Julia

by Peter Straub

  She went around the side of the house and saw the blond child moving easily and swiftly, well ahead of her, down the street. You won’t get away from me, Julia thought, not with that highly visible hair, and began to walk quickly down the street after her in the direction of Kensington High Street. Olivia’s hair shimmered in the dark air like a beacon, drifting twenty or thirty yards ahead of Julia. The. child turned left on the High Street and was lost from sight.

  Alone in the darkness, Julia ran to the corner, hearing her shoes clapping on the pavement. At the corner she looked to the left and saw Olivia moving resolutely up the street, two blocks ahead. A cocoon of silence seemed to have descended over the two of them. Julia was unconscious of the babble of voices and traffic sounds which had so penetrated her earlier; the other people on the street, now merely evening strollers, were insubstantial specters between herself and the girl’s flickering hair. She crossed an intervening street and came up onto a long block, following Olivia. Anger and determination were joined presences, thin, high and sweet, thrumming in her blood.

  The girl drifted ahead of her, slowing whenever Julia was detained by a knot of people or by traffic at an intersection. When Julia tried to gain on the girl and ran for the length of a block, Olivia effortlessly and without seeming to increase her pace quickened her movement and maintained the distance between them. Around Julia, the cool gauzy air, still smelling of recent rainfall, seemed to congeal into a glowing envelope which contained only herself and Olivia Rudge. Energy—Julia’s energy—burned within this envelope, beating at the pulse of her blood.

  After a time Julia ceased to be aware of the stream of traffic, to see the other people on the pavement. When her view of her quarry was blocked, she crossed to the other side of the walk and saw her moving easily and determinedly up the street, jeans and red shirt beneath the pale flame of her hair. There was no one else in the world; there was no other movement in the world.

  At the long terrace of the Commonwealth Institute Olivia paused and turned. A block away, Julia saw her unsmiling, intent face and for the first time did not find in it a challenge. It was nervous and blank, waiting for her to come closer, almost fearful. Julia pushed off a curb to give leverage to her running and nearly went headlong into an oncoming car. “Look here,” came a man’s outraged voice, but Julia barely recorded the protest. Olivia was leading her somewhere; Olivia seemed almost to be pleading to her.

  From her right she heard the clang of gates and knew that the attendants were locking the park. It was nine o’clock. As if it were a signal for her, Olivia turned her face from Julia and scampered up the steps to the terrace, passed through a line of columns and began to move quickly up the lane running north alongside the park. A few stragglers emerged just as Julia reached the path and blocked her view of Olivia; and then they were alone again, walking rapidly up the long dark path. The girl’s hair shone.

  “Olivia!” she shouted as the girl slipped into the darkness between the rows of trees. Again she followed, trying to lessen the distance between them, and began to jog, feeling her muscles catch like gears. Olivia was now far ahead, lost in the dark.

  Then she appeared in the flaring circle of a lamp, still moving effortlessly between the twin rows of trees. Julia passed the lower portion of the silent green length of park and reached the gate to the youth hostel just within the grounds. Olivia had vanished again. She shouted her name; silence. Making a frantic guess, Julia pushed through the wooden gate and ran up another smaller, twisting path: far ahead, confirmingly, she thought she heard the sound of Olivia’s footsteps.

  At the bar of the metal gate pulled across the path she hesitated for only a moment, and then swung her trunk over, awkwardly lifting her legs, and half tumbled into the-locked park. Her body was a weapon, an arrow for Olivia. Before her, the path wound darkly past the side of Holland House and the wooded hostel. It went far up into the area of the park Julia did not know, a woods traced with many small unpaved paths. Olivia was moving resolutely, unhesitatingly up the narrow way toward the woods.

  “Olivia! Olivia!” Julia screamed, but the child did not turn. Julia went after her.

