Julia

by Peter Straub

  She stabbed the reading light on in sudden fear and the plane of darkness disappeared. There was nothing. There was no giant pillow of dark. She switched off .the light, and saw it return.

  When the first touch of small hands came, she went rigid, aware that she had somehow fallen asleep. A cool hand slid up her inner thigh, and she rolled over, twisting in the sheet. The hand returned on her buttocks, caressing, probing. Julia gasped at the violation and spun around, rolling to the other side of the bed. Arms braced her shoulders to the bed. They held her immobilized; her legs, trapped in the .twisted sheet, were as if pinned to the mattress. The cool small hand found her pubic hair, then her cleft. It began, delicately, to rub. Her body felt naked to the dark air, though the sheet bound her. Julia groaned as the hand pressed toward her clitoris and stroked. Feathery: feathers, tongues. She was a fly caught in a sticky cocoon, ministered to by the spider. Against her will, with horror, she felt her body build up a rhythmic tension. The relentless hand stroked, rubbed, as if dipped in oil; it circled, insinuated into her. Her back arched. She felt her nipples harden. Sweat broke out on her chest. Julia inhaled a gulp of burning air. She seemed to be falling into a deep well. Her knees twitched. The tight sheet, wrapping her like a shroud, was itself the lightest of caresses, palms on her taut nipples. The pressure, arching her back, subtly increased and began to beat outward in circles. Suddenly she saw Mark before her, his body taut with longing. The oiled rubbing hands were the huge tip of his penis. The embracing arms were his. Her legs moved wide apart and his shaft slid deep within her. She bared her teeth. Arms, legs, hands, deep velvet held her. She saw, felt him stiffen and plunge and a sound died in her throat as everything burst.

  And the next morning when Julia tottered sick with nausea into the bathroom, Olivia showed herself within the house for the first time. She did not jump out of sight at the last second; she did not flicker away. She stood, a small blond smiling child, behind Julia as Julia looked into the black mirror opposite her. Julia placed a protective hand over her abraded, sore cleft and whirled around. Again, the child appeared behind her in the facing mirror.

  As Julia watched, Olivia gave her asymmetric, challenging smile and slowly drew an index finger across her pale throat. Her other hand gripped the pulped, still trembling body of headless bird.

  A Thames gull slapped into the window late at night, making a noise like a train wreck, and startling into wakefulness the man who reclined on a fluffy Indian cushion. Uneasy—he had been close to fear for the past twenty-four hours—and not as yet quite certain where he was, the man extended one hand and knocked over the bottle of Calvados. His room, crowded with details of his life, reassuringly came together about him; the needle of the record player crackled and hissed in the final grooves. He righted the bottle, shaking his head. None had spilled, for he had consumed most of what was left during the night, after his guest had left. His mind seemed thickened, syrupy; the aftertaste of his heavy cigarettes coated his mouth.

  From beyond the door, his name quietly sounded. He sat up straight, pulling his legs under him, and listened to the sound of the voice. It uttered his name over and over, beseechingly, in a voice neither male nor female. “Foolish little scut,” the man muttered, and for several seconds considered his promise not to open the door again. But that too was foolish. Both had had far too much to drink. The man bent forward and stood in one motion, feeling the muscles in his thighs protesting. Upright, he patted his hairpiece and straightened his pullover. He moved to the door as slowly as he could, relishing the sound of his name, half whispered, urgent, full of need.

  He opened the door to a stranger—a stranger? The voice was a voice he knew. The visitor smiled, and he knew the contours of that smile.

  Too late, he saw the knife slide from beneath the coat. His mind fluttered with bright, hopeless panic and he stepped backward as the visitor moved through the doorway, still voicing his name.

  Part Three

  The Closing: Olivia

  9

  Julia moved hesitantly up Kensington High Street at the end of day, buffeted by the crowds returning home late from work, unsure of where she was going. Confused, she had taken the wrong way, and was dimly aware of this. Her left wrist was still oozing blood, and she dabbed at the deep cut with a wrinkled yellow tissue, hoping it would stop; but the cuff of the blouse was stained and smeared with blood, as her sheet had been. Because of the pills, her mind had difficulty in retaining images, and she looked at the sky twice before being certain that it had stopped raining. All of the sky was a vast dark undifferentiated gray. No holes, she thought, no air spaces, and saw herself beating at the undersurface of gray cloud as if it were a thick layer of ice trapping her in arctic water; the pavements and street were still filmed with black rain. Ascent, escape, ascent, escape, revolved in her brain. But she could think of no escape. Olivia held her fast.

