by Peter Straub
“Do you have time to talk to me before your bus comes, Miss Pinner?”
“I can’t say, I’m sure.” Then the little flicker of fear was replaced by something like cunning. “I’m sorry that I was taken ill at your charming house, Mrs. Lofting. It was a very distressing evening for all of us, I’m sure …and then poor Mrs. Fludd’s sudden demise … her niece forbade any of us to attend the funeral… but I was remiss in not writing to thank you for your hospitality. Miss Tooth mid I were entertained in many grand houses years ago, when Miss Tooth could still follow her career, as you know, and we never sinned against hospitality in that way. I do hope you can forgive me.”
“You were taken ill?” said Julia, focusing on the one sentence she had been able to follow.
“A spell of faintness,” said Miss Pinner, showing the faint but detectable embarrassment honest people bring to their untruths. “I’ve been kept very busy these past months, going through all our old scrap-books.” She hitched up her shoulders painfully, in the movement of one adjusting to the twinges of a long-standing arthritis. “I can’t do it in the mornings anymore, so my afternoons are very tiring. But Miss Tooth”—here the dogmatic face forgot all embarrassment—”Miss Tooth can still do her exercises.”
“Can she?” said Julia, wondering if the drug were still clouding her perceptions.
“She can still work at the barre,” said Miss Pinner with great satisfaction. “Miss Tooth is very supple yet.”
“At the bar?” said Julia, trying to visualize little Miss Tooth serving up pints of bitter in a public house.
“Oh, yes. Of course she hasn’t the stamina she had when she was younger, but she has all of her grace. We are preparing a book from the scrap-books. Many people still remember her, as I see you do yourself. Of course, you would only have heard of her. You’re too young to have seen her dance.”
“Unfortunately, I was too young, yes,” said Julia, seeing it at last. She remembered how, during the stance, Miss Tooth had seemingly floated to the floor in one effortless motion. “But she was very famous, wasn’t she?” Julia guessed.
“How kind of you to remember,” said Miss Pinner, and now her manner was entirely friendly. “Rosamund was a great artist. I was her dresser for twenty-five years and we retired together. After working for Rosamund Tooth it was impossible to work for anyone else. And I wouldn’t touch any of the young lot. All technique and no poetry.”
“Did Miss Tooth see anything in the mirror after you’d fainted, that night?” Julia said brutally.
Miss Pinner’s face trembled into an utter blank-ness of expression.
“I thought I saw something when I followed her in3” Julia added. “And I know what it was.”
Miss Pinner looked aghast, and Julia felt a twisting of guilt for making the old woman confront her lie. “Perhaps you saw it too.”
“No—no—Mrs. Lofting, you should not be asking me about that night. I was tired from the long ride down from our home and from putting the scrap-books in order. I don’t know what I saw.” She stepped nervously back into her place in the queue, and Julia followed her.
“Was it a little girl? A blond child? She is, she was, a wicked person, Miss Pinner. Please tell me, Miss Pinner.” But she was already confused by the expression of mixed astonishment and relief on Miss Pinner’s angular face. “Wasn’t it the blond girl?”
“I am afraid to tell you, Mrs. Lofting,” said Miss Pinner. “Oh. There’s my bus down the road. Please don’t detain me. It’ll soon be here.”
Julia, afraid that she would never know, gently touched the thick black stuff of Miss Pinner’s coat with her right hand. “Wasn’t it the little girl? She does horrible things. She once made me faint too.”
Miss Pinner shook her head. “I don’t think …” she began. Down the block, the bus swerved into traffic and came toward them, its headlamps beaming yellow through gathering dark.
Julia suddenly felt a sick certainty that her assumptions had been wrong; she was again at the edge of the abyss, afraid to look down. The bus swung heavily toward the curb, a wing of yellow light flashing below the upper deck. In his cage behind rain-streaked glass the driver looked totemic.
