Julia

by Peter Straub

  Lily picked up the receiver on the first ring, thinking that Magnus had discovered what had to be done to have his wife safely hospitalized.

  “Yes,” she said, and looked dartingly around the room at her Stubbs horse, her vases, the Persian screen. Julia’s voice came to her, tired and faint, making each of her possessions seem locked in its place.

  “Lily? Lily, I have to tell you some things. Listen tome.”

  “Where in the world are you?” Lily swiftly said. “Magnus and I tried to talk to you last night. You weren’t at home.”

  “Well, now I am,” Julia lied. “I was out last night.”

  “Do you think that’s wise, darling? All of us feel that you should get as much rest as possible. I’d be happy to help you move some of your things over here, so you wouldn’t be alone…”

  “It’s too late for that, Lily,” came Julia’s faint voice.

  “Darling, speak more directly into the mouthpiece.”

  “You must believe me, Lily. No one else will. I can’t talk to anyone else.” She sounded far-off and desperate, and Lily for a moment visualized her sailing off westward, a figure in an airplane getting smaller and smaller in the sky.

  “You’ve been fretting again,” she said. “Why don’t you come over and tell me about it?”

  “Lily, Magnus is Olivia’s father. I know it. He used to meet Heather Rudge—in my house. There’s a picture of them together here. Taken less than a year before Olivia’s birth. He’s Olivia’s father, Lily. That’s why she picked me. I saw her kill someone last night. David Swift. He knew her, and he talked too much, like Paul Winter. She made someone kill them. I came in just after, and he was dying. I’m next, Lily, there’s no one left but me. I’m next.”

  Lily scarcely heard the latter half of this announcement. When Julia had said that Magnus was the girl’s father, Lily had immediately felt that she was speaking the truth. Rage at Magnus’ deception and lies flashed through her like an electrical explosion. She felt completely betrayed. “You’re certain about Magnus,” she managed to say.

  “I’m sure,” came Julia’s bruised voice. “That’s why it was me she wanted. It’s the pattern.”

  “My God,” said Lily, immediately seeing another pattern. “Do you see what you are saying? Julia, if what you are saying is true, there is a reason why you were chosen by Olivia. Magnus …”

  “Magnus and Kate,” Julia whispered. “Magnus and Olivia. The difference is that Olivia was evil. And she can work in people’s minds.”

  “Julia, this is important,” said Lily, her mind spinning among possibilities.

  “Look for that man’s name in the newspapers,” Julia said, not listening to her. “Swift. He was one of her gang. He told me about Geoffrey Braden’s murder. She had him killed. I saw his body—I saw his blood, all over him.”

  “Ju—”

  But Julia had hung up. Lily dialed her number and, her mind still whirling, listened to the phone ringing in Julia’s house. “Pick it up,” she urged, “pick it up, pick it up.” Eventually she depressed the button with a finger and after hearing the dial tone again, tried Magnus’ number at Gayton Road.

  “Lily,” he said. “I can’t just flick a switch, you know. There are a couple of options. It’ll all happen. I’ll let you know tonight.”

  “That’s not what I rang you about,” she said angrily. “I want to ask you something, and I want you to tell me the truth, Magnus.”

  “What now?” The boredom in his voice made her furious.

  “Were you the father of that wretched child? The Rudge girl? I’ve just spoken to Julia, and she says she has proof you were her father.”

  “Syntax, Lily,” Magnus said. “Did you say proof?” His voice came through with an amused incredulity that was as good as a confession.

  “She knows that you were—I think those were her words. I want you to tell me the truth, Magnus.”

  He said, “I don’t know the truth.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I don’t know if I was her father. I could have been. So could two or three others. She bled us all for money. Perhaps the child was a committee effort. Some weekends, one nearly had to punch a clock.”

  “You are a fool, Magnus. You could have told me that a week ago, and perhaps done a deal of good. Now I expect that you shall be lucky ever to see Julia again.”

  “Can’t you do anything while I find out about the paperwork? I can’t do it all myself.”

