Julia

by Peter Straub

  The next morning, with trembling hands, she dialed the number Rosa Fludd had left with her. For the first time in her life, she had taken a drink in the morning—a smoky, unwatered slug of malt whiskey, choked down while she was still in her robe, She had immediately wanted another. The quick explosion of warmth, intimating relaxation and pointing to an eventual extinguishing of consciousness, was uncannily like being back in the hospital, seconds after her morning injection. Now, she thought, I know why people drink in the morning. It’s better than breakfast. She had quickly screwed the top back on the bottle and gone to the telephone. Beside it was the white card Mrs. Fludd had given her.

  She heard the telephone going brrr brrr in Mrs. Fludd’s white antiseptic flat. It trilled six, then seven times without answer. Was she still there, watched over by her budgerigar and the huge sentimental eyes of the girl in the Keane print? It was imperative that Julia speak to her: what would the old woman have said to her-r-admitted to her—if Julia had known about Heather and Olivia Rudge last night? On the tenth ring the telephone was answered.

  “Yes,” said a young woman.

  “I’d like to speak to Mrs. Fludd, Rosa Fludd. My name is Julia Lofting.”

  “Wait a minute.” Julia heard muffled voices; the young woman had covered the receiver while turning to speak to someone else in the room.

  “My aunt says she can’t talk to you.”

  “Is anything wrong?” Julia asked.

  “Anything wrong? You should know. You were one of them brought her home.” The girl’s accent was so strong that Julia had difficulty distinguishing the words. “You’re one of them put her in a state.”

  “A stite? Oh.”

  “A state. You and them others. You bunch of airy-fairies near drove her out of her mind, didn’t you? That’s not proper, is it? Poor woman don’t even take money to jolly you lot along, and…”

  Another voice was raised in the background and the hand again clamped over the receiver.

  “Tell her I have more information,” Julia said. “This is terribly important.”

  “…she says she has more information. You sure? You want to?”

  In a moment Mrs. Fludd had taken the telephone.

  “I’m here,” she said. Her voice sounded tightly

  contained.

  “Mrs. Fludd, this is Julia Lofting. Are you all right? I’ve been worried about you.”

  “You can’t waste your worry,” said Mrs. Fludd. “What did you want to tell me?”

  “Well, I read, just by accident, a story about my house in a book on Kensington, and I had to tell you what it said. Mrs. Fludd? This house used to be owned by a woman named Heather Rudge, an American, who had a daughter named Olivia. Mrs. Fludd, she stabbed her daughter to death, My own daughter was stabbed to death—my husband wanted to save her life, she was choking to death, and he killed her. The other little girl was killed right in this house more than twenty years ago. Is that what you saw? Is that what Miss Pinner saw in the bathroom?”

  “Don’t know about Miss Pinner,” said Mrs. Fludd.

  “Mrs. Fludd, could—could my own daughter be haunting me? Could she try to harm me? Is that what you meant the other night? Did she try to harm you? Is my daughter behind this?” Hysteria and tears mounted in her, and she stopped talking to force calm into her voice. “Can’t you help me, Mrs. Fludd?”

  “Go back to your own country.”

  “Can’t you tell me what you saw?”

  “I didn’t see anything.”

  “But you said—a child and i man. Kate and Magnus.”

  “I saw nothing. Miss Pinner is a old fool, and she saw nothing either. Get out of that house, get out of this country. That’s all I can tell you.”

  “Mrs. Fludd, please don’t hang up. I’ve been doing so much thinking—I have so many things to ask you. How …how do people in the past work through people in the present? How do dead people control living people? Is that possible?”

  “I told you that,” said Mrs. Fludd. “You’re wasting my time. Good-bye.”

  “You said hate or envy,” Julia quickly said.

  “You remember, then. Sometimes they might want to take something of yours, and to give you something. It helps the malefic spirit. But strong spirits don’t need help, Mrs. Lofting. They does what they want to do. I can’t talk, Mrs. Lofting. Please leave me alone.”

  She hung up and Julia kept the telephone pressed to her ear until she heard the dial tone.

