Julia

by Peter Straub

  Then she turned her heavy face again directly to Julia and gripped both of her hands. “Listen. I do. Fake things. Frauds. For the others. Mr. Piggot and Miss Pinner. Expect it. Not all. All that about transcendence—it’s fraud. But I do see. Things. Auras. I do. But I hypnotize them, like. Now I’m scared. They were a man and a girl. They put you in danger. Me. In danger. They’re evil. Just evil.”

  “Is the man my husband?”

  “Get out,” Mrs. Fludd groaned. “Please.”

  “Please, Mrs. Fludd, who is the girl? You must tell me.”

  The old woman rolled on her side, groaning. A wave of corrupt air rose from her body. “Go.”

  On the ride home Lily demanded to know what had happened. “She was frightened out of her wits. What did she say to you?”

  “I’m not sure I understand it,” Julia defensively said. Soon after this the cabdriver confessed that he was lost, and they switched back and forth on dark, oppressive streets before finding their way again. Julia got out of the taxi at Plane Tree House and paid the fare over Lily’s protests: it took most of the money in her purse. Then she walked home, skirting the park, where voices and laughter came to her from the dark regions beyond the locked gates.

  Once in her house, she went into every room, looking for she knew not what and finding nothing: most of the lights had been left burning, and the house had a blank, emptied, waiting air, as if no one lived in it. Half-filled sherry glasses adhered to the tables. One had tipped over, and poured an irregular dark stain onto the carpet. Probably because of what Mrs. Fludd had said to her, the house seemed malevolent: “malefic”—that extraordinary word the old woman had used.

  In the unused bedrooms, where the furniture had been covered with dust sheets and vacancy lived like a guest, Julia felt insubstantial, drifting without purpose, looking for what she knew she would not find. Dusty and untouched, these rooms seemed chilled by their emptiness. When she checked, she saw that the heaters here had been left in the “off” position. Yet the house was a giant structure, a huge form, which hedged her out and kept her at bay: it would resist her impositions, it would not yield to her. Her sense of the house’s obduracy was immense. She felt, more than ever, that she was living inside a comprehensive error, the mistake that her life had become: bigger forces lay without, waiting. A child and a man.

  This hopelessness drove her finally to her hot, claustrophobic bedroom. She undressed quickly and threw her clothing over a chair; before she got into bed, she looked at the heater’s wall switch. The switch was down. Julia remembered having flicked it up yesterday morning when Mark was in the room; certainly she had not turned it on since. She touched the metal surface of the heater, and found that it was as hot as if it had never been turned off. That meant that it had been on last night, since these heaters did not function during the day; yet hadn’t she looked, last night? She cursed her memory. But last night Magnus had been in the house. Could he be so childish as to go about turning on the heaters?—but if he could stoop to smashing things up, terrorizing her as bluntly as the boys had Mrs. Fludd, it was impossible to say what he might not do. Angry, Magnus was capable of anything. She turned the heater off once again; then, on an afterthought, took a roll of tape from her closet and taped the switch to the fixture.

  Though she shrank from the very idea, Magnus had to be faced: as did her feelings about him. What were those feelings? Julia felt at once as though she were on the crumbling lip of a precipice; her control, her hold on things sound and normal, was fragile; she knew that much of her seeming calm and placidity was a performance. Horror lay beneath the surface—horror was what inhabited the abyss below the precipice. The image of Magnus murdering Kate, that sight of him plunging the knife into Kate’s throat while she thrashed on the floor, could rise in her at any time, as it had before she had been taken to the hospital and drugged into insensibility. Even then she had been tortured by waking dreams. Over and over, her wrists strapped to the side of the bed, she had imagined grasping Magnus’ arm and turning the knife to her own throat. That image too had haunted her. Dying for Kate—she would gladly die for Kate. Instead, she had passively watched the clumsiest of murders. Magnus was inextricably tied to this horror, the horror of inanition, of drift which meant loss, of lying, of emptiness without end or meaning: that was death indeed, and it seemed to crawl forth from the walls of this house.

