The Evil Seed (34 page)

‘I won’t hurt you,’ I
repeated, pulling my flask from my coat pocket. I shook it, guessed it to be
about half-full.

‘Here, drink this,’ I
said, ‘it’s whisky.’ A grimy hand struck mine, knocking the flask aside. But I
forced it against his mouth. Some of it went in. I heard him swallow, noisily,
like a dog, and then I heard the sound of him sobbing.

‘I followed you,’ he
said, almost inaudibly. ‘I didn’t know where else to go.’ He was silent for a
minute; I used his own technique on him, waiting for him to say more.

‘What did you see?’ I
said at last.

‘I was in the lavatory.
Someone came to the door. Higgins answered. It was a girl. He asked her in …
Oh God!’

‘You saw her,’ I said. ‘You
saw Rosemary.’

‘Rosemary … I never
thought
…
’

‘What else did you see?’

‘She came in,’ he said,
in his whispering voice. ‘And those others came in behind her. I hid …’ He
whimpered, a pitiful sound.

‘What else did you see?’
I hated to torture him, but I had to know.

‘She went into the
morgue … and I heard her say:

“Elaine”. Just that.’

‘Is that all she said?
Just her name?’ I could hardly believe it had been so easy. And yet, thus had
Christ raised Lazarus. ‘Come forth.’ Some miracles should never be performed.

‘Turner. I want you to
listen,’ I said. ‘I need to talk to you.’

He looked at me, his
eyes wide. ‘You know, I didn’t believe you,’ he said. ‘I thought you were
lying, or mad. I was so sure of everything.’

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I
know a place. It’s safe. I’m going to take you there. I want to talk to you.’ I
lowered my tone. ‘I need your help.’

He turned his gaze
towards me.

‘Help?’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘It’s
safe where we’re going. You can sleep there.’ I hesitated, thinking that in his
condition, he might not be in a state to help anyone. Yet, I thought, if he
was mad he might still be of some use. I had no use for sanity on my side. What
I needed was madness.

‘You’re going to help
me,’ I told him. I put my arms around his shoulders and half-lifted him to his
feet.

‘We’re going to kill
Rosemary.’

I looked after Turner for three days, in
the first of a deserted row of houses just outside Grantchester. He was shocked
and terrified at first, but began to recover as time passed. I developed a kind
of friendship with him, spending as long as I could with him while the others
were sleeping. I brought him food, clothes, bottles of wine. Most of all, I
talked to him. I told him what I planned to do, no longer for my own sake, but
to salvage the little humanity left in me. He had moments of sanity
interspersed with long periods of mania, reminding me forcibly of myself in
those first dark days of the hunger.

When the little death
came upon me, I went out and hunted on my own, or I went to Elaine for scraps
of the night’s hunt, but I did not run with the others again. For one, I was
too afraid of the police, who had now launched a national inquiry into what
they called the ‘Cambridge Police Station Tragedy’. Hundreds of extra police
had been sent for from London, and policemen patrolled the night from ten o’clock
onwards, questioning any passer-by. A semi-official curfew had been
established, although Lamb of the Yard had proclaimed that the killings had
probably been the work of a lunatic. So while the police chased rumours and
false trails through the town Turner and I talked, feverishly, like two
lunatics ourselves. I went over my findings and my theories, sharing every
thought with him.

Rosemary permeated all
our conversations. Rosemary at her most beguiling and her most deadly. I
shared her with him like a lover; the sweetness of her and the poison. With
him, I exorcized her, invoked her, murdered her a thousand times in thought and
intention. For three days we contemplated murder, then we struck.

It was the last day of
August.

Two

SHE WAS NOT CERTAIN WHAT SHE WOULD HAVE
DONE IF anyone had been in the house; but they were not. It was boarded up and
deserted, as were the houses all around, and she knew, with sudden certainty,
that this was where the creatures met.