  She pressed the button, wanting to dial again, but in that instant her instrument shrilly rang. Julia released the button.

  “Yes,” she said softly.

  “I’m going to get you back,” came Magnus’ deep voice. “You can’t get away from me. Do you hear me? Do you hear me, Julia?”

  Julia clapped the receiver down. Some figure behind and beside her seemed tp move quickly away, just out of the line of her vision, and she whirled around, her breath caught in her throat. No one else was in the room. “Kate,” she whispered, “Kate, don’t.”

  When Julia went into the kitchen for a glass of water, she recoiled as soon as she turned on the tap. What gushed from the, faucet was a foul brown stream, stinking like ordure. Julia clapped one hand to her mouth, then twisted the knob and shut off the flow. Now it smelled like metal, like coins. After a moment, testingly, she turned it on again: the greasy stuff foamed from the taps. Frantic, Julia again twisted the knob to make the flow cease. Malvern water from the Safeway, a dozen bottles, ranked beneath the sink, and she took one, pried off the cap, and poured a glassful. It tasted incredibly sweet: drinking it, Julia realized how close she had come to being sick. Even now from the sink rose the stench of that rushing brown fluid, making her stomach contract.

  Then she remembered something, brought back by her physical discomfort. The night she had climbed through the bathroom window, she had lost her shoes; they had fallen outside when she had finally pushed herself through the little frame. And out there they had lain, to be found by Magnus: something taken, something given, Mrs. Fludd had said. Nearly everything she owned had been given her by Magnus. She wore his ring; he had bought earrings, pendants, beads, clothing for her. Julia would nearly have to walk naked to divest herself of everything given her by Magnus.

  But how long had those shoes lain outside? Three nights and two days. They might still be below the bathroom window. Julia ran out of the kitchen into the hall and down the hall to the bathroom. Reflected in the rose mirrors, she threw the rod off its ratchet and lifted the window out. On tiptoe, she leaned forward, holding the window with her left hand, and put her head out. She looked down at broken white and yellow flowers, some snapped off at their stalks, others trodden into the soft dirt. She could not see her shoes. Julia leaned farther out of the window—she leaned forward as far as she could go. Still she could not see the shoes. They were gone: someone had taken them. It seemed like a proof. A girl and a man. They wished to do her harm.

  For some moments Julia thrashed back and forth in the bathroom, out of control. She knew she was making some low, dreadful noise; the noise could not be stopped, and it echoed within the mirrored room, bouncing back and forth like her body. I have . to stop this, she told herself, and forced herself to sit on the floor. The noise came out in hiccoughs and then concentrated itself in her throaty where she could stop it. When she became aware that she had been drooling, she wiped her mouth.

  She looked dumbly around the bathroom. She was sitting, glassy-eyed, her mouth open, near the tub: her face in the rose mirrors looked slack, exotic. Magnus had taken the shoes.

  Julia unsteadily rose, gripping the sink with both hands. Within it, the seersucker dress still lay in an orangey-brown pool. She could still see the bloodstain; it seemed to have got larger. Now it appeared to be several inches long. Julia tore the dress out of the sink, pulled the plug, and squeezed the soaked material while the discolored, odorous water was sucked away.

  She was not really thinking. She knew that she had to dest
roy the blue dress, and the knowledge instantly became action, bypassing thought. She had to burn the dress.

  Julia carried the dress through to the kitchen where she picked up matches and then continued on to the fireplace in the living room. She dropped the dress onto the grate and applied a lighted match to a dry corner of fabric. The dress did not light. Julia lit a second match and held it to the same point; this time, the thin material flared up, crumpling and darkening beneath the spreading corner of flame. An acrid odor spread into the living room, followed by smoke. About half the dress burned before the flames guttered out on sodden material. The room stank of charred fabric—it was the smell of burning fur. Julia scarcely noticed this stench. She tried holding matches beneath the wet remaining half of the dress, but the fabric merely blackened, still wet.

