Familiar Spirit

Chapter Four

Sarah stood in the doorway between kitchen and bedroom and gazed at the ugly carpet. It had to go; it was beyond cleaning. Getting it out was the next task of the day, a job which had to be done before she could move any furniture into the room. She had gone to a discount bedding house that morning, amid the clutter of surplus, furniture and discount stores that lined Burnet Road, and arranged for a new mattress and box springs to be delivered on Monday.

Pushing her sweatshirt sleeves above her elbows, Sarah squatted on the floor to take a closer look. She wrinkled her nose at the musty smell. There were no nails or tacks, and when she tugged at the edge, she was surprised to find it came up easily. Although old and bulky, the carpet was not difficult to move, and Sarah soon had it pushed into a lumpish roll against the far wall. Then she stood back and stared at what she had uncovered.

There was a design painted on the wooden boards in greenish-white paint: three rings encircling a five-pointed star. There were words within the rings which she could not read, and symbols at each point of the star. Although she couldn’t translate it precisely, Sarah knew very well what it meant.

Magic.

Was it Valerie’s? Sarah’s mouth twitched, and then a smile broke through at the picture she imagined: Valerie, standing in the center of the pentacle, candles flickering around her, her face tense with concentration, her arms raised in supplication, her voice shrill and high as she spoke to imaginary demons. The idea pleased her, somehow. It labeled Valerie, and explained the aura of strangeness Sarah had sensed about her. So Valerie was a witch—or thought she was, which amounted to the same thing in the end. Perhaps she even thought she had cast a spell on Sarah and made her rent this house.

So I live in a witch’s house, thought Sarah. It was an interesting thought, and already she was shaping events into a story to amuse her friends, recasting her encounter with Valerie in a new light and choosing her words. And there, underneath the bedroom carpet . . .

A sudden rapping sound made Sarah turn, her smile fading. “Who is it?”

But when she went to look, she found no one at the back door. As she hesitated, wondering, the sound came again. This time it seemed not a knocking, but a muffled thumping. Following the sound, holding her breath in order to hear it better, Sarah came to the bathroom. The noise had a focus now: something was moving beneath the bathtub. She listened a moment, then reached out and pounded sharply on the wall. The sounds of movement became more frantic, scurrying and scrabbling.

Valerie’s voice came to mind, and her sly smile: “I think there’s a rat in the cellar.”

Sarah nodded grimly and went for her flashlight.

It was time to take a look at that cellar. At the back door she paused a moment, then turned back and exchanged her tennis shoes for a pair of sturdy boots. Outside she shivered at the unexpected chill in the air and glanced up at the overcast sky, but didn’t bother going back for her jacket. She didn’t plan to be outside long.

The door to the cellar was on the west side near the front of the house. Old, unpainted, warped, it had no handle, and Sarah had to grasp the splintering edge and struggle to wrest it open. Inside it was dark, the windows too dirty and hidden by leaves to let in much light. Sarah thumbed the button on her flashlight and slipped through the doorway, ducking her head to avoid a spiderweb and looking around cautiously.

The space below the house was cold and damp and filled with a rotten, penetrating odor. Generations of rats might have lived and died and disintegrated here to judge from that smell, and Sarah wondered that it hadn’t seeped up into the house yet. The floor was earth, soft and dusty. Sarah stepped carefully, crouching to avoid the overhanging pipes, and breathing shallowly through her mouth. She swept the space ahead of her with the beam of light, alert for any motion, any unexpected mass or movement that might give form to the noises she had heard. And as she looked, she prayed she would find nothing. Later, she would put out poison and traps, but for now she hoped the rat would have the sense to stay out of sight. She began to regret her impulsive rush down here, armed with nothing but a flashlight, and a sudden internal chill made her grind her teeth together as she remembered her dream.

Her boot struck something soft.

With a cry, she leaped back. Heart pounding, Sarah forced herself to stand still, and she turned the light in the direction of the thing she had so nearly stepped on.

It was a dead cat. Coming closer, Sarah saw that its throat had been cut, so ferociously that the head was nearly off. The fur seemed to shimmer and move in the light—the small corpse was crawling with maggots.

Shivering, her stomach twisting unpleasantly, Sarah backed away from the butchered animal. All heart for further exploration was gone, and the previous tenant’s excursions in sorcery no longer seemed amusing. Whoever had killed this cat was senselessly vicious, possibly dangerous. Sarah felt a perhaps groundless but still powerful conviction that Valerie had killed the animal, probably as one of her witch-spells, a blood offering to some evil spirit.

Do you have a cat? I think there’s a rat in the cellar.

Sarah remembered the gloating madness that had twisted the woman’s face. Crazy. She was crazy.

