Julia

by Peter Straub

  “Why is that? Don’t you fancy the new swami?”

  She let her gaze travel down the rough, pitted bark of the trees. On this cold, cheerless November day few people lingered in the park, and the men and women on the long path rushed by, their hands deep in the pockets of their coats. They looked gray and insubstantial before the great trees, like smoke blown past.

  “Oh, Mrs. Venable is acceptable,” she said, not paying much attention to what she was saying. “I don’t feel the same about the meetings.” Now she was watching a child in a blue hooded coat recklessly ride a bicycle down the path, which was forbidden. None of the people on the path seemed to care, as if their opinions were smoke too. “But I don’t like to disappoint the others,” she said. The child swung off the bicycle and propped it against one of the trees. A girl’s bicycle, Lily noticed. “Rosamund Tooth is such an old dear, and Nigel Arkwright can be quite charming when he doesn’t babble on so,” she said. The child on the path had turned around and was now apparently scrutinizing the ground, her cowl making her look like a dwarfish monk. “But I’m not as interested - as I once was,” Lily said. “Mrs. Venable’s specialty is communing with the departed, through a control named Marcel, and I’ve always thought that was a shade—you know.” Irritatingly, Magnus snorted, lumping her with the class of people who sought information from controls named Marcel. She could now see the pale glimmer of the girl’s face. The child was staring straight ahead, as if counting to herself. Then she tilted up her face and looked right at Lily. Her eyes were blue and expressionless. With both hands, still holding Lily’s eyes with her own, she swept back the hood and revealed hair the color of white gold.

  Lily jumped back from the window, whirled around, and uttered the first sentence to appear in her mind. She said, “We should never have buried Julia in Hampstead cemetery.”

  Magnus said, “What?”

  – END –