  Then she saw the morning’s Guardian on a table near the couch and moved across the room to get it. She shook four pages loose, and stuffed them beneath the dress in the grate. When she picked up the sodden lump of dress, ashes and soot clinging to it, she saw the large, rust-colored bloodstain leading out from the seam. She thrust papers over the dress and tossed matches into them. Greasy yellowish smoke boiled out from beneath the papers. Julia threw match after match onto the smouldering newspaper, but the damp fabric would not bum. Her hands were black with ash.

  Abandoning the effort to burn the dress, Julia went into the kitchen for one of the big black plastic garbage bags, which she flipped open and carried back to the fireplace. Using the small ornamental shovel, she scooped the mess of ashes and charred spongy fabric into the mouth of the bag. She then twisted it shut and carried it outside into the path beside the house.

  Sunlight and warmth surprised her. The past half hour—hour?—seemed to have been visited upon her. She had been dominated by an urgent, thoughtless revulsion she had been unable to resist. Julia felt her pulse slow; she became aware of sensation again, the light defining a million blades of grass, the sun’s warmth penetrating her hair. Julia began to breathe more regularly, suddenly conscious that she had been panting. That thing in the black bag: she had had to destroy it “as though it were alive. Now, grasping the neck of the bag, she felt all of her revulsion once more and thrust it into the bin and clapped the lid over it. Big smudges of ash dirtied her quilted robe. Other smears of ash covered her legs. Julia felt as though she had just run a race.

  Magnus: she had lost all reasoning consciousness when he had appeared, as if by evil magic, on the telephone. Now she could not even remember his words, but she remembered their import. They had been threatening. He had her shoes. She flew back into the warm confines of her house.

  Twenty minutes later, another visitation: this young woman standing before her, a neighbor, living in Number 23, the house next door. Smaller than Julia, her hair nearly as short as Lily’s, a creamy, shy, smiling face only just beginning to show wrinkles. Her name, Hazel Mullineaux. From the woman’s first words (“I don’t know if I should bother you now”), Julia suffered from an acute awareness of her smudged robe and blackened hands. Her face too— from Mrs. Mullineaux’s glances at her cheeks and forehead, Julia knew she was a patchwork of filth. She hid her hands behind her back.

  “You seem so busy that I don’t know if I should take up your time like this.” A smile.

  Julia, bent on appearing normal, did not think to invite this hesitant young woman inside. “Oh, I have all the time in the world,” she said, and then cursed herself for overstatement.

  “It’s just that we thought we should ask. We thought you should know,” she amended, and then gave a further amendment. “And of course we wanted to meet our new neighbor.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I didn’t really catch your name, I’m sorry.”

  She had not given it. “I’m Julia Lofting.”

  Hazel Mullineaux peered past Julia to see the interior. “You are a Canadian? I’m trying to catch the accent…”

  “I’m American,” Julia said. “But I’ve lived here a long time.”

  “That explains why it isn’t so broad.”

  “Oh,” Julia said, “I never think about it at all, it’s changing all the time, I guess. My husband used to say that I sounded like an Iowa farmhand, and I’ve never been in Iowa in my life, but then neither was he.” She babbled, smelling the reek the burning dress had made: for ten minutes, she had fanned a newspaper in the living room, but the smell hung on, as though she had burned a cat.

  Mrs. Mullineaux seemed disconcerted by this chatter about Iowa. “Well, as I said, we thought you should know about it. Last night my husband saw a man standing outside your house.”

  Julia froze. “What time was that?”

  “At ten, when he came home from his office. Like all publishers, he works too late. Then at ten thirty he happened to look out the window, and he saw you going into your house and the man was still there. Perry said he didn’t look like a criminal, but he had moved further down the block and was beside the tree in front of number seventeen, the Armbrusters’ house. Perry was curious, so he kept watching the man, and after you’d gone in, he began to come up the block toward your house again. Then he just stood across the street and watched the house; Perry said he stood there for at least an hour. Of course, there’s no law against looking at a person’s house, but it did seem odd. He asked me if I thought he should have telephoned the police. I said I would speak to you about it. In case he returns. I hope you don’t think we have been prying into your—circumstances.”

