by Peter Straub
“Your wife isn’t here,” said Mullineaux. “And I doubt if you could do anything fdr her, in your condition.” He lifted an admonitory finger. “If you go away this instant, I promise you that against my better judgment I will not speak of this to the police. Now please go.”
“ ‘Now please go,’ ” Magnus mimicked. “Now you will please go, twit, because I’m going inside. You can stand here and watch or you can help me.”
“I must say …” the man said, advancing and placing a hand on Magnus’ arm.
An absolute conviction of his size flashed through Magnus, and he punched the man on the side of his head, knocking him aside. Because Magnus had used his left hand, the blow was weak, but Mullineaux crumpled to the ground. At that instant . Mark’s face floated into Magnus’ mind. He ground his teeth, enraged, and took a step toward the pale figure now groveling on the grass. He lifted his right boot back, intending to kick Mullineaux on the point of his jaw, but looked upward at the neighboring house and saw the pretty little woman inside shrieking through the glass. “Come and get this idiot inside,” he muttered, his fury dissipating, and stalked off back around to the front of the house. He had left his car at Plane Tree House.
Kate? Kate? As he stormed through the park, the slightly hazy, glowing summer air seemed to darken about him.
7
Mark came awake in darkness, the dirty sheet twisted about his hips. He had been dreaming about Julia, a variation on a dream he had been having regularly for the past three or four years. Usually the dream began with his entering a classroom, perching on the desk, and suddenly realizing that he was totally unprepared. Not only had he no lecture or plan for this particular class, he could not even recall which course he was supposed to be teaching. Students from various years and classes regarded him quizzically, already bored: if he could not think of something to say, soon the whole hour, an hour he hadn’t the barest idea of how to fill, would be lost. Was this Working Class Movements in England, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 9:30-10:20? New Trends in Socialist Thought, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, 1:30-2:20? Crowd Theory, Monday and Wednesday, 4:00-5:25? He would realize with growing desperation that he did not know what day it was. Last night, the dream had progressed to this point, and then Julia had risen from one of the chairs and, pulling a sheaf of notes from her bag, began to lecture brilliantly on the London Corresponding Society and its Secretary, Thomas Hardy. He had resented her usurping his class at the same time as he had listened dazzled to her initial summary of information and the cascade of her ideas, which defined exactly what he had been struggling to express to this class over the past year. He had been certain he would remember everything she said so that he could use it in the first chapter of the book he wanted to write, but all of it had vanished in the first second of wakefulness. Instead of her ideas, he would remember how she had looked—dressed in a white blouse and yellow skirt, her hair hanging softly about her shoulders, she was the Julia he had seen that first morning at Magnus9 house. She looked enchanted, like a woman who conversed with fairies: a woman to whom clung the last bewitching traces of childhood. Mark stared up at the low ceiling of his room, realizing that the dream had caused in him a terrific sexual arousal. He wanted Julia very badly. She could not consider herself married to Magnus after his brutal appearance at her home yesterday afternoon; the thought gave him energy to roll over and punch the light switch beside the mattress. Magnus seemed to have at last exploded. Both Julia and Lily- had described the incident to him, each of them advising him to stay away from Magnus for the time being. Well, when hadn’t he avoided Magnus? One of the first utterly clear impressions of Mark’s life was that his adoptive brother detested him.
Maybe loathing was more the word for it, he considered, and giggled.
