It was about the size of a church Bible, and it was of some kind of hard wood, bound with metal. There was a handle with which to carry it, and though the wood was scratched from being dragged out of the hole in which it had been placed, it was still easy to read the inscription on the lid:
KEEP ME SAFE
It took Alice a few moments to remember where she had seen that inscription, but when it came the realization was like a redoubling of her terror. The trap closed upon her.
The lock was secure; it was the wood which finally gave way, the metal coming away from the box like cardboard as she prised it open. For a moment, Alice paused.
What was a box, if not an opening into the unknown, a doorway into a world of secrets? Alice was quite sure that she had had enough secrets for the moment, enough of doors. What she really wanted was to be able to forget all the events of the past few days, to lie comfortably in bed and go to sleep, with all the secrets back where they belonged.
But it was too late; she had already taken the box into the workroom where she could not be disturbed. She had broken the lock; even if she did not look inside, Ginny would know Alice had spied on her. She had declared war; she knew it. She could not go back.
She flipped back the lid, looked for the first time into the box, and fell headfirst into Looking-Glass Land.
Her first reaction was amazement; her first incoherent thought: My God! It’s a Rossetti! Trembling, she reached into the box, drew out a manuscript – and pictures. Delight flooded her, as she spread the pictures out over the floor of her workroom, eyes flitting from one to the others as if she were unsure which one to study first.
They were beautiful, but they were not Rossettis.
There were maybe twenty of them, watercolours, pen-and-inks, chalk studies, all under twenty by fifteen inches square, edges ragged as if they had been carelessly trimmed with a paper-knife, the thick, creamy paper yellowed with age. They were old, old and lovely, all studies of women, no, of one woman. Head-and-shoulders portraits, full-length portraits in different poses, nudes, elegantly draped over a couch, lush in glowing blue velvet, delicately pencilled, leaning against a wall holding a musical instrument, studies of eyes, lips, hair … eyes closed, toying with a strand of hair, head thrown back, head angled forwards … It was some time before Alice was even able to look at them properly, even longer before her mind began to work normally again. Her next rational thought was: ‘The old devil. He had no right to immure these in Grantchester chapel. They must be worth a fortune.’ She picked up a picture at random; a delicate pastel in shades of brown and red. Her first reaction had not been so stupid; it did look like a Rossetti, although looking at it more closely, she could see that it lacked the overemphasized lips of a Rossetti. It showed the head and shoulders of a young woman, head bent at a strange and slightly menacing angle, as if looking back at someone. The hair was luxuriant, painstakingly textured in differing shades of red, and pushed to one side so as to expose a rounded and perfect expanse of bare shoulder. It was dated 1869, and monogrammed in precise, interwoven letters: W.H.C.
The monogram meant nothing to Alice, though the style and the date did; she flipped the drawing over, but apart from a rough sketch on the other side of the picture, could see no more clues there. She reached for another drawing, a pencil, touched with brown ink around the eyes and lips. Again, the monogram. Again, a date, this time 1868. The pictures were a puzzle to Alice. First, they looked genuine: they were clearly finished works of the first order, Pre-Raphaelite in origin, though not signed with the initials of any Victorian painter she knew of. There was some Rossetti there, some Burne-Jones, some Waterhouse, and yet the pictures were none of these; there was a strength in the lines of those compositions, a power in the features beside which Rossetti’s pale and wilting damsels and Burne-Jones’s angelic but weak-featured ladies of legend seemed slightly ridiculous. These pictures were something different. From sheet after sheet of the thick yellow paper, her eyes stared out at Alice, taunting, aloof, enticing, and faintly familiar, in the way that all really classic works of art can appear …
Familiar.
