The Evil Seed (14 page)

Two

ALICE WENT HOME FEELING SICK AND EXHAUSTED.
AFTER the scene in the Corn Exchange, she had found Joe in confrontation with a
police officer who was trying to persuade him to come to the station to give
evidence. At the far side of a little group of stragglers and police, she could
see him in the bright lights, shaking his head, turning away. The policeman
tried to catch him by the arm; Joe shook him off abruptly. Another policeman,
sensing trouble, took a step towards him, a fairground figure in the revolving
lights of the departing ambulance.

Damn.

Alice knew Joe’s
relationship with the police of old; he had a habit of picking quarrels at
demonstrations, and had been taken in on several occasions, although Alice
knew that he had never really meant to cause trouble. She supposed she would
have to intervene before Joe hit someone, or got hit himself, and she ran out
of the Corn Exchange doorway towards the little knot of people which had
gathered around the cars. A dozen or so were standing around, though there was
no sign of Ginny’s friends.

Joe turned when he heard
her voice.

‘Thank God. Is Ginny
with you?’

Alice shook her head.

‘Shit! Where the hell
did she go? Where was she standing?’

‘Relax, Joe. She was
right at the back of the hall, with some friends. She must have got out right
away, and gone off with them. Don’t worry.

‘What do you mean?’ His
anger focused on Alice. ‘What friends? She doesn’t have friends.’

‘She did tonight,’ said
Alice, with a glance at the policeman. ‘Look … she’s probably gone home, and
I’ll find her waiting for me on the doorstep. There’s really no reason to worry
about her. I’m sure she can look after herself.’

Joe didn’t look
convinced. His mouth tightened in a stubborn expression.

‘I’ll take you home in
the van,’ he said, then, turning to the policeman, continued. ‘So you see, I
can’t help you. I didn’t see anything, anyway. I was on stage. The first I knew
of it was when someone started throwing bottles. Sorry. OK?’

‘I’ll have to ask you to
come with me, sir,’ answered the policeman (politely enough, though his patience
seemed to be wearing thin)
.
‘It won’t be for long, but—’

‘Dammit, what’s with
you? I told you …’ Joe took a deep breath and, with an effort, brought
himself under control.

‘I’ll phone you to check
that Ginny got back,’ he told Alice.

Alice gave him a quick
smile.

‘Fine. And keep your
temper, hey?’

‘I’m OK.’

She hoped he was.

The first thing she did when she got home
was to make a pot of tea. The cats were imperious, demanding their food, and
she opened a tin for them and mixed the fish with bread. There were biscuits in
the cupboard, and she opened a packet and ate them, without hunger or pleasure,
between swallows of tea until she began to feel the aftermath of the night’s
events subside. Ginny hadn’t been waiting on the doorstep, but then again,
Alice hadn’t for a minute imagined she would. Very likely she was still with
her friends, the friends Joe didn’t know about. Alice found that she didn’t
care. In fact, she thought as she sipped from her mug, the less she knew about
Ginny the better. It was none of her business.

She put down the empty
mug, reached out to switch on the gas fire beside her armchair … sat up. Just
for a second, she imagined a movement out there in the night — a figure
shifting into the darkness. She stood up. Nothing. It was probably her own
reflection in the window. She reached up to pull down the blind
…
and
hesitated. There it was again, that movement, part-furtive, part-mocking.
Inviting her out to investigate.

Cautiously, Alice looked
out, and saw two figures standing under the street-lamp. At once, Alice
flinched back towards the kitchen, switching off the overhead light. Fear
stapled her tongue to her mouth.

It was the man from the
Corn Exchange. He was still wearing his greatcoat, collar turned up so that a
wing of it hid part of his face. Alice could see long hair, tied loosely back
and spilling over the collar below a pale, angular face with deep shadows at
the eyes and cheekbones. He seemed to be looking straight at her, but she knew
now that it was only an optical illusion caused by the shadowplay. His
companion was the blond boy, and she could see his face clearly. He was thin
and bony, with that graceful angularity peculiar to adolescent boys. Alice took
him to be no older than sixteen, and his face, beneath a shock of bleached
blond hair, was disturbingly feminine. Under a black leather bike jacket, Alice
glimpsed a white T-shirt with the slogan DEATH OR GLORY printed on it, and was reminded
of Ginny. He turned to the taller man, said something. The tall man shrugged,
without taking his eyes from the window. The boy shivered, looked at the sky,
pulled his jacket tighter. Maybe they were cold, thought Alice.