  “No, oh, no,” Julia said. Now she could smell the burned-cat odor all too definitely, and she saw that Hazel Mullineaux also had caught it: the creamy little woman looked at her oddly, and moved a step backward. “I’ve been doing some cleaning,” Julia said. “I know I’m a mess.”

  “Yes. I mean, no, of course not. But as this man seemed to hang about so long, I did want to tell you. I hope you don’t think we did wrong not to ring the police.”

  “It was my husband,” said Julia. “I think he’s watching me. I know he is.”

  “Watching …?” Hazel Mullineaux’s face expressed a perfect incomprehension.

  “He doesn’t live here,” Julia supplied, feeling herself slip into a bog of explanations and not knowing how to avoid it. “You see, I bought this house for myself. I can’t see him—he’s been bothering me, making telephone calls. I think he broke in here one night…”

  Mrs. Mullineaux now radiated shock and disapproval.

  “Oh, please, I want us to be friends,” Julia said. “Neighbors should be friends, don’t you think? I haven’t even invited you in. Would you like a cup of coffee? You were so kind to tell me what you saw; I don’t know if the police should be called or not. I don’t know if there’s any danger…Everything’s gotten so confused in the past couple of days, it’s because of Kate, our daughter, I mean late daughter…Really, I’m terrified of him, but I don’t think I should call the police, it’s not a story they’d understand. But thank your husband for me, for worrying about me, that was a friendly act. She looked at Hazel Mullineaux’s rather dazed expression. “Won’t you come in for a cup of coffee? I’ll have to air out the living room to get rid of that terrible smell, but we could sit in the kitchen, or even in the back garden.”

  “I can’t right now, thanks,” said the other woman. She was already moving down the steps. “Some other time.”

  “Oh, I have to ask you,” Julia said before the other woman could get away. “Did you know the people who used to live here?”

  “Of course we knew the McClintocks,” said Mrs. Mullineaux. “They were older, and a bit remote, but quite nice, really.”

  “No, not the McClintocks,” Julia broke in. “I mean the ones before them. Mrs. Rudge. Heather Rudge. She had a daughter.”

  “Before the McClintocks? We moved here in 1967, and the McClintocks had been here for twenty years, we thought.”

  “Yes, of course. Of course. You couldn’t possibly have known her.”

  Mrs. Mullineaux tu
rned away, went down the steps, and before walking down the pavement to her house, looked back at Julia. Her face twitched into a grimace approximating a smile.

  That woman thinks I’m crazy, Julia thought. And then she thought of Magnus, patrolling the street. He had rapped at the dining room window for hours last night—Magnus was trying to push her over the precipice. She wanted Mark’s easy presence, Mark’s careless masculinity: he was a talisman against Magnus. Even Lily could not be trusted to save her from Magnus. She heard Hazel Mullineaux slam her front door. Against that, too, Mark would stand as protection.

  ***

  “I think you need help, darling. You’re under so much pressure, and I can’t blame you for being apprehensive, even suspicious.”

  “Apprehensive, Lily? Of course I’m apprehensive. That performance the other night put me right at ease…”

  “That’s just what I mean. I rang poor dear Mrs. Fludd this noon, and the telephone just kept ringing. She never goes out, never, except for her sessions. Something terrible has happened, I’m sure. I can’t help it, I’m worried for the old dear.”

  “Well, I’m worried for myself. Magnus was seen loitering outside the house last night. I’m sure he broke in here two nights ago. He’s trying to drive me back to him. He’s out of his mind, and I think I might be too. Do you want to know what I think? I think Kate is punishing me. It’s what Mrs. Fludd said—a man and a girl. Kate is in Magnus’ mind. Sometimes she’s in this house too, and she hates me. She believes Magnus’ lies.”

  “Oh, darling “

  “You want him for yourself, don’t you? You want Mark for yourself too. You’d like Magnus to think I’m going crazy. I suppose you’ll call him right now and tell him what I said, but you won’t get him because he’s probably hanging around here, watching the house.”

  “Julia, you can’t think that of me…”

  “You called him. You broke your word.”

  “Because I wanted you to be back with him.”