Julia

by Peter Straub

  “And Mrs. Fludd was killed because she saw Olivia.”

  “Nonsense. Wait. Did you imply that Julia was in the Swift man’s flat when he was killed?”

  “That’s what she told me.”

  “She told you that she saw him—what? Die? Be killed? What did she say?”

  “I can’t remember. She said that she was there.”

  “Damn!” Magnus said loudly. “Didn’t she inform the police?”

  “I shouldn’t imagine that she thought they had much chance against a ghost.”

  “Ghosts don’t murder people,” Magnus said and went quickly back to the telephone. After dialing and listening intently, his lips working in and out, he said, “Still no answer.”

  “Then she has either drugged herself to sleep or she’s gone out,” Lily said. “We must do something quickly, Magnus. Olivia is after her. I know it. She’s already tried to kill her once.”

  “I wonder if Julia is actually madder than you. You should both be put away.”-He considered a second, containing his anger, and said, “Think about this, Lily. If Julia was right, then aren’t we all endangered? You and I as well as Julia? After all, we know about Olivia too.”

  “We’re all touched by it, we’re all soiled,” she answered him. “Mark too, I should imagine. We may be in as much danger as she is.”

  “Rubbish.”

  “Remember how you felt inside that house,” she said. “She hates you too, Magnus. She’s enjoyed torturing you.”

  Julia was carrying Kate, a bundle no heavier than an armful of leaves and twigs, to the hospital. Kate was injured, and it was urgent that Julia find the hospital immediately: she could feel some warm fluid soaking into the sleeves of her blouse. Down grimy, vacant streets she was wandering, looking up at barred doorways for the name of the hospital. It was her fault that she could not find the hospital, that instead she was trudging through these gritty. hopeless streets, looking exhaustedly into one filthy sunless court after another, dirty cobblestones …she had failed, and she knew that Kate had already died, that the merest breeze would lift away the feather of her body. Soon she would be on the bare rooftop, surrounded by failure and loss, carrying them within her. She saw herself turning the knife from Kate’s body and turning it toward herself.

  Footsteps ran through the house, raising the smells of heat and lions.

  She wandered through these hopeless streets, looking for the hospital that could undo what already had been done.

  “Where are you going?” She watched tensely as he rushed around her flat, gathering up his raincoat and umbrella.

  “I have to get out of this room,” he said as calmly as He could. “Before I deliberately break something, I am going to take a short walk. You ring her.”

  “Will you be back? Magnus, please…”

  “I’ll be back,” he said harshly, almost barking the final word. As she watched, half-cowering by the door to the kitchen, he turned away from her and thundered across the floor like a bison. When he left he banged the door with such force that he split a section of the jamb.

  Julia moved fractionally toward consciousness, her heart thudding, aware that the hand she had turned toward herself had not been Magnus’. It was a woman’s hand, like hers. It was hers. Her mouth flooded with pain and a residue like tar, and she realized moments later that she had bitten halfway through her tongue. She had recognized her hand from the dream. She swallowed a trickle of blood, not really feeling the pain for longer than the time that lay between the vision of the woman’s hand with the steak knife in its fingers and the recognition that it was hers. Instead of pain, there was a drumming sensation through her tongue. Her entire body seemed as dry as a cracked riverbed. Kate’s twig-light, leaf-light body lifted out of her arms. Her lips went numb.

  In the next instant she had fled back into the condition of the drugs, and was walking up filthy stairs to the bleak rooftop. She knew every discoloration and stain on the walls, every warp of the stairs.

  ***

  Mark lay sprawled on wet grass, feeling the ground damply claim his shoulders and buttocks. He was dimly aware of the burnished tips of his new boots, gleaming a dark rich brownish gold all the way down the length of his body. His head was filled with birds. That he had just met and spoken to someone appeared miraculous to him, an unbelievable effort of coherence and will.

