Julian Is Dead

We won't tell him. Ever. He has been so limitlessly sad since Julian died. There is nothing to do but stay next to him and hope he gets over it soon. It is mid-winter now in the fourth year of no more Julian. If he hadn't been under doctor's care, we don't know what would have become of him. He has slit his wrists twice now and sleeps rarely.

We take turns holding him at night, trying to keep him warm. But even in the hottest nights of mid-summer, he is freezing and is like ice. So you can imagine what it is like for him here in snowy cold fourteen degrees winter and close to Christmas when he and his British friend and partner were the closest, for he had always associated Christmas with England; for that matter, it's just about impossible not to with books and the media and all.

We won't tell him it will get better. For it won't. We won't tell him anymore that he will come out of it, that Julian is in a better place, that the car crash in the outskirts of Paris was over four years ago and the pain is long gone from Julian, but Julian is long gone from him as well, and the anguish and the bitterness he feels, though he knew it was mad—he knew Julian hadn't done this on purpose, that it was just a tragic motor way accident and no one was really at fault. It had been late night. And rainy and slick.

When Princess Diana's funeral was on telly, he watched all of it, and mourned Julian instead of her, and he bought the mags and Elton John's "Candle in the Wind" and played it a million times, sobbing his heart out. He watched all the news about the crash, before and after, and the endless investigations into it and who had instigated it and damn the paparazzi anyways. He dwelled on it incessantly. He would not eat. He was skin and bones. We had to force him. It was then we had to accept the fact he was going mad.

He had begun talking to Julian as though he were alive and in the bedroom with him. As though everything was as it had been before, with today and yesterday and last month and a century from now mixed up in his shattered mind. He would tell Julian how it had all been a mix up and as soon as he left bed, as soon as he felt well enough again, he would set everybody straight about it all. I could see in his eyes, he imagined Julian nodding, and he put his hand to the air as if holding Julian's hand, invisible, and then he put his hands and arms round the back of the air as Julian, in his mind, hugged him and it half kilt us.

I thought of breaking ranks with my other cousins and telling him but the others said no, never; they were uncharacteristically vociferous about it, they are normally quiet and soft spoken people, but this has half pushed all of us round the bend, and this is the night I hold him under quilts, as best I can, he keeps throwing them off, and I keep putting them back on.

He can get quite agitated at times and in those times can get quite violent; he will cry great gobs of tears. He will talk and talk to Julian, laugh insanely at jokes he heard from no one. Which scares us half to death; and we can say till we're face blue that Julian is not there, that he will never be there, that you are just doing yourself an injury, your mind is sick, you need hospital again—but we can't have him committed, the thirty days we made him spend were torture to him; all the good they did was to give him the drugs; if the drugs are not compounding his state.

The doctors, good though they are, do not know what he was like before all this, before the drugs too, when he had been able to be level headed and reasonable and cheerful many times, as long as there was Julian. Who is to say the drugs have not propelled him into this nightmare? Who is to say he might have gotten over Julian's passing already, without them?

Morning came slowly, ever so. I am exhausted. Holding onto, or trying to hold onto, the writhing ship that is my cousin, the tormented and wrecking sinking thing that is he. I get angry sometimes. I get angry these things have happened to him. And that they have happened to us too. I know it's the nightmare, the real one, but he doesn't. I know there is a way to fix it. So do they. But they, like I, are selfish. He was such a handsome young man once. He had a melodic singing voice. He was moody and dark a great deal, but he was also a charming person with a joke and an easy smile and soft comforting words. But after Julian, the art of living has passed him by, as he has passed himself by.

Though we stay in the wilds of the English countryside; though we never let him get to that cemetery in Sevenoaks where he so deucedly and feverishly wants to go, because he says over and over, let me stand at his grave, Seven oaks being Julian's home town; let me please make sure, he will beg so piteously. As if there is anything to make sure of. As if there is some trickery; oh, he thinks there is; how suspiciously he looks at us sometimes; as if we are making the whole thing up; as though this is a cruel evil joke invented to drive him mad; we tell him over and again that it is no joke. That we have his very best interests at heart. But he doesn't listen. He blames us. And he blames Julian. And he blames God. As well as himself.

I bring flowers every morning. Sometimes my cousins come with me. This morning, for instance.

We kneel round his bed, and we hold his head and we are so sad. No one would believe about Julian. No one would believe we could have done such a thing. They would say we were faux necromancers. And that would not be true. But it is true; we've lied to him for some time now. It's the only way we could keep him with us, for the lie must always continue. As do ours. We are more selfish than Julian. I dreamed it up. He would have gone mad if he had known the truth. Well, he finally did go mad, so what was the point of it anyway? And that laudanum or whatever he is taking. I would pour it out of doors if my cousins were not keeping such a secure, strict eye on the medicines dispensing.

