The Evil Seed (22 page)

No one moved for a moment
or two, then Rosemary stepped forwards.

‘We won’t be very long,’
she said.

Eve ignored her. ‘I’m
locking up.’ She began to move towards the door.

Java stepped to one side
to bar her way.

‘What’re you doing?’ she
said, an edge of fear lending animation to the flat voice.

Java ignored her.

‘Tony!’ This time the
edge of fear was unmistakable, and the man who was mopping the bar looked up
for the first time. His eyes met Java’s.

What happened then I
could never quite recall; the unreality of it all washed over me like a
breaker, tipping the world sideways, and when it stabilized a few moments later
it was over. I think that it was then that Java drew out his knife; no, the
knife
sprang
from the palm of his hand like an animal, and with one
liquid movement it touched the woman’s throat. A touch was all it took; she
gave a cry of surprise, then the blood flowered down the front of her blouse.
She clutched at the wound, eyes getting rounder and rounder; the blood sprayed.
Java had never ceased to look into the eyes of the man at the bar. I don’t
remember who went for the man first. I think it might have been Zach and
Elaine. Anton was groping for the body of the woman; blood sprayed his face,
and I saw the look of
hunger
there, the bright gleam of greed in his eyes,
older and more corrupt than any child’s eyes have a right to be; but the hunger
was on me then, terrifying and uncontrollable, and before I knew what I was
doing, I had pushed the child out of the way and was feeding myself. Blood
starred the lenses of my glasses; the world swam in shades of red. I fed
messily, without any other thought than appeasing the blood-god within me,
biting at the flesh of the woman’s throat, feeling her shudder beneath me.
Anton whimpered like a puppy, trying to push past me again, clawing at the body
with his little hands; somehow we both fed. As I rolled over, drugged and
sated, I saw the man at the bar — at least, what they had left of him. They had
ripped him apart, from belly to throat. Elaine had found the till and was stuffing
coins and banknotes into her pockets. Java had found the bottles of oil for the
stove and was splashing the floor and furniture with it. Rosemary was cleaning
the blood from Rafe’s face with her tongue, a mist of tiny droplets sprayed
across her eyes like a mask. She looked up and smiled at me.

‘We are the chosen ones,’
she said. ‘That’s what we are. And I chose you. Remember that, and be loyal to
me. Be mine, Daniel.’

Two

ALICE MANAGED TO GET TO SLEEP AT ABOUT SIX
THAT morning. Ginny knocked on the door at half past five and went straight to
her room without a word; Alice let her go with a guilty quickening of the heart
as she thought of the box she had stolen. Her vision was scrambled from too
long trying to decipher Daniel Holmes’s crabbed, neurotic handwriting, and her
head felt terribly heavy. Perhaps after a couple of hours’ sleep she might be
able to see things in a better perspective. Perhaps she might wake up and find
that all the events of that night had been a dream.

She awoke at eight o’clock,
pulled on her robe and tiptoed down to her workroom. For a long time she looked
calmly at the box and the picture she had painted. She knew that it was a false
calm, but she welcomed it all the same, allowing her perception of the
situation to shift again, like sand, into a new pattern.

She would have to
confront Ginny, she decided; maybe the girl would admit everything as soon as
Alice told her what she already knew. Perhaps Ginny needed help.

She looked at her watch:
twenty past eight. Joe would be coming round soon, she imagined. She would have
to talk to Ginny before he arrived.

‘Tea, Ginny?’ That was better. Her voice
was steady now, her smile confident.

Ginny was sitting by the
fire, still barefoot, but wearing jeans and a dark jumper which highlighted
her bright hair. She shook her head.

‘You look ill.’

‘I didn’t sleep much. I
was too busy thinking about last night.’

Ginny looked at her
blankly.

‘You can tell me,’ Alice
went on. ‘I know more about
it
than you think. I know you’re in trouble,
and I don’t think you know how to handle it.’

Ginny just looked at her
silently, giving no indication she even understood.

‘Rafe and Java,’ said
Alice, coming closer. ‘Do they live in that old house?’