“I must get on now or wait another twenty minutes,” said Miss Pinner. The queue moved forward slowly, a crippled insect laden with parcels and umbrellas. “I would not have said so much except that you knew about Rosamund.” She was nearly at the steps of the bus, kept from them by only a fat woman struggling with two small dogs and a little girl with the face of a pampered pig.
“I have to know,” said Julia as the woman swung the pig-child up onto the steps and gruntingly lifted herself and the dogs into the bus. “I have to know.” She raised her hands, as if praying.
Miss Pinner looked in shock at Julia’s left hand and shirt cuff, and then gazed straight into her face with a tense compassion. “I saw you,” she blurted, and the conductor raised her up onto the platform and the bus was gone.
Earlier that day, brother and sister were sitting across from each other at Lily’s table, two empty wine bottles and soup bowls and plates littered with bones between them. Magnus sat slumped in his chair, staring at the unappetizing remains of his lunch. He looked flushed and puffy, but he had changed into a clean suit and shirt, and wore immaculately polished shoes. He was impressive. Locked into his face, at a complicated level beneath the features but informing them, was a combination of authority and power and malice which she had seen in him all her life.
She said, “Magnus, you are a beautiful man.”
“What!” His head jerked up and she saw his bloodshot eyes. “For God’s sake, Lily. I am fifty-three years old, I’m nearly three stone overweight, and I have not been sleeping well. I am tired.”
She wanted to reply, but he cut her off. “And I’m not sure about this. I think you’re rushing it.”
Enjoying this moment as she did each of those rare occasions when she was stronger than he, Lily said, “Yesterday you agreed with me. We both know that she must be put back into professional care as quickly as possible. Magnus, your wife is in danger—-she may do permanent harm to herself. Not to mention the damage she is doing to you.”
“Humph.” Magnus shook his head.
“I trust you wish to keep her from Mark,” she said slyly.
“Mark is a wretch. He is a failure. There has always been something wrong with him. You know that.”
“You are what is wrong with him, and of course I know it. Does Julia? Magnus, she scarcely knows him at all.”
“Yes, I do want to keep her from him.”
“Have you ever told her about his breakdowns?”
He shook his head. “They were a long time ago.”
“Well, you see my point,” she said, “she really only knows Mark’s surface. And that is very seductive.”
Magnus was not ignoring her now.
“You do take my point, and you needn’t pretend that it hasn’t been preying on you as it has on me. If we can get her back into the hospital, we shall have taken care of that problem. Now. As I see it, we must first persuade her to leave that house, by whatever means, and to move into my spare bedroom. It’s possible to—I mean to say that the door locks from the outside.”
“Yes,” he said. “Are you certain—are you absolutely certain there couldn’t be anything in that story of hers? I saw Kate in the window of her bedroom one afternoon. That afternoon I struck that ninny. I’m certain it was Kate. I couldn’t be wrong about her. I know it was Kate. It knocked the breath out of me. And I have felt—things—in that miserable house. I don’t know how to describe it. All I know is that I want her out of there. That place upsets me.”
“You upset yourself,” Lily said calmly. “You see your daughter, whom you miss terribly; Julia is obsessed with a case a quarter of a century old in which a mother stabs her daughter to death. You haven’t been eating or sleeping regularly, and Julia is burning herself up. Of course the two of you see things. But as far as Julia actua
lly being in touch with spiritual manifestations, any such thought is absurd.”
“How can you be so certain? I was certain too, until I saw Kate.”
“Experience,” she said dismissively. “Ghosts are seen all over this country by people who are upset, or have had too much to eat or drink. Magnus, this is my field as the law is yours. I assure you, if a spirit were to appear to anyone in this family, it would appear to me. An untrained, inexperienced person like Julia would simply not have the faintest idea of how to interpret an authentic sighting. Magnus, with respect, do let me tell you that when an untrained person gets it into her head that she is in contact with a spirit, a sort of hypnosis begins to take effect—the untrained person has all sorts of fancies—wild thoughts—and she can easily persuade others to share them. I’ll confess that I had a small trace of this myself.”
“Lately?” Magnus said with interest.
“Yes.”
