Julia Knows
The mist hangs low over the cornfields like an ethereal mass obscuring the stalks’ short, off-season tips. From where Julia sits she can see outside very well. The room is dark, the candle at her side on the window sill long ago snubbed to eliminate the reflection from the cool pane of glass. The mist gleams silver in the moonlight, and she catches herself watching it float over the corn and silently scolds. That’s not what she’s looking for. It’s easy to get distracted by little things like that. You see a shooting star, or maybe just watch the mist roll by for a little, and pretty soon you’re lost in your own head and not doing what you came to do. It’s easy for Julia to get distracted, especially this late at night. Normally, she’d have been in bed hours ago, bundled up in her white nightie with Margie quietly snoring beside her. She’d have been sound asleep, not up late watching out the window.
Julia glances back over her shoulder into the darkness of the bedroom and looks at Margie. Margie asks something in her sleep and rolls over in bed, her murmured question largely unheard, save the fragment that Julia recognized. “…they comin‘?” she had asked.
Julia turns back to the window. The moon is full and the night is bright. From her little perch Julia can see the barn off next to the cornfields and the treeline in the distance beyond. She watches between the trees intently, pressing her little hand against the cold window so she can lean in close. Their thick trunks stand still and silent in the dark, shaded from the bright moonlight by the dense mass of leaves atop them. The forest lies inside. It is deep, going much further than Julia has ever ventured. The trees spread to the hills beyond and follow up and over their tops. Julia can only imagine just where the other edge lies. All the leaves shade and blot out the moonlight so that the forest’s insides are pitch-black, unpenetrated by the moon’s beams. Anything could be happening inside and no one would know, just looking at the edge of it. Still, though, Julia continues.
She thinks she might get lucky. She might see what she came for. It might wander a little. Maybe, just maybe, all the way up to the edge, to the treeline facing the window Julia’s peeping out of even now, and she could know. She wouldn’t have to wonder, or try to convince people, because she would know. So she keeps her post, sitting here late into the night watching into the dark in between the trees and hoping to see it. Even just for a moment.
For a tiny, breath-holding second she thinks she does. The slightest motion, like a shadow stirring in the dark, and the bright gleaming wink of a cat’s eye appears, or maybe doesn’t, in the dark in between the trees. Julia is pressed hard against the window, unblinking and trying hard to see its shape out there, but the cat’s eye winks out and the shadow lays still. It’s just darkness again. Soon, despite the brief excitement, it’s too late for a little girl to stay up and Julia is asleep against the windowsill, the shadows now roaming the forest unobserved.
*
Julia is awoken by Margie’s gentle shakes.
“Julie,” Margie says and Julia’s eyes spring open. She props herself up and immediately looks out the window into the woods, but even she knows that she’ll never see it during the day.
“Did you sleep at the window again? Why not come to bed?” Margie asks.
“I couldn’t. I wanted to look for ‘em,” Julia replies innocently, and her older sister scoops her up into her arms and holds her close.
“They already caught those men, Julie. There ain’t nothing out there at night but deer and owls and mice. Nothing else. Understand?” Julia does not tell Margie that what she was looking for has no name that she knows, but instead nods. Margie sets her down onto the edge of the bed. She crosses to the dresser and pulls on her school clothes, fastening the white bonnet last. “You want me to help you pick out your clothes?” Margie asks and Julia shakes her head. Dressed, Margie makes her way to the door. “Only six and already you’re pickin’ your own clothes and stayin’ up late. Well, don’t fall back asleep, and don’t tarry comin’ down to breakfast, okay Julie?” She shuts the door behind her.
Julia climbs up from the bed and returns to the window. The mist has long evaporated and in the bright sun the corn and grasses wave peacefully in the breeze. Further out, the forest is quiet and shady and the thick line of trunks protects it from prying children’s eyes. Julia reluctantly leaves her post and picks out a little dress for herself.