Ginny shrugged. ‘Don’t
you know?’ She shook her head. ‘But they are your friends.’

‘Sometimes.’ Ginny had
begun to rock gently in her chair, her eyes distant, like those of a child.
Alice took her hand.

‘Ginny. Look at me.’ The
lavender-grey eyes fixed on hers, sweet and empty, as if the soul behind them were
simply a blank, with no more life in it than a mirror.

‘I found the syringes in
your cupboard. I saw you go out with Java. Is he selling dope? And what else is
he doing? At the church … what was he doing there?’

Ginny simply stared at
her.

‘Ginny. You have to tell
someone. You have to get help before you become too involved. If it was only
drugs they were involved with it might be OK to keep quiet, but I was there in
Grantchester that night. I saw you digging in the churchyard. And what about
the box in your suitcase? I know where that came from. It was in the wall of
the church, marked with a brass plaque. Why did they take it, Ginny? What are
they doing it all for?’

But Ginny had withdrawn
again. And half an hour later, when Joe knocked on the door, Ginny was still
sitting there, looking into the fire and rocking gently to herself, like a
cursed princess in a fairy tale.

One

I SUPPOSE THEY THINK I’M SAFE HERE; SAFE
FROM MYSELF and my delusions. I have a nurse to bring me a soothing drink of camomile
tea when I go to sleep; I much prefer whisky, but they tell me it excites me.
On sunny days I am allowed to go for a walk around the grounds, but I prefer to
stay in the library. Sometimes my doctor comes to keep me company; I beat him
at chess. I like him, inasmuch as I like anyone here, and I talk to him, though
I am certain he does not believe me. My proof, the books and the pictures, mean
nothing to him. His concern is with my mind, though I tell him that only my
soul is worth saving now. A young man, Doctor Pryce, young and strong and
filled with laughter, like Robert before he met Rosemary.

He tries to help. He
even brings me books, all the ones I ask for; he shakes his head and grins and
says:

‘They’d have my neck for
this if they knew I was encouraging you.’ But he brings them: Frazer and Crowley
and Ahikar from the Apocrypha, even the writers of fiction, Lovecraft and Poe
and the modern ones, whose names I forget, book titles emblazoned in red foil
on cheap black paperback covers. All those whom I thought might have met
Rosemary in one or another of her aspects, kindred spirits who might somehow
give me a clue as to how to escape her, though I never find what I am looking
for. He sits quietly with me as I search; sometimes I read him passages from
works in Latin and French and German. I do not read Romanian, which is a pity,
as many of the texts I need are not publicly available in translation. I send
money to the local university, so that impoverished and unquestioning students
can do the work for me, but it is a slow and impatient business. The young man
nods and seems to listen; sometimes I find myself wanting to warn him. All your
knowledge, I want to tell him, is nothing in the face of
her
knowledge,
her hunger. If she were to look at you, you would become what I became, with
all your intellect and your certainties. Because Rosemary remembers. Remembers
and waits.

My research is
fruitless, I know; there is no way to stop her. I tried once; maybe she was
careless. It took her thirty years to return; by now she will have been reborn.
Maybe by the time you read these pages, she will be full-grown. All I know is
that I will be dead; maybe by my own hands, maybe by hers. She will never allow
me to interfere again.

The young man is
logical; he tries to use my research to prove me wrong. How can she be a
vampire, he says, when the medieval accounts of vampirism in Romania do not
correspond in the least with what you believe you know of her?

No factual or folkloric
source describes a creature such as you have described.

No name fits her, I tell
him; in the same way, all names do. All I know is that she is old, as old as
the corruption from which she came, though at the same time monstrously young.
She is something which transcends legend, as God transcends childish
superstitions of loaves and fishes. I-suppose that Jung would have called her
an evil anima; you see, I can speak in your language too, I can use your
arguments better than you yourself, but that cannot exorcise the demoness who
rides my dreams. The image of blood which transcends all my visions of her
sickens and excites me, as I suppose you would say my conception of my own
sexuality appals me.