  But I’ve seen her too, thought Lily, still facing the door and listening to Magnus go noisily down the stairs. It was the day I saw Rosa Fludd sitting on the park bench. She led me across the park. Was Rosa really there, or did she conjure her? She wanted me to see Magnus breaking into Julia’s house. She wanted me to feel that sick disappointment. Perhaps Rose came to me as a warning. She had warned Julia, and that day she was warning me. Lily sagged against the counter, felt the metal strip along the top of the wood dig into her hip.

  Mark was moving at the center of a golden, glowing haze, a bowl which had settled down over him as he lay on the wet grass. He knew that this humming golden aura was the outward form of his headache given him by his most successful meditations, and that it was transformingly beautiful proved the rarity, the absolute value of his mind. It proved also the absolute value of his exercises, even of the headaches, since they had transported him bodily into euphoria. Into paradise.

  The trees past which he moved burned at him, the bark blistering in his vision and the leaves rattling like gold. He had felt like this before, but he could not remember when. His boots made the path shiver. If he hit hard enough with his heels, he could open a crack all the way to the planet’s red, seething core.

  Asleep now, Julia reached the opening to the roof and walked out onto baking tar paper that adhered tackily to the soles of her shoes. The sky into which she moved was a flat field of gray striped with vibrating, humming pink. The strange union of colors gripped the pit of her stomach and made her bowels full and watery. Her mouth drummed, lined with a bitter substance like tobacco juice. A pine needle pierced her tongue. She wanted Kate, but Kate was dead. Olivia raged beneath her in the empty house screeching with laughter. Even up on the flat roof, hopelessness pouring into her like salt, she could hear the noise from downstairs: hoarse screams, shouts, loud breakage. It no longer made any difference. She was watching herself as in a mirror. Her skin burned in anticipatory shame.

  Lily pushed herself away, from the counter and went unsteadily into the living room. She knelt before the telephone and with a shaking hand dialed Julia’s number. Now instead of the ringing she expected, she heard only the bottomless space, filled with the echoes of static, which precedes the dial tone. She punched the button and the gray depthless space hung in the receiver. When she struck the button again, the depthless sound mercifully gave way to the dial tone. She tried Julia’s number again, and heard the digits slot into connection; then a sound like that of a man falling through deep space, spinning away from life.

  Lily banged the receiver down, waited until she felt safe enough to lift it again, made sure of the reassuring, chunky dial tone, and then dialed 100. She gave the operator Julia’s number and waited.

  “I’m sorry,” the operator’s twanging voice came back a minute later. “That number appears to be temporarily out of service.”

  “Why?” asked Lily. “What do you mean, out of service?”

  “We are not permitted to offer that information,” the operator disdainfully jsaid. “You may speak to the supervisor.”

  “Yes.”

  “Hold, please.”

  Lily licked her lips and waited again. The silence in the telephone was furry and dense, more solid than the other. She listened to it for what seemed entire minutes before she could bear the waiting no more and hung up. Then she paced nervously in her living room, waiting for Magnus to return. She would not go to Ilchester Place alone.

  Something flew along the upstairs hall, something infinitely despairing.

  Slowly, with merciful intent, the knife in her hand slid into Kate’s blocked throat. Her ha
nd, the hand she had dreamed of turning toward herself, gripped the sleek little knife between thumb and finger, blade up. Kate uttered a half-conscious, choking noise and opened her eyes at the instant Julia began to carve into her throat. Kate’s eyes were clouds. As in a mirror, the scene glinted at her from where it was happening at the flat edge of the roof, two figures bent together in a clumsy parody of love. She heard the door to her room bang open, and the hot wind gusted about her, making the scene before her and the pink-striped sky mist over, like a mirror; The one who wanted her was with her, and she whirled about on the roof and saw only desolation, dirty tar paper and a ruined sky. A white column of air blew toward her. She could see dust and scraps of paper whirl about inside it, spinning crazily. From somewhere below in the streets or from another side of the bedroom came a chortling sound she knew was the suppressed laughter of a small dark-skinned child whose name she could not remember. Strong arms braced her, and Olivia’s smoldering odor invaded her nostrils and the white column of air whirled her into it, caught up with dust and scraps of old newspapers, dust and paper.

