The Evil Seed Read Online Free PDF Page A

thought that with Robert gone, I had nothing else to fear.
She was gone, I said to myself, gone, buried, forgotten. I laid my little bunch
of mistletoe and holly at the head of the grave and turned to go.
    Poor Robert.
    Suddenly, I felt her
there, her presence filling the churchyard. Her hate, and with it, amusement.
The scent of rosemary wafted up from the little row of shrubs in front of me,
warmed by the slanting winter sun, sweet and oddly nostalgic, the scent of
country kitchens, of drawers filled with clean white linen, of country girls
combing rosemary oil through their long hair. I was absolutely convinced that
if I were to look up I would see her there, watching me from beneath her heavy
eyelids, face pale, her tragic mouth curling in something not quite like a
smile … I was so convinced that she was there that when I raised my eyes I
actually saw her standing in the shade of the hawthorn tree, then she was only
a jumble of light and shade on the bare path, where a patch of brown and frozen
weeds nodded almost imperceptibly over a gravestone I had never noticed before.
    For a moment I stared
stupidly. It was a simple enough idea: a flat stone set into the mossy ground
with a small cast-iron sculpture rising above it, maybe two feet high. A frame,
like a door-frame, with a kind of crest on the top, within which stood what
looked to me like a little door or gate, set against the frame with hinges. As
I looked, a gust of wind pushed against the little gate and it blew open with a
tiny sound, then clicked shut as the wind released it. At the head of the grave
was a shallow stone trough, in which a few small green shrubs nodded and
whispered.
    Of course. This must be
her grave; this the remembrance Robert had spoken of. His idea. I don’t know
why I approached it then; I should have known that it would do me no good. It
may be that I wanted to know what had been in my friend’s mind before his
suicide, as if my penance before Rosemary’s grave might help his tortured soul
to rest. Maybe I felt some stirring of guilt. Because I killed her, you know,
or at least, I did the best I could. Or maybe I went for the same reason that
the young girl looks into Bluebeard’s chamber, for the same reason that the two
children go to the gingerbread house, or that the boy lets the genie out of
the bottle…
    I read the inscription,
of course. After all, that was why it was there.
     
    Something inside me remembers
and will not forget.
    Rosemary Virginia
Ashley
    August 1948
     
    Something inside me
remembers… I came there often after that, not able to help myself,
fascinated and repelled and terrified all at once. Something inside me
remembers… Only I really understood those words. Everyone else took it as
a message from Robert, proof of his love for his dead wife.
    But I knew Robert better
than that. He may have been weak, but he was not maudlin. He may have died a
little when Rosemary was buried, but he would not have laid his heart open like
that for lovers to gawp at as they took their romantic walks in Grantchester
churchyard. He was a practical man, and practical men are the ones who suffer
the most from love, when it comes their way. And whatever the evidence, I know
he didn’t kill himself. That was a message to me from her. A defiant cry from
beyond the grave. She isn’t dead, and she wants me to know it. She has all the
time in the world. And she still remembers.
    But I’m not afraid. I’m
safe. I still have my final trick to play, the last card which will keep me
safe. And do you know what my last card is? It’s you, friend. You don’t believe
me? You will. As you read this diary you’ll hate me, despise me, but you won’t
disbelieve me. It’s all right, you don’t have to do it all at once; put the
book away in a drawer, forget it for a while, for years if you like, but you’ll
come back. I know you will. You’ll have to come back sooner or later, because
she’s here. She’s waiting for you. Just as she