  “You petulant fool,” she snarled at him. “At the moment, I am going to see if I can find anything in the morning papers about a fellow named Swift. Your wife says she saw him killed.”

  “For God’s sake, now you’re going mad too.”

  “Good-bye.” Lily delicately put the phone back in its cradle and went to the couch, where the morning’s Times and Daily Telegraph had been folded over one of the arms. She ripped the two papers off the couch and spread them on the carpet. She flipped through the Times, scanning the headlines on each page. When she had reached the sports news, she went through it backwards, making sure. No mention of a David Swift, no unexplained deaths at all.

  With great relief, she turned to the Daily Telegraph. It was a hallucination of Julia’s, another reason for locking her away. Nothing, of course, on the first page, and nothing on the second. Lily scanned the third page with a growing certainty that she had been rushed into a foolish panic; she would have to find a face-saving formula for apologizing to Magnus. A headline on the fifth page, two inches from the bottom, put an end to these thoughts. KNIFE DEATH, it read.

  The body of David Swift, 37, was discovered by police in his Islington flat during the early hours of Thursday morning. Police were investigating the open doorway to the flat when they found the body of Mr. Swift, who appeared to . have died from multiple stab wounds. Witnesses located by Islington police say that an unidentified woman was seen leaving Mr. Swift’s flat approximately one hour before discovery of the body.

  Lily hastily read the short paragraph again, and then stood and dropped the paper to the floor. It was true: Julia had been seen running from that man’s flat. Magnus was Olivia’s father. The pattern she had seen while talking to Julia became clearer and clearer to her. Julia was unable to see it, and so had invented another pattern to suit the facts she could acknowledge. All along, Lily had dismissed Julia’s stories because there had been no compelling reason for her to have been the object of a genuine manifestation. Now the reason seemed so obvious—so glaring—she could not think how she had failed to guess it. (But she shamefully knew how much her dismissal of Julia’s story had to do with pride.) Blood rushed to her face. Lily walked to her window and looked down at the empty park. Rain leaked from a dark sky.

  Now more than ever it was important to get Julia out of that house. Suppose Olivia Rudge were to appear there …Lily shuddered, and returned to the telephone. She was afraid, she recognized, for all of them. If Julia were right, none of them were safe. Suppose Rosa really had seen something, and had died for it? Lily groaned, and picked up the telephone to ring Mark.

  Julia knew that Lily would call her back at the wrong number. Then what would she do? Look in the paper, she hoped. Surely a man could not meet a violent death in London and not have a paragraph written about him. Someone has to believe me, Julia thought, and now there’s only Lily. Mark’s attitude, whenever he wasn’t in bed, was distant, doctorly, calming; she had seen that he hadn’t believed her, and had been surprised that, even in shock as she had been, she was not more wounded by his disbelief. It was confirmation of her isolation: what was Olivia’s atmosphere if not that? The atmosphere of the rooftop dream.

  She sat on the edge of the mattress, her mind vague, uncertain of what to do. Eggs and bacon had been Mark’s idea. For Julia, the thought of food was almost anthropological in its remoteness. What she wanted, though her vagina throbbed, was to cling to Mark again, to put her arms about him and nest beside him without thought, in a deep blankness.

  Sh
e allowed her eyes to rove over his incredible flat. The floor was crowded with articles of clothing and plates and cloudy milk bottles. Books were heaped in odd places. Underlying the general odor of Gaulois cigarettes was an odd grainy smell like that of an uncleaned birdcage.

  She unsteadily stood up, having decided to do something about the floor. When she bent to pick up several plates stacked together, blood pounded into her head and she saw moving blots of red and black, and sat heavily on the mattress again until her vision cleared. The room seemed to wobble about her. She touched the plates. Brown stuff had hardened on the top surface, and glued all the plates into a single unit. Julia held them in her lap until the room ceased to vibrate and then carried them into the kitchen. The sink was already jammed with china and glasses submerged in cold greasy water, so Julia set the plates on top of the little fridge and returned to the other room to pick up more things. When she came back to the kitchen with two glasses and two milk bottles, she found two dozen webby milk bottles ranked on a ledge behind the sink. Complex green spidery growths and furry tendrils linked the bottles. Julia rattled them backward and squeezed in her two bottles.