  She thought of the beggar maid’s king, Cophetua, his face immobilized by love. Mark. Was he safe? He had rung immediately after the grinning specter of the girl had vanished from the mirror.

  Take some pills and go to sleep, he’d said. Do you have anything?

  —Yes. Pills? Yes.

  —You need rest. Take a couple of pills and get a really good rest.

  —I have to see you. I’m in danger. Like Mrs. Fludd said. I am, Mark.

  —Listen to me. Ghosts don’t kill. Your danger is entirely from Magnus, and you’re staying away from him. Julia, love, you’re overtired. Lock your door and knock yourself out for the rest of the day.

  —I need you, Mark. She wants me.

  —Not half as much as I do, he had laughed. I’ll see you this evening, sometime tonight.

  —Save me.

  Had she said that, save me? Perhaps she had imagined the entire conversation. All that was clear, besides gulping down two pills—memories of the hospital making her shudder—was running back upstairs and heaving the polished, rose-veined stone at the walls of the bathroom. Heaving it, again and again, until the black mirrors had showered down, leaping off the walls and shivering past her face. Then she had slipped on a large panel of glass and gone down into the mess, gashing her wrist. She had barely felt the pain. Now she can’t come in here, Julia had thought, uncaring of the blood which welled out of the gash and down across the palm of her hand. The walls were unreflecting gray-white plaster marked like a graph with small black studs, to a few of which adhered an inch of mirror. Broken glass, some of it catching muted light from the ceiling, was strewn over the bathroom carpet, tumbled in long snaky shapes in the sink and tub. She felt warm blood falling onto her bare feet and snatched a towel from the rack and wound it about her wrist. Pebbles of glass snagged at her cut. Then she had swallowed the two pills. And staggered across twelve feet of broken glass to her bedroom.

  (Thus she did not hear the bell seven hours later when Lily and Magnus came together to her front door.)

  As in the hospital, she was visited by long fluent dreams. Those had been of turning the knife on herself, of sacrificing herself for Kate, that Kate’s vibrant little life could be restored: her blood for her daughter’s, a barter. She had felt Kate’s forgiving approach at such times. But now her dreams all had the same flavor; they were as ashy as failure and loss. Even as she began to slip steeply into them, she resisted, sensing the approach of that hopeless territory. She was again walking through the gritty streets, carrying her daughter’s corpse. The child she knew to be Olivia lurked ahead, unseen, and it was her duty to find her. The sky above the blackened roofs of tenements was lurid, red and orange shot with black streaks. Again, her long, burdened wandering took her to a mean courtyard. She moved across the filthy cobblestones and past abandoned, bricked-up warehouses and passed through the arch of the yard. A hunched leering man in a tattered coat winked at her, summoning from a doorway a small black girl with a curly ruff of hair. Julia ascended broken stairs and came out, as she knew she would, on a flat rooftop. A little woman in a large brown coat sat alone on t
he rooftop, her weight supported by a rickety chair. The woman was Mrs. Fludd. Seeing her, Julia felt tears welling in her eyes.

  —I’m sorry, she said. I put you here. And I still need your help.

  —I cannot help you.

  Kate’s body was taken from her; it had been needed to bring her here, and now it could vanish.

  —You called her up.

  —Yes, said Julia.

  —You invoked her. She needed someone to call “her back, you see, and you were chosen. This happened because of your daughter.

  —What do I have to know?

  —She won’t like you knowing her secrets.

  Mrs. Fludd turned sideways in her chair, refusing to speak further.

  —Talk to me.

  The old woman’s face, heavy and washed of color, turned again toward Julia.

  —She will have your friends.

