Authors: Peter Straub
He jumped off the doorstep and half circled the house, peering in the windows. The interiors he saw looked motionless, tomblike, immaculately dead. He pounded on the window of the kitchen until its whiteness and sterility repelled him; then he continued around to the back of the house where he tried the handle of the French windows. They were locked. He leaned forward and looked past the parting of the drapes, cupping his hands about his eyes. The stolid furniture bulked on the floor as if it had come from a taxidermist’s show window. Before taking out his Access card he glanced at the house next door and saw Julia’s kittenish little neighbor staring down at him in horror from an upstairs window.
He shook his fist at her before noticing the tall, weedy man cutting around the corner of Julia’s house to come toward him. The expression on his face, that of a policeman about to dress down a tramp, infuriated Magnus, as did everything about the man, his modishly long blond hair and his velvet jacket and glinting ascot. When the man glanced suspiciously at Magnus’s rumpled and stained, tieless exterior, Magnus whirled to face him, balling his fists.
“Just a minute,” the blond man began. “Just a minute there, you.”
Glowering into his face, Magnus saw, with the sureness of
years of sounding witnesses and juries, an essential weakness beneath the bluster. “Piss off,” he growled.
The man stopped, as if hesitating, and then approached to within two feet of Magnus. “I don’t know what your game is, mister, but you shall be in trouble with the law if you don’t leave this house alone. I’ve seen you here before and I don’t like the look of you.”
“You utter twit,” Magnus said. “Piss off and leave me alone. My name is Lofting. My wife lives here. I don’t know who the bloody hell you are and I don’t care. Now get going.”
Amazement came into the well-cared-for face. “My name is Mullineaux,” he blurted. The admission caused him anger and Magnus, seeing it, braced himself. “I live next door to this house you were about to break into. Now I must ask you to leave.”
Magnus leaned his forehead against the windowpane, grinning ferociously. “You have a lot of guts for a Golden Wonder,” he said. “I’m going inside. I think my wife is in danger.” He straightened up and smiled at the man, knowing despairingly that he would have to fight him.
“Your wife isn’t here,” said Mullineaux. “And I doubt if you could do anything for her, in your condition.” He lifted an admonitory finger. “If you go away this instant, I promise you that against my better judgment I will not speak of this to the police. Now please go.”
“ ‘Now please go,’ ” Magnus mimicked. “Now
you
will please go, twit, because I’m going inside. You can stand here and watch or you can help me.”
“I must say …” the man said, advancing and placing a hand on Magnus’s arm.
An absolute conviction of his size flashed through Magnus, and he punched the man on the side of his head, knocking
him aside. Because Magnus had used his left hand, the blow was weak, but Mullineaux crumpled to the ground. At that instant Mark’s face floated into Magnus’s mind. He ground his teeth, enraged, and took a step toward the pale figure now groveling on the grass. He lifted his right boot back, intending to kick Mullineaux on the point of his jaw, but looked upward at the neighboring house and saw the pretty little woman inside shrieking through the glass. “Come and get this idiot inside,” he muttered, his fury dissipating, and stalked off back around to the front of the house. He had left his car at Plane Tree House.
Kate? Kate? As he stormed through the park, the slightly hazy, glowing summer air seemed to darken about him.
Mark came awake in darkness, the dirty sheet twisted about his hips. He had been dreaming about Julia, a variation on a dream he had been having regularly for the past three or four years. Usually the dream began with his entering a classroom, perching on the desk, and suddenly realizing that he was totally unprepared. Not only had he no lecture or plan for this particular class, he could not even recall which course he was supposed to be teaching. Students from various years and classes regarded him quizzically, already bored: if he could not think of something to say, soon the whole hour, an hour he hadn’t the barest idea of how to fill, would be lost. Was this
Working Class Movements in England
, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, 9:30–10:20?
New Trends in Socialist Thought
, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, 1:30–2:20?
