Julia

by Peter Straub

  Julia got up and moved to her desk and pulled a sheet of paper and a pencil from a drawer. Someone would have to know, or Olivia would never be stopped, she would keep on filling people’s minds, using them, going from one to another like a disease.

  If I am found dead, she wrote rapidly, it will be no accident. If I am found dead in this room or anywhere else, whatever the cause of death may appear to be, I shall have been murdered. The murderer will be either my husband or his brother, Mark Berkeley. One of these two is planning to kill me. This same person will have been the cause of the death of Rosa Fludd, and will probably have killed Captain Paul Winter and David Swift. (But maybe not.) This is because—This has to do with a dead child named Olivia Rudge, who died in the same way as my own child. My husband Magnus was also the father of Olivia Rudge. Look her up in the newspapers for the year 1950. But leaving the supernatural aside—since it may prejudice the opinion of whoever reads this; I beg you to know that I am not suicidal, and that my death will in no way be an accident. PLEASE KNOW THIS.

  Without rereading what she had written, Julia folded the paper and inserted it into the pages of her address book, and then slid the book between two sweaters in a drawer. Then she lay down on her bed and stared up into the heat and watched patterns move across the surface of the ceiling. She waited. Gleeful noises seemed to well up from other parts of the house. Hot air and a feral stink blew about her. Eventually she swallowed three of her sleeping pills.

  12

  Once, everything had been different. There had been a pretty, rather placid young woman named Julia Lofting, who had lived in North London with her successful husband and their beautiful daughter, and all three of them had unthinkingly led happy, contented lives, each devoted to the unity they made, each devoted to the other …once there had been a girl with a great deal of money named Julia Freeman, and she had married an older man, an Englishman named Magnus Lofting, and lived with him in London, tolerating his infidelities and his angers for the sake of their daughter (her daughter) …once a confused, uncertain American woman named Julia lived in a house with her daughter, seeing her husband late in the evenings when he came home from one of his drinking clubs …there had once been a beautiful and imaginative child named Kate Lofting …but she was dead …once there had been a couple, Magnus and Julia, with a nice house but not as nice a house as they could afford because they (she) hated extravagance, and with two cars and one daughter, and they’d had few friends outside the family because many people did not like Magnus and because Julia was a bit shy and their daughter was all they needed, really …once an American girl had thrown herself at a man named Magnus and made a daughter with him, she used her money to make him sleep with her (marry her) …once there had been a girl everybody liked. Julia looked up at the cracked ceiling of her bedroom, thinking of the girl she had been, her father’s darling (her hair was her best feature). She waited. Her best and truest self was in the past which had sent her Olivia Rudge. Whose father she had married. She was too tired to move from her bed, and her mind spun from version to version.

  From downstairs came the noise of a rampage— she could hear glass breaking, a series of popping, hollow explosions, and ripping noises, fabric being torn. The noises had started in the kitchen and then moved into the dining room. It sounded now like chairs being thrown up against the wall. I wanted to set you free, Julia thought, meaning that I wanted to send you away in peace. But you don’t want peace. You want control. You hate all of us, and you hate this house. I did set you free, but in the wrong way. Wood splintered somewhere in the house, and this sharp sound was immediately followed by another series of popping explosions. The cups in the dining room. Then the broader, flatter sound of the china plates being broken. A bottle of some kind smashed against a wall? Wine? Whiskey? Julia, half in a daze, sniffed at the air but caught only a faint odor of excrement.

  “It’s settled.”

  “In what way?”

  “We need a certificate signed by her physician and one other. Two doctors at the hospital, Dr. Whatever and another one, will agree to sign it. Then she goes in for a period of examination. It’s a temporary order, but it gives me time to look into ways of keeping her there out of trouble. Does that satisfy you?”

  “I don’t know what would satisfy me now.”

  “Lily, don’t go soft on me. This was really your idea, you know.”

  “My idea for your good, brother.”

  “For ours. And hers.”

  “Chiefly yours.”

