drew
itself.

Click.

The door closed behind
Alice and she set off after them into the orange-lit silence.

She kept well hidden;
her shoes were soft, her clothes, accidentally chosen, were dark. She knew the
streets and kept to the shadows; alleys and archways were plentiful. The night
air was still and cold; here and there the pavements twinkled with a light
frost; Alice’s breath spiralled away behind her … her steps were easy and
elastic. She crossed the town; deserted streets, the colleges blank carnival
masks with the occasional winking eye at a late-night student’s window.
Gradually she left the town behind. The road grew narrower and darker, the
buildings few. They crossed the river, twice, crossed a road, waded through a
field of green corn. Alice waited until the others had crossed the field before
she began to make her own way across it; the delay left them far ahead of her,
but she was virtually certain of where they were going; this was the short road
across the fields to Grantchester. She knew this way by day; by night the path
was loaded with signs and portents, the sky was bright with hidden moonlight,
the clouds huge. In darkness it dwarfed the ground more efficiently than it
ever did by day. Alice felt unease, but accepted it, dreamlike, and broke into
a half-run to catch up with the three shadows, the ground flying beneath her
like a magic carpet. She did not feel tired or impatient, only thrilled with
the chase, the hairs on her arms electric with cold and anticipation. The
snatch of song still played inside her, matching the rhythm of her padding
feet:

Strange
little girl, where are you going?

Strange
little girl, where are you going?

Do you know
where you could be going?

Grantchester crouched at
the end of the road, the squat little tower of the church with its stubby spire
black against the luminous sky. The three figures were almost upon it. Then, at
the gate, they slackened their pace. A voice, clear and almost careless,
reached Alice from further down the road. Its message was inaudible, but the
speaker was unexcited, unafraid.

There was only a tiny
spark of sound, metal against metal, as he leaped up on to the spiked gate,
then down to the other side. A second figure followed suit, then the third,
with equal ease. A languid word spoken; laughter. The figures were at one with
the dark; the church swallowed them up. By now Alice was trembling. This was no
student prank, no joke; this they had done before, maybe many times. The
thought of black magic did not seem so laughable now. But still she followed
them, fascinated and appalled, her mind spinning its own mandala of fear and
foreboding, until she stood in front of the gate. She surveyed the church for a
moment, somehow disliking its cold face, its mean little windows. The gate was
not too high; not higher than the college gate which Alice used to climb on sly
Cambridge nights. But it was locked.

She wondered why a
churchyard should have to be locked; remembered, or half-remembered, Joe
telling her (on the way back from some nocturnal escapade, her hand in the
pocket of his overcoat), his voice warm and humorous.

‘Beats me why they lock
them. The way I see it, no one wants to get in, and no one’s likely to be wanting
to get out!’

The memory was a sad
ghost in the still cold night, its warmth evaporated into pale nostalgia. And
the joke seemed sinister now; the thought of people trying to escape chilled
her. She touched the wooden bars of the gate; rot had bubbled through the
paint, grains of it clinging to her fingers. Beyond the gate was the Dark-side,
the other side of the looking-glass. She longed to know what lay beyond, but
was afraid to leave the safety of the road; yet, dreamlike, she knew that she
would cross over whether she wanted to or not. She pulled herself up, the world
shifting perspective abruptly as she did so; the darkness made her feel seventy
feet high, hovering above a chasm of blackness. She tilted, feeling carefully
for the wood beneath her … swung her leg over the top.

She found them under
cover of night, and hid behind a monument to see what they were doing; but the
wall of the third churchyard shadowed them, and she could see only jumbled
shapes, shadowplay without meaning, hear their voices in broken snatches, hear
the sound of metal against stone, of metal against earth … of digging.

The red-haired figure
was Ginny, she could see that much, could hear her voice, higher and clearer
than the others, could occasionally glimpse her dancer’s body moving among the
graves. Another figure was tall, had long hair in a pony-tail, metal on the
instep of his boots. The third was fair, androgynous; Alice could see no face.

‘…
somewhere close
by …
has to be here …
had no time
…
anywhere else
…
find it, even if I have to
…
dig him up
…
sure
…
know
it
…’

She waited there for a
long time, listening to the sound of the digging, then the sound of wood
against metal, metal against metal. Whatever it was, they seemed to have found
it; Alice could tell by their voices. More sounds, a tearing of paper, a sound
of metal scraping … footsteps. Alice could feel them in her teeth. She
crouched against the monument, the throbbing of her eardrum echoing in the cold
stone, as the footsteps passed and died away. After a while she got up.

