Julia

by Peter Straub

  She was conscious of Olivia: that tense, webbed atmosphere of waiting tension, Olivia’s air seemed to fill the room. Her lion’s smell. She was here, or had just left. Julia saw the knife first. Wonderingly, she picked it up from the floor, feeling her palm adhere to the handle. She remembered—as though it too were dreamed—the penknife she had uncovered in the sand on her first day in the house. Holding the knife, she could feel sand in her palms, grinding at her skin. Olivia.

  She whirled about, certain she had heard Olivia calling. But it had been a noise from the couch, the repetition of that whiffling noise she had heard on the staircase. As if truly in a dream, Julia walked smoothly across the bare carpet to the couch and saw David Swift lying on his back, his eyes open and his mouth working. Broken syllables came from him. He was sleeping, Julia thought, talking in his sleep.

  As she looked, his head snapped to one side and his chest seemed to bloom. A red slot opened up from his breastbone to his belt, and redness spurted out, foaming over his shirt. It was as though a flower had opened, revealing a sudden configuration of great complexity and intricacy. More blood flowed from beneath his chin and sheeted across his neck. He stared up into Julia’s eyes and tried to speak. Blood filled his throat, and it welled from his mouth, garbling his words.

  “She…”

  “She’s just left,” Julia finished for him. He had already lost an appalling amount of blood; Julia took up a cloth from the little table and pressed it over the long wound on the man’s midriff. She must have seen it wrong, she thought, her mind surprisingly calm; he had been dying when she had come in. As Julia held the useless cloth over the long wound, David Swift thrashed on the couch and sent a wave of blood over her hand and then fell back. Julia dropped the knife into the sticky fluid beside the couch. She stood up, blinking. Olivia had got here first and had killed him while he slept. Her stink was in the room.

  She washed hands at the sink, her back to the dead Swift. When she was free of blood, she fled down the stairs and left the street door ajar, so that a policeman would look within. Through increasing rain she ran in the beam of the Rover’s headlights toward her car. Laughter and music from the pub followed her.

  The horror what she had seen broke over her when she sat again in the car, rain sliding down her collar from her hair, and she shook back and forth, slamming from the seat to the steering column, yanking and pushing back with her arms, her hands locked on the circle of wood. She had been too late; even the police had been powerless against Olivia. Julia slammed the Rover’s door and cowered within, shaking and freezing. Her mind cleared long before she was able to control her body. Images of America, of valleys and green distances, invaded her.

  11

  She drove through dark, rain-slicked streets, her window wipers thumping, on what she knew was the wrong side of the road. She should have been on the right, because she was driving through the back reaches of a city like Boston, which was familiar to her in a surrealist, dreamlike fashion; yet all the other traffic was on the left, and that too was dreamily familiar. Julia went with it, driftingly, faintly pleased by her knowledge of this strange city, and faintly annoyed that she could not get her bearings properly. She saw a spot of blood on her thumbnail, and in reflex wiped it on the seam of her trousers.

  Her turnoff, the access road to the expressway, lay somewhere nearby; from there it was only a couple of hours’ drive to New Hampshire. She knew that because she had never in her life been more than a couple of hours’ drive from her family’s valley: Julia could visualize all the roads, the highways and expressways and turnpikes and seal-coated county roads and gravelly tracks used by farmers, which formed a lacy web of connections between where she was and the valley. And she could visualize with a perfect wholeness the last turning before the valley, the sweep of the exit ramp from the freeway down through dark hills, a few mysterious lights shining in deep vales, far off the glow of a town. She could see every inch of that dark access to the valley, and she knew where the river was, though you couldn’t see it. She wanted to see it now, before her.

  She was driving through an American city, a city like Boston, bearing generally south. Nineteenth-century houses, built of red brick, now a grimy brown, stood on either side of narrow streets. Cold rain rattled on the top of the car.