Alice was jolted out of her reverie by a thought which was as ludicrous as it was terrifying; of course that face was familiar! She had drawn it herself, that same face, the wide eyes, the lips which were a curving mockery of their own sensuality … She reached for her file of artwork, fumbled for the string which closed it … tugged. Papers spilled out, faces which were all the same face, hallucinatingly similar, images laid upon images like reflections along a hall of mirrors, a hall which reflected not only images, but time. She looked at the pictures for a long while, her gaze moving from her own portraits to the ones marked W.H.C., and back, searching vainly for logic. And though there was no logic to be found there, the facts still stared out at her from the pages which a dead man had thought important enough to hide for ever in a church wall, and her growing certainty was a little like hysteria, a little like insanity.
For the pictures of Ginny and those of an unknown Victorian model, no doubt long since buried, looked very like twins.
One
HOW LONG I knelt there in the dust, myself and the corpse in an embrace as intimate and unholy as ever was shared between monster and prey, I cannot tell you. The last of the whisky had faded like mist into the cold pre-dawn, leaving an emptiness in me where for a timeless time my sanity flickered, assailed by monstrous shadows. Maybe I wept. I could not move; I was at the end of all movement, all hope. I had seen what no man should ever see, and, mockingly, scornfully, they had let me live, knowing that I could be no danger to them; knowing that they had made a monster and a fugitive out of me, they had let me live. Maybe it pleased them to. It would have been very easy for me, at that moment, to crawl back into the crypt, like a snail into its shell, into the comforting dark, and hide; my despair was more than I could stomach, and the darkness beckoned, womblike, promising oblivion. I was so close to accepting what it offered … I stood, my arms gloved in blood almost to the shoulders, stumbled, began to turn away from the light …
Then I remembered Robert.
The thought was like a shower of cold water. I gasped, clapped my hands to my mouth, felt cold blood smear across my lips. In all my fear and self-pity, I had forgotten Robert, my friend. Robert who was going to marry Rosemary.
Rosemary. The name alone brought me out in a cold sweat. Everything was centred around Rosemary, my Blessed Damozel. Even then, I did not begin fully to understand what she was; there were no words, no thoughts in my world for that. Already, as I began to slide out of my catatonia, I had begun to rationalize, to think in terms of crime, of police (I hastily put out of mind that thin trickle of blood at the side of the fair-haired boy’s mouth), for I liked to think of myself as a rational man; I could believe in murder. The rest I chose to ignore. So I closed my eyes to the truth again and began to sift the evidence for what was acceptable to me. She was a murderess. Her friends had probably committed the actual deed, but the fact that the body had been in her apartment proved that she was as guilty as they were. Maybe they were all three of them insane … only an insane man could bring himself to drink blood … if the boy had been drinking blood. I chose to believe my frenzied imagination had created that. They had been panic-stricken when I had walked in on them; they had been afraid to kill me, and instead had dumped me in the churchyard, with the body, hoping, perhaps, that I would be discovered unconscious and reeking of alcohol, the next morning, and accused of the crime. It made sense.
By this time, my panic had grown cold; my mind had begun to function again, and coolly I surveyed my situation. It would not do to be caught. No one, on seeing me, could fail to suspect me of the murder; I was up to my armpits in blood; there was blood on my face, my knees where I had knelt on the bloody floor, my clothes were torn and filthy, and I suspected there was a wild light in my eyes, born of having seen too much.
I stepped over the body and made my way to the gate of the crypt; I had waste
d too much valuable time, and I could see the beginnings of a pale grey dawn on the horizon. The rest of the sky was dark; I judged it to be about four o’clock in the morning, but even that was too late for me to pass unseen in the streets of Cambridge. It would take only one person … a milkman, perhaps, on his way to work, to see me. I ran my hands through my hair, pushed my glasses up the bridge of my nose, tried to clean the smeared lenses with a hand I had wiped on my trouser leg, and carefully, with newfound stealth, I made my way out of the churchyard and down towards the Grantchester road. I followed a line parallel to the road, keeping low in the fields, dodging behind trees, occasionally crawling on my stomach through thin vegetation to avoid being seen. Only once did I see someone, and even then they were so far away that I could not make out whether they were men or women, walking slowly in a group of three or four down the road, but although I knew I had not been spotted, terror nailed me to the ground, my tongue cleaving to the roof of my mouth, and I cowered in the ditch for a full ten minutes before I gained enough courage to go on.