  After a few minutes she had left the path and was running across soft grass. Olivia’s shining hair appeared flickering between the trees, moving steadily forward. Julia’s cuff snagged on a low branch, and then ripped away. Her shoes sank in loamy earth, and admitted chill moisture. In the sparse wood she lost her quarry, then saw a gleaming flash of white up to her right, cutting through bushes and across a barren dark space. They went deeper into the wood, Olivia floating over the low wooden fences and Julia tripping over them, staying on her feet by sheer momentum. In this way, Olivia seemed to lead her for nearly a mile, tricking her into loops to one side or the other, disappearing behind trees and surfacing in wide clearings, tracking back to the right.

  Where the wood ended Julia saw the girl racing through low bushes to a wire fence, and ran after. When she reached the fence Olivia was already beyond it, going slowly down a pitted asphalt walk. In the darkness Julia saw only a shimmer of white, pale as breath, to mark her going.

  She would have to get over the fence, which was chin-high. Pulling at the top bar with her hands, she lifted herself up to place a toe between the links of chain, then her other foot, and pushed on straining leg muscles so that her torso was above the top bar, where sharp twisted strands of wire prevented her from rolling over. She tremblingly balanced herself, leaned out across the bar, and raised her right leg over the top. Down the sloping path she would find Olivia: this conviction allowed her to swing her other leg over the top, catching the ripped cuff on one of the strands of wire. She tore it impatiently away, and pushed herself off the fence onto the lightless path.

  From ahead of her came the sound of running. With all of the breath left in her, Julia forced her body into a trot; the downward slope of the path carried her into a run she was unable to control. It was as if she were running down a mountain, her legs flying out to keep her body upright. Gravity brought her forward, falling like a boulder, toward the sound of Olivia’s movement.

  Light, noise, astonished faces met her as she tumbled out onto the street below the^ path. Still ahead of her, she heard Olivia’s noise, and she bounced off and around a metal containing fence and raced out into the middle of Holland Park ‘Avenue. Headlights fixed her like a pinned butterfly; her upper body, head, arms and shoulders were still traveling faster than her legs. When she fell, a car squealed to a stop, horn blaring, only inches from her body.

  10

  Olivia had murdered Geoffrey Braden; she had murdered Paul Winter; she had murdered Mrs. Fludd; and she had tried now to kill Julia. She had been called up from whatever rank, resentful obscurity she had inhabited; Julia’s appearance on Hchester Place had clothed her in flesh, and now she was a bodily presence in the house. Or so Julia had felt: she could not enter a room without imaginihg that her tormentor had just quit it. When alone in her bedroom, she locked the door, knowing that Olivia could reach her at any time she wished. The long run through the park had been something like playfulness. Olivia had been toying with her, trying to reproduce Rosa Fludd’s “accident.”

  They were in a new configuration: the screw had tightened, and Olivia wanted her blood. Julia stood on weak, aching legs in the kitchen, waiting for her coffee to boil. It was as dark beyond the windows as if it were still night; the sky, a patch of which Julia could see above the wet brown boards of a fence, hung motionless and woolly, looking as if it might snag in the trees. A few small drops dashed against the window.

  Paul Winter. Someone had visited his room and butchered him. Someone under Olivia’s control, some man driven by hate so that Olivia could enter him; a man whom absurd, touching little Paul Winter had trusted. Someone who was his Magnus. Whoever it was would not know that he had killed a man for talking to a woman named Julia Lofting. Maybe he wouldn’t even remember committing the murder—maybe Olivia could sweep into a mind and then flow out again,
leaving no real memory of her occupation. This thought weakened Julia’s legs, and she leaned against the counter on shaking knees, perspiring.

  The disturbed, reclusive woman in Abbotsbury Close would read the newspaper item or hear of it from Huff, and be savagely glad. She too was Olivia’s victim.

  And David Swift would be the next, if she understood what Olivia was doing. Julia immediately left the kitchen and went into the living room. She had to check in the directory to find Swift’s number. Would her story convince him of his danger? He had seen Olivia at work, but Swift was a stupid and arrogant man. She had no choice, she had to persuade him. She dialed the number and listened intently as the telephone shrilled at the other end. She prayed for him to answer it, but the telephone continued to ring. He might be outside, she thought, or in his bed, sleeping off a hangover.

