The Evil Seed (20 page)

Dear Mr
Daniel,

I have had to Pop out for a While to Visit my Sister, I will be Back
this Evening. I am Sorry you are not Yourself today. Should you be Wanting a
Bite to eat I have left a Pot of Tea on the Hob and a Nice Piece of Cod in the
Oven for your Supper. And help Yourself to Anything in the Larder.

Yours Sincerely,

V. Brown

I smiled. That meant I
had the house to myself for the evening, and I was glad of it; I would have no
awkward questions to answer, for Mrs Brown was as protective as she was
good-hearted, and I sometimes found her affection rather overpowering. I did
not bother to dress, knowing that I was alone in the house, and I made my way
down to the kitchen. There was food left for me in the oven, as promised, and
tea on the hob, and I settled myself down at the kitchen table to eat. I-had
hardly eaten more than a mouthful, however, before the sickness came upon me
again; my head swam, my stomach roiled, and I pushed the plate away unfinished.
I drank two glasses of water in rapid succession, fighting off nausea, and
remained for a few moments in front of the fire, shivering with fever. The
events of the previous night had taken more from me than I had suspected. I
reached my hands towards the fire, and began for the first time since the
beginning of my nightmare to review the situation logically. I prided myself on
being a logical man, a man of learning, and my natural pragmatism had begun,
with the help of a bath and a long sleep, to return to me. This I must
emphasize; I was not neurotic, nor am I yet; all conclusions I have since
reached are based on my own experiences and research. Even then, dragging
myself from a vortex of horrors, I began to view the situation objectively.

My first thought was a
profound gratitude at being alive at all. I had obviously witnessed something
which incriminated Rosemary and her band of murderers to the hilt; they had
tried to be rid of me, and in some way had bungled it. Perhaps they had
intended me to be accused of the crime; perhaps after having tried to throttle
and drug me, they had abandoned me for dead. It was clearly a police matter, as
much for my own sake as for Robert’s (I refused to believe that he had in any
way been involved in the affair), and I racked my brains for the best way to
handle the situation.

By now, the murderers
would have disposed of the evidence; the body, I knew, was hidden in the
churchyard, and would no doubt be found sooner or later. Rosemary, in her
apartment, would be unassailable. Rafe and Java
…
they were my only
chance of being believed, and I had no idea of who they were or where to find
them. I myself — well, there was no doubt that even as a police informant I
might be suspect; I had already been strategically placed to discover one
corpse, and the circumstances in which I had found myself this time might
easily be seen to be suspicious. I shrank from placing myself in a situation
where it would be Rosemary’s word against my own …
where would it end?

My head had begun to
ache again with the effort of concentrating. I knew that this was by no means
the first violent death to hit Cambridge in the past few months. Could Rosemary
somehow be implicated in the death of the woman in the weir? Or was my evidence
circumstantial, and Rosemary innocent?

I wanted to believe it.
Remembering her face, the sweetness of her features, the innocence which shone
through her eyes, I wanted it, for I loved her, have maybe never ceased to love
her, and I wanted to believe it with all my heart. My brain began to formulate
wild and attractive hypotheses. She was innocent: a pawn of Java and Rafe,
somehow in their power. They had hypnotized her. They had drugged her, too.
They were somehow blackmailing her. From my earlier suspicion and horror of
her, my delusions led me to believe that she was the persecuted one, that she
needed my help, that my fearsome nightmares were only the product of jealousy
and the trauma of what I had seen the previous night. I told you, Rosemary made
children of all of us.

Contact the police? I
dared not, as much for fear of incriminating Rosemary as myself; could I expect
them to fail to suspect her? The newspapers had by now revealed that Scotland
Yard had been called in to investigate the ‘Body in the Weir’ case; I expected
to be contacted for questioning again at any time. The last thing I wanted was
to draw the attention of the investigators towards myself, or towards Rosemary.
I saw that I would have to act on my own, and as quickly as possible. I went
back to my room, dressed in a plain, dark suit, a light overcoat and my hat,
returned to the kitchen, and lingered over the drawer of knives. Finally I
chose a small carving-knife, sharp, but small enough to hide in my sleeve, and
set off out, feeling slightly ridiculous, but excited too. I suppose that for a
man of action, to set out into the night with murder on his mind and a lady for
the rescuing would have been no great thing; but I was no man of action.