It took me almost an hour to reach my house, and by that time a red dawn was blazing, the mullioned windows reflecting blood as the sun came up. Spurred by panic, I ran for the door, grasped for the keys in my pocket, fumbled the key into the lock. One endless moment of terror as the key jammed, then the door was open, and I hauled myself in, as a drowning man hauls himself aboard a lifeboat. Two, four, six, eight stairs, and I was in my room, gasping for breath, the air thick as blood in my lungs, panic still tearing, mindlessly, at my throat.
For a nightmare instant I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror and I almost screamed. Then, coming closer, I recognized myself behind the deathmask of blood, my hair on end, blood smearing the lenses of my glasses, a long scratch across my forehead, broken bruises on my neck. Only my eyes were sane, very bright behind my thick lenses. Looking into my own eyes in the dark, lead-marked mirror, I knew I was no monster.
Methodically, I stripped off all my clothes and put them in the fireplace. With paper and wood, I lit the fire, and as I burned every scrap of evidence that I had ever been in that crypt, I washed very carefully, using Mrs Brown’s antiquated bathtub, a pitcher and cold water, washing my glasses too, so that not a smear or speck of blood remained. Then I washed the tub and the pitcher, stirred the ashes of the fire with the poker, dressed in fresh clothes, and with a damp cloth painstakingly wiped the door-knob, the banisters, the inside and outside door-handles and the keys, before deciding that I had done all I could, and that none of Rosemary’s grim work could be traced back to me.
A glance at the hall clock told me that it was now a quarter to six in the morning; I could hear sounds from the kitchen, where Mrs Brown was making breakfast for herself (she always was an early riser, although I never tended to get up much before nine), and I crept upstairs again before she could come out and speak to me. After everything I had been through, I felt drained and exhausted, and all I wanted to do was lie down, sleep, and try to forget. I locked my door, undressed, fastened my curtains so that no light could enter and trouble my sleep, then, with a long sigh of total exhaustion, I crawled between the cool lavender-scented sheets into oblivion.
A tapping on my door awoke me, and I sat up in bed, my eyes crusted and sore, my head aching. The tapping continued.
‘Are you all right?’ It was Mrs Brown. ‘Don’t you want any breakfast?’
‘What time is it?’ I asked, both hands on my head as if to still its ache. My eyes felt gravelly and hot.
‘Near ten. Would you like a cup of tea?’
I shook my head.
‘No. I … I don’t feel very well. I need some sleep. Let me sleep, Mrs Brown. Don’t wake me up.’
Clucking noises from behind the door. ‘Come back too late last night, did we? Well, if you do want a bite to eat later, just give me a call, won’t you?’
‘Thanks.’
I heard her footsteps recede, and I crawled under the covers again, thankful of the darkness. The sheets were no longer cool and fresh, but clung saltily to my sweating body. I rolled over, trying to find a cool spot, instinctively shielding my face from the glow of the window. I wished the curtains were darker, for their deep crimson allowed the sunlight to cast a coloured nimbus of light around the window which hurt my tired and sensitive eyes. My throat, too, felt swollen and sore, my face puffy. I pulled the covers over my face as far as they would go, and in the cryptlike, uneasy darkness, I slept again. And this time, as I slept, I dreamed.
I was in the crypt again; damp, clinging darkness all around me, the smell of grave-earth in my nostrils and grave-sweat at my fingertips, and I was hungry. My hunger was a coiling sickness at the pit of my cavernous stomach, a spinning delirium in the echoing chambers of my brain, worse than panic, more demanding than the sexual urge, more overwhelming than drug withdrawal. My eardrums boomed with it, my tongue was dry with it; I was weak. I turned towards the light at the end of the chamber and winced away, though the thin filaments of daylight which showed they were weak indeed. Hunger drove me on. I left the cool, comforting darkness, put one hand on the gate, stopped. Beside one of the graves knelt a figure, a young girl, her back turned to me, a shawl wrapped round her thin shoulders. Tendrils of light hair had escaped the confines of the headscarf to flutter around her face.
