Julia (23 page)

“What did she look like? Was she blond?”

“Sure. Blond. A color anyone else would have to get out of a bottle. It was the most beautiful hair I ever saw. And a sweet little face. Oh, she was charming. Sometimes I think about the way she’d look if she were still alive—Christ, that bitch would have changed the world.” His hand slid over her leg. “I like talking about this, you know. If I weren’t drunk, I’d probably chuck you out, but I like telling you about it. It was funny. She made us feel that we were all in a war. Soldiers.”

“Her tooth,” Julia said. “Didn’t she …?”

“How did you know about that? The first day she tried to do little Braden, he hit her mouth with the top of his head—broke one of her front teeth. He didn’t have a chance after that. She had to have him. But he never really did have a chance, the little bugger. Do you know what happened afterward? With Paulie? Your poof friend?”

He was gripping the underside of her thigh, and she put a hand on his wrist. It was feverishly hot. She shook her head.

“Paulie was bent even then. She liked that. She made him bite him after he was dead.”

“Bite him?”

“Bite him. Bite his cock. She made him bite his cock.”

He leaned over and snared her wrist. His mouth slurred on her cheek. “She said if he didn’t do it, she’d do it to him.”

Julia twisted away and stood up. She broke her hand away from his grip and tottered backward toward the door.

“You’re not leaving,” Swift growled. “You’re going to stay with me.” He struggled to stand.

“I have to talk to Olivia,” she said, facing him.

It stopped him long enough for her to seize the doorknob and pull it open.

“You’re crazy,” he shouted, half-crouching before the table. His trousers bulged at the fly.

When she fled down the stairs she heard him yelling above her. “Cock-teaser! Remember—nobody cares anymore, you bitch. You can’t do anything.”

She slammed the street door. The beaten man no longer lay beside the pub, but still some blood remained, tinting the puddles of rain. Julia ran toward her car. She knew, she knew. It had been Olivia Rudge all along: Kate was safe. Once in the car she began to sob, whether from horror or relief she could not tell.

Y
OU KNOW
. The words had been smeared in soap on the black mirror above the bathtub. From the atmosphere of tense quiet within the house—for the first time in two weeks, Julia had not heard the rustling noises from upstairs—she had expected some atrocity, and had been fearful of leaving the ground floor of her house. She had no idea of what Olivia intended to do with her now that she had discovered the truth. Julia mounted the stairs, looking for signs of triumph or outrage. In her throbbingly hot bedroom, all lay undisturbed from the morning: the burst dolls sprawled at the back of the closet, sprouting gray curls of wool, their power to frighten her gone. Every time she looked over her shoulder, she expected to see Olivia Rudge. That adult, challenging smile. Or she feared to see Magnus, controlled by her. But all she found were the two words of confirmation. Y
OU KNOW
. She scraped them off with a table knife, and wiped the remaining flecks and smears with a towel until the black mirror held only a foot-long blur which translated her reflection into cloud. There would be more,
much more. This lull, this truce, and the two words were more frightening than Olivia’s displays of power.

Julia gazed out of her bedroom window into the night and rain. Out there, everything had disappeared into darkness. Reality lay within.

She snapped off the light, undressed in the dark and felt her way to the bed. Then she lay beneath the burning sheet and watched the darkness move. A black plane composed of millions of particles sifted down toward her, withdrew, and sifted down again. Perspiration trickled into the hair above her ears.

She stabbed the reading light on in sudden fear and the plane of darkness disappeared. There was nothing. There was no giant pillow of dark. She switched off the light, and saw it return.

