The Evil Seed

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to all those who contributed to
bringing this book back from the dead. To my editor Francesca Liversidge, to
Lucie Jordan and Lucy Pinney, to Holly Macdonald who did the artwork. To my
heroic agent Peter Robinson, to Jennifer and Penny Luithlen and, as always, to
the book reps, book sellers and enthusiasts who work to tirelessly to keep my
books on the shelves. Thanks also to the many readers who persisted in asking
for the reissue of this book. It wouldn’t be here without you.

Author’s Note

THERE ARE DANGERS IN TRYING TO DIG UP THE
PAST. THERE must be rewards as well, I daresay, but as a child it was always
the dangers that appealed most to my imagination: the curse of the pharaoh’s
tomb, the artefacts removed, in the face of ancient warnings, from the ruined
Mayan temple, bringing catastrophe in their wake; the lost city guarded by the
ghosts of the dead. Perhaps, then, it was inevitable that this book, written so
many years ago that I had thought it safely buried, should haunt me so
persistently, clamouring for release, just as so many of my more avid and
curious readers have clamoured for its re-publication.

A little background,
then. First, let me say that it was never my intention to bury this book. Time
does that pretty well on its own; and I was twenty-three when I wrote it. That
makes this seed a good twenty years old, and when it was first planted, I had
no idea of what it might one day blossom into.

I was a trainee teacher
a few years out of Cambridge, living with my boyfriend (later to become my
husband) in a mining village near Barnsley. We had seven cats, no central
heating, no real furniture except for a bed, a drum kit and a couple of MFI
bookcases, and my computer was an unwieldy thing with only five hundred bytes
of RAM, which had an unpleasant mind of its own and a definite tendency to
sulk. The neighbours referred to us as
Them Hippies
because I had
decorated our walls with psychedelic murals, painted in acrylics and oils on to
the Anaglypta. I made the patchwork curtains myself, as well as re-grouting the
bathroom. My study was an upstairs bedroom, a kind of eyrie from which I could
see the whole village: terrace houses, cobbled streets, back yards, distant fields.
It always seemed to be foggy. I drove an ancient, bad-tempered Vauxhall Viva
called Christine (after the Stephen King novel), which broke down on a weekly
basis. Looking back now, I don’t even know how I found the courage to write. It
was freezing cold in my study; I had a little gas heater that threw out toxic
fumes, and some multicoloured fingerless gloves. Maybe I thought it was
romantic. My previous attempt at a novel,
Witchlight,
had been rejected
by numerous publishers. I believe my pig-headed, awkward side (which is still
the strongest part of me) took this as a kind of challenge. In any case, I
began writing
The Evil Seed
— what my mother came to call
That
Terrible Book —
and the idea slowly gained momentum, was galvanized into a
kind of life and finally attracted the attention of a reader employed by a
literary agency, which ultimately took me on.

Of course, I had no idea
of what I was doing. I had no experience of the literary world, no contacts, no
friends in the business. I had never studied creative writing, or even joined a
writers’ group. I didn’t have a long-term plan; I didn’t expect to make money.
I was simply playing
Can You?
— that game that all storytellers play,
following the skein of cherry-coloured twist along the crooked path through the
woods to find out where it leads them.

For me, it was Cambridge
— partly because I knew the place, and it seemed like the ideal setting for the
kind of ghost story I wanted to write. I’d had the idea originally when I was
just a student. On a visit to Grantchester, I happened to look in the cemetery
and saw an interesting gravestone, bearing the inscription:
Something inside
me remembers and will not forget.
That phrase, and the odd open-door shape
of the monument, sparked off the beginnings of this story. My plot was
ambitious; my style experimental. I was still too young to have quite found my
voice, and so I wrote in two voices: one, that of a middle-aged man, Daniel
Holmes, the other as a more conventional third-person narrator. I headed all the
chapters,
One
and
Two
alternately, to distinguish between the two
time frames; one being the present day, the other being just after the Second
World War. I made it a story about vampires without ever using the word itself;
a ghost story without a ghost; a horror story in which the mundane turns out to
be more unsettling than any mythology. But it wasn’t just a horror tale. It was
also about seduction; about lost friendship, about art and madness and love and
betrayal. I chose quite an ambitious structure — rather too ambitious for a
horror novel. But I didn’t think of what I was writing as genre fiction at all.
I was trying to recreate the atmosphere of a nineteenth-century Gothic novel in
a modern environment and a literary style. My publishers wanted the next Anne
Rice. I should have known
that
would cause trouble.

The book came out some
years later, under a somewhat gruesome black jacket. I’d wanted to call it
Remember,
but had been persuaded to change the name because my editor felt that it
sounded too much like a romance. I never felt sure of the new name. Still,
there’s nothing to beat the feeling of seeing your first book in print. I used
to lurk in bookshops, trying to spot someone buying my book, occasionally
removing copies from the horror section and putting them into literature.