  Then she had been running into a long tunnel, noticing even as she ran that the tunnel led nowhere, that it narrowed the further and deeper she went. At the end was Mark, the New Hampshire valley, peace …but she knew that at the end of all her running would be only a black narrow hole. About her rang Heather Rudge’s coarse, wheezing laughter.

  She had awoken with this laughter still reverberating above her, joining the other noises of the house. The towel had been dragged off her arm, and the left side of the bed was stained by irregular red blots. For a moment she sensed that, as in her dream, Olivia Rudge hung nearby, just out of sight, waiting to appear. It would not be long. Mrs. Fludd’s final words had then come back to her. Struggling to impose firmness and direction on her dream-tattered mind, Julia had wrapped her wrist in the top sheet and groggily sat up. She looked out the window across the room and saw rain drizzling down from a ghost-gray sky. A scarf of cool wind reached her from the open window and instantly vaporized in the heat. For the first time, Julia was consciously aware of the hot, feral smell pervading the bedroom, the reek of a lion’s cage.

  Throwing aside the ruined sheet, Julia had risen and looked at her watch: now it was eight, and she had slept through the entire day. Your friends. Mark, her truest friend, was in danger. Her mouth filled with dust. When she had glanced into the closet and seen again the ripped, scattered dolls, she staggered away from the bed and felt blood begin to move sluggishly down her wrist. She tore several sheets of Kleenex from the box near her bed and clamped them over the slash, which had begun to pulse and complain. When she struggled into her robe, she buttoned the left sleeve to fasten the Kleenex to the wound and went down the echoing stairs to telephone Mark.

  Olivia was abroad; Olivia would have anyone she wanted. It can’t be got rid of. It wants revenge, Heather Rudge had said. It wants revenge.

  Mark’s telephone had shrilled a dozen times. She would have to go to his room.

  So now she walked blearily along Kensington High Street, the wad of sodden Kleenex dropped somewhere behind her and blood seeping into the cuff of her shirt. Between the flat gray sky and the rain-blackened streets, the streetlamps had already switched on, and cast an acid yellow light over the crowds through which she pushed. From time to time, a wave of oblivious men carried her back a few paces, making her stagger as she was thrown, almost unseen, from one comfortless shoulder to the next. She looked in all their faces for Mark, and found instead—it seemed to her—only sneers and laughter. Julia realized that the men thought she was drunk. Sleeping pills had never affected her so strongly before. Maybe it was due to lack of food. But the image of food—a greasy pile of pinkish-gray meat—made her stomach lurch and tighten.

  A heavy curtain of dark appeared before her vision, blotting out the bunched, jostling crowds and the snarling jungle of traffic beyond them. Julia tottered, blind, and fell sideways against the rough facing of a building. For a moment, as the people sweeping past brushed her elbows and knees and trod on her feet, she lost all awareness of her identity and surroundings. The wave of nausea and dizziness was nearly a relief, sucking responsibility from her, and she gave herself over to it, forgetting why she was out on the street and where she was going. Her mind fled back to the image of the drained Mrs. Fludd, seated on a rickety chair alone on a rooftop. Your friends. Then the long, long flight down a narrowing tunnel, Kate had been her nearest friend. Her thought bucked like a rearing horse.

  She opened her eyes to a dark burned with acid yellow. I’m in her world now, she thought. Soon I will meet her again. I nearly know it all. The two imprisoned women, the two ruined men had nearly brought her to the full knowledge she sought, and she had to make her way through Olivia Rudge’s world to find the rest. Men like beasts rutted past her, each eyeing the stricken woman leaning against the brick wall of a bank. A high thin red line—a scream—traced the sky.

  Men followed her with their eyes. Before her, as she watched them quicken with lust or amusement (What in the world can I look like? she wondered), they drew their faces into the masks of beasts, boars, bulls, wild dogs. Bristles jutted from their snouts, their feet were hooves tearing the ground. Their skin burned in the yellow light, unhealthy and sallow. In the babble of voices, she thought she discerned Magnus’ low growl, and started, her mind a fluttering rag.

  Her hands brushed her thighs: cotton. She was wearing cotton trousers. She could not remember dressing. Looking down, she saw that she wore a pale shirt, a short tan jacket. She touched her hair and felt oil The voice was not Magnus’, merely that of a man shouting to another man in the street.