Crowd Theory
, Monday and Wednesday, 4:00–5:25? He would realize with growing desperation that he did not know what day it was. Last night, the dream had progressed to this point, and then Julia had risen from one of the chairs and, pulling a sheaf of notes from her bag, began to lecture brilliantly on the London Corresponding Society and its Secretary, Thomas Hardy. He had resented her usurping his class at the same time as he had listened dazzled to her initial summary of information and the cascade of her ideas, which defined exactly what he had been struggling to express to this class over the
past year. He had been certain he would remember everything she said so that he could use it in the first chapter of the book he wanted to write, but all of it had vanished in the first second of wakefulness. Instead of her ideas, he would remember how she had looked—dressed in a white blouse and yellow skirt, her hair hanging softly about her shoulders, she was the Julia he had seen that first morning at Magnus’s house. She looked enchanted, like a woman who conversed with fairies: a woman to whom clung the last bewitching traces of childhood. Mark stared up at the low ceiling of his room, realizing that the dream had caused in him a terrific sexual arousal. He wanted Julia very badly. She could not consider herself married to Magnus after his brutal appearance at her home yesterday afternoon; the thought gave him energy to roll over and punch the light switch beside the mattress. Magnus seemed to have at last exploded. Both Julia and Lily had described the incident to him, each of them advising him to stay away from Magnus for the time being. Well, when
hadn’t
he avoided Magnus? One of the first utterly clear impressions of Mark’s life was that his adoptive brother detested him.
Maybe loathing was more the word for it, he considered, and giggled.
Still grinning, Mark untangled his legs from the sheet and stood up beside the mattress, carefully avoiding the stacks of plates and half-empty tins strewn over the floor. He had begun eating in bed the previous winter, when his bed was the warmest place in the flat, and had not yet got out of the habit. A pile of clothing lay atop a chair near the mattress, and Mark extracted from it a shirt and trousers, which he pulled on over his body, taking great care with the zip of the trousers. From the pocket of the shirt he took
a pack of Gauloises and a lighter and applied the flame to the tip of the cigarette, relishing the smoke’s occupation of his mouth and lungs. Then he felt beside the mattress and found his watch. It was eleven o’clock. He glanced for a moment at his desk, set below the window at the opposite end of the room, and immediately felt the loss of all sexual desire. There lay his typewriter, some pencils in a small bottle, a stack of paper, a few sheets of notes, and a dozen books in two piles—all the material for beginning work on his book. They had lain there since the previous summer, when he had deliberately not taken any teaching work so that he could write. But that summer had passed in a series of casual meetings with women, daydreams, grandiose plans which had never come to anything. He had spent an alarming amount of time asleep, as if exhausted by inactivity. After another three terms of teaching, Mark had thought that he could at last get down to the book, but now he could not look at his desk without feeling a panicky fluttering of guilt. He was less sure of his ideas now than when he’d first thought of writing his interpretation of working class social movements. When he could bring himself now to think about the book, he chiefly visualized the reviews it would earn. “The breakthrough in socialist thought achieved by this brilliant young lecturer.…” “This classic of Marxist praxis.…” He snubbed out the Gauloise on a plate and went down the hallway to the bathroom.
When he returned Mark separated the curtains above his desk and let a drained, weak version of the sunlight enter the room. Well below street level, the little flat required electric lighting at all times of day. Forever gloomy, on overcast days it held large areas of brownish obscurity. The windows, like the smaller window in the kitchen—the flat’s second
room—looked out onto a wall of concrete which had once been white. Soon his headache would return. It had first come nearly a month ago, just after he had awakened. Ever since, he had been haunted by it, an insistent throbbing behind his temples and a feeling of constriction over the entire top of his head. On mornings when he had dreamed of Julia, it seemed worse. These sensations, never actually painful, had affected his concentration. Even if he were able to sit at his desk and begin work, he thought, he would be unable to construct a decent paragraph: he found himself losing the thread of conversations, of suddenly being aware, as in his classroom dream, that he was uncertain of what he had planned to do next. Several times on the street, he had been unable to remember where he had been going. He often found himself brooding about Julia and Magnus. A displaced, lost child himself, Mark had lately begun to see Julia—whom he had for years thought of as no more than a sweet, moderately pretty housewife—as his counterpart. Magnus’s possession of her seemed a cruel and blatant injustice. No man as bastardly and arrogant as Magnus deserved any sort of wife, certainly not one as sensitive as Julia. And Julia’s money, which he could use to further a thousand worthwhile purposes—the writing of his book only the most immediate of these—had been squandered on drinks and bourgeois dinners, and almost certainly funneled off to Lily. At times, Mark nearly hated Julia for tolerating so long her brutish parody of a marriage. And the money had come from that old crook, Charles Windsor Freeman, Julia’s great-grandfather, one of the classic American plunderers and exploiters: Mark could turn it against that very class and cleanse the money of its stain.