  Magnus looked across the room to where Lily sat on her delicate little couch beside the Persian screen. She was staring at him oddly. Her eyes seemed slightly larger than usual, and the hazel irises appeared to swim in the surrounding white. Lily’s whole face was pale. “For God’s sake, Lily,” he said, “are you still angry with me about that wretched child? You’re making it all up, you know, I did not lie to you. I never did see the child. Anyone could have been her father.”

  “Anyone wasn’t.”

  “It’s a trifle late for a blood test, Lily.”

  “I wish you weren’t so obtuse at times.”

  He looked at her in complete puzzlement. “Lily, let me explain our position. Julia can be put into the hospital as soon as I have the doctors’ signatures. That should be no later than Tuesday. I have control over all monies, whether held jointly or separately, in case of Julia’s hospitalization or death. I mention the latter only as the extreme case. The legal point in question is mental incapacity—which shall be proven by the doctors’ authorization of our request that she be involuntarily hospitalized. It is very simple.”

  “Try to ring her,” Lily ordered. “Right now.”

  “What? Do you want to bring her here? There’s really no need for that now, since the doctors—”

  “Try to ring her.”

  “Lily, what in the world is going on?”

  “I’m terrified, you idiot,” she said. “She has been telling us the truth all along, and I was too stupid and vain to recognize it. She is in mortal danger.”

  “What in the world …” Magnus stared at her in disbelief. “Are you telling me that you believe in that cod’s wallop now? Didn’t you just assure me, two days ago, that it was all fantasy? Didn’t you say that?”

  “Yes,” she admitted. “But I was wrong. We have to try to save her life. Please ring her, Magnus. I want to know that she is still safe.”

  Magnus reluctantly lifted himself heavily from his chair and padded across the room to the telephone. He dialed Julia’s number and listened silently for some time. “No answer,” he said. “What’s this all about, Lily?”

  “Revenge,” she answered. “Olivia Rudge’s revenge.”

  That was it, Julia thought, listening to the savage noises from downstairs. It was revenge. She hated being thwarted, and Heather had cut off her career: so Heather was part of her revenge, Mrs. Braden immured in her bedroom was part of her revenge, and all of her gang had shared in it too, seeing their lives disintegrate or grind to powder, nothing accomplished except by the severest penance.

  She had been meant to buy the house. Olivia had reached out and found her, the only woman who could release her into the world again.

  If only Kate had not tried to swallow that piece of meat… if only she and Magnus had waited longer for the ambulance. Julia seemed not to be lying on her bed, but to be suspended above a thrashing seacoast, sharp upthrust rocks and seething water.

  Her skin was boiling, as with fever. She imagined holding Kate in her arms. But Kate was in that small deep hole, in that small box in the deep, deep hole. In wretched Hampstead cemetery. She wanted to carry Kate away from here. Tb float with her, far above the sea and the rocks.

  Then she saw Kate with her back turned to her. It was what she had seen before Mrs. Fludd stopped the s6ance. J am responsible, she thought, without knowing what she meant.

  A black bird zipped past Mark’s head and muttered some message to him, as it would to another bird.
It was a single word. Brief, perhaps, or free. Or be. He watched the bird whirl off into the glowing area above the tops of the trees, where the sky was unnaturally pink. The cottony undersides of the thick clouds, which had just ceased to release their drizzly of rain, seemed to reveal some incandescent color laid across their upper surfaces. They looked as though they had been painted by Turner, and Mark, thinking this, was moved to the edge of tears. His scalp tingled. Birds spoke to him, he walked beneath Turner clouds. Since completing his last meditation, he had felt almost unbearably, uncomfortably happy—he had reached ecstasy. Colors of the grass and trees boomed out at him, as if they were shouted through loud-speakers; so many different greens! He felt that he had never truly seen any of these shades before, how they rippled next to each other, jumped forward or receded in space. Color was a stupendous bounty.