And her throat tightened in sudden fear. Valerie had wanted her here, living in this house. Why? She thought of the nearly useless locks on the doors upstairs and decided to have them changed the next day. She would have bolt locks installed on both the inner and the outer doors. Just in case.

Hating it, but knowing it had to be done, Sarah used some old newspapers to transport the cat’s body to the garbage can, and fastened the lid down with a shudder. She could almost feel the maggots squirming on her hands as she hurried inside to wash.

When she came out of the bathroom she paused in the doorway, staring at the floor. The green-white pentacle seemed to mock her. Had there been blood spilled on this floor? Sarah wondered. Had Valerie raised the knife here in this room and brought it down on her unsuspecting cat, later discarding the body in the cellar? Had she meant for Sarah to find it, pointing the way with her hints of cats and rats and cellars? Stop thinking. Do something. She squared her shoulders.

But soap and water, ammonia, and a scrub brush had no effect on the paint. Looking at her watch Sarah guessed that it was too late, on a Sunday, to find anyplace open that would sell paint remover, and added that item to her list of things to buy. She closed off the bedroom and went into her office.

She couldn’t settle down. She couldn’t concentrate. Sarah laid aside the letters of Flannery O’Connor and prowled restlessly through the house. Her nerves were strung tight, and every small noise made her heart beat faster. She looked sharply at the windows time and again, expecting, beyond all reason, to find Valerie’s mad, grinning face looking in at her, expecting to see a thin figure lurking in the bushes. The doors were locked every time she checked; the windows undisturbed. Still there were sounds—scrabblings behind walls, beneath the floors, overhead. Sometimes aggressively loud, sometimes so quietly that it might have been someone whispering in another room. Sarah had the irrational feeling that the rat, having seen her fearful departure from the cellar, was taunting her now, daring her to do something.

Twice Sarah grabbed her purse and jacket and headed for the back door only to stop herself. She wasn’t going to leave. She wouldn’t let her own silly fears drive her out. Where would she go? Beverly and Pete deserved some respite from her company, and she had to get used to living alone.

The house began to feel cold as evening came on. Sarah plugged in the electric heater in the living room and closed the door to her office to conserve the heat. She busied herself making dinner: a large plate of macaroni and cheese with a few strips of bacon on the side, and then settled with the food and a glass of wine on the living room couch. She wrapped a soft blue blanket around herself and turned the television on to a movie about a husband and wife detective team.

The show was mindless and relaxing and Sarah was grateful for the opportunity not to think. The sound of pleasant, California voices and bland background music covered any other sounds she might have heard, and Sarah felt herself drifting, the food and wine and pleasant warmth all comforting her. The movie ended and Sarah meant to rise and turn off the television, but it was too much trouble. Just too much trouble to move. She was stretched out on the couch, the blanket enveloping her, and the thought of sitting up, unwrapping the blanket, and walking across the room to the television set was exhausting. It was too much work. It was much easier to stay where she was, with the light and the television on, and make no effort. Easier to relax. To let go. To give in.

It took her a little while to realize that these were not her own thoughts. Giving in, letting go—that was what the rat wanted her to do.

The rat’s eyes were like flames. It sat up on its haunches and glared at her, and burned its will into her mind.

Give up. Let go.

She had to look away, Sarah thought, confused. It was hard to think, but she could feel the urgency of that. If she kept looking into those eyes it would become harder and harder to resist. The rat was hypnotizing her, compelling her, and, in time, those flaming eyes would burn her mind away. Already the flames were singeing the edges of her will, and once it was gone, she knew, once her will had been burned up like a piece of paper, the rat could do whatever it wanted. She would not be able to oppose it. She knew that, and yet it was so hard to look away. She had to, to save her own life, and yet it was hard to think of anything beside those golden, glowing eyes. But if she did not turn away, she would die. The rat would leap upon her with its cold, sharp claws, and scrabble up her motionless, will-less body, and bite out her throat.

In a moment she would turn her head, and save herself from those twin flames. In a moment.

Sarah woke, shuddering, to darkness and cold. For one horrible moment she thought she was lying in the cellar, but then she felt the solid, rather hard cushions of the couch beneath her, and the softness of the blanket, and knew where she was. She had been dreaming.

But why was it so cold? And why so dark? She missed the hum and glow of the electric heater, and the light, and the television. She didn’t remember turning any of them off. Her last memory was of falling asleep amid babble and glow.

Who had turned out the light?

Sarah’s heart pounded and she held her breath, listening. She was afraid to sit up, afraid to reach out to the lamp beside the couch, afraid that someone was waiting for her to move, waiting to grab.

Perhaps a fuse had blown. Perhaps she herself had turned off the light and forgotten about it. It was ridiculous to lie here terrifying herself with fantasies. Sarah sat up and made herself reach out, her skin prickling with fear, anticipating sudden, tearing pain from the jaws of a rat.