On the tail of that
thought came another, at the same time compulsive and terrifying: Why not ask them
in? That way she would find out who they were and their exact relationship to
Ginny. Maybe she would find out what Ginny was hiding. She hesitated for a
moment, then flipped on the light and opened the door. Light flooded out, on to
the doorstep so that she could hardly see the two figures as they merged into
the shadows.

‘Excuse me,’ she said to
the darkness, ‘are you waiting for Ginny? I’m fairly sure she’ll be back soon;
I thought she might have been with you. You’re welcome to come in here and wait
for her, if you like.’

For a moment, there .was
no answer, and Alice had the peculiar sensation that she was calling down a
tunnel, with only the echoes of her own voice to answer her. Then two faces
turned towards her from the dark.

‘We’re friends of
Virginia.’ It was the tall man; his voice was quiet and cultured, unexpectedly
so, given his bohemian appearance. As he stepped closer to the light, Alice
noticed that he was older than she had first thought; the fine-boned face was
lined, giving it a hard look, and the long hair was touched with grey.

‘Do come in,’ urged
Alice. ‘Wait for her in the warm. I’ll make you coffee if you like.’

The door was wide, but
the stranger made no move to go in. The boy stepped through the gate, lingered
at the fringes of the light. There was a silence, rather too long for comfort,
and Alice began to feel a little embarrassed. A little frightened. She shook
herself. What possible harm could come to her here, in the light? In her own
house? Cat poked her head through the door to see what was going on, then
hissed furiously and fled back in.

Alice smiled, uneasily.

The blond boy grinned,
exposing slightly uneven teeth.

‘Do come in,’ said
Alice, once more. ‘It’s getting really cold out here.’

At once, as if they had
only been waiting to be asked a third time, Ginny’s two friends came through
the door into Alice’s living-room, bringing a draught in with them.

‘Pleased to meet you. I’m
Alice,’ she said. ‘Are you old friends of Ginny’s?’

‘My name is Java,’ said
the tall man with a smile. ‘My young companion is Rafe. Yes, we’re old friends.’
He smiled at the blond boy. ‘Very old friends.’

‘You’re a painter,’ he
said. He looked at her. He nodded at the painting she had tacked to the cork
noticeboard. ‘She looks like Virginia.’

Alice was slightly
startled. ‘Maybe it’s the hair,’ she said.

He smiled. ‘Maybe it is,’
he said.

Alice heaved a sigh of relief when they
left, then locked the door and drew the curtains. Even then she knew she would
follow them, drawn to them, just as she had been before. She waited a moment
for them to leave before letting herself out through the back door, keeping to
the shadows, never moving closer than a hundred yards to the two garish neon-lit
figures as they half-ran down the narrow streets, casting long arcs of shadow
in their wake. Alice was conscious of the scuffling of her shoes on the
pavements, of the sounds of her clothes as she brushed walls and archways, but
Rafe and Java were utterly silent, never exchanging a word or slackening the
pace of their eerie night walk. Breathless and furtive, Alice followed.

The town centre was
empty; windows and doorways were dark blind eyes. A couple of tramps waited on
benches by the side of the market square, occasionally dipping into a brown
paper bag which contained a bottle of cider and watching the night with
incurious eyes. This was their time, the people of the night, when the colleges
had locked their gates and the pubs closed their doors and the security men
patrolled the shopping precinct to evict the undesirables. That was when the
old men came out of hiding, silent, hunched in their tattered overcoats and
fingerless gloves.

Alice hardly noticed
them, but their eyes were on her. For a moment she stopped to catch her breath,
and as she was about to set off again, she became aware of a presence at her
elbow and she turned to see who it was. An old tramp, scrubbily bearded and
muffled in a dirty pink scarf, a woollen hat on his greyish-white hair, and
carrying the inevitable brown paper bag, had hesitantly moved to her side. Both
arms were clamped around the precious bag, and he was watching her intently.