Looking at the place for
the first time in daylight, she saw that the roof had partially collapsed, the
slates stripped off to reveal the blackened beams. All but the very highest
windows were broken, half-shielded from the rain by boards, but at one
glass-fanged window the rags of a scorched curtain still remained, flapping in
the wind like a black flag. Cautiously, she came closer, until she was facing
the door. This too was broken, the wood rotten and the hinges half-torn away so
that it stood ajar, almost invitingly, like a door in a fairy tale. Behind a
cracked glass panel to her left, Alice could still read the names of the
erstwhile tenants:

S. . PPER 1

. . SHLEY 2

..KIN 3

KEN…Y 4

The house had stood
empty for decades. Alice looked around, but the street was deserted. Then,
taking a deep breath, she pushed the door and stepped forwards into the
darkness.

The house was damp and
stank of urine, mould and an under-smell of the circus. The nightwalkers were
not the only ones to have used it as a hiding-place: on the ground floor Alice
found traces of other visitors, sweet-wrappers and silver paper and plastic
bags and empty tubes of glue. A box of broken toys had been dumped in one
corner of the room, but dust covered it in a thick veil. Alice found herself
wondering what had happened to those young trespassers, and she shivered.

The house was so silent
and deserted that until she reached Rosemary’s apartment she had almost begun
to believe that she had been wrong, and that the night-walkers had found some
other place to hide; but as soon as she pushed the door to apartment 2 ASHLEY
she knew that her instincts had been right.

There was a mattress in
one corner, piled with blankets, and a table, and some chairs lined up against
one of the smoke-blackened walls. Wine bottles littered the floor; a pack of
cards had been left spilled across the rotten boards. A shoe-box containing
syringes and silver paper on the window-ledge. Candles in empty wine bottles.
Tied to the door-handle, a white rag, marked with bloody hieroglyphs.

The atmosphere and the
sense of predestination almost paralysed Alice. It seemed to her that there
were ghosts in the very air she breathed, ghosts like fumes invading her mind
so that before long she was the one who felt unreal. Her sense of scale
temporarily eluded her; here she was infinitely tiny, helplessly huge,
suspended in limbo, racing faster than light. She was a puppet, jerking here
and there on a cherry-coloured twist of string, dancing, spinning, struggling
to breathe …

Alice tore herself from
the paralysis and ran to the window, gasping air. The ghosts and illusions dissipated,
and she forced calm upon her fraught spirit, learning to breathe again,
reassembling her fractured thoughts.

There could be no more
cowardice, she thought. No more hope of evading this commitment she had somehow
accepted. When she had escaped from Joe, a hot stitch biting into her side as
she ran down alleys and dodged under archways, she had somehow shed most of the
burden of fear which had paralysed her. How it had happened she did not know;
she simply knew that somewhere between Cambridge and Grantchester she had
decided to
survive,
and that however ill-equipped she might appear to
bring down Rosemary and her friends, she would give whatever she had to do it.

A sound jolted Alice out
of her reverie, and she turned, the roots of her hair beginning to stiffen. In
a single movement she had pulled out the knife and had turned to face the
slight, grey figure which had detached itself from the shadows to speak to her.

‘So you’re here at last.’

Alice, the knife held
out in front of her, adrenalin-charged blood singing in her ears, recognized
the sparse grey hair, stubbly face, rheumy eyes and pink muffler; it was the
tramp she had met the previous night. For a moment she hesitated, but,
remembering Joe, held on to the knife.

The old man nodded,
almost covertly. He seemed sober now; maybe it was still too early in the
evening for him to be really far gone.

‘What are you doing
here?’ Her lips were dry.

The old man nodded
again.

‘Same as you,’ he said. ‘Just
about. I reckoned you’d be here sooner or later.’ His critical glance took in
the knife, her pallor, the stubborn look behind her fear. Scared, he thought,
but behind all that, there was an underlying toughness of which even she
herself was not aware.

‘Remember me?’

Alice nodded, still
wary.

The old man smiled, not
pleasantly.

‘I’m not what you think,’
he said. ‘It’s just a good way of getting people to leave me alone.’

Alice narrowed her eyes
at him, re-assessing her earlier opinion.

‘I remember you from the
other night. Had a look to you, like you were planning something.’

The voice had changed
subtly, had sharpened, the back was straighter, the eyes less rheumy.

‘I’m not sure I know
what you’re talking about,’ said Alice.

‘Of course you know. I
know what you saw in Grantchester that night, and I know you’ve read Daniel
Holmes’s book.’ He took a step towards her, as if to punctuate what he was
saying.