  The telephone shrilled from the other room and Julia hesitated before she left the kitchen to stand over it. Perhaps Lily had guessed where she was: did she care to hide it any longer? Indifferent, she lifted the telephone. A rich breathy female voice floated into her ear. “Mark, what have you been up to lately? Annis said you were positively rude to her, and garbled something about meditation; well, we think you’ve got some Great Love taking up all your time, it’s just not like you, why don’t we all meet sometime at the Rising Sun to—”

  “He’s not home,” Julia said and hung up on a whoop of startled laughter which caused her to drop the telephone. When it hit the floor, the plastic base cracked apart like the shell of a snail.

  Julia wandered across the room to Mark’s desk. She sat in his chair and pulled the drapes to one side. Rain fell into the gray well before the window, flattening the few spears of grass which had struggled up through the concrete. A wedge of gray sky hung in the upper corner of the window, seeming out of perspective, crazily tilted. Julia touched Mark’s typewriter and then licked the dust off her finger. She could not make sense of the telephone call. Now, behind her, the broken phone began to buzz periodically like an angry bee. Great Love? Annis? Was that a girl’s name? Julia could not make her mind understand the words of the girl on the telephone. She felt as though she had been jeered at, made fun of, by the whoop of laugher. Even that had been in a Knightsbridge accent. She put her head down on the cool keys of the typewriter.

  His desk, his books, his papers. He was working on something. She felt intense gratitude for his working, for his being part of that comfortable line of men who did things, who made bridges and books and decisions. She caressed the stack of paper beside the typewriter. Mark. His name seemed to heat in her chest. He could not be blamed for his inability to accept her mad story. Later in the day she could show him a newspaper and prove that she had not invented the death of David Swift.

  The afternoon seemed an impossible distance away; even thinking seemed to require an unreasonable amount of effort. She was sure that the breathy woman on the telephone had laughed at her. Again, she thought of leaving for America.

  She rolled down onto the mattress, hoping that Mark would soon return. The door of a wardrobe gaped open beside the mattress, and Julia idly looked at Mark’s few clothes hanging on wire hangers. He seemed to possess only one necktie, nearly six inches wide, silvery in color, with a sunburst painted on it in orange. Julia thought of Magnus’ neat rows of striped ties, hundreds of them, and managed to smile. Mark owned a green tweed suit which clearly derived from the late fifties and looked as though it had not been worn since then. Magnus had seemed not to care for clothes, 1wt he had owned a lot of them. He had, for instance, owned seven pairs of shoes, all exactly alike and made by the same bootmaker on Cork Street who had made his father’s shoes. Mark appeared to own only boots, no shoes at all. Black and brown boots, one pair of each, with zips up the side. One pair of sandals. Something brown and partially hidden by a bag at the back of the wardrobe caught her eye, and she looked closely at it. The particular woody shade of brown was familiar, and even as she registered its familiarity, she felt the beginnings of alarm, as if a bell had begun to ring.

  She reached from the edge of the mattress into the closet and twitched the bag aside with her fingers. She was looking at the backs of a pair of shoes with chunky low heels and a benchmark stamped discreetly into the leather just at the bottom of the back seam. It was a small letter D, and stood for David Day, who had made the shoes. She had purchased them four years ago, and even now she could remember how much they cost. They were the shoes she had lost climbing in her window on her first night in Ilchester Place.

  Julia stared at the backs of the shoes for a moment, panting slightly, her mind unable to reckon with what she was seeing. She reached into the wardrobe as though it contained a rattlesnake and extracted the shoes. Their uppers were water-stained and scruffy from their two days outdoors. It was Mark, not Magnus; who had taken them.

  “Wait,” she told herself, touching the brown shoes. Her heart had begun to thrum. She looked at her right wrist where she wore the little green bracelet Mark had given her. Something taken, something given, Mrs. Fludd had said. Julia tugged off the bracelet and dropped it onto the dirty sheet. Mark had appeared in Olivia’s wake several times; sympathetic magic, she had once thought it was. But he had appeared every time, every time.