At breakfast, everyone else eats their oatmeal quickly. Margie finishes first and kisses her parents and Julia before hurrying out the door on her walk to school. Pop finishes his bowl and pushes it aside, stroking his thick beard and watching Julia eat. She has barely touched her oatmeal. “Only another year now before you go with your sister to school in the mornings. Won’t that be fun?” Pop smiles at her and she looks up into his shining eyes and finds them peering back into hers, searching.
“Be nice to get out of this house for a little while and learn something every day, huh?”
“Yes, Pop,” Julia says, and consciously takes a bite of her oatmeal. Satisfied, he sighs and stands.
“Better get to those cows,” he says. He leans across the table and kisses Julia on the top of the head before kissing his wife. Once he has gone, it is only Julia and her mother at the table.
“I’m gonna miss you when you have to go to school too, Munchkin. I like havin’ some company around the house,” Julia’s mother says after a few moments and sips her coffee. “Gets to be a little too quiet with nobody else here.” After a few moments Julia’s mother cleans their places and Julia stands to go outside and play. “Julia,” says her mother and Julia turns and faces her.
“No playing in the woods.”
*
Julia is swaying on the porch swing in the midday sun. She’s been counting on her fingers, brow knitted in concentration. She’s been through it twice already, and is pretty sure she’s got it right.
“Thirteen,” she says aloud, though no one else is on the porch but her. It’s been thirteen days since she last saw Rose Ann Gowling, her one and only best friend.
Fourteen days ago was a day almost just like today, with the sun shining bright and the sky nice and blue overhead. Julia and Rose Ann had been running through the corn. The two girls had been trying to find each other, the other’s giggles and the residual swaying of freshly disturbed corn-stalks their only clues. After wearing themselves out (and finally finding each other) the two girls had emerged, panting, on the other side of the corn fields, close to the treeline.
They had collapsed, still giggling and sometimes tickling each other, and lay on the grass for a long time, but there was only so long you could tickle and look at clouds before you got the urge to wander, as little girls sometimes will.
“Let’s go find the creek!” Rose Ann had suggested, and Julia had agreed. Their families were friends, and the whole lot of them had been to the creek together before. They would sometimes go on hot summer days, the men and women smoking tobacco and dangling their feet in the cool water while the children played and swam. Julia had thought she knew the way.
“We can swim!” Rose Ann had said excitedly, and had jumped to her feet and bound off towards the trees, with Julia close behind. The way to the creek wasn’t memorable enough. Once they were inside the forest all notion of landmarks and direction had evaporated, and the pair had taken to wandering with the vague hope of coming upon the creek. They had been leisurely wandering among the trees in the cool, shaded air for a few minutes when Rose Ann had stopped.
“Listen,” she told Julia. “You hear that water runnin’ noise? I think we’re getting close!” By her suggestion, Julia had listened long and hard, but heard nothing. Rose Ann was incorrigible, though, and before Julia could stop her she was running along between trees and ferns, dashing about excitedly with Julia following close behind. Rose Ann was taller, though, and her legs longer. It hadn’t taken long for them to become separated, and soon Julia was running after footsteps and giggles. Soon after that, she was running after nothing at all.
She had stopped under an enormous tree and sat at its trunk with her ears perked, faithful that the noisy Rose Ann would reveal herself in due time. She was right. A piercing shriek had cut through the foliage and found Julia’s ears, and she had sprung to her feet and immediately run in the direction of the shriek. She couldn’t mistake Rose Ann’s voice, nor the intent of the shriek, but what could she have done? Had she fallen and hurt herself? Julia was just a little girl, and she doubted she could carry Rose Ann out of the forest. Maybe she had only scared herself. Julia had been busy envisioning whatever peril Rose Ann had placed herself in when she burst upon the scene, and the shock of seeing it had forced all those thoughts from Julia’s mind and choked the breath out of her.