  Julia had bled on his sheets. That too seemed a sign of grace. Blood after making love. He felt as though Julia were his other half, as though they shared the same limbs, or the same heart. She had dug the shoes out of his closet, knowing in what love he had spirited them away from her garden after finding them one morning. He’d had to look at her house, he’d walked all round it, passing his hands over the rough brick, almost swooning. Even his headache had not diminished his joy. Julia had left Magnus, and she would be his.

  She was his. He moved dazedly through Holland Park, nearly alone on the paths, chiming with this knowledge. He had flown deep into her; he knew her bones and joints. Julia was light and vision. And a creature of blood, a furnace of it. Be, the bird had said to him. Traveling toward Julia, he was traveling toward blessedness. A pure greedy joy smashed drunkenly at him. Queenly, she was waiting. Be. He staggered under the impact of it.

  A girl walking slowly in front of him lowered her umbrella with a motion of such grace that he nearly sobbed aloud. He recognized the back of her head and neck, where black hair fell down over a brown leather jacket. Mark quickly crossed the ground between himself and the girl and linked his arm into hers, laughing. When she twisted toward him, startled and a little frightened, he kissed her familiar mouth and felt his soul expanding with a scream of happiness.

  “I can’t believe this,” Magnus said, still holding the telephone. “I tried to persuade you that there might be something to Julia’s story, recall that? And you were certain that it was all delusion. You convinced me. I cannot be convinced back again, Lily.” He set the receiver back in its cradle, very gently, sign Lily knew quite well: he was rapidly reaching the demarcation between annoyance and outright irritation.

  “Perhaps not,” she said. “It makes little difference whether or not you are persuaded. But do think back, Magnus—what did you see on that day you thought you saw Kate?”

  “How can I answer that? I don’t know what I saw. The reflection of a cloud, a flash of sun on the window…”

  “No. I mean, what did you think you saw?”

  He looked at her in disgust. “I am not going to be made a fool of, Lily.”

  “Tell me. Just tell me what you saw.”

  “Kate. Standing in the window of Julia’s bedroom.”

  “How do you know it was Kate? Was she facing you?”

  “She needn’t to. In fact, the girl I thought I saw was facing the other way, and I saw only the back of her head,”

  “It might not have been Kate! It might have been the other one!” Lily half-started from her chair. “Magnus, that’s it. You saw Olivia Rudge. She wanted you to see her, and to think that she was Kate. She wanted to hurt and confuse you.”

  “Lily,” Magnus said slowly, “I have never interfered with your enthusiasms, and I have never jeered at them. But if you are telling me that I saw an apparition in that window—”

  “What did you feel when you went into her house that day? Didn’t you tell me that you were terrified?”

  “I was spooked. You told me that yourself. I was also drunk.”

  “No, Magnus! You felt her. You felt her evil. She hates you too.”

  “My God,” Magnus said. “This is a nest of ninnies. What reasoning is behind all of this? Why should this little demon out of the past suddenly appear again?”

  “Because of Julia,” she said. “She needed Julia to free her. Both of your daughters were stabbed to death by their mothers. Julia was what she needed.”

  First I gave birth to Kate, Julia thought, and then I gave birth to Olivia. But part of Olivia is still in me. I complete her. The sleeping pills and lack of food made her mind swim about a general focus, which was her awareness of the noises from the ground floor. Things were still being smashed. The suffocating heat that dried her throat and burned her eyes seemed to carry her some inches above her bed and leave her floating above a vast, undefined space into which she could be spilled at any moment. Julia knew that this was due to a warp, a wrinkle in her mind that was a part of Olivia. She wished to read, to bring herself back into gravity, but she was too weak to pick up any of the books on the bedside table. A wind seemed to blow through the house, hot and African. The glass across one of the McClintocks’ paintings shattered, accompanied by screams of laughter. Then she heard the thunking noise of the painting’s being kicked in.

  Maybe all this is just in my head, she thought. Would that make it less true? Indeed, everything in the world seemed crowded into her head. The smell of beasts and burned skin settled about her.

