The Bad Seed

by William March

It seemed to her suddenly that violence was an inescapable factor of the heart, perhaps the most important factor of all—an ineradicable thing that lay, like a bad seed, behind kindness, behind compassion, behind the embrace of love itself. Sometimes it lay deeply hidden, sometimes it lay close to the surface; but always it was there, ready to appear, under the right conditions, in all its irrational dreadfulness.

“You are the bright thing in my life. You were the thing I loved more than all others. I want you to remember that, no matter what happens. I want you to remember that always. And never change from what you are at this moment.”

She was like a charming little animal that can never be trained to fit into the conventional patterns of existence.…

Actually, homosexuality is triter than incest!

He would have been surprised to know that, in a sense, he was in love with the little girl, and that his persecution of her, his nagging concern with everything she did, was part of a perverse and frightened courtship.

“I wonder what young people talk about these days? When we were young, at least we had sex and social betterment to occupy our minds. I’ve got a feeling that young people now don’t talk about anything except television and canasta.”

“You have to have a permit,” said Emory. “That is, everybody but the crook that shoots you has to have one. Now, we’re more civilized in this state; we believe in giving the victim a chance, too.”

I have a reputation of being an eccentric—a great advantage in dealing with others, I assure you. People are afraid of eccentrics; they can never be sure which way they’ll jump, or what they’ll do next.

In other words, most of us were able somehow, under the molding force of precept and example, to develop the strange thing we call conscience, to acquire a reasonably acceptable moral character; but others did not have this ability at all, no matter what benign influences they were subjected to. They were not even able to love another except in the crudest manifestations of the flesh. They had a mental understanding of the shadings of right and wrong, but none of them had the same moral understanding of these things. They were the true, inborn criminals that can neither be changed nor modified.…

They cannot imagine others doing the things they themselves are incapable of doing; usually they accept the undramatic solution as the correct one, and let matters rest there. Then, too, the normal are inclined to visualize the multiple killer as one who’s as monstrous in appearance as he is in mind, which is about as far from the truth as one could well get. He paused and then said that these monsters of real life usually looked and behaved in a more normal manner than their actually normal brothers and sisters; they presented a more convincing picture of virtue than virtue presented of itself—just

Laugh heartily, if you’d like to, my dear. I’m not at all concerned when others find me ridiculous.”

They shared a bond of horror that bound them together, that tied them to a common past, a community of guilt that could never be changed through thought or word.