Free The Evil Seed by Joanne Harris

but
fascinating, to see how the corpse, in her jewellery, her white burial-robes,
had changed, had swollen, then shrunk …
    ‘I am a maid at your
window …’ she croaked at me, and I screamed again, scrabbling at the flanks
of my horse, pushing myself backwards with my fingernails, burning the palms of
my hands, leaving shreds of my skin on the polished wood, my sanity leaving me
in great, sparkling bursts of light, like fireworks (and for a moment, I could see them, brighter than any fairground illuminations) as she began to creep
towards me.
    ‘A maid at your window …’
she went on, relentlessly, ‘to be your Valentine …’ Then her hands met around
my neck, soft and cold, her mouth opened, sending a great cloud of that dark,
graveyard reek towards me, and I fell towards her open mouth, all will gone,
all feeling gone, into the tunnel of blackness which was Rosemary, where even
screams become meaningless.
     

 
     
     
     
     
    Two
     
     
    ‘HOW DO YOU TAKE YOUR COFFEE, GINNY?’ ALICE
BROKE OFF in mid-sentence. The cup she was carrying wobbled, but did not fall.
    ‘Thank you,’ said Ginny
softly, ‘but I don’t think I’ll have coffee after all. I think I’m going out
for a while.’
    ‘Oh … ? Oh yes, of
course.’
    Alice was so stunned by
Ginny’s transformation that she was unable to say anything, but her mind raced
uselessly on. Was that really Ginny there? She would hardly have recognized
her, she thought, and it was not only her clothes which had changed, but her
whole self, sloughed off to reveal something closer to the bone. She had taken
off the powder-blue dress which had given her such a medieval look. She had
aerosol-sprayed a band of black lacquer across her eyes, like a mask, and her
red hair had been made to stand up around her face like quills. She was wearing
faded jeans (a long tear positioned high on each leg to reveal white skin), and
a T-shirt with the sleeves torn off which sported the picture of a grinning
skull and a flowery DEATH logo. Her boots were of purple suede, laced up to
mid-thigh, and the spiked heels had left little indentations in the pile of
Alice’s living-room carpet, little gaps, like airholes for something which
might be living under there. She looked even younger than before, vulnerable,
somehow, in that lurid adolescent’s garb, still wrenchingly beautiful, but
wiser somehow. Older.
    Her eyes danced, a
roller-coaster of troubling, multicoloured lights.
    ‘There’s a fair,’ she
said, brightly. Even the voice had changed, adopting, instead of the whisper of
a shy child, the slightly nasal, ungrateful intonations of the adolescent girl.
    ‘Yes?’ said Alice.
    ‘On Parker’s Piece. It’s
only eleven. It won’t be shutting down till midnight. It won’t take me long to
get there.’
    Her eyes were a band of
fractured light behind the spray-paint, glimmering dangerously. She seemed
entirely unconscious of the effect she had created.
    ‘So when will you be
back?’ said Alice rather coldly.
    Ginny shrugged.
    ‘Not very long. I’m
meeting some friends … don’t bother to wait up, will you?’
    ‘I’ll leave the door
open.
    ‘Thank you.’
    Her hand was on the
door-handle. Suddenly, Alice felt an abrupt rushing of emotion; anger, anxiety
and reaction against all the things she had been made to feel during the
evening. She reached impulsively for the girl’s arm; held it. The skin felt
cool and smooth.
    ‘Ginny?’
    ‘Yes, what is it?’ The
note of mockery was there again, almost … almost as if she knew what
was in Alice’s thoughts better than she did herself.
    ‘Joe … You like him,
don’t you?’
    Ginny faced her for a
second, then she ticked her head to one side, like a doll. Behind the grey of
her eyes, the fairground lights cavorted.
    ‘Joe?’ she said in a
birdlike voice. ‘Who’s Joe?’
    Then the door opened,
and she walked off into the night.
    Alice paused at the door
for a moment, her emotions a mixture of anger, shame, and