  “A rape, Mark? Not in your style, I should have thought.” Annis stood before him, breathing a little heavily, her face flushed. He could see the place on her full lower lip where he’d bitten it. “I thought I was being sent away, anyhow,” she said.

  “Lovely, sweet Annis,” Mark said, holding her again, “darling, lovely, gorgeous, sexy Annis, how could I send you away?” He laughed at both her absurdity and his own, bubbling up within him.

  “Is meditation responsible for these moods? I think I’d advise a little rest. Are you up on something?”

  “On you, Annis, on you,” he chanted, and swung her around.

  She pushed at his arms. “Mark, put me down. Mark, I don’t like this.”

  He whooped with laugher, seeing himself from both within and without, and nearly fell down. “Are you going somewhere? Let’s go to a pub. Let’s go to a pub and hold hands. I was just noticing how the sky looks like a Turner. Don’t you think?”

  She looked at the sky half with genuine interest, half with bemusement. “It looks like a slate roof, if you want my opinion. You know, you don’t have to act like this with me. I’m perfectly willing to start seeing you again. But I thought you had some new interest in your life.”

  “On the contrary, dear Annis, I am shedding some of the old interests. I decided to quit teaching. I’m just going to travel for a while. Travel with me, Annis. You’d look lovely on a boat.” He began to laugh uncontrollably, and fell onto a bench. Annis and Julia shared one substance, and Mark giddily witnessed Julia’s features shining through the other’s face. When she turned away from him in irritation, he caught her wrist and pulled her down beside him. “I’m serious, let’s have a drink and talk about it.” He looked into her wide, beautiful, hungry face and felt himself turn on all the voltage he possessed. Annis’ face broke over him like a wave.

  “Well,” she said. “I’m going somewhere now. How about lunch at one?”

  “Lunch at one, what fun,” he sang. “Only an hour away.” Joy seemed to smash at his ribs again, and he gripped her hand. “Name two places you want to go to, Annis.”

  “Well, I’ve never seen California,” she said. “I can’t think of any other place I’d like to go.”

  “Europe?”

  “Europe is boring. I’d settle for California.”

  “You’ll have it.”

  “Doesn’t it take a lot of money to get there?”

  “Doesn’t everything come through meditation? Lord Buddha provides, Annis, Lord Buddha provides.”

  “We’re going to have everything,” Magnus said, having by now passed firmly into
outright anger, “we’re going to have the lot, and you decide to get mysterious and orphic. Aren’t we going to have everything you wanted? I have a mad wife who’s going to be locked away for God knows how long, but you’ll have the bleeding lot, Lily. What do you think you’re trying to do to me?”

  “Self-pity isn’t your most attractive trait,” she said. “What I think I am trying to do, as you put it, is to tell the truth at last. Look, Magnus. Suppose that Julia came to you with some idea about a point of law that you’d been thinking about for months? Suppose she said something about it at breakfast?”

  “Bugger the analogies,” he said, even angrier, and causing her more fear than she knew she could afford to reveal.

  “I’ll tell you what you’d do. You’d ignore her, and resent her incursion on your special territory. That’s the way I felt.”

  “The law is not a ridiculous bundle of lies and fantasies!” he shouted.

  She merely looked at him, not daring to speak further.

  When he turned away and slapped his fist into the counter top, she waited for him to settle down again—she could see his shoulders sinking back to their normal level, and his neck lose its swelling, as if it were shedding layers of tissue—she said, “Try to ring her again. I am afraid for her, Magnus.”

  “Damn you/’ he said, but said it quietly.

  She said to his back, “Someone killed those two men. Julia knew about it before they were in the papers.”

  “Are you sure? She’s no fortune teller.”

  Lily thought back to her last conversation with Julia. “I think so. She told me about the second one, certainly. The Swift man. She was in his flat.”

  “Then I’m glad he’s dead.”

  “She was there to warn him about Olivia Rudge—I think that’s what she said. Or I may have gathered it.”

  “That’s two things you’re vague on. You’re not terribly persuasive.”