  November

  “You said you’d heard from Mark at last.”

  “Yes.”

  “Still in California?”

  “Still in California, yes. Los Angeles.”

  “With that girl?”

  “What was her name?”

  “Annis.”

  “Odd sort of name for a girl. Or is it her patronym?”

  “I don’t know. He said that he was working at last. He’d found a job as maintenance man at something called a free school. Annis apparently has a little money each month.”

  “Do you think he will marry her?”

  “I don’t know whether she would marry him.”

  “I suppose that means you are becoming liberated, Lily.”

  She sniffed, and returned to her novel. When she was certain that he was not looking at her, she peeked across the room to the Sisley. Magnus had bought it for her in October. It hung in the place of the Stubbs drawing of the horse, although she had actually preferred the Stubbs horse. That had been relegated to the dining room.

  “Mark has found his level at last,” Magnus was saying. “Maintenance man. That means cleaner. I’m surprised that in the city of the angels the position is not referred to as maintenance engineer.”

  “He said he is also taking classes at a yoga institute.”

  “And belongs to the Che-Mao-Lumumba Revolutionary Tactics Chess League, no doubt. Didn’t he tell you sometime before the inquest that it was yoga—those damnable exercises—which had finally pushed him over the edge? I should think he’d stay away from that sort of thing.”

  “You know very well it wasn’t that. I don’t imagine I need particularize.”

  “Please don’t,” said Magnus, sounding rather wounded. “But even he said that it played a part in his crackup.”

  “Julia played a larger part,” Lily said maliciously.

  “I think I just said that I did not require reminding. A very nasty shock, finding that my wife spent her last night before committing suicide in another man’s bed. Especially that lunatic’s bed. And the bloody fool didn’t even possess the wit to see what Julia was going through.” Magnus stared at his hands, which he had clasped tightly in his lap.

  “We can be very grateful she left that—letter,” Lily said substituting the last word for “note.” “It really did make things much clearer. I did think the coroner was right, don’t you? To think that it proved instability of mind and was a clear indication of suicidal intent?”

  “It offends me to see any man lead a jury to that extent,” Magnus growled. “Coroners have far too much power in this country. Little gods. But yes, Lily, for the thousandth time, yes. I do think the coroner was right. Of course he was bloody right. There’s no doubt about it. Any fool looking at the condition of that house and her car would know that her mind was gone. Now do you suppose we might have some tea? Actually, I’d rather have a drink. Would you get me one? No, I’ll get it myself.” He rose and moved toward the drinks trolley.

  “Do have some cheese and biscuits, Magnus. There’s a bit of Stilton on the sideboard.”

  “One cannot get a real Stilton anymore,” he said. “Only supermarket rubbish. And have you seen or, heaven forbid, tasted what they have the gall to refer to as Sage Derby? It should be fed to birds. A decent pig wouldn’t touch it.”

  “I just thought you might like a bite of some nice cheese and bikkies,” she said, watching him splash whiskey into a tumbler. He took even more than she had expected. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “I… am … not… upset.”

  “Magnus, you know that I am deeply, truly grateful to you for not being affected by my silliness on that last day. Your steadfastness was simply remarkable. I lost my head, I was an utter fool, and you were so strong, you wouldn’t be shaken, not in the least, and I am enormously grateful to you for that. I am grateful for your clear head and for your strength.”

  He glanced at her, and took a long swallow of his drink. “You shouldn’t be grateful that I avoided being an ass. That’s a negative sort of compliment.” But she saw that he was calmer.

  “And I shall never cease to be grateful that she wrote that note,” she said. “If she hadn’t given the game away by naming two of you, well…”

  “Well,” he said. “Tellingly put, Lily.” He went back across the room and sat carefully in his chair. Magnus seemed to Lily to be gaining weight with every day. “I should have been in the soup, at least until they tried to ‘pin it on’ Mark.”