When the first touch of small hands came, she went rigid, aware that she had somehow fallen asleep. A cool hand slid up her inner thigh, and she rolled over, twisting in the sheet. The hand returned on her buttocks, caressing, probing. Julia gasped at the violation and spun around, rolling to the other side of the bed. Arms braced her shoulders to the bed. They held her immobilized; her legs, trapped in the twisted sheet, were as if pinned to the mattress. The cool small hand found her pubic hair, then her cleft. It began, delicately, to rub. Her body felt naked to the dark air, though the sheet bound her. Julia groaned as the hand pressed toward her clitoris and stroked. Feathery: feathers, tongues. She was a fly caught in a sticky cocoon, ministered to by the spider. Against her will, with horror, she felt her body build up a rhythmic tension. The relentless hand stroked, rubbed, as if dipped in oil; it circled, insinuated into her. Her back arched. She felt her nipples harden. Sweat broke out on her chest. Julia inhaled
a gulp of burning air. She seemed to be falling into a deep well. Her knees twitched. The tight sheet, wrapping her like a shroud, was itself the lightest of caresses, palms on her taut nipples. The pressure, arching her back, subtly increased and began to beat outward in circles. Suddenly she saw Mark before her, his body taut with longing. The oiled rubbing hands were the huge tip of his penis. The embracing arms were his. Her legs moved wide apart and his shaft slid deep within her. She bared her teeth. Arms, legs, hands, deep velvet held her. She saw, felt him stiffen and plunge and a sound died in her throat as everything burst.

And the next morning when Julia tottered sick with nausea into the bathroom, Olivia showed herself within the house for the first time. She did not jump out of sight at the last second; she did not flicker away. She stood, a small blond smiling child, behind Julia as Julia looked into the black mirror opposite her. Julia placed a protective hand over her abraded, sore cleft and whirled around. Again, the child appeared behind her in the facing mirror.

As Julia watched, Olivia gave her asymmetric, challenging smile and slowly drew an index finger across her pale throat. Her other hand gripped the pulped, still trembling body of a headless bird.

A Thames gull slapped into the window late at night, making a noise like a train wreck, and startling into wakefulness the man who reclined on a fluffy Indian cushion. Uneasy—he had been close to fear for the past twenty-four hours—and not as yet quite certain where he was, the man extended one hand and knocked over the bottle of Calvados. His room, crowded with details of his life, reassuringly came together about him; the needle of the record player crackled and hissed in the final grooves. He righted the bottle, shaking his head. None had spilled, for he had consumed
most of what was left during the night, after his guest had left. His mind seemed thickened, syrupy; the aftertaste of his heavy cigarettes coated his mouth
.

From beyond the door, his name quietly sounded. He sat up straight, pulling his legs under him, and listened to the sound of the voice. It uttered his name over and over, beseechingly, in a voice neither male nor female. “Foolish little scut,” the man muttered, and for several seconds considered his promise not to open the door again. But that, too, was foolish. Both had had far too much to drink. The man bent forward and stood in one motion, feeling the muscles in his thighs protesting. Upright, he patted his hairpiece and straightened his pullover. He moved to the door as slowly as he could, relishing the sound of his name, half whispered, urgent, full of need
.

He opened the door to a stranger—a stranger? The voice was a voice he knew. The visitor smiled, and he knew the contours of that smile
.

Too late, he saw the knife slide from beneath the coat. His mind fluttered with bright, hopeless panic and he stepped backward as the visitor moved through the doorway, still voicing his name
.

Julia moved hesitantly up Kensington High Street at the end of day, buffeted by the crowds returning home late from work, unsure of where she was going. Confused, she had taken the wrong way, and was dimly aware of this. Her left wrist was still oozing blood, and she dabbed at the deep cut with a wrinkled yellow tissue, hoping it would stop; but the cuff of the blouse was stained and smeared with blood, as her sheet had been. Because of the pills, her mind had difficulty in retaining images, and she looked at the sky twice before being certain that it had stopped raining. All of the sky was a vast dark undifferentiated gray.
No holes
, she thought,
no air spaces
, and saw herself beating at the undersurface of gray cloud as if it were a thick layer of ice trapping her in arctic water; the pavements and street were still filmed with black rain. Ascent, escape, ascent, escape, revolved in her brain. But she could think of no escape. Olivia held her fast.