It was a dark, quiet little clearing. Darkened strips of Rose Ann’s white dress clung to protruding branches. Julia’s mouth fell open. The brown soil had been stained a dark red only moments before. Rose Ann lay on the ground. Flecks of dirt and mud clung to her face and her bright, blonde hair was fanned away from her head as though she had been thrown to the ground. Beneath her chest, the skin ended in ragged, torn flaps that lay wet against the dark mud. The white tip of spine that poked through was splintered and crushed, and sat feebly against the spilling, wet insides that had streamed from the ragged tear and now lay where her legs otherwise would. They were nowhere in sight.
Julia’s scream was bisected, ending in a gasp. To her right, a muscular and serpentine tail slid behind a fern and was suddenly gone, leaving Julia alone with what remained of Rose Ann.
She had run faster than she could ever remember running, streaking through a landscape of shady trees and ferns blurred by her tears and speed. She had found her father and led him back to the spot, but all that they had found was the wet, dark earth.
Very late that night, Sara Ann’s father had come by the house. Julia had come down from bed quietly and listened secretly to the hushed conversation that he had with her father and mother in the kitchen by candlelight.
“… Marcus, and if you think otherwise then you’re a delusional fool!” Her father’s voice carried the best of the three, and she had no trouble making out his words. “You’ve brought it upon yourself! I feared it would come from the first moment I heard of the electric light you had installed. I knew that I took a risk in allowing my daughter to continue associating with yours but I hadn’t the heart to separate the girls, though I knew the chances I took. I can only thank them for sparing my girl and curse them for taking yours.”
“Thank them!” Marcus Gowling was hysterical, and despite her age Julia could hear the pain in his voice. “You would do well to curse them unprovoked! They are a menace, John! Do you really think that you can appease them in any way? They care not at all for the electric light or your candles, or for your sacrifices! The goats are wasted on them because they will kill again and again no matter what you do.”
Julia could hear the slap.
“How dare you suggest that our fathers were mistaken. You know as well as I that they found the only way to keep them at bay was with constant, humble, tireless work and sacrifice! We have managed it this long. Were it not for your damned electric light we would have managed it much longer,”
There was a long moment of silence before Julia finally heard her mother’s voice. “Marcus, go home to your wife and the family you still have. Look after them the same as you have always done, but do away with your sinful light! Give them the flesh and sacrifices we always have, and pray that such a thing never happens again!” There was silence again before Marcus Gowling spoke one last time.
“Does Julia know, now?”
Her father’s voice was quieter than it had been before, almost ashamed. “We hoped to never have to tell them. Even Margaret has no idea.”
The next morning at breakfast Julia’s parents told her and Margie that Rose Ann had been hurt by escaped lunatics, but that the police had caught up with them. Every time Julia had pressed her father, asked him about the tail she had seen or anything else to do with that day she was punished and told that she was mistaken, that she had not seen right and remembered what wasn’t there. She learned quickly to stop asking.
*
Margie comes home as the sun fades and the sky darkens to find Julia on the porch swing.
“Julie!” she greets her. “Have a good day here at home?”
Julia gazes out towards the forest. Margie knows nothing of what really happened to Rose Ann. “Yes,” Julia lies.
“Come on Julie, let’s go in and get ready for supper.”
Julia lets Margie bring her inside. For supper they have potatoes by candlelight.
Upstairs, Margie and Julia prepare for bed. They both pull on their nightclothes and Margie immediately crawls into bed. Julia puts out all the candles but one and takes up her perch by the window.
“Come on, Julie, no sense in looking out that window any more! I know you’re hurtin’, but they already caught the men that did that to Rose Ann. No sense watching for ‘em all these nights.”
Julia lets Margie finish talking. She won’t force Julia into bed, she never does. She has to know. Her father and mother lie to her, and tell her that Rose Ann was hurt by bad men that have gone to prison. Julia knows that she did not see any men. She turns away from the bed to the window, and soon enough Margie’s light snores and seep-mumbling greet her ears. She puts out the candle and the reflected image of her face in the window pane disappears instantly. Out in the night, the mist is rolling in. Beyond the cornfields lies the treeline. Inside the woods shadows move across the darkness and tails connect to hidden beasts, unafraid and unobserved. Julia keeps watch.