  Could he have just found her shoes? Then why would he hide them in the wardrobe?

  Receptive, Mrs. Fludd had said. He wants to be filled, like a bottle.

  Julia became aware she was making a noise in her throat, but found she could not control or stop it. Her heart seemed to thunder, banging her rib cage like a noisy drum. She plucked at her bandage and tore it off her wrist. She could feel herself breaking, as though she were a thin bone. The long wound on her wrist pouted, a ragged weal along the skin, and she tore it apart with the fingers of her right hand, separating the lips of the wound. A bright surprising ribbon of blood appeared in the gash.

  He’ll know, her mind said. She tore at the wound and the ribbon of bipod bannered out across her hand and onto Mark’s bed. She rubbed the shoes in her blood and left them on the bed. Her arm began to throb. She realized that the noise in her throat had subsided to a choked gurgling noise, half a snarl. She printed the mark of her wound on Mark’s sheets.

  When she stood from the mess she had made, she wound the bandage around her wrist again, ignoring the fresh stains on her trousers, and then ran toward the door. She had to get out before Mark’s return. Her vagina throbbed in the same rhythm as her. wrist. Wounds. She gasped, realizing that five minutes before, she’d been thinking about safety. There was no safety, only its illusion.

  Julia opened the door and looked fearfully up the steps, as if she expected to see Mark Berkeley smiling down at her. Rain filtered gauzily down onto her face. Julia went up the six steps to the street. Within seconds, the thin material of her blouse had adhered coldly to her skin. She ran down the block, pursued by Olivia’s taunting smile and the thought of Mark. Only one escape, only one safety, existed. Kate was there before her. In her haste and fright, she forgot the Rover until she had reached the end of the block.

  Her house seemed as hot as Ecuador. Julia slammed the front door and bolted it, knowing that Hazel Mullineaux had seen her come limping up from” the sidewalk, her hair streaming and her clothing soaked. Her neighbor had been standing at the side door of her home, her face white and gleaming beneath the cover of a wide black umbrella. She had looked like an advertisement for skin cream. Breathing hard, Julia waited behind the door for what she knew would happen. Before thirty seconds were out, the bell rang down the hall. “Go away,” Julia whispered.

  Hazel Mullineaux knocked on the door, then rang the bell again.

  “I�
�m all right,” Julia said, a little louder.

  After knocking again, Hazel Mullineaux bent to lift the flap of the mail slot and called, “Mrs. Lofting? Do you need any help?”

  “Go away,” Julia said. “I don’t need your help.”

  “Oh!” Julia could tell that Hazel was kneeling outside the door. She probably looks adorable doing that, Julia thought.

  “I thought you looked …well, upset,” came the low voice through the slot.

  “Leave me alone,” Julia said. “Get away from my house.”

  “I don’t mean to intrude.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. Please go.” Julia remained leaning against the door until she heard her neighbor’s footsteps go reluctantly down to the pavement. Then she went into the dark living room and yanked the cord of the telephone out of the wall. Holding the severed telephone in her hands, Julia noticed that the weeks of abnormal heat had effected some chemical change in the walls of the house, for the wallpaper had buckled in places; one strip curled down from the ceiling like a dog’s tongue. The whole room seemed to have aged during the weeks of heat, to have become wrinkled and shabby. The McClintocks’ furniture had lost its solid fat Victorian look, and now appeared to be peeling, like sunburned skin. The glue had cracked in one of the dining room chairs. The carpet lapped up at one end of the room.

  Julia dropped the useless telephone to the floor. Her wounded wrist, the muscles in her calves, and her vagina all ached. The flesh on her face felt as though it were blubber, puffing out from the bones. She could trust no one.

  Upstairs, she sat on the edge of her bed, waiting. The house hung emptily about her. No one could telephone now, and she would not answer the door. The others knew what they needed to know. It was Mark or Magnus, one of them. One of them had been used by Olivia Rudge, and Mrs. Fludd had seen it weeks before. She had been tricked by Mark. It was Mark. It could be Mark.