Still grinning, Mark untangled his legs from the sheet and stood up beside the mattress, carefully avoiding the stacks of plates and half-empty tins strewn over the floor. He had begun eating in bed the previous winter, when his bed was the warmest place in the flat, and had not yet got out of the habit. A pile of clothing lay atop a chair near the mattress, and Mark extracted from it a shirt and trousers, which he pulled on oyer his body, taking great care with the zip of the trousers. From the pocket of the shirt he took a pack of Gauloises and a lighter and applied the flame to the tip of the cigarette, relishing the smoke’s occupation of his mouth and lungs. Then he felt beside the mattress and found his watch. It was eleven o’clock. He glanced for a moment at his desk, set below the window at the opposite end of the room, and immediately felt the loss of all sexual desire. There lay his typewriter, some pencils in a small bottle, a stack of paper, a few sheets of notes and a dozen books in two piles—all the material for beginning work on his book. They had lain there since the previous summer, when he had deliberately not taken any teaching work so that he could write. But that summer had passed in a series of casual meetings with women, daydreams, grandiose plans which had never come to anything. He had spent an alarming amount of time asleep, as if exhausted by inactivity. After another three terms of teaching, Mark had thought that he could at last get down to the book, but now he could not look at his desk without feeling a panicky fluttering of guilt. He was less sure of his ideas now than when he’d first thought of writing his interpretation of working class social movements. When he could bring himself now to think about the book, he chiefly visualized the reviews it would earn. “The breakthrough in socialist thought achieved by this brilliant young lecturer…” “This classic of Marxist praxis…” He snubbed out the Gauloise on a plate and went down the hallway to the bathroom.
When he returned Mark separated the curtains above his desk and let a drained, weak version of the sunlight enter the room. Well below street level, the little flat required electric lighting at all times of day. Forever gloomy, on overcast days it held large areas of brownish obscurity. The windows, like the smaller window in the kitchen—the flat’s second room— looked out onto a wall of concrete which had once been white. Soon his headache would return. It had first come nearly a month ago, just after he had awakened. Ever since, he had been haunted by it, an insistent throbbing behind his temples and a feeling of constriction oyer the entire top of his head. On mornings when he had dreamed of Julia, it seemed worse. These sensations, never actually painful, had affected his concentration. Even if he were able to sit at his desk and begin work, he thought, he would be unable to construct a decent paragraph: he found himself losing the thread of conversations, of suddenly being aware, as in his classroom dream, that he was uncertain of what he had planned to do next. Several times on the street he had been unable to remember where he had been going. He often found himself brooding about Julia and Magnus. A displaced, lost child himself, Mark had lately begun to see Julia—whom he had for years thought of as no more than a sweet, moderately pretty housewife—as his counterpart. Magnus’ possession of her seemed a cruel and blatant injustice. No man as bastardly and arrogant as Magnus deserved any sort of wife, certainly not one as sensitive as Julia. And Julia’s money, which he could use to further a thousand worthwhile purposes—the writing of his book only the most immediate of these—had been squandered on drinks and bourgeois dinners, and almost certainly funneled off to Lily. At times, Mark nearly hated Julia for tolerating so long her brutish parody of a marriage. And the money had come from that old crook, Charles Windsor Freeman, Julia’s great-grandfather, one of the classic American plunderers and exploiters: Mark could turn it against that very class and cleanse the money of its stain.
It was time for his exercises. Mark extended himself on the carpet, which showed strands of thread beneath its scuffy greenish tufts, and deliberately emptying his mind, first lifted one arm and then the other straight upward. He tightened his muscles and pushed upward with all his strength. He repeated this with his legs. Loosened, he sat in the lotus position and attempted to touch his forehead to the ground.’ He extended his tongue until its roots ached. Then he sat blankly, expectantly. He closed his
eyes to a furry darkness.
He stared deeply into the opaque darkness, letting it take shape around him. No movement, no thought. He was a vessel to be filled.
Within ten minutes the chaos of the flat had spun away, leaving him in a vibrant, circling universe. He was a dancing point of light in darkness, a slit of entry for spirit. Stars and worlds moved about him like spheres. The single burning lamp was a glorious golden wheel of consciousness toward which he flew, circling. It breathed and pulsed, trembling with life and knowledge.
His body, no longer tiny, became immense. His whirling encompassed worlds, galaxies. Mark-body became Mark-self, breathing in gusts of spirit. Time cocooned him, light as dust. Everything was holy. He could blow time away and fracture the world, leaving only Mark, only holy light. His hands lay across continents, weightless as the buzzing of a fly. His arms lifted themselves, and extended through vast distances. Wordless chanting filled the glowing space about him. Disembodied peace indistinguishable from tension illuminated and lifted him. Muscles, birds, flight. He was up. Now he was traveling toward a swarm of bright particles which coalesced as he traversed the great distance separating himself from them. He ached for union. He saw first a golden city, then a face he knew to be Julia’s even before it came fully into focus. He was creating her from spirit. Space began to hum with energy, to sing. He was dissolving into flames and candles, into sheer brightness. The face he saw was not Julia’s, but that of a beautiful child. The brightness unbearably, gloriously intensified.