“So you saw Kate too.” His big face was suffusing with blood.
“No, but if I listened long enough to you and Julia I very well might. I saw—I supposed myself to . see—something far more mundane.”
“What?” Magnus seemed to be increasing in size, and Lily felt a thrilled, appreciative trace of her fear of him.
“Actually, I imagined that I saw Mrs. Fludd,” she said, and Magnus slumped back into his chair.
“Which simply proves how careful we must be not to be swayed by Julia’s delusions.”
“But what if she is right? What if I was right, and not merely overtired?” But even in his tone of voice, Lily heard that he did not want to believe it.
“Then I expect that we should all be endangered. Any truly vengeful, destructive spirit, once set free, draws strength from its own evil. It might even control any mind weak enough to be open to it. But such cases occur very infrequently. There isn’t one in a century. Genuine evil is as rare as that. Most of what we call evil is merely lack of imagination.”
“Most murderers are an unhappy lot,” Magnus agreed. “I’ve defended several who didn’t so much commit murder as fall over it.”
“Precisely,” Lily said. “So I think we can dismiss the possibility of this being a case of genuine manifestation.”
“What did I see in the window, then? And what did I feel in that house?”
“You saw and felt your own fear. If that can happen to my commanding brother, then I think this has gone far enough. I should never have introduced Julia to Mrs. Fludd. Neither of us should have permitted Julia to indulge her ill fantasies about Kate’s death.”
“That’s enough of that,” Magnus said warningly, and pushed himself away from the table.
“Except for this,” said Lily. “We—you and I—must accept the truth. We are going to institutionalize Julia. For her own good and for ours. Do you think that she might be suicidal?”
“I don’t know,” Magnus said.
“There you have it. We don’t know. You can’t afford to have her divorce you, and you don’t want her to die. She must be put back into the hospital, and kept there until she is docile. And I suggest that you take whatever steps are appropriate to ensure that her money is accessible. You must be able to control her money. You must be able to control her.”
Magnus was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, staring directly at her. “You are being very frank, Lily.”
“It is too late to be anything else,” she said straight to him. “In truth, Magnus, we all desire to own her. That is what we wish. You, I—and Mark. We wish to possess her.”
“I wish to save her,” he flatly said.
“Did I say differently?”
“Fine, then,” Magnus said.
“I adore you when you’re reasonable,” Lily half sang, “and there’ll never be a time when I don’t. I think we should go over there now. We can walk across the park.”
“I’ll begin to look into things tomorrow,” Magnus said, and shrugged; he stood up and dropped his napkin beside his plate.
***
When Julia had numbly watched the bus disappear around the corner and up Kensington Church Street, exhaustion seemed to invade her with every breath, weighting the marrow of her bones. Her body seemed very heavy; she no longer felt able to trudge up to Notting Hill; she wanted to lean on Mark’s arm. She thought with longing of her bed, of long sleep, of reading a book propped against the blanket while a light kept her safe from the dark. She saw me dead, she thought. Or had Miss Pinner seen—an idea fragile as a moth’s wing, but freighted with all of Olivia’s darkness, flickered for a half second at the borders of her consciousness and was then tamped down, forgotten, and her mind veered away, not recognizing what it had done.
And with it she veered, turning to her side, blinking, knowing only that she wished to be at home.
She got halfway back up the street before her burning feet could carry her no farther. A few steps away was a bench, and she limped toward it and collapsed onto it, sighing. A man in a black raincoat with the collar turned up sat beside her and brushed her legs with his. Very lightly, he brushed her leg again. Julia peeked at him, hoping he would leave, and saw—thought she saw—that the man had no lips. His face seemed to be chopped off below the nose, and to begin again at the chin. Between was a white scream of teeth, a permanent snarl of rigid teeth and blackened gums. She was afraid to look again and was too tired to move on, so sat hunched within herself, staring directly ahead of her, seeing nothing. He too hunched in his black raincoat, the collar turned up, and stared ahead. His leg hung against hers, with almost no pressure save that of the thin black cloth of his trousers. After what seemed an hour the man shifted, and she glanced quickly at him and saw that his face was, after all, utterly normal, rather pudgy and full-lipped. She realized that she had been holding her breath, and noisily inhaled. The man pressed his leg to Julia’s but now he was just an ordinary man, and she moved down the bench, pretending to look for something on the wet sidewalk, so that she would not offend him. After a time he moved away, leaving behind a copy of the Evening Standard. Julia unthinkingly picked up the newspaper and numbly walked home. Noises and screams drifted across from Holland Park.