  A child and a man. Kate and Magnus. Mrs. Fludd had seen them. And what had she said, before the trance? It had been something about hate or envy— they were what made a spirit “malefic.” Kate was present; Kate lay behind Magnus’ mad forays into Ilchester Place. She was unforgiving. Logic took her relentlessly to this illogical conclusion. Julia began to rock from side to side on her bed, moaning. She was breaking down. It was an image, again, of the precipice where she had so carefully walked, of clods and pebbles shredding away, breaking up on the long fall down. It was Kate. Mrs. Fludd had seen Kate. In some vivid, dreamlike way, Magnus was dominated by Kate; he was an unthinkable danger to her mind.

  Unable to sleep, unable to control her thoughts, Julia snapped on the reading lamp at the head of the bed. She forced herself to extend her arms alongside her body. Flatten the fingers so the palms touch the sheet, extend the thumbs. Relax. She breathed deeply, twice. She would talk to Mrs. Fludd. If she had to leave the house to escape the danger Magnus posed, she was capable of leaving. For now, sleep was impossible: but she would not leave this bedroom. This room was hers. If she were to be driven from the room, she would leave the house.

  Julia turned her head to see the books on the little stand beside the bed. She had finished the Bellow novel, and now had The Millstone, The White House Transcripts, The Golden Notebook and The Unicorn on the table; she needed something less stimulating than any of these. Kate and Magnus: Mrs. Fludd’s hints and warnings outlined a dread possibility. Kate’s spirit still living, hating her and using Magnus’ anger, feeding that anger, Kate’s spirit seething through this house…All of this was real, happening to her.

  Julia had to call Miss Pinner as well as Mrs. Fludd; before the departure of the West Hampstead ladies, Miss Pinner had been too shaky and distraught to describe what she had seen in the bathroom.

  Then she saw another book which she had recently placed on the bedside table, hidden behind the little stack of paperbacks. It was The Royal Borough of Kensington, Lily’s present to her. A sober, judicious list of facts, a few anecdotes, color plates—it was just what she needed, a book about as tangy as a suet pudding, a sleeping pill of a book. She lifted the heavy volume into her lap and began to flip the pages, reading paragraphs at random,

  Prominent inhabitants of Kensington in the eighteenth century …Kensington as a village …political history of the royal borough . . , the planning of Kensington Gardens …merchant princes included … a notorious Mr. Price, hanged for the theft of a whippet…Flipping a page after reading about the fate of Mr. Price, Julia saw a Reading which read “Crime, Ghosts and Hauntings.” At first she turned over several pages, not trusting herself to read such a chapter, but her curiosity was too great, and she went back to the heading and began to read.

  At first she found nothing more exciting than had been the lists of prominent Kensington aldermen and merchants; the author had tracked down a number of conventional haunted-house anecdotes and set them down in colorless straightforward style. The ghost of a headless nun in a “manorial” building on Lexham Gardens; two sisters who had killed themselves in adjoining houses on Pembroke Place and had been seen crossing the gardens, hand in hand, by moonlight; the Edwardes Square “paterfamilias” of 1912 who had been possessed by the spirit of his mad great-grandfather and taken to dressing in the extravagant style of a century before and had finally murdered his children; Julia read all of these stories with a dulled interest.

  Then a sentence and a street name burst from the text.

  One of the most vexed and troubling of all Kensington murders [Julia read] was that of the — case of He
ather and Olivia Rudge, of 25 Ilchester Place. One of the last women to be sentenced to death in England, Heather Rudge, an American, had purchased the house on Ilchester Place from the architect, who had built it for himself in 1927 but in two years wished to move, due to family troubles; at the time, Mrs. Rudge, who was separated from her husband, had a reputation as a brilliant, rather reckless hostess, and was considered by many inhabitants of her social world as “fast.” [Eda Rolph implied a fondness for handsome younger men and wealthy businessmen from the City.] One contemporary, the author of several mild books of verse and a once-popular series of theological novels, described her as possessing “a small, vivid, distinctly alarming face in which beauty and avidity fatally conjoined. Vanitas indeed: yet we found in her a helter-skelter charm.” The birth of a daughter, Olivia, twelve years after the purchase of the Ilchester Place house, occurred in wartime, and so did little to affect her already damaged career as a hostess—the morals of a rich, aging playgirl whose greatest notoriety had passed six or seven years before interested only a few.

