The Evil Seed (26 page)

A black cat crossed my
path. It paused for a moment, one paw raised, then I saw its jaws open in a
soundless hiss, and it was off into the bushes. My stomach grinned, and I
realized that I was hungry again. Oh, not with the desperate, stabbing sickness
of that first time, but with a clenched anticipation which began at the root of
my groin and spread, with a quick burst of warmth, to my stomach.
Appetites,
she had said.

I cursed myself for
having waited so long. I should have left at midnight, when the bars closed; I
might have found a drunk on a bench, alone, a waitress coming home from work.
My mind recoiled from the thought, but my stomach kept on grinning as I
quickened my step. Suddenly, I needed Rosemary, I needed the touch of her cool
lips, her absence of passion, her purity. I wondered that not half an hour earlier
I had actually considered killing her … and for what? I could have no
loyalties, no jealousies; I sneered at myself and my bourgeois values; she
belonged to all of us, we belonged to each other. From my earlier state of
elation I was plunged into a sudden blackness. My hunger was no longer
pleasant; my grinning stomach twisted and cramped. My erection felt knotted,
cancerous. Tears of repentance clouded my eyes; I had betrayed her in my
thoughts, and she had turned away from me. I felt like Judas.

Later I began to
recognize this frame of mind, and I took measures to avoid it, but at that time
I really had very little knowledge of what had happened to me, and I became
very frightened. I suppose that users of certain kinds of drug must have
experienced this kind of reversal, but until I met Rosemary I had really been
very sheltered, and I had not been prepared in any way for the hurricane of
conflicting passions into which she had swept me.

It was then that I felt
a touch at my elbow, and my nostrils caught a sudden, half-pleasant odour of
weeds and damp. Someone whispered my name, and I turned, with a joyful terror.
It was Elaine, one of my companions of the previous night, the waiflike, wan
girl with the child.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ said
Elaine softly, ‘I’ve been looking for you.’

‘Why?’

‘I knew you’d be like
this.’

‘Like what?’

‘We call it “the little
death”,’ she explained. She had the gentlest voice I had ever heard. ‘You get
used to it after a while.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I
said.

‘I don’t expect you do,’
said Elaine, ‘but you will. You have to eat, you know.’ She gave the word ‘eat’
a bizarre inflexion which made me shudder; it was as if she had said: ‘You have
to die.’

I looked up, my face
wet, and noticed her for the first time. She was not especially beautiful, and
when Rosemary had been there, I had not spared her a glance. My first
impression had been one of long, tangled hair like that of a storybook witch,
and giant, dark eyes in a smudgy face. Looking at her again, I saw that she did
have a kind of passive beauty, not the beauty of Rosemary, but something deep
in the bones of her face. Starved, I thought; she looks starved.

‘How old are you?’ I
asked.

She laughed, softly,
without joy. In the shadows, her face was paper-white, and seemed to hover, disembodied,
above the collar of the black coat she wore. She looked terribly young.

‘Seventeen? Twenty?’

Elaine turned her face
away with a tiny sound, and I realized she was crying.

‘How old are you?’ I
cried, realizing as I did that my meaning was different from the first time I
asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Who are you?’ Suddenly
my need to
know
was very urgent. ‘Where do you come from?’

She stared at me, as if
she did not understand my question, or as if the whole concept was ludicrous. ‘No
one. Nowhere.’

‘You have to eat,’ she
repeated. It was the uppermost thought in her mind, and from the pocket of the
coat which dwarfed her, she drew out a package, wrapped in cellophane paper. It
was warm and loathsome to touch. I slipped it into my pocket.

‘Thanks.’

Elaine stared at me, and
smiled, looking like a frightened child.

‘You don’t understand,
do you?’ she said.

‘You love her. We all
love her.’ She looked unhappy, as if repeating a truth in which she had long
since ceased to believe.

‘I love her.’ It was
nearly true.

‘I was a model. People
painted me. At first I used to work in a milliner’s shop, you know, serving
customers … I helped to make the hats, too; I used to be good at that …
then some men came one day, and they saw me. They said I was a stunner. They
paid me really well, just to sit, with a book or a harp, while they painted me.
I was sixteen. Then I met Rosemary. She wasn’t called Rosemary then, she was
called Maria. But that wasn’t her real name either.’

