by Peter Straub
“So you are convinced he was innocent,” Julia said.
“Of course, of course! Listen to what I am saying to you. There were no secrets between Geoffrey and myself, Mrs. Lofting. I know what they did to him in that park. Those others tortured him daily. They made his life a hell because he was sensitive and because he had asthma. And because he was partially German. They called my son the Kraut, the Jerry, the Hun. They were all bad children, those others.”
“And you knew Mrs. Rudge?”
“That one. She laughed at me. She scorned me. I begged her to help me for Geoffrey’s sake, but she was blind and foolish. She could not see what was happening within her own house. She could not see she was defending a monster. I have no doubt about what happened to my son, Mrs. Lofting. The Rudge girl mutilated him and then killed him. And the others helped. Now. Do you think that I am wrong?”
Julia gently touched the sheeny material of Mrs. Braden’s sleeve. “What did Olivia look like, Mrs. Braden? Can you describe her?”
The reply destroyed her expectations. “She was just a girl. Her exterior was unimportant. She looked like one of a hundred girls. She has been dead as long as Geoffrey. You must be aware of that.”
“I am aware of it, yes, but there are reasons—I have to know what she looked like. Did she have blond hair? How tall was she?”
“Those are foolish details. Blond, yes, she may have been blond. But you couldn’t tell she was evil by looking at her, Mrs. Lofting.” “That’s the same word her mother said.” Mrs. Braden smiled. “That stupid woman,” she said. “That rude common little fool. No, Mrs. Lofting, you must not dwell on the wasted lives of the Rudges. You must find the others. You must make them confess.”
“I have to find them,” Julia agreed. “I know some of their names. Minnie Leibrook and Francesca Temple and Paul Winter…”
“And John Aycroft and David Swift, yes. And the Reilly boy. You surprise me, Mrs. Lofting. Those were the children who helped Olivia Rudge kill my son. If you want your proof talk to them. And I can help you.”
Julia waited tensely, unable to guess what would come.
“Some of them have died. None of them have prospered. As you can imagine, Mrs. Lofting, I have been interested in the lives of this group. I have ‘kept up,’ as you would say. I can tell you that the Reilly boy disappeared in America, your country, ten years ago—he is lost. John Aycroft killed himself when his business went bankrupt, Minnie Leibrook died in an automobile accident while drunk. Francesca Temple was very wise and became a nun. She now lives in the Slaves of Mary convert in Edinburgh, under a vow of silence. Paul Winter became a professional soldier, as was his father, but was cashiered by his regiment. He lives in a flat in Chelsea. David Swift ruined his family wine business and lost his wife in a freak accident—she was electrocuted. He lives above a pub in Upper Street, Islington. Talk to those two men, Mrs. Lofting. If you can make them talk, you will have your proof.”
Julia was stunned. “How did you find out all this?”
Mrs. Braden flexed her shoulders, making the cloth creak. “My eyes and my ears. Huff. I pay Huff very well. She has many talents. I will ask you to leave now, Mrs. Lofting. But first I will give you some advice. Be very thorough. And be careful.”
“Well, careful is what you’d better be,” Mark said that evening. “I never heard such a tacky idea. You mean you really intend to march up to those two people and grill them about a twenty-four-year-old death? For which a man has already been executed? Look here, have another drink instead and forget all about it. God knows what you’d be getting into.”
“I’ll have another if you let me pay for it. Please, Mark.”
“If you insist, I reluctantly accept.” Mark had counted his money a few minutes before in the men’s room, and knew that the last round had left him with sixty-three pence. He owed twenty pounds to a colleague, and when he’d paid that, his next check from school would leave him just enough to pay his rent and buy a month’s food and drink. Still, he supposed, he could always put off Samuels for another month—maybe he could put him off until the second term. He watched hungrily while Julia withdrew a small purse from her bag and took from it a ten-pound note. With a start of anticipatory pleasure, Mark realized that he already thought of Julia’s money as his own. “That’s sweet of you, darling,” he added. He took the note from her fingers.
When he came back from the bar with the two drinks he put the pile of bills and change on the table between them. He ^aid, “Are you bothered about the change?”