Outside, far away and to his left, a taxi blared. Mark began to spin downward, heaviness invading his body’s vast molecular spaces. He collapsed forward onto the carpet, his thighs cramping. His tongue caught a dusty web of hair. Mrs. Fludd, sitting beside him on a couch in Julia’s living room, said to him, “You are being blocked.” With the repetition of the taxi’s bright, horrid noise came his headache, settling like night over his scalp.
“I’m so grateful that you agreed to see me,” said Julia to the pleasant, smiling middle-aged woman who had opened the door of the large white house at 4 Abbotsbury Close. “It’s very important that we talk, important to me—I was so surprised to see your name in the directory, I thought you would have moved after your tragedy. Do you remember speaking to me on the telephone, Mrs. Braden? I’m Julia Lofting. You said I should come over this morning before lunch…”
The woman opened the door further and admitted Julia to deep gloom. All of the house she could see appeared to be dark brown; a far wall held a cluster of old photographs layered with dust. “I am not the one you spoke to,” the woman whispered to Julia.
“Mrs. Braden is upstairs in her room. She is waiting for you. It is about Geoffrey, yes?” Her German accent sounded like that of the voice Julia had heard over the telephone yesterday: but this woman’s voice was higher in pitch, silvery. Julia immediately, irrelevantly thought of it as the voice of a hypnotist.
“You’re not…” Julia glanced up toward the staircase, which ended at a darkened arch.
“I’m Mrs. Braden’s companion,” said the woman, her voice insinuating, lulling. “I am called Mrs. Huff. I have known Mrs. Braden only since the tragedy. At first there were so many, those men from newspapers, the police, many wicked people coming to pry—the curious. I kept them away from her. Now no one comes for a long time. She wants to see you.”
Mrs. Huff, moving with a stiff efficiency that recalled Miss Pinner, and which Julia only now recognized as arthritis, pulled open a door at Julia’s left and revealed a musty parlor. Brown overstuffed chairs faced each other across a mottled carpet. Beside each rose a hairy plant. “Please to wait here until I return. It will not be long.”
“Is there a Mr. Braden?” Julia stood uneasily beside one of the fuzzy chairs.
“He died in the war,” Mrs. Huff said, and was gone. The door clicked behind her.
Julia did not want to sit in the chairs; they reminded her of some sticky plant that trapped insects and then digested them. She turned in the dark little room and began to pace, too excited to take in the room’s furnishings, which seemed to hang in the dusty gloom. Her steps took her to a wooden bookcase; Julia looked at the titles, odd in some way, uniformly stamped in gilt on the thick spines. Then she saw that they were all in German. She ran her hand along the books, and her fingers came away black. Wiping her fingers on a tissue from her bag, Julia walked in small circles on the dark carpet. Surely it was Turkish? Her grandfather had owned a carpet much like it. She became aware of a pressure in her bladder. Where was the bathroom? It was only the excitement, she knew, and it would soon pass away if she could take her mind off it. She began to pace more rapidly; if the pressure increased, she would have to sit cross-legged in one of the awful chairs. Then her steps took her immediately before a small canvas, and she stopped pacing, puzzled “by its familiarity. It was not a painting she had seen before, but surely she knew that arrangement of uptilted table, pipe and gash of newsprint. Braque—it was a Braque. She peered at the little painting more closely. It had to be a reproduction; but when she read the signature she saw the buttery raised strokes of paint. Surprise dissipated the urgency in her bladder.
She turned about just as the door opened. Mrs. Huff beckoned stiffly with one hand, smiling. “Mrs. Braden will see you now. Please follow me.”
“This painting—I can’t believe it!” said Julia.
“Please to come. I know nothing about painting.”