‘When?’

Elaine ignored me. ‘She
was a model, too,’ she went on. ‘The most beautiful thing I ever saw. She was
engaged to be married to a young man; another painter, William. I liked him.
She was seeing a married man, too. She called him Ned. He was crazy about her
as well, but he wouldn’t leave his wife. She didn’t care about either of them,
really; she would create scenes you can’t imagine, threaten suicide, but inside
she was just playing games. She told me, made friends with me, taught me.’

‘She chose you.’ I was
beginning to understand.

‘The young man, William,’
Elaine looked at me pleadingly. ‘He went mad. He burned all his paintings. He
went for her with a knife.’

‘Yes?’

‘Then he killed himself.’
Elaine looked at me bleakly. ‘He thought he was free of her,’ she said. ‘But
she came back. She always comes back.’ Elaine turned away, and I knew that she
was crying again.

‘Elaine,’ I began
clumsily.

She did not look at me;
her face was lost in the rags of her hair. Despair emanated from her like a
darkness. I was helpless in the face of it; she was like a damned soul, and the
keening sounds which came from her mouth were bleak as winter wind.

‘Elaine.’ I turned her,
forcibly, to face me; pushed back her hair. Streaked with dirt and tears, her
face looked unmistakably erotic, and I began to see the beauty there, which had
caused men to call her a ‘stunner’. I opened up my arms and held her; light and
thin as a child, she was, huddled up in that man’s coat, and the new appetites
which Rosemary had awakened in me stirred greedily. I almost expected her to
draw away from me; but as I unbuttoned her coat, drawing my own around her body
so that she should not be cold, then her dress, leaving her standing in only a
torn and dirty shift, she melted towards me with a sigh and a sob. Her white
skin was smooth as ivory, and her limbs were like ice, but there was warmth
there too, warmth upon which I gorged myself, there on the road, heedless of
who might see us. She remained passive throughout our lovemaking, childlike,
without passion, but I sensed her despair abate a little and when I had
finished, my face flushed, she leaned towards me and kissed me, very gently, on
the cheek.

‘I was beautiful once,’
she said.

‘You’re beautiful now.’
I said it because she wanted me to, but she ignored me.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Help
me.’

‘How?’

She looked at me. ‘Kill
her.’

I stared.

‘Kill her. Please. I can’t
bear it, every night the same. Do it while you still can. God! It’s been such a
long time. I was glad he killed her. I thought I’d be free. But she came back.
She found me again. Since then—’ Her voice broke, and I felt despair flood from
her again. ‘So long and she won’t let me die … so long with nothing but
blackness and blood. She won’t let it end. Oh, kill her, please …

I shrugged, once more in
control. My meeting with Elaine, as well as the presence of the parcel of food
in my pocket, had restored my feeling of power, my ambition. I might kill
Rosemary, I thought. But not for Elaine. She would be mine, then, as she was
Rosemary’s now; she and the others with her.

I looked down at her,
but she was crying again, her face hidden in her hair. Without a second glance,
I turned and walked away down the road to Cambridge, my shadow, faint in the
greenish dawn, spindling before me. My hand crept to check that the package in
my pocket was still there; it was, and despite the cellophane wrapping I
thought I caught the ripe and dizzying scent of meat. I quickened my pace,
instinctively. I didn’t want to be on the road when the sun came up.

One

WHEN I RETURNED, ROBERT WAS STILL ASLEEP,
SPRAWLED helplessly across my bed. Behind his eyelids, the blur of his eyes
moved restlessly from side to side. I latched the door behind me, feeling
light-headed from hunger and lack of sleep, and made myself comfortable in the
chair, keeping my eyes on Robert.

Elaine’s package was
still warm in my pocket, and I drew it out, feeling queasy with hunger. It was
easier the second time; the meat was rich and flavoursome, its texture at the
same time appealing and repellent. I ate it quickly, watching Robert all the
time. A few times, he twitched, cat-like, his eyes moved, but did not open, and
I finished the meat, cleaned the cellophane wrapping with my fingers, and
licked them like a greedy child. I waited for him to awaken, refreshed and
strengthened by the food, and once again perfectly certain of what I was going
to do, and as I watched and waited, my thoughts turned again, compellingly, to
Rosemary.

