The Evil Seed (31 page)

You must kill the thing you
love, as I, in the end, was not wholly able to do.

They can be killed. I
know they can, and the action is as simple and dreadful as the taking of any
life. Any hand can do the deed, any mind formulate the, desire. But this is not
enough. Their strange life can be taken, but not kept. It re-emerges like some
deadly transparent thing of the sea, beckoned by the rays of the moon. They are
not immortal, though their kind has lived almost for ever.

Their seed is
everywhere, dormant, like a poison tree under the orchard, their roots
quartering the earth and spreading like maggots into the minds of men. The evil
seed may lie sleeping for a hundred years, before it wakes, shaking the snow of
winter from its face and looking up into the sunlight. The ancient priesthood
knew how to stamp out the seed of the night; they burnt it and buried it in
stone and lime, but still it lived, in memories, in tales, in song. Every child
who has longed to be Cinderella or the Wolf Boy, every young man who has
dreamed of raising a dead princess with his kiss has sown the night’s seed,
Proserpine’s underworld seed which grows the blood-red fruit.

Desire.

It takes a certain kind
of desire, but all it needs is one person, one soul, to call her back, and
willing or not, she will return. A single soul. That’s all it takes.

And, oh — to be
Rosemary. To burn bright as Rosemary
…
to wield that power for myself.
What would I give for that? What have I already given?

August …
die
she must. September, I remember.
If only I did. But my mind wanders so. She
had control over my mind that summer, as surely as she possessed my body. It
was a sweet possession, feeding me, feeding from me. I didn’t think about
Robert at all; Rosemary was ours, mine.

How long
it
might
have gone on, I do not know. I was comfortable in the warehouse; Elaine washed
my clothes and brought me food. She even gave comfort to my other appetites when
Rosemary was not available. Her only wish was to die, and there were many
things in those days that I did not understand, one of those being how Rosemary
could keep Elaine alive against her will. I had come to accept that all my
companions, except, perhaps, Rafe, had died once before; Elaine had (or at
least, believed she had) been dead for about fifty years, Java more than that.
Zach had died in France during the First World War, but remembered little about
it. That, or he was unwilling to speak of it. Anton had been killed by Elaine;
from what I could understand, his presence gave Rosemary some kind of a hold on
her. Perhaps he was her brother; I could never make her tell me. Perhaps — who
knows? — he was her son.

All Elaine could tell me
was that Rosemary had called them all back, though she knew nothing of how. I
supposed (wrongly, I see now) that she had used some kind of necromancy; I had
already steeped myself in dubious magic and ritual, and fancied I knew
something about the subject; perhaps I even had some notion of trying it for
myself some day. I never had the chance to try, but it happened that I did see
it in action, quite unexpectedly, late that August. The day Elaine finally
achieved her heart’s desire.

One

DO NOT THINK THAT INSPECTOR TURNER HAD
GIVEN UP THE search for the Cambridge murderer so easily. He had not. I was not
accused, but one tentacle of the search had begun to move once again in my
direction; or so Rosemary told me.

Maybe in our hunting we
had become complacent; maybe Turner had been observing us for sometime, and we
had not been aware of it. Maybe he had had Robert watched, and Rosemary had led
him to us unawares. Whatever the reason, we were in the warehouse, all of us,
one night, drinking and playing cards, when I was suddenly conscious of an
unaccountable sense of unease. Maybe there was a stronger psychic link between
Turner and myself than I knew at the time.

It was perhaps two o’clock
in the morning; we had had to wait longer than usual for Rosemary, and we had hunted
among the destitutes of Cambridge for our prey, wary of the late-night bars and
the occasional lights in the windows of the colleges. Passers-by were
infrequent after the police scare; people were wary of going out late, and we
were all the more noticeable for the lack of other folk in the town, but it was
always possible to find a tramp or vagrant lurking around the river or passed
out in the doorway of a shop. We had even acquired a taste for such victims, as
the alcohol in their veins gave the blood an extra piquancy.