  Julia did not want to look at the third possibility, but neither did she evade it. In the A-D directory she found the listings for police departments, and rang the Islington police. “A man may be dead,” she intoned. “Look at Three Thirty-seven Upper Street, the flat just above a pub called The Beautiful and Damned. His name is Swift. This is in connection with the murder of Captain Paul Winter. Hurry.”

  “What is your relationship to Mr. Swift, madam?” inquired the policeman’s drawling voice.

  “I’m afraid for him,” Julia said, and hurriedly hung up. Relieved that she had at least done something, she went back into the kitchen, where the kettle full of Malvern water was emitting its high shriek. She promised herself to telephone Swift later.

  She drank her coffee standing at the white counter, trying to decide how to act, what to do to meet Olivia’s challenge. Olivia would try again to kill her. All the previous night, after she had been aided by the puzzled, half-solicitous, half-furious man who had nearly hit her, she had lain atop her sheet in the steaming bedroom, afraid to close her eyes. Then, she had vowed to leave Ilchester Place; Olivia’s secret was known, there was nothing left to find; she had to defend herself. Yet in the morning she had realized that Olivia could reach her anywhere. No house was any safer than her own. She had cleaned up the bathroom, filling pails and bags with sections of black glass, with that certainty lodged in her mind.

  She thought of it just as she finished her coffee: if freedom from Olivia were anywhere, it would be in America. It was time to return. Her marriage was finished. She did not want Magnus or need him. She was closer to Heather and Olivia Rudge than to anyone else in England—save Mark. But she and Mark had almost never had even so much as a serious conversation. Would he like to live in New Hampshire? She realized with dismay how little she knew about him.

  But the thought of him gave her courage to answer her telephone when it began to ring in the living room. She braced herself, thinking that she might hear for the first time the voice of Olivia Rudge. But it was Lily’s voice she heard.

  “Julia, I hope you won’t mind my asking you how you are?”

  Julia found that she could speak to Lily only in the coolest, most detached manner. Lily seemed to have emerged from another era.

  “Good morning, Lily. How am I? I don’t know: I feel sort of suspended. I feel very odd. A lot’s happened. I know how Mrs. Fludd was killed. Olivia almost did the same to me. I think it was her idea of a joke.”

  “My darling, if you are saying …”

  “That Olivia tried to kill me. That’s right. Next time, she won’t be so playful. What would you do if your life were in danger?”

  “I’d go to Magnus,” Lily said simply.

  “Well, so you would. But I can’t. The next time, it might be Magnus trying to run me over. So I can’t do that, Lily, can I? No.”

  She could almost hear Lily’s patience snapping.

  “I understand that you’re overtired, darling,” said Lily. “But you should realize that you’re being almost absurdly unrealistic. Magnus loves you, Julia. Magnus wants you for his wife. He wants to begin rebuilding your marriage. We—Magnus and I—went to see you yesterday, just past lunchtime. I wish you had been at home, so you could have seen how pathetically distressed he is.”

  “I was at home, I was asleep. I’d taken two sleeping pills. Olivia had just given me a message. Do you believe me, Lily? And last night she tried to put it into effect—she lured me outside and ran me into traffic. I was almost killed. It was like being hypnotized. It’s what she did to Mrs. Fludd. Would you have called it an accident, Lily?”

  “Have you ever wondered why it is to you that all these things are happening? Why is it you?”

  “You’re clever, Lily. That’s all I have left to find out.”

  “You have been very active and you have been through a great deal, my dear. How long has it been since you’ve been out of the hospital?”

  “I don’t know,” said Julia, feeling her artificial detachment-begin to recede. “What difference does it make? A month, maybe.”

  “Not as long as that, I shouldn’t think. My dear, darling Julia. You’ve had such a rotten time of it. Don’t you think you really deserve another rest? Don’t say anything now, but I do want you to think about it. And I want you to consider moving in with me for the time being. All alone over there, you might be hurt, or injure yourself in some way, and no one would know anything about it. That’s what Magnus and I wanted to talk about with you yesterday afternoon. We wanted to beg you to move in with me for the time being.”

  “You and Magnus,” Julia said. “You and Magnus wanted, you and Magnus thought, you and Magnus this and that. So you’re afraid I’ll hurt myself. What do you mean by that, Lily?”