My watch told me it was
close on eight o’clock; the day had been hot, and had given way to a sultry,
cloudy evening. I was still shivering, however, and glad of my overcoat, though
most of the people I encountered were more lightly dressed than I was. My step
was purposeful, my left arm stiff from the pressure of the knife; I knew where
I was going. Where? To her apartment, of course, but in stealth, this time,
forewarned and careful. I had walked about half the way to the town centre when
the first cramps hit me; one moment they were sudden but bearable, like a stitch
in my side, the next they had me doubled up beside the road, almost on my
knees, cold sweat running down my face, my jaw locked in agony. The road was
not a busy one; no one came to help me. I sank to my knees by the roadside,
hardly even able to breathe, to wait it out. A breath, drawn out an eternity-long,
acid in my belly, my lungs … another breath. The pain ebbed, ceased.
Carefully, I stood up, afraid to move too quickly lest the pain came on again.
I straightened, took several deep breaths.

Satisfied that the
cramps, whatever had caused them, were indeed over, I began to walk again, with
more care, down the deserted road. I had hardly gone more than a hundred yards,
however, when the cramps hit me once more, flooring me immediately this time, paralysing.
The world spun around me like a carnival ride, I retched agonizingly, spat
blackness on to the road. Maybe I cried out; maybe I imagined it. My glasses
slipped on to the grass, I fumbled for them, touched only grass, tried to
stand, slipped, fell to my side. I think I suspected I was having a heart
attack, and with both hands clasped to my chest I managed to crawl on to the
road, where a street-lamp threw uncertain fragments of light in an ellipse
around me. Then, I fainted.

When I regained consciousness
(not, I believe, more than a few minutes after), the pain was gone, and the
street was still deserted. I stood up carefully, felt no hint of a cramp,
straightened up to my full height. I brushed my clothes, feeling rather foolish
now that my malaise was over. I was inclined to disbelieve the whole thing and
put it down to my lack of food, or perhaps the after-effects of whatever poison
they had injected into me, for now I felt quite recovered, indeed, I had the
beginnings of a healthy appetite. I found my glasses, wiped them and put them
on, immediately feeling better. I brushed my hat, replaced it on my head and
set off on my way again, feeling distinctly hungry now, and wondering whether I
should not stop somewhere on the way to Rosemary’s apartment for a bite to eat.
It would not do for me to pass out while I was there. A group of students,
strangers to me, passed me as I joined the main road into Cambridge; I caught
the sound of laughter as they went by, a merry call of: ‘Good evening!’

Maybe they had surprised
me; I started as I heard the voice and my steps wavered again. I was suddenly,
acutely conscious of the cold, of the sickness in the pit of my stomach. I felt
dizzy once more, raised my hand to touch the brim of my hat in greeting, and paused
in mid-gesture, my smile faltering on my lips. The hunger was suddenly very
acute. They passed me, still chattering; only one young fellow looked at me
askance as he went by, wondering, perhaps, if I were drunk. He was the closest
to me of the group; the lamplight reflecting from his broad, ruddy face as he
loomed out at me from the darkness. For an instant, my sense of perspective was
distorted; his young face seemed to rush towards mine like something grotesque
seen through a fishbowl, and I backed away; his vapid blue eyes, his broad
laughing mouth, the beads of sweat in the enlarged pores of his shaven cheeks
horribly magnified in my mind’s eye. The sudden heat of him was overwhelming; I
could
smell
him, ripe as a parcel of meat in the night, the scent of his
hair-cream only an accompaniment to the primal throb of his young blood. Before
I knew it, I had reached out a hand to touch him
…
but the party was
gone, laughing into the night, and I was left to stand beneath the lamp-post,
shaking and appalled at my thoughts. Surely, I had not been thinking
…?