The hunger hit me like a sledgehammer; I staggered. My lips were dry; despite myself, I licked them. The palms of my hands were slick; I rubbed them on my trousers and came a little closer. The girl was praying; she did not turn as I came to stand behind her, did not move as I reached out my hand, almost close enough to touch her face. Her warmth was palpable; the thin ribbon of the exposed nape of her neck between the shawl and the headscarf was pale, almost translucent. I could see the delicate tracery of her veins beneath the skin, living deltas in an alien landscape. I reached for her; spun her round, imagined her head thrown back, eyes wide, mouth open ready to scream … and saw none of those things.
She was smiling, arms open to receive me, lavender eyes huge in a pale, delicate face, beautiful eyes in which I read a hunger akin to my own. It was Rosemary.
I hesitated, knowing in my dream no fear, only hunger. I had caught her by the wrist; I allowed my gaze to travel down her bare arm, down the sensual river of her veins.
‘Daniel.’ Her voice was breathy, erotic. My own caught in mid-breath as I looked at her. Never, never, had I seen anyone as beautiful. She smiled again, lifted a small hand to press it against my cheek.
‘What’s happening to me?’ I spoke almost to myself, but my eyes were lost deep in hers.
‘Love me,’ she whispered. Her hand was warm on my mouth. I caught a sudden, exhilarating scent from her skin; lavender, sweetness, and warm, quick blood.
‘My God!’ I cried out incoherently, her wrist against my mouth. My arms were around her, her hair in my face, her thin bones so light against my embrace, the pounding of her blood against my lips …
‘Love me.’ With a sudden wrench, I twisted her hand towards my mouth; her skin was smooth, salty beneath my tongue. I bit deeply into the flesh; it was yielding, like the skin of a fruit, then the blood came, clean and salt. I gagged on it in my eagerness, fumbled against the wound, licked abjectly. Blood trickled down the side of my mouth, awakening a memory … though of what, I could not quite remember. The sides of the incision had a faintly metallic taste, were slightly uneven, and I pushed my tongue between them to feel the pulse of the rushing blood, my breath ragged and laboured in an excess of delight and greed. I remember the taste of her. The pattern of every line and vein on that wrist. Could I have dreamed it? Am I insane? The blood was power, was life … I lapped it deliriously, fearfully, aware that at any moment she might choose to withdraw her favours and leave me to hunger and hopelessness again.
And as I fed, I looked up into her pure, fathomless eyes.
And the stars in her hair were seven.
Restlessly I dreamed and whimpered for hours between my damp and fevered she
ets, and she walked my dreams in glory. It seems strange, now that I live my life in the midst of such dreams, to remember how new and how terrifying it was to me then, to enter the crypt of my subconscious. I was racked with lust and horror; my limbs were water, my head pulsed with migraine. I don’t remember Mrs Brown knocking on my door again, though I expect she must have heard me cry out in my sleep, and twice I was just able to drag myself to the sink in time to retch a darkish slime into the porcelain basin … at that time, I took it for bile. The scratches on my face hurt wretchedly; touching them with the numbed tips of my fingers, I realized that they had become great raised welts, reaching from my forehead, across one cheek and right down my neck though I had been protected to some extent by my shirt. There were marks like needle-tracks on the inner part of my wrists, half explaining my disorientation and my nightmares. They must have drugged me. My throat was swollen, and I wondered whether one of Rosemary’s cronies had tried to strangle me, but I was too weak and too feverish to examine the damage any further.
It was near dark when I awoke completely; I looked at my watch, and was astounded to see that it was half past seven. Never in my life, even after all-night parties, had I slept away a whole day, and I flung back the sheets and stood up, feeling more refreshed, but still rather sick and light-headed. I put on my dressing-gown and went to the bathroom, where I switched on the light, washed my face, took two aspirin, and looked at myself in the mirror.
The Evil Seed Page 14