We were all of us
glutted and somnolent, drinking wine brought by Java and Zach, and smoking, and
the room in which I slept was already littered with the empty bottles. I often
drank on those nights; I think it helped me to distance myself, to taste the
thrill of the hunt without the pangs of mind or conscience. The light was dim,
coming as it did from a couple of candles stuck into empty wine bottles; the
windows were covered with sacking. No one could have stumbled upon us by accident.

At first, I attributed
the sensation of being watched to paranoia; I drank another glass of wine to
still my nerves, but that did not allay my fears. In fact, the wine only seemed
to attune my new sensitivity even more.

At last, I could not
bear it. I turned to Rosemary.

‘Are you sure no one
followed us here?’ I asked.

She looked at me. ‘Poor
Daniel,’ she said. ‘Do you think I care? There are plenty of us to deal with
them if they did.’

In some ways, she was
very innocent.

‘I think there’s someone
outside,’ I said. ‘Watching the warehouse.’

Zach made a gesture of
dismissal; he had been out at about midnight, and had seen nothing.

No one seemed to want to
take my suspicions seriously, except Elaine, who looked up, her eyes huge in
her shadowy face.

‘I think Daniel is
right,’ she said. ‘I’ve been feeling uneasy, too. I think the police have been
watching us. I’ve heard odd sounds. I’ve seen people in the street.’

Zach shrugged.

‘Send the kid out to
see. No one will suspect a kid.’

Everyone agreed, except,
strangely, Elaine.

‘I’ll go with him,’ she
said. ‘It isn’t fair he should be sent out on his own.’

‘Afraid the bogeyman’ll
get him?’ said Zach. ‘What is he, scared of the dark?’ But Elaine, in some
ways, was as untouchable as Rosemary herself. A soft movement of material from
the shapeless coat she was wearing, a scuffling of feet, and she and Anton were
already gone. I followed them, at a distance, feeling unsteady because of all
the wine I had drunk. I heard the sounds of their footsteps on the cement floor.
I was just beginning to believe that I had imagined everything when I suddenly
heard a cry.

Elaine screamed, and I
heard her footsteps and Anton’s, suddenly much louder, running through the
building. Instinctively, I hid. A light flashed on close by me, and three
figures ran past. I heard a voice, shouting: ‘Stop! Police! Stop!’

The three men rushed
past me, dwarfing me, monstrous against the white wall. Sounds behind me, from
the room I had just left; I guessed it to be the others, finding their own way
out of the building, scuffling, shoving, pushing away from the light. I knew
that Zach and Java had a considerable armoury of weapons (stolen or otherwise
acquired) hidden in the building. I was inclined to believe that the police
might be in for a nasty surprise.

There was a large window
in the passage, which was loosely boarded up. Thinking quickly in my panic, I
yanked the boarding away and looked out. The drop was not high; I measured it
in my mind, then pulled myself through the uneven gap, looking around for more
police. I saw no one; the moonlight was veiled, shadowy. I ran out across the
yard and into the bushes and long grass at the back. I lay on my stomach in the
undergrowth, the smell of growing grass and cool earth in my nostrils. Across
the flat ground, I could hear raised voices. Two shots were fired in rapid succession.
I pressed my face against the ground.

When I happened to look
up a few seconds later, I saw three shadows; I guessed them to be Rafe, Java
and Rosemary, moving at speed across the yard. In a moment, they were out of
the gate and out of sight down the road. I dared to raise myself higher, and as
I did Elaine came running silently round the angle of the building, the tail of
her greatcoat flapping stiffly out behind her. I could hear her breath, sharp
in the quiet night air. She was crying, repeating something to herself which I
could not hear. As she reached the path to the gate, I saw her clearly, in the
faint moonlight, and realized that all was not well. She was limping, holding
her dark coat around her as if for protection. In her hand I could see that she
carried a knife, a long straight blade which flicked the light back at me like
a mirror. I think she saw me, as I crouched in the shadows, but she did not
betray me by as much as a glance. Instead, she turned to face the men who were
following her, with a cry of challenge or despair.

One of the officers
called to her: ‘Here! You! Stay where you are! Drop the knife!’