She thought of the beggar maid’s king, Cophetua, his face immobilized by love. Mark. Was he safe? He had run immediately after the grinning specter of the girl had vanished from the mirror.

Take some pills and go to sleep, he’d said. Do you have anything?

—Yes. Pills? Yes.

—You need rest. Take a couple of pills and get a really good rest.

—I have to see you. I’m in danger. Like Mrs. Fludd said. I am, Mark.

—Listen to me. Ghosts don’t kill. Your danger is entirely from Magnus, and you’re staying away from him. Julia, love, you’re overtired. Lock your door and knock yourself out for the rest of the day.

—I need you, Mark. She wants me.

—Not half as much as I do, he had laughed. I’ll see you this evening, sometime tonight.

—Save me.

Had she said that,
save me
? Perhaps she had imagined the entire conversation. All that was clear, besides gulping down two pills—memories of the hospital making her shudder—was running back upstairs and heaving the polished, rose-veined stone at the walls of the bathroom. Heaving it, again and again, until the black mirrors had showered down, leaping off the walls and shivering past her face. Then she had slipped on a large panel of glass and gone down into the mess, gashing her wrist. She had barely felt the pain.
Now she can’t come in here
, Julia had thought, uncaring of the blood which welled out of the gash and down across the palm of her hand. The walls were unreflecting gray-white plaster marked like a graph with small black studs, to a few of which adhered an inch of mirror. Broken glass, some of it catching muted light from the ceiling, was strewn over the bathroom carpet, tumbled in long snaky shapes in the sink and tub. She felt warm blood falling onto her bare feet and snatched a towel from the rack and wound it about her wrist. Pebbles of glass snagged at her cut. Then she had swallowed the two pills. And staggered across twelve feet of broken glass to her bedroom.

(Thus she did not hear the bell seven hours later when Lily and Magnus came together to her front door.)

As in the hospital, she was visited by long fluent dreams. Those had been of turning the knife on herself, of sacrificing herself for Kate, that Kate’s vibrant little life could be restored: her blood for her daughter’s, a barter. She had felt Kate’s forgiving approach at such times. But now her dreams all had the same flavor; they were as ashy as failure and loss. Even as she began to slip steeply into them, she resisted, sensing the approach of that hopeless territory. She was again walking through the gritty streets, carrying her daughter’s corpse. The child she knew to be Olivia lurked ahead, unseen, and it was her duty to find her. The sky above the blackened roofs of tenements was lurid, red and orange shot with black streaks. Again, her long, burdened wandering took her to a mean courtyard. She moved across the filthy cobblestones and past abandoned, bricked-up warehouses and passed through the arch of the yard. A hunched leering man in a tattered coat winked at her, summoning from a doorway a small black girl with a curly ruff of hair. Julia ascended broken stairs and came out, as she knew she would, on a flat rooftop. A little woman in a large brown coat sat alone on the rooftop, her weight supported by a rickety chair. The woman was Mrs. Fludd. Seeing her, Julia felt tears welling in her eyes.

—I’m sorry, she said. I put you here. And I still need your help.

—I cannot help you.

Kate’s body was taken from her; it had been needed to bring her here, and now it could vanish.

—You called her up.

—Yes, said Julia.

—You invoked her. She needed someone to call her back, you see, and you were chosen. This happened because of your daughter.

—What do I have to know?

—She won’t like you knowing her secrets.

Mrs. Fludd turned sideways in her chair, refusing to speak further.

—Talk to me.

The old woman’s face, heavy and washed of color, turned again toward Julia.

—She will have your friends.

Then she had been running into a long tunnel, noticing even as she ran that the tunnel led nowhere, that it narrowed the further and deeper she went. At the end was Mark, the New Hampshire valley, peace … but she knew that at the end of all her running would be only a black narrow hole. About her rang Heather Rudge’s coarse, wheezing laughter.