I cursed under my breath
and went on my way. My experiences of the past twenty-four hours were giving me
delusions. I walked on, and the hunger stalked me, whetted, as I resumed the
hunt.

Two

ALICE PAINTED SWIFTLY, PRECISELY, THINKING
OVER the facts as she had read them in Daniel Holmes’s journal.

The facts. They loomed
overhead like apocalyptic birds, spiralling out of the dim past with their
message of destruction. It was tempting to go beyond the facts, to imagine all
kinds of rare and disturbing things, but Alice frowned at her canvas, her deft
fingers handling airbrush and paintbrush and masking gum and thinner as her
mind went over and over what she had read in compelling, primal rhythms of
thought.

She painted absently,
unconsciously, her hands moving deftly and quickly, her mind elsewhere. She
supposed that she had planned what she was going to do; had made preliminary
sketches, had mixed paints and wiped brushes, but hours later as she looked at
the canvas, she saw it with the eyes of a stranger. It was not that she had not
looked at it before, but as she had been working on it, she had only ever seen
details: a hand here, a patch of vegetation, a square of sky; she had seen only
effects of pigment and form. Now she saw a work of art, utterly individual,
compelling her to
look
at it. She took a step backwards, looked calmly
at the canvas for a long time, and listened to the deceptive beating of her
heart as everything swung slowly into place with the inevitability of a
pendulum.

A riverside scene again,
perhaps even the same place: Alice recognized the little twist in the riverbank,
the overhanging vegetation, the pale reflections of the trees in the dark
water. Again, everything was rendered in painstaking detail, somehow clearer
than reality, cleaner in shape and with its own lambency. Two figures stood in
the foreground, one facing Alice on the far side of the river-bank, though with
his face turned down towards the water, the other seen in profile, standing up
to his knees in the river, trousers rolled up to reveal thin, pallid legs,
comically foreshortened by the refraction of the light from the river’s
surface.

Both were young men,
dressed rather formally in suits with broad lapels; the one with the glasses,
facing Alice, was wearing a hat. Alice could not quite read their expressions,
but there was something in the way both of them were standing, something
strained,
as if by curiosity, but at the same time holding back from the object which
floated between them in the river. Alice squinted to see it, then as she
realized what she had painted, she gave an involuntary grimace. God! What on
earth had possessed her?

The canvas was small;
the figure should have been mercifully indistinct, but was not. On the
contrary, as she approached it, it seemed to move sharply into focus, so that
she saw it in far more detail than she would have liked. It was partly
submerged; she could distinguish its pallid bulk just below the surface,
resting bonelessly on the greenish water; could imagine the lazy movement of
the ripples around it. But she could see its face, turned towards her, saw it
and recognized it, despite the discoloration and the bloating, recognized the
mass of red hair which pooled around it; and as she peered closer, Alice
thought (no, she knew) she saw the expression on that ruined face. The eyes
piggy with swelling, the mouth open to reveal a black hole framed with yellow
and carnivorous teeth … the expression was triumph, morbidly out of place on
the face of that corpse, no, not even triumph; it was
rapture.

Alice was mesmerized; it
seemed that the closer she looked, the more detail she saw; she imagined every
twig, every blade of grass to contain infinities of divergences, though whether
this delusion came from the picture or her own subconscious, she never knew.
Maybe the picture was her way of dealing with ideas her rational mind was at
first incapable of accepting; while her conscious mind struggled to make sense
of what she had read in Daniel’s papers, her subconscious was sifting the
information and drawing (literally, it seemed) its own conclusions.

Alice had somehow
believed it all along.

In some ways, it was a
relief to accept this; believe in the irrational, she thought inconsequentially,
and anything becomes possible; even in Looking-Glass Land there were rules, if
you only knew where to look. She studied the picture further, paying especial
attention to the two figures standing by the water; it seemed to her that at
least one of them, the one with the hat, should be familiar. There was
something about the way he was standing, the slight stoop of his shoulders, the
light reflecting from the lenses of his glasses
…