  The parties continued, at intervals and with considerably less splendor than previously, and then ceased altogether; little was heard of the Rudges until 1950. In that year, the nine-year-old Olivia Rudge was mentioned in connection with the death by suffocation in Holland Park of , a four-year-old child, Geoffrey Braden of Abbotsbury Close. Olivia Rudge and what the popular press briefly referred to as the “Holland Park Child Terror Mob”—a group of ten or twelve children apparently led by Olivia—had been seen tormenting young Braden on the day before his death. The following morning, Olivia and several others, according to a park attendant, had again pursued young Braden and abused him. The attendant had chased away the gang of older children and advised young Braden to go home; when he had returned to that area of the park, he had found the boy’s body lying in a shadowed place beside a wall. Public and police interest shifted from the gang of children when it was learned that young Braden had been sexually injured before his death; and subsequently a vagrant was hanged for his murder.

  Two months following the execution of the vagrant, Heather Rudge telephoned the Kensington police station to confess to the murder of her daughter. Police arriving at the house found Olivia stabbed to death in her bed; the coroner later reported more than fifty stab wounds to the body. Mrs. Rudge was immediately taken into custody and hence was protected from the crowd of journalists who wished to harry her—the murder of Olivia Rudge had quickly become a front-page speciality of the scandal press which had soon unearthed the past of Olivia’s mother. (“Society Sex Queen Murders Daughter.”) In time, Heather was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Later her sentence was commuted to life in prison.

  Certain questions remain. Why did Heather Rudge kill her daughter? Why was her sentence commuted? Was there a connection with the murder, a year previous, of Geoffrey Braden? Certainly the press had implied such a connection. Newspapers had seized on the case, claiming that Heather Rudge had been driven mad by her daughter; the more sensational papers asserted that Olivia had taunted her mother with her knowledge of the Braden murder, and that Heather had decided that her daughter could not be permitted to live. In time, Heather, now represented as a victim herself, was found to be insane by a special examining board. She is at present an old woman living in the permanent seclusion of a private mental hospital in Surrey. The questions remain unanswered. Heather Rudge will take the secrets of her daughter’s involvement in the Braden case to her grave. Forgotten by the public, her mind shadowed and confused, Heather Rudge is a living ghost.

  Julia’s first thought, after reading this, was an irrelevance: so that’s where those mirrors came from—Heather Rudge, with her wild parties staffed with young men, not the proper McCIintocks. Then in the next half second, she knew that she would find out, that she was compelled to find out, everything there was to know about Heather and Olivia Rudge. She read the two pages over again quickly, then flipped back and read them once more, slowly and carefully. Eda Rolph nowhere stated directly that Olivia Rudge had murdered or had helped to murder the Braden boy: what grounds were there for the implication? Julia immediately began to think of how she could discover information about the Rudge case. Newspapers: surely the British Museum, if not a branch library, had newspaper files on microfilm. Could Heather Rudge be living still? She turned to the first pages of the book to look at the publishing information. The Royal Borough of Kensington had been published by the Lompoc Press in 1969, five years ago. She might easily be still alive. “… a private mental hospital in Surrey.” How could she find the name of the hospital? Heather Rudge had lived in this house, she had slept in this bedroom; in sleep, her body had occupied the very space Julia’s body now did. Julia seemed to be spinning through time; time seemed plastic, distorted, unsafe: the past seemed to rise up all about her, like a foul gas.

  Then she sat upright, her heart speeding. Perhaps Heather Rudge had stabbed Olivia in this very bedroom. Olivia dying as Kate had died, bleeding as though blood willed to depart the living body, her blood foaming out over this spot around a hidden corner in time…Julia nearly bolted from her bed.

  But it could not be true. This must have been Heather’s bedroom, she thought; her daughter would have had one of the smaller bedrooms down the hall. And that was where the murder would have been done.

  Why am I so interested in this, in these people? Julia thought. Because it will be an explanation.