I am a man who prides
himself on intellect and rational thinking; inconceivable, that there should be
such thoughts beyond my consciousness; repressed, they only grow, like mould in
a crypt. The part of myself I cannot accept takes on a different identity. I
call the entity Rosemary. I imagine that it is she who is responsible for the
darkness within myself. I make it into a werewolf fantasy, of murder and
feeding by night, of blood, mystic river of the subconscious; Rosemary the
vampire, irresistible and lethal … I substitute the kiss she gives me for an
act of aggression, a bite (is not every sexual act an act of aggression, and am
I not inherently afraid of women?) which makes me into an imitation of herself.
Part of me wants it — to be wanted, loved, aggressed — the other part fears it,
disassociates itself once more, and distorts my natural desire for a beautiful
woman into something perverse, monstrous, even to the point of deluding myself
into believing that I was guilty of the most bestial of atrocities.

You see, I tell him, I
speak your language. A guilt complex involving my basic fear of women, perhaps
a latent homosexual tendency emerging on the event of the tragic death of my
best friend
…
and here we have all the classic elements of a neurosis.

He smiles doubtfully; he
has heard me speak in this fashion before. The first time, he was elated; could
it be that at last I was showing some proof of recovery? He has heard me speak;
he is puzzled at the apparent coherency of my arguments, my apparent sanity in
all areas except one.

She is not a neurosis.

She is neither vampire
nor werewolf but a real entity. Fragments of her walk the pages of books, but
her reality is something more real even than that; she is an infection of the
soul, no human being, but something older and more archetypal than the most
familiar of Jung’s figures. I call her the Blessed Damozel.

They took me home, you know, after that
night at the bar; it would never have done to have left me on my own. The
police would have found me half an hour later, still screaming as the café
burned; as it was, they found nobody, and the others half-dragged me, almost
catatonic with the shock of what we had done, to Rosemary’s hideout.
It
was
a disused warehouse, half burnt to the ground in a fire several years
previously, and damp, but
it
was an excellent place to hide. She took me
in hand; I remember her hands around my neck, her breath on my cheek as she
held the beaker of hot whisky to my lips; I gagged, drank, spluttered, but
managed to keep down the drink.

‘Don’t worry,’ she told
me, her hair hanging down towards me, almost touching my face. ‘The worst is
nearly over. You’ll feel ill for a while, you’ll have a fever, and bright light
will hurt your eyes, but it will be over in a week or two. Drink some more.

I swallowed. I struggled
to raise myself to my elbows, and looked round. Rafe and Java were sitting
together in a corner, their backs turned to me. I could hear the sibilances of
their conversation, light as cobwebs on the still air. Zach was asleep already,
hunched beneath a pile of sacking and blankets, his face turned at an odd and somehow
touchingly youthful angle into his folded arms.

Elaine was nursing
Anton, rocking and singing a little meaningless song.

‘Be still,’ admonished
Rosemary. ‘Everything will be all right.’

But I could not be
still.

‘What happened? Did I?
Did we … What happened?’

‘We are the chosen ones,’
she said. ‘We do what we have to do. Don’t worry; you’ll get used to it; all
the others did.’

With a lunge and a
wrench, I sat up. I was caught between laughter and mounting hysteria.

‘What do you mean? You’re
telling me I’m a
vampire?
Like Dracula?’ I thrashed at the beaker of
whisky and knocked it out of her hand. I made a grab for her, meaning to shake
her. I saw Java make a sudden movement in the corner, caught the flick of a
glance from his cold eyes, and knew he was ready to intervene if I showed any
sign of violence. The laughter welled up in me again.

‘Vampires!’ I hooted.

Rosemary looked at me
with a cold, sad calm.

‘No one mentioned that
name but yourself,’ she said. ‘There are no vampires. But we are different, as
you are different now. We have certain privileges. And we must feed. You know
we must.’

I shook my head.

‘No! I don’t want, I
mean. I don’t want to be chosen.’

‘Neither did Moses,’
said Rosemary. ‘You’ll get used to it, I told you. The rest of them are like
cattle to us.