Julia hurried from the room, propelled by the silvery, lulling voice. Mrs. Huff gestured toward the staircase, smiling, and then began to ascend. Julia followed. When she had passed through the darkened archway, she saw Mrs. Huff opening a door halfway down a lightless hall. Julia had time to notice rows of paintings lining the walls, but the obscurity within the corridor effaced them. She went hurriedly through the door Mrs. Huff was holding open for her.
“Please sit down, Mrs. Lofting,” said the large gray-haired woman dressed entirely in shining black who had risen at Julia’s entrance. “I am Greta Braden and it was I to whom you spoke on the telephone. Please take the chair to your left. I think you will find it comfortable. Thank you, Huff.” The door closed softly behind Julia.
She found herself staring at a painting encased in a gold frame from which depended a sliding red velvet drape, now pulled to one side to reveal a fleshy naked woman whose skin seemed to absorb all the room’s light. It was, unbelievably, a Rubens. The rest of the bedroom shared with its occupant the atmosphere of elegance gone down in neglect. The flocked wallpaper, once red-gold, had been darkened by grime to a mute shade of brown. Books and newspapers lay over the floor, many of the papers yellowing with age. On the worn black velvety expanse of material covering the massive bed lay a tray holding the ruins of breakfast. Mrs. Braden’s large angular face/seemed to have caught dust in every fold. The gray hair was stiff with grease. Looking at her, Julia was not sure that Greta Braden was quite sane.
“You wish to talk with me about my son. Why is that, Mrs. Lofting?”
Julia sat on the chair Mrs. Braden had indicated, and felt the cushions slither beneath her weight. Now she was looking at a photograph, hung on the wall above the huge bed, of a small frail-looking boy in spectacles. Beside it hung a second photograph, of a tall, gaunt man wearing pince-nez and a Norfolk jacket.
“That was Geoffrey,” said Mrs. Braden. “My husband stands beside him. What is your interest in me, Mrs. Lofting?”
“I saw Heather Rudge two days ago,” said Julia, and saw the woman’s body stiffen inside the shiny black shell of her clothing. “She was abusive and disturbed, but she did mention that I might speak to you.” Overriding a curt, dismissive gesture from Mrs. Braden, Julia hastily added, “I am not working for Heather Rudge, not in any way. You see, I recently bought the Rudges’ former house. I was—I was recovering from a long illness. Something about the house demanded that I buy it. Since then I’ve been looking into the past of the Rudge family—the past of the house. It’s been something like
a compulsion—I want to know everything I can find out about them. I don’t think the truth ever came out about your son’s death, Mrs. Braden. There’s a lot more, but you might think I was crazy if I said it all. The chief thing is, I have to find out about the Rudges.”
Mrs. Braden was looking at her very shrewdly. “And then you will perhaps write about what you find?”
“Well,” said Julia, afraid to risk expulsion by uttering the wrong answer, “I’m not sure about that…”
“Twenty-four years ago I would not have talked to you,” said Mrs. Braden. “Especially if you mentioned the name Rudge. Now much time has passed, and I have waited for someone to speak the truth about my son’s death. Many have gone unpunished. When my tragedy happened, the police would not listen to me. I was a foreigner, a woman, and they thought me suspicious, foolish. They ignored me, Mrs. Lofting. My son’s death has gone unavenged. Now do you understand why I am speaking to you?”
“I… I think so,” said Julia.
“My world is in this room. I have not left my house since twenty years. I have become old in this room. Huff is my eyes and ears. I care for nothing but my husband’s collection of paintings, his memory, and my son’s memory. Even Huff does not know everything about my son’s murder—doesn’t that word sound awesome and terrible to you, Mrs. Lofting? Do you know what murder is? That it is the greatest crime against the soul, even the souls of the living? It is an eternal crime.”
“Yes…I feel that,” Julia breathed. “But what I need is proof. Or knowledge more than proof.”
“Proof.” The older woman expelled the word from her mouth as if it were rotten meat. “I need no proof. That man the police executed was a harmless vagrant. He was a simple man, a child himself. He liked to talk to the children. What proof did the police have when they killed him?”