Out of his hearing, now this cold gray drear December day, we huddle together outside the small house, in our heaviest clothes, and our heavy coats, the snow falling thickly on us; when everything looks like a shadow; and the world appears to be made of nothing but charcoal, as well as we are made of the very same substance as well as the world round us, small little dark bobbin it seems to us now with a very ugly knife edge frozen ice smell to us. He is a ways away, I told him at first, after I saw with horrors the eldritch nightmares we were causing him, making new, deeper inroads to his heart and tearing it apart, but he would leap at me and clasp my hands so tightly, they would have red marks on them for days.

He would be so red-faced and monstrously hopeful, as if he would tear the world apart to find his friend and be with him again. He would cry, "Where is he? Take me to him. Did he tell you that he died in order to get rid of me? Am I that worthless? Am I so much a nothing to him that he dreamt up this cruel hoax to rid himself of me? I forgive him. Everything. Tell him please. Whatever I did to offend him, I will never do again. I will be his servant. I will be his dog. Tell me and I will race to him." It would take all of us to get him to release me. We would have to administer so much medicine, he would pass out.

I stopped telling him Julian was far away, for he always interpreted it as he would be less far away the next day and the next week, that he would be at the door then and rush to his bedside and crush him in his arms and the sweet words "Julian, Julian" not night terror words anymore, but words of love and adoration met, with Julian's arms round him and kisses to follow.

We did make up the lie.

We walked away from him and went to the parlor, where we took off our coats and hats and gloves, as we sat by the fire, and Sophia made tea and brought us our cuppas. We didn't talk much. I imagine we were thinking the same thing. He was right. Julian couldn't have cared about him after all, even after eight so very close years. Julian wrote him, saying it's over, don't try to contact me, it was fun, but there are other things and other people I have to attend to, Cheerio, Julian. Cheerio, indeed! I threw the dreadful offal letter in the fire immediately. It burned a stench into this very room that is still lingering. What a bastard to do such a thing. What a royal f---ing bastard; may he rot for it.

He had moved in the meantime. I tried to find him. To demand answers from him. To beg him to come back. To do something. To kill him, perhaps. I don't know. I tried my best. I went everywhere; talked to all the people I could think of who knew him. I didn't know him well. Met him and some of his friends, had he done this to them as well? and for what reason? Or had this been reserved for Hugh alone?

Selfishness, I would imagine. Not giving a damn, I would imagine. Save about himself. I even tried Scotland Yard, checked school records of some schools I remember hearing him mention. He never mentioned his family to me or in my presence. He was a likeable fellow.

Open and witty and charming as well as his ex-friend and ex-partner he had summarily kicked in the teeth, consigned to hell, and had gone blithely on his way, other wise how could he have done such a monstrously evil thing? Or perhaps he is dead, indeed and is in hell indeed. Most hopefully so. I try to think of betrayal of him from Hugh's side and cannot. Hugh was utterly devoted to him. They were together all the time, exchanging books, and all, Christmas letters and gifts in the mail till Hugh moved here. It was all going so well, till out of the blue.

I knew there had been no fight. Huge had been so happy and bubbling about Julian's birthday the next week and where Julian had said they would celebrate-in Paris. Which gave me the immediate idea of the car wreck in France. I had to say something, didn't I? He was so in love with Julian. He collapsed after denying over and over it was not true. As it got worse and worse. As my cousins came to stay with us.

Yes. Julian may very well be dead. He certainly is by now. We are dead too. But we keep tending the grave of our beloved Huge, who knifed his own throat, tearing it open, bleeding to death five days after I had told him Julian was dead. We kept his ghost alive as long as we could with our lies and our selfishness. And the fact, for reasons we didn't understand then, we were tied somehow in the spider's web of the thing. I guess you could say we are Flying Dutchmen, now, my cousins and I for putting Huge through that torment for four years, until I found a book on magic, and used it to cast his spirit back to a calm and restful afterlife. Julian should be serving our eternal sentence with us, since it was his fault to begin with. And perhaps he is. Somewhere out of our sight.

Be that as it may, once upon a time, a ghost, thinking himself alive, mourned a man who was, as far as we know, and most probably was, snakes being skillful survivalists, alive, who in spirit and soul was truly the dead one. Later, after we've warmed our ghostly legs at the fire enough, we will go into Hugh's bedroom and continue the shadow play with illusion. It is something, after all, to keep us busy. And not think of the grave and the tombstone scarcely a yard away. Sleep being sleep and bed being bed. Or how we adapt the story line to each year or so, keeping up with the times, for we've no choice in that either.

Someday I will find Julian. And I will kill him most horribly. Even though he is now a ghost. After all, I am practiced in the fine arts of all the ways to kill one, and to keep it alive in torment for as long as I want. That would be worse. That is what I plan to do.

I still search. And will not stop. Till finding him.