  Driving through an American city, driving through America. London was a furry patch in her memory; London did not exist. She was in Boston, and there was no London. Soon she would find the Berkshires, and that lovely long highway through banks of trees. Tanglewood. Julia pressed hard on the accelerator and her car slewed on wet Pentonville Road, fishtailing in its lane. Except for all these cars, it looked like the outer edges of Boston. She knew that people drove on the wrong side of the road here. It was habit with her by now. Why should that be? She pushed the question down.

  She was of no age, she was going home, nothing had happened to her. Her father waited, dressed in an elegant dark gray suit; her grandfather had just died, and that was why she was going home from Smith. Boston was a mistake, she should not be in Boston; but she knew the way to go.

  Now she was near the Fens, she thought. It would look much different, for everything had changed, and she had not been at Smith for years. She wheeled the car around a corner, blindly, her mind fluttering. A vision of a man’s chest gouting fluid… It meant nothing, though her feet had slipped on red blood. Nothing. Julia forced herself to smile at a young man striding across the road, walking on broad white stripes, and he returned the smile. He had an American face, round beneath floppy hair.

  Wet with rain. A slippery face, a face which left no traces.

  The Rover jolted forward past the boy. Soon she would find the way, and then she would be sailing, with no mental effort at all, down the turnpike, leaving the city behind, moving toward the sloping bank of the exit, turning down between hills, passing small ghostly lights deep in a vale where the winding of the road shone under the trees.

  At the same time, she knew where she was going, though her mind seemed to detach itself at times and go floating through Boston. As she drove down Marylebone Road, she noticed on the back of her left wrist another smear of blood, and hurriedly, disgustedly, wiped her wrist on the car seat.

  But she could not rid herself of the feeling of being in Massachusetts until she had left her car parked outside a house in Notting Hill, rushed up the path in the rain, gone down six steps at the side of the house. Her mind seemed to be flying apart, a wispy cloth tugged by birds. She pounded at the bell. A basement, a valley. Breath caught and tore, chugging, in her throat. Her mouth open and cottony. Finally the door opened, and she rushed against the man who stood within, touching his wet face with her hands. He held her tightly while he struggled to remove his coat. Raindrops coursed down her face, and she butted against his chest, shaken by what she recognized as crying only after what seemed a long time of it.

  Mark stood just within his door, letting her sob. His damp coat hung uncomfortably on his shoulders, and while he cradled Julia he shrugged first one arm out of its sleeve and then the other. He allowed the coat to fall squashily to the floor and hugged Julia tighter. She trembled against him like a trapped bird, her elbows and forearms whipping at his chest.

  “Oh, thank God you’re home,” she finally uttered. “I was so afraid I wouldn’t find you and then I’d have to …” Her voice became too damaged and soft to continue.

  “I just got home, just this minute,” he said down into the wet hair on the crown of her head, plastered down on either side of a natural part. “Good Lord,” he said, “I never thanked you for that money. I really shouldn’t have taken it, but it came just when I was short, and—”

  Julia’s distorted face tilted back to look at him confusedly. She had obviously forgotten all about the check.

  “Never mind,” he quickly said, and hugged her to him again. “What’s happened to you?”

  She rested her cheek on his shoulder, and breathed heavily for a moment. “Everything’
s happened,” she finally said. “She’s going to kill me. I saw—I saw—” Julia stared at him with blurred eyes, her face looking directly into his without recording it.

  “You saw?” Mark stroked her cheek, but she made no response.

  “I thought I was in America all the way here. I thought I was driving through Boston. I was looking for the turnpike, so I could get to New Hampshire. I was going to my grandfather’s place, in the valley. Isn’t that funny?”

  “You’re under strain,” Mark said.

  “I’m going to be killed,” she said again. “Nobody can stop her. I don’t want to die. Can I stay with you tonight? You’re all wet.” She touched his face. “Why are you wet?”

  “I was out,” Mark said. “I was having a chat with Lily. About you.” He smiled at Julia. “I got in just before you came crashing in. Come in.”