  “Nothing, darling, we were simply …”

  “I want you to know something, Lily. I was just thinking, this morning, right before you called, that I would like to go back to America. There’s nothing here for me any more, unless it’s Mark Berkeley. I want to divorce Magnus. He seems impossibly remote to me. If I live through this siege, I’m going to divorce him. There. What do you think of that, Lily?”

  “I think it’s calamitous,” said Lily. “It’s psychic disaster. You still blame Magnus for what happened, and you should not be permitted to do that.”

  “I see,” said Julia coldly. “I think you’d like to have me back in the hospital, Lily.”

  “I just want you, darling, to think,” wailed Lily. “How much sleep do you get? How well do you eat? Can you take care of yourself? Why, why, why do you think this Olivia person wants to kill you? You—out of all the people she might have chosen.”

  Julia listened, her mouth open, almost thinking that Lily would tell her.

  “We’re not making any progress,” Lily said finally. “Please think about staying in my guestroom, darling. You don’t truly want to return to your troubled country and leave dear old England and Magnus. You need Magnus. You need help. Julia, none of us shall be happy, none of us shall be what we were until you accept some basic truths. The truth about Kate—”

  Julia shouted into the telephone, “You don’t know the truth about Kate, you don’t know the truth about Magnus!” Then she hung up.

  Lily rang back several seconds later. “Julia, you are still heroic, I respect you in every way, darling, but you are also a bit erratic. Did you ring off on me?”

  “Give up, Lily,” said Julia. “Give up on me. I’m not in your world anymore. I’m in hers. Ask Miss Pinner.”

  “You’d better begin thinking very quickly and very well,” Lily said five minutes later to Magnus, having roused him from sleep with her telephone call. “She wants to divorce you. And she mentioned that she is thinking of returning to America.”

  “Good God,” Magnus managed to utter. “Is she mad? She can’t divorce me.”

  “I should imagine, brother dear, that she has grounds sufficient to divorce you fifty times, should that be necessary. But, yes, I think she is mad. This Rudge affair has utterly unhinged her. She has snapped, Magnus. There is surely some way that you can have her put away in the hospital. Put away for good, if necessar
y. Or at least until she is capable of listening to reason.”

  “Lily,” Magnus wheezed, his voice foggy and menacing, “what the devil did you say to her? Did you wave Kate in front of her again?”

  “No,” Lily said, “at least not directly. She is much too full of this Rudge matter to consider Kate. Will you go to your chambers and look up in your musty old books whatever law you can invoke to get her .safely put away? Because if you do not, you will not have a wife at this time next year. She could go to Reno, or wherever it is Americans go to be especially vulgar.”

  “I’ll see what I can find,” Magnus growled. “I’ll look up what’s needed for an involuntary commitment.”

  “You might have done that when she left you,” Lily offered in her sweetest tone.

  “I needed you to suggest it, Lily.”

  One question of Lily’s stayed with Julia. Why is it you? She could have answered, because it was I who bought the house, but that merely pushed the . question back a step. She was not satisfied with what she already knew; it seemed to her that the force which had taken her out to Breadlands and had led her to Olivia’s group had not yet released her.

  What she most wished to do was to take two more pills and sleep out the rest of the day. But there had been something, some idea she had not followed up…Her mind traced the flicker of memory back, almost catching it. A magazine. Then she had it, The Tatler. She had been going to look for pictures of Heather Rudge’s parties in The Tatler on the day she saw the Burne-Jones painting.

  Well, she thought, why not? Since making the discovery of Olivia’s role in the Braden boy’s death, she had felt occupationless. Now it seemed that she Was only to wait—wait for Olivia to decide in what way she would move. Leafing through magazines in Colindale was far more attractive. Let Olivia appear in the reading room, let her wave her knife over bound stacks of John O’London’s and Punch. The image was so bizarre that Julia, for the second time, caught at the fluttering tails of her sanity. Was it possible that she had ripped the dolls and written on the mirrors? Turned on the heaters? Perhaps she had imagined seeing Olivia. Her doubting mind bent back oil itself.