But the rat existed only in her nightmare. Her hand found the lamp just where it should have been. The switch clicked back and forth between her fingers with a loud, empty sound. There was no light.

It had been many years since Sarah had been afraid of the dark, but that long-buried, nameless fear rose up to assail her now. The dark closed around her, menacing, suffocating. She tried not to imagine what dangers it might hide. She forced herself to stand up and walk away from the couch, towards the kitchen. The flashlight was there. She realized she had no idea what to do if a fuse had blown, but she was far too tense, now, to go back to sleep and wait to deal with it in the morning.

Sarah made her way slowly and carefully towards the kitchen, her whole body rigid with dread. At every step she expected to encounter something horrible—to run into a waiting human figure, or to step on something warm and alive. She scarcely knew which would be worse. The darkness was oppressive. Sarah stretched her arms out, trembling, and pushed her way through it.

At the doorway to the kitchen there was a light switch, and she groped for it eagerly. Her spirits fell again when it clicked emptily. It must be a fuse, then, and not merely a dead bulb. In the kitchen she experienced a few long, horrible seconds of running her hands over the clammy tiles beside the kitchen sink before she finally felt the comforting metal roundness of the flashlight. She held it close to her chest and switched it on.

Feeling safer already with the light in her hands, Sarah turned towards the back door. The yellow beam carved a path out of the darkness before her, illuminating a segment of linoleum and wall, and threw back the gleam of two eyes.

Two evil, golden eyes, set in a narrow head. Crouching before the door, barring her escape, was a huge, grey rat.

It wasn’t the monstrous creature of her nightmare—it was no larger than a rat might be. And Sarah knew that she was awake. So the rat had to be real.

But real rats didn’t have eyes like that, huge, glowing golden flames which dwarfed the small, pointed head. Rats didn’t stare and compel attention with eyes that hypnotized. Sarah tried to look away and could not. She was trapped by those eyes—and the will behind them—just as in her dream. But this was far more horrible than her nightmare. This time, she could not wake up.

Sarah tried, tried desperately, to move. Any physical motion at all, however small, would be a release from this numbing paralysis. At last she managed to flutter her eyelids and then, with a feeling of triumph, to close her eyes. Saved, she thought. If she couldn’t see the rat, she couldn’t be trapped into staring into those dangerous eyes.

It was like cold, dirty water moving into her head. Sarah realized she couldn’t breathe. She had to keep blowing air out through her nose, to expel the water, to keep from being suffocated. Her chest labored, and each breath required more energy, more struggle, more strength. She was weakening rapidly, feeling the filthy water catch at her lungs, and she wondered how long she could continue to fight for air.

Easier, much easier to stop. Had someone said that? The words seemed to ring in her ears, like kindly advice. Give in. Relax. Easier to give up. Easier to let go.

She continued to struggle, but she did not quite understand why. It was a dream, after all; only a dream. What happened in dreams didn’t matter. She couldn’t really drown in a dream—if she let go, let the water fill her lungs and bear her under, she would wake up. And her waking life would be so much easier. No more struggle. She didn’t need air; she didn’t need to breathe. Someone else would do it for her, while she slept undisturbed and peaceful. She had only to stop, to let go.

And still Sarah fought, breathing in and out, accomplishing each breath with greater struggle. She wasn’t sure why she continued to fight—she supposed it was because the habit of breathing was so strong that she didn’t want to give it up, even in a dream. Even though it would be so much easier, and she thought, more and more, of letting go.

But there was something else that bothered her. A small, distant pain. She couldn’t isolate the feeling—to do so would have required too much effort, too much concentration, and she could not spare anything from her struggle for air. Like small, sharp teeth worrying at her flesh—something she was forgetting—something important—

The rat!

Sarah opened her eyes and saw the rat, still fixed in the beam of her flashlight. Had it moved closer? She couldn’t be sure. Bitterness welled up inside her, a pain in her chest. She could breathe—she was in no danger of suffocation—that had all been a trick. The rat had made her think she could not breathe in order to distract her, to keep her from recognizing the real danger. And the real danger was in the rat itself. She felt its evil, its almost overpowering will, burning out of those eyes. It had nearly tricked her into giving in. It meant to destroy her. Sarah stared back at it, briefly free of the power of those hypnotic eyes, and she recognized her enemy. Self-preservation rose up inside her, strengthening her, and a feeling of hatred stronger than any she had ever known. She would not let herself be destroyed or used—she would kill the thing that had tried to kill her—she would smash it, burn it, crush it, cut its throat—

Crying out incoherently, Sarah hurled the flashlight at the rat, and heard the sound of metal striking the floor.

Darkness swallowed them both.