Elaine drew back a
little, holding the weapon in front of her. She knew how to use it; had done so
often enough already. The officer began to move towards her, while the other
two fanned out to take her from either side.

‘It’s no good,’ he said.
‘Put down the knife.’

Elaine took a step back,
away from me. For some reason, I felt that she was trying to lure the men away
from me, and I shrank back into the dark.

The man was not more
than a dozen feet away from her now; as he spoke, he had been edging gradually
closer, one hand in his pocket. Now, he lunged at Elaine. One hand brushed her
coat, but Elaine was too quick for him. The light arced from the knife she was
carrying, then the man was on his knees. His expression was one of stupid
surprise as his belly released its contents, then he began to scream, and I
cheered Elaine inwardly from where I was hiding. But almost as soon as it
happened, the second officer fired his gun, and she fell.

Now it was my turn to
stare; I kept expecting her to get up.

The two other officers
approached — I was not surprised to see Turner there. The other man went to his
fallen companion, who was still very noisily alive. Turner went to Elaine,
touched her with the toe of his shoe, knelt down to feel her heart. I saw her
face for a moment, still and very white, lips parted to show bared teeth. Then
I heard his voice, quiet and with a quaver in it which belied his apparent
calm.

‘It’s a woman,’ he said.
‘She’s dead.’ Then, with sudden viciousness: ‘Shit!’

He hesitated for a
moment, then regained some of his momentum. Addressing the other officer, who
was trying to move his injured companion into the car, he snapped: ‘Don’t waste
time. Call an ambulance. Hurry!’ He was obviously shaken; even though gun
regulations in those days were rather more lax than now, perhaps it was the
first time he had ever shot someone in the line of duty, and the man’s coat
Elaine had been wearing had probably deceived the officers as to her size and
the danger she might present. I almost sympathized with him, although the shock
of Elaine’s death had hit me hard. You see, I had really thought that we were
immortal.

For maybe ten minutes,
as I watched the ambulance arrive, the sound of its bell shockingly strident in
the quiet night, I waited for Elaine to come back to life. For that time I was
half-convinced that she would. It was only when she was loaded on to the
stretcher on a polythene sheet that I began to think that there would be no
resurrection. Even as the ambulance set off at full speed, its bell ringing, I
felt an absurd stab of hope: surely there would be no need for the bell to be
rung unless she were still alive? Cursing my stupidity, I realized that I was
forgetting the injured officer.

‘I really thought he was
here this time,’ said Turner in his quiet, intense way. ‘I smelt him, damn it.
We should have brought more men. Damn the Yard, I warned them there was
something going on here. What’s the good of bringing in three hundred men to
investigate if they’re going to waste their time fooling about the river? They
don’t know this town.’ For a moment, he brooded. ‘Who the hell was she?’ he
said. ‘Was she with him?’ The other shrugged.

‘Maybe we’re on the
wrong track altogether,’ he suggested. ‘Maybe Holmes isn’t our man.’

Turner shook his head. ‘He’s
our man. And he was here. I
know
he was.’

The second man seemed
less certain. ‘What about those others?’ he said. ‘I’m sure I saw at least two
more, but they must have got clean away. Where do they fit in?’

‘I don’t know.’ Turner
paused. ‘But if we find who the dead woman is, then we’ll find Holmes. I’m sure
of it.’

Their voices drifted,
and remotely, I considered my situation, still anaesthetised by wine, blood and
shock. For a moment, I wondered how they would react if I just stepped out of
hiding and said hello. Then the humour of the thought shifted, became something
poignant; suddenly I
wanted
to be able to step out, into their light,
like a child ending a game. I wanted to see their faces, to touch them, to run
to them to be comforted. It was more than just a desire to confess. I choose to
see what I felt then as the essential humanity in me in revolt, the thing
which, through everything I have undergone, has never quite abandoned me. I stood
up.

‘Inspector.’ His
expression was almost hilarious. I found myself smiling, an absurdly wide,
boyish grin. Turner brought out his pistol and pointed it at me.

‘Put your hands up,
Holmes,’ he said. ‘I want you to put your hands on your head and turn round. On
the count of three. One. Two. Three.’