‘Excuse me?’ he said.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Alice.
‘I don’t have any money.

For a moment she thought
he was going to say more. His mouth worked, and his rheumy eyes fixed hers with
a wild kind of hope.

Then he turned away
again, and once more Alice resumed her pursuit of the two men as they made
their way to the Grantchester road.

Alice was not certain
what she had expected: another visit to the church, perhaps, but Java and Rafe
did not stay on the road for long. Instead they turned towards the river about
a mile before they reached the village, leading Alice down a dark section of
street bordered by derelict terraces. There were no street-lamps, and Alice
soon lost the two men from view, feeling her way in the darkness along the
empty houses. From time to time she caught sight of Rafe’s pale hair or a spark
from one of Java’s steel-capped boots in front of her, but apart from that she
was blind. Sweat plastered her hair to her face, and there was a tightness in
her throat. A snatch of music began to play, inconsequentially, in her mind:

Strange
little girl, where are you going?

Strange little girl,
where are you going?

Suddenly she heard a
sound, shockingly near, and froze. She had come much closer than she had intended
in the dark, and she was almost on them. A door opened, metal sparked against
metal, and the flame of a cigarette lighter blossomed, bright, in the darkness.
Instinctively Alice drew back; Rafe was standing at an open door, one foot on
the step, and Java was holding the lighter, a cigarette between his teeth,
hands cupped around the flame. A nimbus of light surrounded his head. He looked
up as Alice shrank back towards the wall, and although the shadows seemed
impenetrable, smiled directly at her.

‘Alice,’ he said. ‘Won’t
you come in?’

For an instant, her mind
was a total blank. She took a step backwards, and almost fell in her haste to
get away. Java’s quiet voice halted her; she imagined his inhuman gaze drawing
her back like a fish on a hook.

‘You have come such a
long way,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you would like a drink before you go? Besides,
Virginia is here.’

At Ginny’s name Alice
turned feeling suddenly foolish. Surely no harm could come to her no more than
a mile from the town. Besides, if Ginny was here …
She shifted her
gaze to the door, where Rafe was still standing, a tiny smile touching his
lips. If she backed out now, she thought, she might as well give up trying to
find out anything else about Ginny or what had happened in Grantchester. She
had dared to come this far — surely she could stay a while.

‘Do come in,’ said Java.
For a second time Alice was conscious of an undeniable attraction to him, an
almost unbearable awareness of the beauty of the man, of the flawlessness of
his angular features, an admiration of the grace with which he stood, that
poetry of movement indicating that here was a creature entirely self-possessed,
content to be himself and prey to none of the anxieties and insecurities of
normal people. He radiated a glamour which was almost irresistible. Alice found
herself smiling in response, and before she even knew it she was through the
door and in the house.

By the cigarette lighter’s
hesitant flame Alice found that she had entered a lobby, where a number of
stained and yellowed cards still bore the names of former residents. Beyond
that a narrow staircase led to the upper floor. Rafe led the way with the
light, and Java followed behind in silence. They passed several doors until
they reached the right one; Rafe opened it and went in. Alice looked round. A
spirit lamp lit the room casting monstrous shadows against the walls. The room
itself was filthy, with wooden boxes covered in blankets to serve as seats, and
the remains of several meals littering the floor. A table stood in the centre,
with newspapers to cover it, and a dozen or so empty bottles winking green and
white in the lamplight. There was a smell of mould and dust, and a sweet
under-smell, like incense. Ginny was sitting on an old sofa in the corner of
the room, legs crossed, face turned up towards Alice with a peculiar insolence.

‘So it’s you,’ she said
without interest. ‘Is Joe here? ‘Alice shook her head. ‘He was looking for you.
He was worried.’

Ginny shrugged. ‘So you
came to find me. How nice. Now what do you want?’

‘To learn, of course. To
know what we do in here. ‘Java laughed lightly, touching the nape of Alice’s
neck with thrilling, icy fingers. Rafe came a step closer, a cross-shaped
earring dangling hypnotically …
the sense of unreality was so
overwhelming that Alice even forgot to feel afraid.