She looked up at him, startled. “Why, do you need money?”
“Just something to tide me over. I’ve had a tight month.”
She pushed the bills at him, her face beautifully focused on his. “Mark, please take it—please. Do you want any more? It’s silly of me to have so much when you don’t have enough. Really, do you need more?”
“We can talk about that later,” he said. In the soft ° light which filtered through to the back corners of the pub, Julia looked much better, he thought. Her face still seemed milky from lack of sleep, but she was more confident, vibrant, like the Julia of old, before Magnus had sunk his claws into her.
“Are you feeling well, Mark?” she asked.
“Just a headache. It comes and goes.” He adjusted his face to put on his most endearing expression, what an old girl friend had called his “sheep in wolfs clothing face.” “I have to say,” he went on, “that I think you should just drop the whole business right now. I don’t think you should have upset yourself by visiting those two old grotesques. I don’t understand your worry about Kate. You still have Kate, my love. Kate is part of you. She can’t hurt you. I blame Magnus for planting all that fear in you. I could kill him for what he’s doing to you. You should have let Perry what’s-his-name go to the coppers.” His headache had tightened up a notch, but he kept his face steady, putting, if anything, more warmth into his eyes.
“You hate Magnus, don’t you?” Julia sounded faintly startled.
“Magnus is a bastard.”
“I do think of you as my protection against him. It was magic, how you appeared that time I fainted. And you and Lily are the only people I can talk to about what’s been happening to me. If it weren’t for poor Mrs. Fludd, I probably wouldn’t be able to talk about it at all. Did you hear about her?”
Mark nodded, and his headache made the pub swirl. “Lily told me. Too bad. Funny old girl.”
“She saw something, and she knew she was in danger. I think she was killed so she couldn’t tell me what it was. Mark, I’d think I was going crazy if it weren’t for her—I have to make her death mean something.” Julia took a big swallow of her drink. “She was murdered. I’m sure of it.”
“She walked in front of a car, didn’t she? That’s what, manslaughter, not murder.”
“Why did it happen, though? And if it was a straightforward accident, how did she know she was in mortal danger? Mrs. Fludd said there was a man -and a child—I’ve been thinking all along that they were Magnus and Kate, I thought Kate was haunting my house, but there’s another possibility. Of course the man is Magnus, I know that much—he’s completely irrational—but the girl might be someone else. That girl I saw. And that’s why I have to see those people.”
Mark rubbed his temples. “I think you’re making a mistake. I think you should forget about the whole business/’ Julia had got an exalted, excited look which rasped on his nerves.
“What did Mrs. Fludd say to you that night? I have to know, Mark. It might help.”
“Nothing. It was nothing. I can’t even remember.”
“Oh.” She seemed chastened. “Really? Please try/’
“I can’t tell you how much my head hurts. Well, I think she said something like, ‘You’re being blocked,’ and then she said that I should leave “your house.”
“It’s what she told me! Oh, Mark, she wanted to save you too.” She reached toward him and stroked his wooly hair. The pain seemed to ebb. He looked at her flushed face and
her brimming eyes and saw that some of her exaltation was from the whiskey. “Dear Mark,” she said. “Your poor head.”
“Maybe she was trying to keep me away from you.” That was in fact what he had felt.
“I went to the Tate this week,” he heard her say. Her fingers continued to caress his hair. “I looked at that painting. The Burne-Jones. You’re in it too. I am so grateful for you.”
When he looked up from his cupped hands he saw that Julia was crying. “Finish your drink and let’s go,” he said. The headache had resumed its normal proportions.
Then they were standing in the squalor of his flat, holding one another. Carefully adjusting his stance to support Julia’s weight while avoiding a crusty dish on the floor, Mark stroked her long, rather unkempt hair. He saw a profusion of split ends and wiry single hairs thrust up in a fuzzy corona. “Mark, I don’t know what is happening to me,” she was saying. Each word floated out into his collar and burst in a haze of whiskey. “Sometimes I’m so frightened. Sometimes it’s like I’m not in control of myself. Ever since I read about the Rudge case I’ve been kind of dominated by it—-it’s all I think about. Because it would mean that Kate…” Her back shook with her sobbing.