It
wasn’t
literature,
of course. It was a piece of fairly juvenile writing from someone who yet had
to find her own style. At best, it was a heroic failure. At worst, it was
pretentious and over-written. For a long time I resisted the demands of my
readers to see it back in print — out of superstition, perhaps; my version of
the mummy’s curse. But given the chance to revisit this particular ruined
temple, I have found it strangely rewarding. Heroic failure though it may be, I’m
still rather fond of this first book of mine, in spite of all the time that has
elapsed and in spite of the way my style has evolved. There’s something in
there that still resonates, something I had thought dead and buried, but which
has come quite readily back to life. I’m not sure what my readers will make of
it. Students of creative writing may use it as a means of charting the progress
of one author over twenty years of trial and error. Others will just read the
story for what it is, and, hopefully, may enjoy it.

The editor in me has
made a few changes — only a few, I promise you — the story remains completely
intact, but I couldn’t resist brushing away some of the cobwebs that have
gathered in the passageways. Even so, you should read the inscription over the
door before you decide to follow me in. It’s written in Latin (or maybe in
hieroglyphics). It reads, roughly translated:

Caution
—
May Contain Vampires.

There. You can
come in now.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

PART ONE

The Beggar Maid

Introduction

Larger than life, face and hands
startlingly pale in a canvas as dark and narrow as a coffin, eyes fathomless as
the Underworld and lips touched with blood, Proserpine seems to watch some
object beyond the canvas in a mournful reverie. She holds the orb of the
pomegranate, forgotten, against her breast, its golden perfection marred by the
slash of crimson which bisects it, indicating that she has eaten, and thereby
forfeited her soul. Doomed to remain for half the year in the Underworld, she
broods, watching for the reflections of the far-away sun which flicker on the
ivy-crusted walls.

Or so we are led to
believe.

But she is a woman of
many faces, this Queen of the Underworld; therein lies her power and her
glamour. Pale as incense she stands, and the square of light which frames her
face does not touch her skin; she shines with her own lambency, her pose weary
as the ages, yet filled with the strength of her invulnerability. Her eyes
never meet yours, and yet they never cease to fix a certain point just beyond
your left shoulder; some other man, perhaps, doomed to the terrible bliss of
her love, some other chosen man. The fruit she holds is red as her lips, red as
a heart at its centre. And who knows what appetites, what ecstasies lie within
that crimson flesh? What unearthly delights wait in those seeds to be born?

From
The
Blessed Damozel,
Daniel Holmes

Prologue

There’s
rosemary, that’s for remembrance;

pray you, love, remember.

Hamlet,
4.5

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I HAD A LOT OF TOYS; MY
PARENTS were rich and could afford them, I suppose, even in those days, but the
one which I always remembered was the train. Not a clockwork train, or even one
of those which you can pull behind you, but the real thing, speeding through
countryside of its own, trailing a plume of white steam behind it, racing
faster and faster towards a destination which always seemed to elude it. It was
a spinning-top, painted red on the bottom half and made of a kind of clear
celluloid on top, beneath which a whole world glowed and spun like a jewel,
little hedges and houses and the edge of a painted circle of sky so clean and
blue that it nearly hurt you to look at it too long. But best of all when you
pumped the little handle (‘always be careful with that handle, Danny, never
spin your top too hard’), the train would come puffing bravely into view, like
a dragon trapped under glass and shrunk by magic to minuscule size; coming
slowly at first, then faster and faster until houses and trees blurred into
nothingness around it, the whine of the top lost in the triumphant scream of
the engine-whistle, as if the little train were singing with the fierce joy of
being so nearly there.

Mother, of course, said
that to spin the top too hard might break it (and I always took care, just in
case that might be true). But I think I believed, even then, that one day, if I
was careless, if I let my attention wander even for a moment, then the train
might finally reach its mysterious, impossible destination like a snake eating
itself, tail first, and come bursting, monstrous, into the real world, all
fires blazing, steel throwing sparks into the quiet of the playroom, to come
for me in revenge at its long imprisonment. And maybe some of my pleasure was
knowing that I had it trapped, that it could never escape because I was too
careful, and that I could watch it when I liked. Its sky, its hedges, its mad
race through the world were all mine, to set into motion when I liked, to stop
when I liked, because I was careful, because I was clever.

But then again, maybe
not. I don’t recall being a fanciful child. I was certainly not morbid.
Rosemary did that to me — did it to all of us, I suppose. She made us all into
children again, looming over us like the wicked witch in the gingerbread house,
ourselves little gingerbread men running around in circles, like little trains
under celluloid as she watched and smiled and pumped the handle to set her
wheels in motion.

My mind is wandering; a
bad sign, like the lines around my eyes and the thin patch at the top of my
head. There again, Rosemary’s doing. When the priest said, ‘Dust to dust’, I
looked up and thought I saw her again, just for a moment, leaning against the
hawthorn tree with a smile in her eyes. If she had looked at me, I think I
would have screamed. But she looked at Robert instead.

Robert was white, his
face hollow and haunted beneath his hat, but not because he saw her. I was the
only one who saw her, and only for a moment; a change in the light, a movement,
and I would probably have missed her. But I didn’t. I saw her. And that, more
than anything, is why I am writing to you now, to you, to my future beyond the
grave, to tell you about myself and Robert and Rosemary… yes, Rosemary.
Because she still remembers, you see. Rosemary remembers.

One