The house pulsed with heat and expectant, waiting quiet, its lights flaming. Julia walked through rooms which seemed alien and dead, utterly apart from her. She heard none of the by now familiar noises of the trapped echoes and spirits of the Rudges. Julia thought, as she sat wearily on the McClintocks’ ugly couch, that Olvia might have withdrawn, leaving Julia in her world forever: that was the strength of evil, she saw, its absence of hope, its stink of moral failure. For a moment she saw the tramp on Cremorne Road savagely stuffing a dog into a bag; from an accumulation of these sordid, hopeless moments evil was condensed.
She bent her neck backward and closed her eyes and suppressed a half-formed image which threatened to flood into her mind.
To distract herself, Julia took up the newspaper she had taken from the bench. In time she would have the energy to face the stairs and her bedroom. Then she remembered the carnage she had made of the upstairs bathroom—bare white-gray walls like dead skin and skeletal shards of black mirror over everything. That mess: Olivia seemed alive and present in its midst. She could not bear to look at it now.
Julia skimmed the news on the front page—it seemed remote and irrelevant. She read the names of politicians, looked at their photographs, and scarcely remembered who they were. They had nothing to do with her, nothing to do with Olivia Rudge. Why was she reading this? It was the first current newspaper she had looked at in weeks. She felt the atmosphere of the house intensify around her, and turned the page.
At the bottom of page four she saw the little headline. Paul Winter had not been judged worthy of much space. The headline read GENERAL’S SON FOUND DEAD IN CHELSEA FLAT.
Captain Paul Winter, 36, son of General Martin Somill Winter, second in command to Montgomery at Alamein, was found dead this morning by a friend in his small flat in Stadium St. SW 10. Captain Winter, wh
o had left the army several years ago, suffered multiple stab wounds. General Winter was informed of his son’s death soon after discovery of the body, The General and his son are said to have not been on speaking terms for many years. Captain Winter was unmarried.
Julia’s first thought was of David Swift: he had to be warned. As she began to move dazedly across the room to the telephone, she heard the sound of chattering, high-pitched laughter—gleeful hiccuping childish laughter. “Damn you, damn you, damn you,” Julia screamed; at the same time recognizing with a part of her mind that Olivia Rudge could never produce a sound so innocent. It was the delighted laughter of a young child.
Where was it? For a moment it seemed to ring all about her and pervade the house. She forced herself to be still and quiet, and then heard that it came from beyond the kitchen. She knew where. If she had not shattered the black mirrors, it would come from upstairs. Julia ran through the rooms, her warning to David Swift forgotten, and rushed down the hall to the bathroom.
Some figure lurked in the mirror, pouring out that delighted laughter. When she banged open the door she saw its shape crouched on the side of the tub, darkly reflected in the rose mirrors. She stabbed on the light.
The little black girl, Mona, perched on the side of the mirrored tub, rocking with glee. From her upturned throat poured gasping high trills which bounced off the shining walls, redoubling. Mona saw her and raised a short pointing finger and continued to screech.
“What…” Julia uttered, and spun around. Olivia Rudge passed the bathroom door and was proceeding calmly, her back to Julia, into the kitchen.
“Stop,” Julia shouted. She sprinted out of the bathroom, Mona’s screams of glee locked in her inner ear, and saw Olivia, in jeans and a red shirt, going out the side door of the kitchen into the dining room. As Julia reached the door Olivia twisted the handle of the French windows and disappeared out into the garden. Rage flashed through Julia’s entire nervous system, and she followed.