“Don’t talk about it,” he said. He slipped his right hand between them and began to stroke her breast. Julia gasped, and then tightened her hold on him.
“Stay with me,” he said. “I need you.”
“I want to,” she uttered into the side of his neck. His back was beginning to ache from supporting her. Julia was heavier than he had thought. “You’re the only man I’ve ever wanted, except for Magnus. But…”
“I need you,” he repeated. “You’re beautiful, beautiful, Julia.” He swung her body around, kicking a plate and knocking over an empty, clouded milk bottle, and, grunting a little, lowered her to the mattress. “Please, Julia. Stay with me.” He bent and began to unbutton her blouse, brushed his lips on the mound of her belly. In the light from the single lamp beside the mattress, her face looked blotchy and flushed.
“I can’t,” she moaned.
“You can do anything you want.” He peeled her blouse away from her breasts and put his mouth to one of her nipples. Then he leaned sideways, rolled one hip onto the mattress beside her, and kissed her mouth. It was warm and fleshy, with the feeling of crushed fruit.
“Mark “
“Shh.”
“Mark, I can’t.” But still she did not move. “Just stay beside me,” she said.
Mark pulled the blouse over her shoulders and slipped it down her arms, then tossed it aside. He rapidly stripped off his own shirt, and gave her another long kiss. Julia lay inert, her eyes glazed and bloodshot, out of focus, in the light of the lamp. After undoing his belt and pulling off his boots, Mark shed his trousers. “I will,” he said. “I’ll just stay beside you.”
“Promise. Please.”
“Yes.”
He discarded his underwear as she distractedly, uneasily, removed the rest of her clothing. “Your house is a mess,” she said, laying her skirt atop the blouse.
“Touch me.” He guided her hand.
“You’re soft.” She smiled into his face. “Sweet. Big soft Mark.”
“I still have my headache,” he confessed. “This doesn’t usually happen to me.” Julia’s hand warmly cradled his penis, holding it hesitantly. “No. Keep your hand there.” Now he was beginning to feel a fractional urgency, and he stiffened a little. Her hand jerked him awake. He tongued her nipples, sliding his hand between her legs. Julia’s body seemed an immense, fruitful meadow of warmth.
“My God,” he said. “What happened to your thighs?” They bore enormous purple bruises.
“I hurt myself crawling in a window one night when I lost my key.”
“Damn it,” Mark said. He had lost the small erection he had just gained. His headache throbbed. He lowered his head to the place beside hers on the pillow and reached down to pull the sheet up over them. He touched a warm knee, the curve of a calf, then looked down to see that the sheet lay tangled at their feet. He closed his eyes again and felt her hands pulsing warmth into his back. He slid one hand between her thighs and caressed a bush of long coarse hair.
“Don’t,” she said, suddenly gripping him tight. “Don’t. Just stay with me.”
But Mark was incapable of anything else. His head seemed to have grown to twice its size. There was a whirling vacuum between his legs. He punched the button on the lamp and held to Julia’s warm body because it anchored him in the room. His head found the cushion of her breast. Everything spun about him. He tried to create an erection by willpower, but his brain could not retain the necessary images. His body felt as though it were traveling—traveling great distances toward a cluster of lights. Julia’s voice brought him closer to his real size, but he could not focus upon that either.
“… keep seeing grotesques. Did you see that man in the pub? He had a red stump instead of a hand—just scar tissue—and his mouth…” He forced himself to think: he had not seen a man with one hand in the pub “… a roomful of blank, flabby people reaching for me …that old woman at Breadlands …swearing…” Her voice slipped away altogether.
In the morning she was gone, and his body stretched uselessly, achingly, into air. Beside his head on the pillow he found a note which read You’re a darling. I’m off to do my detecting. Love. Beneath it was a check for a hundred pounds.