  He led her into his room and helped her to sit on a cushion and removed her shoes. Then he dried her feet with a towel and wiped her hands. He finished by dabbing at her face.

  “You have another bruise.”

  “I fell down. In the street. She was playing with me then.”

  “And what’s this on your wrist?” He stared at the thick dirty bandage under the cuff of her blouse.

  “I cut myself. Not on purpose. It was after I saw her. I called you.” Julia was looking straight before her, as if now that she had come to him, he could offer no further help. “She wanted me to be hit by a car. Like Mrs. Rudd. She doesn’t care about murder. She likes it. She makes other people like it too.”

  “Hold on,” he said, taking her hands and chafing them. Mark was squatting down before her, looking at her unfocused,eyes. “Who’s this ‘she’? That girl you were talking about earlier? Olivia Rudge?”

  Her eyes snapped into clarity. “I didn’t tell you her name,” she said, staring at him and beginning to snatch back her hands.

  “Lily did,” he said. “Just now.”

  “Lily doesn’t believe me. She can’t. It’s because of - Magnus.”

  “Don’t worry about Lily. What about this girl?”

  Julia watched in fascination as an ant crawled out of Mark’s shirt and traversed one of the wings of his collar.. The ant, small, red and very quick, sped down the collar and across his chest and fled again into the interior of Mark’s shirt.

  “She wants to murder you.”

  “Yes.”

  “She knows that you found out about that child, whoever it was, twenty years ago.”

  “Geoffrey Braden.” Julia thought of the ant struggling through the hair on Mark’s chest. She felt astonishingly light-headed.

  “And now she wants to kill you.”

  “She’s killed two other men. Paul Winter and David Swift. I just came from Swift’s flat.” Julia spoke in a level voice, looking straight at his shirt front. “May I lie down on your mattress?”

  “You’d better,” he said, and lifted her up and helped her across the room to the mattress. Sheets and blankets lay rumpled at its foot, and Mark pulled them up over her legs. Then he sat on the floor beside her, shoving clothing and plates to one side.

  “I’m going to find you some sleeping pills,” he said. “They’ll help you relax, Julia.”

  “I don’t need sleep,” she said.

  “You need to rest,” Mark said. He lifted her head and pulled the grimy pillow across the mattress to place beneath it. Then he left her staring up at the ceiling and went to his kitchen for a vial of pills and a glass of water. “It’s just Valium,” he said.

  “Take too many pills,” Julia mumbled, but swallowed one anyhow. Then she focused her gaze on his eyes—he could see her pupils contract—and said, “I found out that Magnus is her father. That’s why it’s me. That’s why she wanted me from the start.”

  “Just close your eyes, Julia,” he said, “and we’ll talk about it all in the morning. We have a lot to talk about. You’ll see.”

  She obediently closed her eyes. “I washed my hands because I had blood on them.” She turned he£ head toward Mark and opened her eyes to look at him. “I want you to protect me. Just tonight. Please.”

  Against his will, Mark was looking at the outline of Julia’s thighs beneath her trousers. He noticed a smear of some dark, brownish substance along the seam of the wool, and felt everything within him leap as though touched by a live electrical wire.

  “I think I might be sick,” he heard Julia say. “I feel so funny. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die, Mark.”

  After Mark had switched off the light, he threw off his clothes in the darkness, unsure of where to sleep. Julia lay unconscious and fully dressed across his mattress. He did not dare to move her—Julia’s condition seemed dangerous to him, fully bearing out everything Lily had said. It was as though she could spin off into outright lunacy if she were as much as touched. And her suggestion about Magnus had upset him, reminding him again that she was his adoptive brother’s wife, despite the events of the past week or two. Mark knew all too well that Magnus was stronger than he, and would not hesitate to beat him senseless if he suspected him of sleeping with Julia. Magnus had beaten him twice during his youth, and Mark shied away from the memory of these experiences. He pulled a patterned Indian rug, given him long ago by a girl whose name he could no longer remember, from the closet and arranged the stiff scratchy thing over his body as he lay back in a chair.

