“I wish I could,” I said.
“Leave it alone. Walk away.”
“I can’t. It’s not that easy. And I think you know that, don’t you, Julie.”
“People think I’m fucked up,” she said. “Fucked in the head—and I am, I admit it. Since that day I’ve had problems, but—but I’m not crazy. I wasn’t then and I’m not now. I’m not.”
“Right about now a lot of people think I’m crazy too.” I managed a halfhearted smile. “Whatever you’re willing to tell me, I’m prepared to believe.”
She sipped her tea, smoked her cigarette; said nothing.
“Julie,” I pushed, “who was with Bernard in the woods that day?”
“There weren’t any other people with him—not really,” she said blankly. “But he wasn’t alone.”
CHAPTER 16
With Julie’s words still hanging in the air, I tried to convince myself that her statement had been made metaphorically. But even then I knew it hadn’t been. I pushed the fear back like the bile that it was, did my best to keep it under control and contained beneath the surface.
“When it was over, he left me out in the woods,” she said, splitting the silence. “Like I told you, I had a concussion from hitting my head and I was dirty, had leaves and twigs and things in my hair and all over my clothes from being pushed down into the earth. It was like for a few seconds he had contemplated killing me, suffocating me there in the clearing, forcing me to breathe in all that loose dirt. I realized later that it was probably just his way of letting me know he could have killed me had he really wanted to. In some ways it would’ve been more merciful if he had.”
As Bernard’s friend, as an intruder in this shattered woman’s life, I couldn’t help but somehow feel a sense of responsibility, a need to assume the fault in his absence and to apologize for what he’d done, for what he’d become. “I’m sorry,” I said pathetically.
“I told my parents I tripped while I was on my run,” she said, her mind still far away and trapped in that horrible forest. “I told them I hit my head and knocked myself out and came to a while later. I never talked about the rest of it. I couldn’t, I mean—even if I had they all would’ve thought I was crazy. Most ended up thinking so anyway.”
“I’m not passing judgment with this question,” I said carefully, “but why didn’t you tell, Julie? Why did you let him get away with doing that to you?”
She let out a burst of pessimistic laughter that was brief and violent and possessed the cadence of rapid automatic gunfire. “My parents kept taking me to doctors. They were sure my bump on the head had caused the changes in me. The nightmares I had, the screaming in the middle of the night, the inability to focus or concentrate anymore because it always felt like I was being watched, the depression and the suicide attempt not even a year later. That little trick landed me in a special hospital in Boston.” She sat back a bit in her chair and assumed a more defiant posture. “And that was my first stop. Been in and out of nuthouses for years. Ever been on the inside of an asylum, Alan?”
I shook my head in the negative.
“Well, let me tell you, there are some crazy motherfuckers in those places. Full throttle, out of control nuts—I’m talking crazy. Only I wasn’t one of them. And you know what? I wasn’t the only one. There were other people in there just like me, people who knew, people who’d seen. Only they talked about it. They talked about it until their medications stopped them from talking or thinking or being anything with an intellect higher than that of a fucking coffee table. But I knew the truth about things too, and all I wanted was to die, to snuff myself out and hopefully put an end to the chaos. Of course no one could understand why. Just months before I’d been this perfect little Barbie doll with perfect grades and perfect friends and everyone loved me and just knew I was going to go to college and meet the perfect Ken-doll man and have the perfect Ken and Barbie life. I was Julie-fucking-Henderson. How could Julie go crazy?” Tears again filled her eyes, but she somehow managed to prevent them from spilling free. “And I wanted to tell them, believe me I did. I wanted to tell my friends, I wanted to tell those doctors and nurses and the other lost souls in that awful place, I wanted to tell my parents and anyone else who’d listen that I wasn’t crazy, that there was an evil in this world I’d never known existed, but I’d seen it, I’d witnessed it, experienced it firsthand. It was real. That’s what that day in the woods taught me. That evil isn’t just a concept or a theory. It’s real. It destroyed my life. Destroyed it. You live in Potter’s Cove; I’m sure you heard all the whispering and talk about how I’d gone off the deep-end. Everyone knows everyone else’s business there. Can’t fart in that town without someone hearing it.”
“If it’ll make you feel any better,” I said, “I had no idea until your brother told me you’d had some problems. I always just assumed you’d gone on to college and moved off somewhere else.”
She gauged the candor of my reply before she spoke again. “Will you answer a question I have?”
“Of course.”
“Do you expect me to believe that you were his friend—his close friend—and never suspected, never knew what Bernard had done?”
“I had suspicions, but—no—I never knew for sure that he’d done this to you.”
“You never knew what he really was?” She slowly shook her head, as if she pitied me. “Jesus, you really don’t.”
I leaned forward over the table and slowly brought myself closer to her in as non-threatening a manner as I could. “I need your help. Please tell me what you know.”
Without breaking eye contact, Julie reached for her cigarettes. “Careful, I just might.”
“What really happened in those woods that day?” I asked. “What was it you saw?”
“The dark,” she said softly. “I saw the dark.”
I waited for her to continue. When she didn’t, I grabbed her lighter from the table, produced a flame and held it out toward the cigarette resting between her fingers. The ignition sound, or perhaps the flame itself, caught her attention and broke the trance that had fallen over her, and with a startled jump, she rolled the cigarette into the corner of her mouth and leaned into the flame. I placed the lighter back on the table and watched as she ran a hand through her hair, stopping to rub the skin along her hairline before continuing on toward the back of her head. She’d left the cigarette in her mouth, and it dangled there like a tiny smoking limb.
I wondered if she always smoked so heavily.
“Do you have any idea what it’s like to have your life become one continuous nightmare? I guess we all do on one level or another, huh?” She raised her head, plucked the cigarette free after a deep drag and exhaled a cloud at me. “But how do you describe evil, what it looks like, what it feels like? How do you describe darkness, how do you describe oxygen? I felt… I felt things watching us, watching me.” Her eyes narrowed. “And they were pleased.”
I wanted out of that apartment more than ever, but gripped the edge of the table and held myself in place. What if Julie Henderson really was insane? What if we both were?
“He had a stick,” she continued, staring at the wall over my shoulder now. “He was saying things but I couldn’t make out the words. They were strange words that I later learned were an obscure, ancient form of Latin. But he spoke them quickly and under his breath, and I was dazed and sound seemed to filter in and out—everything came and went like that while I was on the ground—sight, sound, and sensation—all of it. But he had this stick and he made drawings in the dirt next to me while he chanted those strange words and phrases. Urgent drawings in the dirt, he kept scratching them into the ground like he only had a certain amount of time, like he had to do this fast or it might not work. I couldn’t see what they were because I couldn’t lift my head, I—I tried to lift my head but I couldn’t, all I could do was let my eyes fall in that direction. All I could make out were glimpses but I started to feel… I felt something welling up all around us, and then inside me like—like the way a yawn starts in the back of your head and then that tingling slowly spreads out across your body, you—you know how I mean? It was like that sort of sensation, only instead of feeling good, instead of feeling like a release or relaxing, it was just the opposite. It gave me that feeling in the pit of my stomach, deep in my gut, the kind like you get right before you’re sick or… or have you ever heard the brakes on a car screech at night? In the dark, you lay there listening for that awful sound of impact, and when it comes, you get that twisting feeling in your stomach—it was like that. Only worse. Much worse.