‘Don’t move.’ Her eyes
fixed his with a hard light, and the point of the knife rose a little. ‘How did
you know about that?’

The man shook his head
with a little gesture of irritation.

‘Put that down, girl, we
don’t have time.’

‘Not a chance,’ said
Alice. ‘I’ve had that trick pulled on me once today already. Now if you want to
talk—’

Suddenly, the old man’s
hand snaked out towards Alice. Before she had time to lash out, he had grabbed
the hand which was carrying the knife and twisted it sharply. His fingers
jabbed stiffly into the back of her hand. Alice jerked backwards instinctively,
and found that he was holding the knife half an inch from her throat, his other
hand locking her left arm firmly and agonizingly at the elbow and shoulder, the
pain of the lock forcing her on to her toes. He held her for a couple of
seconds longer, then released the hold.

‘Here’s your knife back,’
he said, holding it out by the handle. ‘Next time you have to pull it on someone,
use it to cover your body and keep them at arm’s length. Don’t just poke it at
them like that.’ His voice was amused. ‘Now, will you please put it away?’

Alice pocketed the
knife, still rubbing her aching shoulder.

‘What do you want?’

‘You’ll want to hole up
in the house for a while. If you go right up to the roof, you’ll find there’s a
little room there with a stash of stuff, couple blankets, chocolate, flask of
tea, all that. You can take what you want. You wait there till night comes. I’ve
got some cans of petrol piled up there, too, you’ll know what they’re for
later. You—’

‘Wait a minute,’ said
Alice, recovering from her astonishment. ‘Who are you? What the hell are you
doing here, anyway?’

‘I might well ask you
the same thing,’ he said. ‘I’ve been watching you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s time you
realized what you were up against,’ he replied. ‘Time you let an old man tell
you what he knows.’ She looked at him, wondering for an instant whether he was
as sober as he seemed. His red-rimmed eyes were crazy as broken glass. He
nodded.

‘You’re a bright girl.
You know who I am.’

Suddenly, Alice thought
she did.

‘You’re Inspector
Turner,’ she said.

He smiled, showing a
broken tooth.

‘A lot of water under
the bridge since there was any Inspector,’ he said. ‘The Inspector died when
that girl came back from the dead. What’s left is what you see. I’m Alec now,
Alice, my girl, just Alec.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s not so bad, you know,’ he added.

‘I thought …’ Alice’s
voice cracked. ‘I thought maybe…’

‘You thought I was an
undercover policeman come to save all at the last minute?’ He rasped a phlegmy
chuckle. ‘No. there was a time
…
’ His voice trailed away. ‘But that’s
all over. She killed me, like she killed Daniel Holmes. It’s just taken a
little longer, that’s all.’

He sat down on the
window-ledge, his back to the fading greenish light. ‘He told me about the
diary, you know,’ he said. ‘Before he went into Fulbourn. About leaving it in
the church wall. He reckoned that if Rosemary ever came back, that would be
where she would go. He wanted to be cremated, so that she wouldn’t be able to
raise him. But he wanted the diary kept safe. Because he’d got it right, you
see. Right for the first time yet, and too late for it to do him any good, but
right enough for someone else to finish her off for good, for ever. What we did
in the flat, he and I—’ Here he broke off and spat, raspingly. ‘But he did have
the right idea. She can be killed, and kept buried, so long as no one gets left
to raise her. That was it. It was that simple. I knew soon as I saw you that
you were going to be the one … you had that look on you. But now …’ He
stopped again, clenched his fists in their fingerless gloves. ‘You’re not ready
to deal with them, yet,’ he said. ‘You think they’re going to come like lambs?
You’ve seen them; she’ll come with the others, the ones Holmes called
nightwalkers. You’ve never seen them at work. I came with you; came ready. You
think you’ll do anything against all of them at once?’

‘I’m ready,’ said Alice,
not quite steadily. ‘As ready as I can be.’

‘With that baby knife?
Do you really think you’ll use it?’

‘I thought …’

‘You didn’t think. There’s
more important things for you to do than to get yourself killed. You have to do
what the old man missed; only you can do that right. Leave me out there, in the
alley between the houses. I’ll deal with the ones that come.’