  Magnus seemed to be everywhere, behind every rock and round every corner: Magnus’ virility, according to Julia, had spawned Olivia Rudge, Julia’s fantastic wraith. Though they were approximately the same height, Mark invariably thought of Magnus as much taller than he, twice as massive, twice as serious a presence. Was it really possible that Lily could control him? Her offer had been a neat instance of payment for services rendered, but it would be a valid offer only if Magnus agreed that his efforts to persuade Julia were worthy of recompense. Mark knew that Magnus considered him an incapable, nearly insignificant man, but he did not think that Magnus would cheat him. Certainly none of them could permit Julia to leave England.

  Mark lay back in the chair, his head lolling and the blanket scratching his skin as if it were sandpaper. Julia still lay motionless beneath the sheet. Magnus and Lily were right about her needing a long rest, under supervision. All he had been doing was humoring her along any direction that seemed to lead away from Magnus, but perhaps it was now time to be more thoughtful. His academic career, in truth, was at its nadir; Mark could not imagine enduring much longer the boredom of teaching. His book was a phantasm, a dead thing which had lived only in illusion. Teaching was his only income, apart from the beggarly amount Greville Lofting had bequeathed him. There had been no nonsense about equal division of wealth in that old bastard’s head. Not that, in comparison to Julia, he’d had much anyhow.

  She groaned from the mattress, and muttered something.

  He had expected his headache, which had descended on him when he was leaving Plane Tree House and had not left for four hours, to return with Julia’s arrival, but he was surprisingly free of it. It was, he thought, because of her condition: a Julia so weak, so dependent, could not pull whatever trigger it was that launched his headache. (For in these past few days, it felt like that, as though a bullet, a red-hot foreign substance, had tumbled into his brain.)

  He heard Julia’s voice: “Mark?”

  “Here,” he grunted. “In the chair.”

  “Why aren’t you with me?”

  “I was thinking.”

  “Uh-huh,” Julia offered, already half asleep again.

  Had she used to talk in the night, half muttering, to Magnus? Wanting him to come to her bed? This thought stirred Mark, and he sat up in the chair and examined Julia’s sprawl beneath his sheet. Her face was dug deep into the pillow, her hair bursting out around it. With her hair disarranged and uncombed, she looked far more like most of the other women whose heads had rested on that pillow.

  She pronounced his name, very clearly, in her sleep.

&nb
sp; Involuntarily, Mark suddenly imagined Magnus’ heavy, serious body straddling hers, Magnus’ belly pressing on Julia, Magnus opening her legs, Magnus’ confidence taking her. She was his. Mark could see Magnus’ arms circling her, her legs bent at his hips. His penis surged forward against the roughness of the cloth, and he threw the blanket off and crossed the room to climb onto the mattress beside Julia. A little later that night, after a quick struggle with buttons and elastic, he felt his mind traveling over enormous distances as he plunged atop his brother’s wife. It was like making love on LSD, but even that had been a pedestrian experience beside this, for during all of the night remaining, hallucinations and visions lifted and inspired him: he was a gorgeously sexual bird, fertilizing the air. Innocence irradiated the air, canceling odors of sweat and old cooking.

  In the morning Mark left the flat to shop for eggs, bacon and bread, and Julia, alone in the squalor of his room, began to weep. She felt abandoned and helpless, beached on a gray shore. Even Mark could not restore her to the ordinary human world or save her from the bleakness. She cried for a few minutes, and then arranged the sheets atop the mattress. They bore ridges of dirt and crusty stains, which Julia rather consciously overlooked. She was wondering if the police had discovered the body of David Swift; and if they had, if the papers would carry a story about the death. Swift was not a general’s son. Someone had to be told what had happened. Mark had only pretended to believe her; and she had been too weary and shocked to fully explain the events of the night. She realized that she knew only one person she could telephone.