  “Do you know, I think that I appreciate how she felt. Not about you or even Mark, of course, but how she must have felt about life, when I was being so foolish on that day, I experienced the most remarkable sensation of utter hopelessness and despair. It was quite total. I felt utterly gray and washed-out, as though everything bright was long behind me. Julia must have felt something of that kind.”

  “Julia was not in a rational frame of mind. None of us can know what she thought about anything, much less something so vaporous as life.” He looked at her sourly. “You didn’t see the condition of that house.”

  “I couldn’t go in there,” she said. “I just couldn’t do it.” She switched to a safer topic. “Have you had any luck with the house?”

  “Nobody is buying houses now, especially not houses as criminally expensive as that one. That officious twerp at Markham and Reeves told me the market is worse than it’s been for fifteen years.”

  “Have you been to the cemetery yet, Magnus?” She had been earlier in the week, to see to the flowers.

  “No, not really. Not since the funeral. I can’t abide Hampstead cemetery. It looks like a suburb of Melbourne.”

  “Julia never liked it either.”

  “Rot. Utter rot. How can you claim to know such a thing?”

  “Because she told me on the day of Kate’s funeral. She said that she wished Kate could have been buried in an older cemetery. In Highgate.”

  “I don’t believe that Julia held a firm opinion on a boneyard she saw only once, and then so exhausted she could scarcely stand upright.”

  Lily shrugged, irritated with him.

  “Anyhow, nobody seems to want the damned house,” he said. This was an oblique apology to her, and she peeked again at the Sisley painting. He was still talking, of course. “People look at it and they don’t like it, for some reason. Did I tell you that that McClintock person wrote wondering if Julia would sell him his furniture back? Said he couldn’t find any furniture like it in Barbados. He’d have had a shock if he could have seen his precious furniture.”

  “That frightens me,” she said. “Please don’t dwell on it.”

  “I wasn’t about to dwell on anything/’ he said and gulped at his drink again. “Anything good on the goggle box tonight?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I thought I might try^ reading one of those books Julia had. I’ll be finished with this novel by tonigh
t, and I thought I’d try one of hers. That’s an odd coincidence, isn’t it? I didn’t have time to look at them for ages, and then I didn’t want to. But it seems a pity to let them go unread. There’s a nice long one about a rainbow. I think I’ll begin with that, it looks a lovely read. She did have a lot of books, didn’t she?”

  “It was because she was friendless,” Magnus said flatly.

  “How can you, Magnus?” she said, genuinely surprised. “Julia had friends. You and I were certainly her friends. And I suppose Mark was a friend of a sort.”

  “Bloody Mark. I hope he falls under a bus.”

  “Mark has suffered a great deal.”

  Magnus turned away in impatience. “Are you sure there’s nothing on the box? I’d like to watch something tonight.”

  Lily knew that this meant that he wished to spend the evening with her, and that he would fill it by insulting the television and all who watched it. She wished that he would leave—Magnus was in one of his carping moods, which lately annoyed Lily more than they once had. “Nothing you would care for, Magnus. You despise the television, as we both know. But,” she added more from habit than desire, “you might stay for dinner. This is one of my vegetarian nights. I’ll make a big salad.”

  Magnus shuddered. “I could get something from a restaurant and bring it back. I don’t like these meatless Tuesdays of yours.”

  As neutrally as possible, she said, “If you wish.”

  “Right, then.”

  In exasperation, she thrust down her book and went over to the window on the terrace. Her flowers still bloomed vigorously, and were dazzlingly, violently colored in the damp gray air. To Lily, they looked like little flags of contentment—they said we, at least, have no problems.

  Behind her, Magnus cleared his throat. “Just out of curiosity, my darling, do you still go to those groups of yours?”

  Lily looked into the deep green of the treetops.

  “Not as often as before,” she said.