What Robert had seen the
night before, whatever it was that had distressed him so much that it had sent
him running to me to be comforted, he had not been able to tell me, except in
broken, breathless phrases. He thought he had seen Rosemary having some kind of
an attack, he had said, had thought he had seen her
change
somehow, had
glimpsed — or thought he had glimpsed — blood. I had heard enough to guess,
however, that whatever it was, he had no proof, no certainties which might
endanger either Rosemary or any of the rest of us. But I could not let him go
without knowing that for sure. Strange, the ease with which I slipped into my
new role; strange, how easy it was for
us
to become
them.
As I
looked at my sleeping friend, I felt nothing of friendship. I looked into the
face of the stranger who had been my best friend, and all I saw was Rosemary.

What had he seen?

‘Dan … ?’ The voice
rose, waveringly; my eyes caught the gleam of his in the shadows.

‘Dan,’ he said again.

‘I’m here.’

‘I’m sorry about last
night,’ he said. ‘You must have thought me a damn fool.’ He smiled at me
appealingly. ‘I can hardly remember what I said,’ he went on. ‘You must have
guessed I wasn’t quite sober. All the upset about Rosemary, you know. I wasn’t
myself, you understand.’

I listened as Robert
retold the tale more rationally, in the light of day.

I nodded when it seemed
expected of me, hardly able to mask my contempt. I was relieved that he suspected
nothing, of course, but at the same time I felt disappointment in him. To think
that Robert, whom I had always thought of as being so shrewd, could have been
face to face with that terrible glamour and not seen it; that he could have
held it in his arms, and not seen it for what it was
…

He had even managed to
convince himself that he had been drunk the night before; better to believe
that than to be forced into believing that the world is a wheel within a wheel,
and that a beloved red-haired girl may walk the night with monsters. After
coffee, I managed to persuade him to leave. By this time I was feeling very
tired; bright motes danced behind my eyes, and besides, I had my own truths to
confront, alone, in the privacy of my room. I was supportive, comforting,
sympathetic, and between my comfort, my sympathy and my support, I managed to manoeuvre
him to the door at last. I closed it with a sigh of relief, moved to my
armchair, sat down. I stuck my hands in my pockets, and my fingers encountered
the rolled-up cellophane package in which Elaine had wrapped her present. For a
second, I was reminded of my schooldays, of the neat little packets of
sandwiches with which my mother always crammed my pockets — ham, cheese, pickle
and onion, and sometimes a thick slice of plum cake, to be opened and eaten
with great care, under the lid of a school desk, in the dim yellow light of the
winter schoolroom — the memory was so unexpected and so incongruous that I gave
a shocked snort of mirth.

Suddenly, someone
knocked on the door.

I stopped, all hilarity
gone. Silence. Not a sound.

‘Who’s there?’ No
answer. Only that eerie silence.

I opened the door,
bracing myself for horrors. For a split second, I actually
saw
them; the
shambling Freudian beasts of my imaginings; a monster’s monsters. Then the
shapes coalesced into one shape: neither small nor tall, a neat and felt-hatted
shape, features sharp and hard, cynical blue-grey eyes like broken glass.

It was Inspector Turner.

Two

DOCTOR MENEZIES WAS OLDER THAN ALICE HAD
EXPECTED: a big, fat man of about fifty, with thick, black hair and a full
beard, who wore his blue pinstriped suit with reluctance and unease, as if he
would have been more at home in a lumberjack shirt and jeans. His voice seemed
less sharp than it had sounded on the phone, and Alice noticed that he moved
his legs with difficulty, as if the joints were painful. Sharp, colourless eyes
caught her glance as she preceded him into the office, and he smiled.

‘Polio,’ he explained
shortly, manoeuvring himself into an armchair by the window. ‘Do take a seat.’

He gestured towards a
couple of chairs by the side of a desk; Alice sat down. Her eyes flicked over
the room, liking it. Green plants in front of a wide, sunny window, a Thai
sculpture on a stand, some Indian abstract prints.