  Julia felt wide-awake, as stimulated as if she’d just had three cups of strong coffee. She wanted to telephone Mark, to see Lily—she wanted to telephone Eda Rolph, to ask her the name of the hospital where Heather Rudge had been kept for the past twenty-four years. But she is here too, Julia thought, she is part of the character of this house, and she lives here still, moving up and down the stairs, her skirt rustling, turning down a bed, running to the door to greet a lover or a friend, locked in the bubble of her time. Every moment lives parallel with every other moment. What had Miss Pinner seen, to make her faint?

  As if in answer, a clicking noise came to her from downstairs. It was the same noise she had heard before when, crouching beside the drapes, she had seen Magnus standing motionless in her garden. It was the noise of something outside wishing to come in. Julia realized that, paradoxically, she was now less afraid of Magnus than she had been before reading about Heather and Olivia Rudge—Magnus was flesh, Magnus was blood. All about her moved intimations of the past of the house, those echoes of her own past. She lay in bed listening to the soft rapping at the downstairs windows. Some minutes later she picked up The White House Transcripts; she read doggedly for two hours, getting through very nearly half of the book, before she finally fell asleep, her light still burning. The rapping, patient and insistent, continued to sound through the house.

  Sweating, she dreamed of Kate.

  Julia came drowsily awake two hours later feeling that she had just been touched: no, caressed. Her light still burned. She reached up to switch it off. The bedroom was even hotter than it had been when she had first come in; her entire body seemed filmed with sweat. The bedroom curtains hung straight and unmoving; in this room, air refused to circulate, but piled atop itself, densely. The sky shone through the window, lighter than the dark of the bedroom. Julia could still feel, along her bruised left side, the afterimage of a hand, stroking lightly. The caress was gentle, seductively soothing. Of course there was no one else in the room; she had conjured up the caress herself, summoned it up out of her needs.

  Julia settled down into the sheets again, deliberately relaxing. The rapping from below had ceased: Magnus had gone home, unable to bring her wandering and calling through the house, having failed at least this once. She closed her eyes and crossed her hands on her midriff. Perhaps Heather Rudge had nursed Olivia in this room, talking to her daughter in baby talk . .-. perhaps Mrs. Fludd had seen Heather doing violence to her daughter. Surely such an event still lingers in its physical setting, still reverberating there…Julia�
�s mind began to drift. She heard a snatch of music playing: it was big band music, tinny, as if on a radio, and then it dissolved, along with everything else. She fell immediately into dreams which were indistinguishable from semi-wakefulness. Once again she was being caressed. She was being touched by lingering, stroking hands beside her own hands. Small hands moved lightly down her body. They paused, and began again, stroking. Julia saw Kate beside her: they clasped one another. Kate was with her. The caresses were like music—soft, moving, layered. Julia felt infinitely quietened, infinitely soothed; the small, moving hands were like tongues, lapping at her. She gave herself to this comfort. Broken dreams, fed by these long caresses, filtered through her mind. She and Mark sat side by side on the gray couch, speaking words she could not hear. Mark’s hand surrounded hers. She was swimming in warm water, a pool of water as warm as a bath. She wore no bathing suit, and the water slipped about her like oil. Her skin was opening. She was beneath strong sun. The flickering touches ran insinuatingly over her opening body. Mark and Kate: then, shockingly, only Kate. “No,” she said, groaning, and her voice brought her up through sleep. “No.” She could still feel the last touch of the hand, stroking between her thighs: she felt sickened and frightened, roused. Now she was absolutely awake.

  She had been dreaming of Kate. What horrible thing had she dreamed? She listened for the sound of Heather Rudge slipping down the stairs. Now, the thought of Kate was fearful: Kate, she realized, must hate her. She was caught in a terrific dislocation, her body moving toward its resolution, her consciousness stunned by what was logically inexplicable. Slowly, feeling as though soiled for life, Julia slipped her hand to the part of her body which needed its touch, and with hard circular movements of two fingers brought herself over the edge. She felt like the unappeased ghost of the living Heather Rudge. Her body smelled of loss and failure, of airless exertions.