It was time for his exercises. Mark extended himself on
the carpet, which showed strands of thread beneath its scuffy greenish tufts, and deliberately emptying his mind, first lifted one arm and then the other straight upward. He tightened his muscles and pushed upward with all his strength. He repeated this with his legs. Loosened, he sat in the lotus position and attempted to touch his forehead to the ground. He extended his tongue until its roots ached. Then he sat blankly, expectantly. He closed his eyes to a furry darkness.
He stared deeply into the opaque darkness, letting it take shape around him. No movement, no thought. He was a vessel to be filled.
Within ten minutes the chaos of the flat had spun away, leaving him in a vibrant, circling universe. He was a dancing point of light in darkness, a slit of entry for spirit. Stars and worlds moved about him like spheres. The single burning lamp was a glorious golden wheel of consciousness toward which he flew, circling. It breathed and pulsed, trembling with life and knowledge.
His body, no longer tiny, became immense. His whirling encompassed worlds, galaxies. Mark-body became Mark-self, breathing in gusts of spirit. Time cocooned him, light as dust. Everything was holy. He could blow time away and fracture the world, leaving only Mark, only holy light. His hands lay across continents, weightless as the buzzing of a fly. His arms lifted themselves, and extended through vast distances. Wordless chanting filled the glowing space about him. Disembodied peace indistinguishable from tension illuminated and lifted him. Muscles, birds, flight. He was up. Now he was traveling toward a swarm of bright particles which coalesced as he traversed the great distance separating himself from them. He ached for union. He saw first a golden city, then a face he knew to be Julia’s even before it came fully into focus.
He was creating her from spirit. Space began to hum with energy, to sing. He was dissolving into flames and candles, into sheer brightness. The face he saw was not Julia’s, but that of a beautiful child. The brightness unbearably, gloriously intensified.
Outside, far away and to his left, a taxi blared. Mark began to spin downward, heaviness invading his body’s vast molecular spaces. He collapsed forward onto the carpet, his thighs cramping. His tongue caught a dusty web of hair. Mrs. Fludd, sitting beside him on a couch in Julia’s living room, said to him, “You are being blocked.” With the repetition of the taxi’s bright, horrid noise came his headache, settling like night over his scalp.
“I’m so grateful that you agreed to see me,” said Julia to the pleasant, smiling middle-aged woman who had opened the door of the large white house at 4 Abbotsbury Close. “It’s very important that we talk, important to me—I was so surprised to see your name in the directory, I thought you would have moved after your tragedy. Do you remember speaking to me on the telephone, Mrs. Braden? I’m Julia Lofting. You said I should come over this morning before lunch.…”
The woman opened the door further and admitted Julia to deep gloom. All of the house she could see appeared to be dark brown; a far wall held a cluster of old photographs layered with dust. “I am not the one you spoke to,” the woman whispered to Julia. “Mrs. Braden is upstairs in her room. She is waiting for you. It is about Geoffrey, yes?” Her German accent sounded like that of the voice Julia had heard over the telephone yesterday: but this woman’s voice was higher in pitch, silvery. Julia immediately, irrelevantly thought of it as the voice of a hypnotist.
“You’re not.…” Julia glanced up toward the staircase, which ended at a darkened arch.
“I’m Mrs. Braden’s companion,” said the woman, her voice insinuating, lulling. “I am called Mrs. Huff. I have known Mrs. Braden only since the tragedy. At first there were so many, those men from newspapers, the police, many wicked people coming to pry—the curious. I kept them away from her. Now no one comes for a long time. She wants to see you.”