  Four young men passed before her, their hair languorously curled; as they turned to stare, she saw their faces inflamed with pustules, death in the pouches of their cheeks, their eyes like razors cutting pieces from her body. In the high, curved, bald forehead of a man thrusting past she saw death, the skin tightening on his skull; and she saw in a woman’s colorless lips death, as they parted over her teeth. And she saw they were all dead, sweeping past her in the noise of raised voices and automobiles. The dark gained on them all.

  Bone-shining foreheads, skeletal umbrellas against the dark, now nearly invisible sky and the wash of yellow from the lamps and headlights. It was the world of her dream life.

  Julia fought to right herself steadily on her feet. Simple movement would cure this dreadful trick of vision. The boys, now further down the block, were only boys; the men and women merely weary from work and the journey home. She felt a familiar pang—an echo from her old personality—as she realized that the little tan jacket would probably cost two weeks’ wages for any of the men crowding past. Magnus had persuaded her to buy it: or had he bought it, using her money? After so many years, it made little difference, but she wanted him to have bought it. Possessions were shameful. Then why had she bought the house?

  She had been chosen. In that was the last mystery.

  One step, another; she tugged at the hem of the jacket and straightened her back. No one was looking at her, in all the sweeping flood passing by. Julia began to walk more steadily, and recognized she had come over half the way to Kensington Church Street. It was one way of getting to Notting Hill, though roundabout. She hung unmoving on the crowded pavement for a second, debating whether to go back and take the walk along the side of the park which went directly north and ended at Holland Park Avenue, but then decided, in the cool gauzy air, to continue on the long way. The unaccustomed coolness would clear her head. She moved on again, passing W. H. Smith’s, a package store, a clothing shop where mannequins flung out their arms as if wailing.

  Then she caught sight of herself in a shop window and hurried past, unable to look away. Her face was a formless white puddle, with discolored blots beneath her eyes—it was the face of one of the women in the Breadlands Clinic, the face of a dazed animal fleeing experience. For a moment she saw how she would look when old, and she turned wildly away and rushed down the street, her bag bumping at her side.

  A known face at a queue at a bus stop across the street from Biba’s made her shorten her stride. The old woman in the long black dress hadn’t yet seen he
r; Julia turned her back to the line of people at the edge of the pavement, feeling an instinctive desire to escape… Still, she might have been mistaken. She edged sideways and back, and dared to turn around. The long narrow face now in profile, the dogmatic chin, tendrils of white hair escaping from beneath a black hat: it was Miss Pinner.

  Her first response had been panic: perhaps she did not want to know what the old woman had seen in the mirror that disastrous night. Perhaps she already did know.

  But her curiosity about that evening was too great to be dismissed; she could not flee from Miss Pinner too. Julia’s decision seemed to help her dispel Olivia’s world, for the tired people at the bus stop all appeared reassuringly ordinary, and she waited until two or three men had walked between them and then crossed the blackly shining pavement to tap the old woman on the shoulder. She pronounced her name, and heard her voice emerging levelly, distinctly.

  “Yes? Yes?” The old woman started out of her reverie and turned her headmistress’ blue eyes on Julia.

  She doesn’t recognize me, Julia thought. “Excuse me,” she began, and saw the old woman purse her mouth expectantly, as if she were about to be asked for directions. “I’m surprised to see you here, Miss Pinner,” she said.

  Fear jumped for a second in the woman’s eyes, and she stepped out of the queue. “Mrs. Lofting?” she said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t recognize you at first, you see …you look ill, my dear. Yes, you are quite right, I am not here often …and I am afraid that I shall have to be getting off home.” She lifted a small brown parcel. “We used to enjoy shopping here, and since Miss Tooth’s birthday is approaching soon, I wanted to see if I could find anything for her at Derry and Tom’s—but I found that they had been replaced by that very curious store across the street, and the little restaurant on the roof was shut, so I bought her something elsewhere.” As she chattered, she glanced down the street obviously looking for her bus. “I’m late already. I must be home in time to prepare our dinner. Heavens, it’s past eight.”