8
The spirit did not like her leaving the house for an entire night. When Julia entered her home, wanting to wash and change clothes before looking for Paul Winter and David Swift, she saw with little surprise that some of the furniture had been tumbled about, chairs overturned and cushions flung to the corners of the living room. From upstairs came an angry knocking and banging that she knew would disappear when she set foot on the staircase. In the midst of the din, she could hear a radio playing some vapid forties dance tune, and that noise too would vanish. The odd, fumbling night with Mark—he had lain against her unmoving all night, as unconscious as if drugged—slipped away. As much as tenderness for Mark, she had felt all during the long hours after the alcohol had worn off an acute awareness that she was not in the real place, the place where the important things happened. Mark’s inability to make love had been a relief; apart from her house, deflected from her quest, she wished only for comfort from the desolation. Back in her house and close again to the source of the mystery, she felt that desolation as her familiar element—it was the gray commanding sea in which she swam. What was happening to her was necessary; she was at home.
Julia went into the kitchen and experimentally turned the tap. A pipe clamored in the wall like a trapped owl. A viscous brown jelly plopped at the mouth of the faucet, and she hurriedly twisted the knob of the tap. Into the air she softly said, “You’re angry with me.” The hullabaloo upstairs quieted for a moment. When she had poured three bottles of Malvern water into a pot for heating, she quickly went through the living room, uprighting chairs and replacing the cushions.
“You’re not Kate,” she said, tilting her head back. “You’re Olivia. I’m going to prove it. I’m going to find out, I’m going to find owl—it’s what I’m here for, isn’t it?”
The toby jug lamp crashed to the floor and shattered.
“I’m going to help you,” Julia whispered. The house seemed to get warmer with each word. “You are very powerful, but you need my help. And when I find out, I’ll find out everything. I’ll know why you are torturing Magnus. And then I’ll be free too.”
She waited for another bang from upstairs, but the house seemed to hover about her, expectant.
“I’m going to free us,” Julia repeated softly. “You want Magnus to hurt me, but “I’m going to set you free. That’s why I came, isn’t it? You needed me. You had to have me live here.”
A heavy painting thudded to the floor, cracking the glass with a sharp noise like a pistol shot.
“I’m not afraid,” Julia said, and then added, “I don�
��t have to be afraid until I know.” She was lying—at any moment she expected something to fly at her head—but it was a lie which contained a glowing corner of the truth. Fear could not keep her from the hot center of the truth: fear was only personal.
After she had washed at the sink, scrubbing herself in armpits and private parts with a sponge, Julia ascended to the throbbing heat of the upstairs. Her bedroomi door gaped open. An elbow of noise seemed to pulse from the walls. The heat from her room gusted out in a breeze which lifted her hair and dried her skin as she entered the bedroom. The paint on the storage heater had blistered, leaving brown ulcer-like disks on its surface, curling upward in serrations. Julia heard rustling footsteps in the hall where she had just been. The closet door hung open. She went toward it, pulled it fully open and looked inside, her throat clenched. Some of her clothes had been pulled from their hangers and lay tumbled and twisted on the closet floor, mixed up with her shoes. Then she saw the box of dolls. It had been burst open, and the dolls scattered all over the back of the closet. Their floppy, uncomplicated bodies were torn and slashed. Ancient gray wool foamed from their chests. The terror poured back into her, and she fell gasping to her knees. Her certainty blurred with her vision. Kate had treasured the dolls; a malevolent Kate would destroy them. For a moment she was sick with yearning to be back in the hospital.
When she dashed into the bathroom, she first noticed that the figure in the black mirror—her?— looked haggard and old, her hair a mess and her eyes big with shock. Then she saw that the large untinted mirror over the marble sink had been heavily scored with soap. She stared at the lines and slashes until they coalesced into a list of obscenities. All the details of lying next to Mark flamed in her mind, dirtied by the words glaring at her from the mirror. The spirit knew, and hated her for what she had done. The last word jumped out at her: MURDERESS. “Liar” she snarled, bone-jolted, and seized the nearest heavy object—a large ovoid rose-veined stone, polished to glassy smoothness—and with it shattered the mirror. Her heart froze, contracted. Magnus seemed all about her, wrapping her in a chill, despairing blanket of deception. That accusing word still burned in her sight. After a few minutes she breathed deeply and began pushing together the long silvery shards of the mirror. Her mind skittered away from her as her hands mechanically brushed at the smaller pieces of glass. Had she written those words herself? Had she mutilated the dolls? For a moment she was certain that she had.