Her eyes were accustomed
to the darkness, and she could see quite well; the hammering fear had left her
for the moment, to be replaced by a strange, transparent calm. She took two
steps nearer to the patch of shadow she now knew to be an open grave; one step
nearer and stopped. There was a hole in front of her, not deep, but magnified
by the strange night-time perspective, and in front of it, the slab of carved
stone had been shifted, laid neatly by the side of the grave. A thought struck
her; she had been here before. She recognized the corner of the churchyard, the
yew tree and the hawthorn … caught sight, as she spun round, of the place she
had seen earlier, when it was light, the grave with the little gate.
(Something
inside me remembers
…)

The gate was open now, a
line of moonlight touching the frame, and for a sudden, panic-stricken moment,
Alice thought she could see something on the other side, something waiting to
get out. Then it moved, pushed, no doubt by a gust of wind, moved and swung
back on its hinges with a little sound of rusty metal, as if some tiny,
invisible child were swinging on it. Alice could feel no wind, but the gate
swung again, more violently this time, open, shut, open … shut … open …
the squeaking voice had three notes, two falling, one rising, like the song of
a marsh bird:
Ti-ri-weeee …
tiriweeeeeee.
Alice watched it,
eyes wide, mouth wide, stomach falling away within her into a great cauldron of
panic, the song of the marsh bird following her, its three sad, limping notes
forlorn as snowflakes in a dark well, and throughout, the gate continued its
dance, open, closed … open.

She wondered why she did not scream.

Two

ALICE AWOKE WITH A SUDDEN START, THE LAST
IMAGE OF a terrible dream in her mind, and, for a moment, she wondered where
she was. She ached all over; her neck was stiff, her legs curled awkwardly
underneath her body, her clothes clammy against her skin.

‘Ginny?’

She shook her head to
clear it and sat up. What on earth had she been doing? Working? It certainly
seemed that way; it had happened to her before to fall asleep in her workroom,
but never to wake up with no memory at all of how she had got there. She
remembered. What? A dream? She supposed it must have been, a dream of
uncommonly vivid detail. She remembered getting up. But there was her painting,
propped up on the easel and covered with a piece of muslin so that the dust
would not dry on it, where she had, presumably, left it.

So why was it that she had
no recollection of any picture, any picture at all? There was nothing but that
damned dream in her aching head, nothing but that and a half-dispelled
foreboding, spinning its mandala of fear into her mind. She wondered, with a
now-familiar paranoia, whether Ginny had drugged her. She stood up, shaking the
pins and needles out of her legs, fumbled an aspirin out of a brown bottle,
swallowed it with a crunch and a grimace, shook out two more.

She remembered the
outing with Joe, remembered going to bed, remembered, was that the dream? She
could not seem to remember going to the workroom, could not remember the
painting.

The painting!

Surely if she saw it
again, it would trigger some memory, some fragment of that lost time; surely.
She paused, hand poised over the sheet; through the thin cloth she could see
green, grey, the palette, still smeared with acrylics, a half-filled water pot
containing green water … Suddenly, she was not at all sure she wanted to see
what was behind the muslin cloth. But the compulsion was too great
…
that, and perhaps she still could not quite believe in that familiar easel,
laden with unfamiliar memories, the paint hardly dry.

She lifted the cloth. A
blaze of chaotic colour met her eyes, colour which merged form and motion, symmetry
and abandon in a composition of perfect completeness. It was her work, all
right, her style, and yet the memory eluded her. Her signature in the corner;
there. Her pointed calligraphy at the edge of the work, indicating the name of
the picture. And what a picture! A river, a water’s-edge spiral of grass and
wildflowers, roots trailing surrealistically down into the limpid grey water,
the willow tree, seen dizzyingly from above, a half-reflection mirrored shakily
in the river; green, a tunnel of green with a white figure at the end of it, a
white lady dimly glimpsed in the green and the water … Alice drew nearer. The
perspective shifted, and she realized that she was looking at the figure from
above, from above the surface of the water, while the white lady lay below. The
water and the partial reflection from the tree obscured her image; only the
face, by some trick of refracted light, was clearly visible: a pale oval,
greenish in the shade of the leaves, open eyes and mouth dark beneath the
water, red hair darkened to almost-black under the surface, while above the
surface it regained its brightness in patches, like floating weed, lurid
against the still grey river. The features were clear, still not clear enough
for Alice to be sure, and yet, she was sure; they were Ginny’s. And name of the
painting was: