Familiar Spirit

Chapter Seven

But how to find Valerie?

Sarah didn’t know how to begin. She didn’t even know Valerie’s last name.

Waking Thursday, still at the Marchants’ apartment, Sarah thought of her landlady, Mrs. Owens, and the scrap of paper Valerie had given her. She retrieved it from the blue-jean pocket where it had been since she took it from Valerie’s fingers. She recognized the name of the street; it wasn’t far from her own house. She might as well stop by, since she would be in the neighborhood.

A cold wind was blowing and the sky was overcast. Sarah zipped up the front of her jacket and hurried through the rows of parked cars to her own. She felt the beginning of a dull depression and wished Beverly had been free to spend the day with her. Company might cheer her and keep her thoughts from circling hopelessly back to Brian. She tried, as she drove, to concentrate on the immediate problem, but the depression was already spreading, tingeing every avenue of thought with its greyness. She would not find Valerie. Even if she found her, Valerie would be unwilling or unable to help. After all, Valerie had fled the house after meddling in forces beyond her control. She had been able to save her own skin, but she couldn’t vanquish the demon she had summoned.

Mrs. Owens’ house was on a short street that ended abruptly, a ditch and a high wire fence separating it from the expressway. It was the last house on the street, covered in pale green aluminum siding, with white shutters framing the curtained front windows. The small, flat lawn was littered with the big leaves of a slippery elm and the smaller brown curls of a young ash. A car the color of tomato soup was in the driveway.

As she parked her car and got out on the street, Sarah felt uncomfortably as if she were being watched. But when she looked around she could see no one. The windows of Mrs. Owens’ house presented her with the blank, cream-colored backs of long draperies. She stared hard at them, but they did not stir to reveal the presence of a watcher.

Listening to the doorbell, Sarah did not believe it rang through an empty house. There was someone inside, she thought. She could feel an intangible presence. But no one came to the door.

Finally, Sarah turned away. She had taken only a few steps towards the street when she heard the soft but unmistakable sound of a door being opened. She turned.

There was no one there. But now the door was slightly ajar, as if a breeze had pushed it.

Sarah frowned and looked around, almost expecting someone to tell her what to do. But there was no one in sight; only the open door waiting for her decision.

Wondering what she would say if challenged, Sarah stepped forward and pushed the door wide.

“Mrs. Owens?”

Sarah found herself in a small foyer which opened on one side into a living room, and onto a narrow hallway on the other. From the end of the hallway came a faint sound.

Sarah swallowed hard. She could not place the noise, which was soft and uncertain, but she knew she had heard something. She said, more loudly, “Mrs. Owens?”

There was no answer. By now, Sarah scarcely expected one. Her whole body prickled and crawled with unease, but she felt committed to going on, having come this far. She made herself step into the dim hallway and walk in the direction of the sound.

Doors opened off the hallway on either side, and Sarah glanced into each one as she approached: a bedroom, a bathroom, a sewing room, all empty and tidy and still. The last door on the right was closed. Sarah stared at the painted white wood and the glass doorknob. She raised her hand, hesitated; then raised it higher, and finally knocked.

“Mrs. Owens? Are you in there? Are you all right?”

She had come too far to go back. Her hand closed around the fluted glass knob, held tightly, then turned it.

The door opened on a white-walled bedroom with short, flowered curtains at the window and a bed with matching flower-print spread. Beside the bed, flat on the powder-blue rug, was a woman in a pale yellow dress. She lay on her back, her white hair making a halo around her head. The look on her face was one of mute, uncomprehending terror. Her bright blue eyes met Sarah’s, and her lips moved, but she made no sound.

Sarah crouched beside her on the floor. “Can you speak? Can you move?”

The muscles of the woman’s face contorted, as if she were struggling to scream. Her eyes conveyed an intense appeal. Sarah touched her shoulder. “All right. Take it easy. I’m going to call a doctor.”

The front door slammed jarringly, and Sarah jumped up and hurried into the hall. “Who’s there?”

She saw no one and heard no other sound, and when she opened the front door and looked out, there was no one in sight. The sky had grown darker, and there was a wind.

Sarah stepped back into the house and closed the door gently. Her throat was dry and her heart pounded. She went back to the bedroom hardly knowing what to expect. But nothing had changed: the white-haired woman still lay on the floor. Sarah tried to smile, hoping her expression was comforting. There was a telephone on the bedside table, and Sarah used it to call the emergency ambulance number which was given on a decal stuck to the receiver.

After the paramedics had taken the old woman away, and after Sarah had given her story to a sympathetic young policeman, she stood beside her car and debated what to do next. She had come to a dead end, no closer to Valerie than before. The only idea she could come up with was to wander around the campus in hopes of meeting her by accident—and that could take forever. Valerie might well be keeping out of her way deliberately.

Sarah looked around uneasily. The feeling of eyes watching her was not paranoia this time, she thought. She felt very conspicuous, standing in the street in the lull that followed the departure of an ambulance. Finally she got back into her car, deciding to go to the library, where at least she could work.

But at the corner of Jefferson and West 35th, Sarah took the wrong turn, realizing what she had done a few seconds later as she approached the expressway overpass. She grimaced at the mistake. It was her subconscious again, she thought—first warning her away from the house and then drawing her back.

And yet she wasn’t sorry she had taken the wrong turn. Her pulse speeded up at the thought of going back to the house, and it wasn’t fear she felt, but a more pleasurable anticipation. She felt a perverse desire to challenge the thing that had driven her away, to test herself against it in the same way that, as a child, she had dared herself again and again to do the things that frightened her most, deriving pleasure both from the fear and the conquering of it.

I won’t go into the house, she thought. I’ll just have a look at it. She turned the corner and drove towards the house.

There was a black Ferrari parked in back.

Sarah pulled up behind it, blocking it, feeling excitement knot her stomach and tighten her throat. What luck, to find her here.

But was it luck? It couldn’t be luck. Suddenly wary, Sarah emerged slowly from her car. What had made Valerie come here? What did she want?

The back door opened, and Valerie came out. She looked tense and nervous, jerking her head around to give Sarah a furious, watchful look. “What are you doing here?”

Sarah stepped away from her car, leaving the door hanging open, and said, in the gentle voice people affect with children and the mentally disturbed, “I live here, remember?”

Valerie snorted contemptuously. “No you don’t. Not anymore. Jade scared you off. I know that.”

“What do you mean, Jade?” Sarah felt a quickening of excitement, the sense of being on the trail. A name, she had now. Jade.

“Why did you erase my magic circle?” Valerie asked, her voice plaintive. “Did he make you do it?”

“I got rid of it because I thought it might help banish the . . . demon. You called it Jade? Is that its name? I thought it might be holding the spirit to this house, somehow, providing a link.”

Valerie shrugged. “It was supposed to protect me. It didn’t work well enough. But I thought I might be safer if I stayed there. Oh, well, I don’t guess it matters. I’m going.” She came down the steps.

Sarah moved quickly to block her way. “Wait a minute. I’ve got some questions . . . you’ve got to help me.”

Valerie stopped short. She looked bewildered. “Me, help you? What do you mean?”

“You can help me get rid of the demon . . . Jade, you call it?”

“It’s what he told me to call him. I don’t know what it means.”

“Well, it’s a name, and names are important. It might be useful,” Sarah said. “All right, that’s a good start. I want you to tell me everything you know about Jade, and how you summoned him.”

“Why do you care?”

“Because he’s evil, and we have to destroy him.”

Valerie shrugged. “I don’t see . . . you got away.”

“Yes, I got away, but the next person might not be so lucky. As long as that thing is loose in this world, it’s like . . . like the germ of some horrible disease. And if his power grows, he might not be restricted to this house, as he seems to be now. There’s no telling what he might not do.”

A faint, unpleasant smile appeared on Valerie’s narrow face. “Well, he’s not in the house now,” she said. “He’s got a body, not that it will do him much good.”

Sarah felt a mental chill, and moved away from Valerie. “What do you mean?”

“I mean he’s trapped. Jade’s trapped in a sick, dying body, and when it dies . . . well, I hope he dies, too. If he doesn’t, I don’t want to be here to find out what happens. I’m going.”

She walked past Sarah towards her car, but Sarah grabbed her arm. “Wait a minute. You’ve got to tell me what you mean.”

Valerie looked down at Sarah’s fingers and she pulled away, her whole body seeming to shrink and recoil from contact.

“Let me go,” she said sullenly. “I’ll tell you.”

“Not here,” Sarah said. Her eyes went to the house, half expecting to find some visible sign of Jade’s presence, like a face at the window. But if the demon still lurked in the form of a rat or a cat or some other animal, it was not showing itself. “We have a lot to talk about. Let’s go somewhere . . . I know a coffee shop nearby.”

Valerie gave her head a jerk, presumably in agreement. She was staring fixedly at the ground, her body rigidly pulling away from Sarah’s grasp. Feeling a little sorry for her, Sarah let go her arm. Immediately, Valerie went to the gleaming black Ferrari.

“Let’s go in my car,” Sarah said quickly. “I’ll bring you back here afterwards.” She saw Valerie’s bony shoulders hunch, and then she backed away from the car. Feeling like a teacher with a backward child, Sarah said, “Don’t you want to bring your purse?” She could see the soft brown leather bag on the front seat. She remembered it from the first time she had seen Valerie because, along with Valerie’s knee-high boots, it was obviously expensive, and she had envied it.

But instead of simply reaching into the car for the bag, as Sarah expected, Valerie turned around to face Sarah, a look of dumb suffering on her face. “Yes,” she said. “Of course I do.” As if in slow motion, she leaned back into the car and got the purse. Slipping the strap over her shoulder, she held the bag close, almost cradling it against her body.

“I’m ready,” she said.

Valerie would not make a comfortable ally, Sarah thought as she let her into her car, but she might be useful. She made no attempt to break the silence between them, but drove swiftly to the coffee shop on Lamar Boulevard. There they settled into a corner booth and, after the waitress had brought them two steaming cups of coffee, Sarah finally spoke.

“Now tell me what you mean about Jade being trapped. What did you do? What happened? And what exactly is Jade, anyway? How did you summon him?”

Valerie glared at her sullenly across the gold-speckled formica table top. “What do you want to know first? I don’t know much about Jade . . . just what little he told me, which I don’t believe, or what I could guess, which turns out to be mostly wrong.”

“Start at the beginning,” Sarah suggested. “Where did Jade come from?”

“I don’t know. I just called him up and he appeared. I painted the magic circle on the floor like the books said, to protect myself, and I said some invocations, which I found in the books, and I made a blood sacrifice.” Her lips twitched upward in a tight little smile.

In her lap, beneath the table, Sarah’s hands clasped each other. “What sort of sacrifice?”

“I killed a rabbit. I bought it in a pet shop. And I had the most beautiful knife . . . a guy I knew, a real warlock, gave it to me once, in trade for some drugs. He said it was a genuine, sacrificial knife, real powerful . . . I never thought then that I’d use it for anything like that, though.

“But one day . . . it was after I’d moved into that house . . . I started thinking about magic. I’d always known people who were into witchcraft, but I wasn’t. It always seemed, well, those covens always seemed to be into dancing naked down by the lake, and group sex and stuff.” She wrinkled her nose. “I wasn’t interested in that. But then I started thinking about being able to get some things . . . money, mostly, because I was always broke. And I got some books at the library, and I thought I might as well give it a try—I decided I’d try to summon a demon, if there were such things, and make him work for me. So I did the whole number, with the chanting and the rabbit and the candles and the blood, and . . . he came. Jade.

“Only it wasn’t like the books said it would be. And . . . he tricked me. He made me come out of the magic circle, where I was safe, and then he—” Valerie’s mouth moved but no more words emerged. She licked dry lips and looked pleadingly at Sarah.

Sympathy welled up, overwhelming Sarah’s dislike of the woman. She reached across the table for her hand, but Valerie jerked it away.

“He took over,” she said flatly. “Just took me over . . . just . . . snuffed me out, like I wasn’t anything, like I didn’t exist, so that he could use my body. And I couldn’t stop him.”

“But you managed to fight him off.”

Valerie shook her head. “No. No. I told you . . . I couldn’t do anything. He was too strong. He must’ve . . . I don’t remember, but it was horrible. He smothered me and took over.”

“Then how can you sit here and tell me about it?” Sarah asked sarcastically.

Valerie shrugged. “Because in the end he let me go. He let me have my body back. I don’t know why . . . I guess I tried to kill him, or myself.” She stretched her arm on the table, palm up, and peeled back the sleeve of her green sweater, revealing a tightly bandaged wrist. “I can’t remember doing it, but I figure I just couldn’t stand having him in my body. So my body rejected him. I couldn’t drive him out, so my body tried to kill itself. Kill me, I mean. Or him. Anyway, it worked. Jade got out. He said he could have stayed, but it wasn’t worth the trouble of keeping me alive. He wouldn’t have been able to trust his own body.” She smiled faintly.

Sarah sighed. “That’s not very useful. If the only way to avoid being taken over is to kill yourself . . .” She sipped her coffee.

“Jade says I want to die. He says he’ll let me die after I . . .”

“He says you want to die, so you believe him? And he’ll let you die—that’s some reward!” Sarah said, a little too loudly. The emptiness in Valerie’s eyes, the flat, childlike way she spoke, made Sarah’s skin crawl.

“I don’t care,” Valerie said. “Maybe I did once, but I don’t anymore. I don’t care if I die, so maybe that means I want to die. I don’t know anything else I want.”

“You must have wanted something a lot in order to try conjuring up a demon,” Sarah said. “What did you want? Surely not death.”

“I don’t remember . . . money, I think. A lot of things, maybe. It doesn’t seem real to me now. Jade told me he’d give me whatever I wanted . . . but that was a joke, I guess, because by then there wasn’t much of anything I wanted. But I brought you to the house for him. I did what he asked.”

“And did he reward you? Did he keep his word? What did he give you?”

“Oh, there’s plenty of money, now. I don’t have to work anymore. I can have whatever I want,” Valerie said without enthusiasm. “Jade told me the way, he said the simplest way was for me to find a rich man. He said even I could learn how to make a man be in love with me.” She fell silent, then raised her eyes to Sarah’s. “Only . . . I have to let him do things to me.”

Sarah shuddered. Again, Valerie reminded her of a child—a molested child who did not understand. “Leave him,” she said. “If you’re not happy . . . do something about it. Why do you talk as if you have no control over your own life? You don’t need that man’s money, you don’t have to obey Jade’s orders, you can go away—”

“Jade won’t let me go,” Valerie interrupted. “I’m not like you. I’m not strong. Jade hurts me if I don’t obey him. He called me back this morning, early. He said I’d made a mistake with you, that you were too much trouble, he couldn’t have the patience to spend the time it would take to wear you down. Also, he thought you might have run away for good. He told me to bring him another body, any kind of body would do—any human body, that is. If I didn’t, he said he’d use mine, that he could control me and my death wish for long enough to get out into the world and find himself a more suitable, permanent home. I didn’t want him to do that to me again; I’m afraid of him. You don’t know what it’s like.”

“I do,” Sarah said softly, but her words made no impression.

“I kept trying to kill him,” Valerie said. “I kept trying to trick him. When he was in my cat’s body, I killed my cat.”

The smell of the cellar was strong in Sarah’s nostrils.

“But Jade didn’t die. The cat did, he escaped. But I still thought . . . maybe if he was trapped in a body that was dying, a human body, away from the house and away from other people and animals, so he couldn’t escape into some other animal . . . I thought maybe then he really would die, for good.

“So when he told me to bring him another victim right away, I thought of old Mrs. Owens, the landlady. She didn’t know I’d moved out, and she was the only person I could think of to get to come to the house. And I thought, she was so old, she’d probably be weak . . .”

“I don’t think age has anything to do with it,” Sarah murmured.

“The minute she stepped into the house, he attacked. She fell on the floor like she’d been hit by lightning, stiff as a board. I thought she was dead, at first, then I looked at her eyes. And I saw him. Those yellow eyes. Furious. He was trapped. Something had gone wrong, something he hadn’t counted on. I guess she’d had a stroke. And he couldn’t get out, and he couldn’t use the body.” Valerie dribbled a spoonful of sugar into her untouched coffee and stirred it around. “I hoped he would die there, and never be able to get out. It was the first thing to give me hope in such a long time, seeing him trapped inside her like that. So I took the body back to Mrs. Owens’ house and left her there. And I said a spell of protection around her door, just in case. And then I thought I’d better go back to the house, I thought maybe . . .”

“You just left her there?” Sarah said. “Knowing she would die? You left her helpless and alone?”

“She’ll be better off dead, than having him in her body,” Valerie said unemotionally. “And if he dies when she does . . . then it’s worth it. Isn’t that what you want, too? For Jade to die?”

Sarah remembered the helpless terror in the old woman’s eyes. Her clear blue eyes. She frowned. “But you’re wrong. Jade wasn’t there. I’m sure of it. I’d have known it if he was.”

Valerie looked confused. “You? You weren’t there. What do you mean?”

“I went to Mrs. Owens’ house this morning. I found her there, lying on the floor. But she wasn’t possessed, I’m sure of it. I could see how absolutely terrified she was . . . there was nothing but terror in her eyes, and helplessness. Jade wasn’t there. I called the ambulance, and she’s in the hospital now. If she dies—”

The pupils in Valerie’s eyes were dilated and her freckles seemed to blaze out of her pale face. “Damn you! You’ve ruined it! If you’d stayed away—if you’d left her alone—”

“If I’d left her alone she might be dead by now,” Sarah said angrily.

“Yes! Dead! And he’d be dead, too, and I’d be free!”

Valerie’s fury subsided back into hopelessness then, and she slumped down in her seat.

Sarah looked around. Two waitresses were staring, but at Sarah’s look they turned away.

“You’re wrong,” Sarah said quietly. “Jade wasn’t there. I don’t know what you saw happen, but I know that by the time I got to the house, Jade was gone. I didn’t help him escape. All I did was to help a poor old woman, another victim, like us.”

Valerie twitched her shoulders; it was not quite a shrug. “Maybe you broke the spell by going inside. I cast a spell of protection around her bedroom when I closed the door, to try to keep Jade trapped there even if he left her body. And what made you go there, anyway? You don’t know Mrs. Owens.”

“I was looking for you. I wanted to ask you to help me. The only person I could think of who might have your address was Mrs. Owens.”

“So you went there to find me,” Valerie said. Her lips twisted. “He made you go there. He’s got his hooks into you—he called you, and you didn’t even know it. That’s why you won’t run away and stay away—you think it’s your own choice, but it isn’t. You can’t escape from him any more than I can.”

Sarah imagined invisible fingers lightly touching her mind, making her decide to go to Mrs. Owens’ house, and she shivered uneasily. Why had she gone there, rather than phoning? It didn’t make sense when she thought of it. And what had made her go through that open door? And what force had opened the door?

“He’s playing with us,” Valerie said. “Now he’s got two of us, to fetch and carry for him. Maybe he couldn’t take you over completely, like he could me, but he’s got part of you, anyway. Give him time and he’ll get more. You’ll be like me. You won’t even care.”

“You’re crazy,” Sarah said sharply, to shut her up.

“Yes,” Valerie said. She scooted out of her seat and dropped a five-dollar bill on the table. “Let’s go. This place is getting crowded.”

Feeling angry, tired, and vulnerable, Sarah followed Val­erie outside to the car. Another dead end, she thought. Valerie was useless, having made up her mind that Jade could not be defeated. Valerie was not the powerful witch Sarah had imagined, but just a crazy kid who had played around with forces she did not understand.

Maybe Valerie’s right, Sarah thought. Maybe all I can do is run, run away and not look back. Away from the house, it would not be her business anymore, not her fault what happened to other people.

Right, responded a bitter voice in her head. And all my life I can tell myself it wasn’t my fault. Not my fault that innocent people might be destroyed, not my fault if a demon is let loose in the world. Not my fault that I turned tail and ran, doing just what Jade wanted me to do. I’d be no better than Valerie if I gave up now.

At that moment Valerie turned to face Sarah, slumping against the side of the car. She looked very small and pathetic suddenly.

“I’d help you if I could,” she said. “Truly. But I’ve tried—I’ve tried everything I could think of, and none of it worked. The longer he goes on, the more powerful he gets. If he gets what he wants, he may come after us, and destroy us both. But I don’t know how to stop him. He won’t let me trick him again. But if there is something I can do—if you think of something—I’ll help you.”

This faint concession from Valerie—useless though it probably was—sparked hope in Sarah again.

“We have to try,” she said. “We have to. We can’t give up. There must be a way, and we only have to find it. We’ll talk more later, after I’ve done some research. Maybe there’s a ritual somewhere, in some old book, which will work. You can tell me exactly what you did to summon him, and maybe we can figure out how to reverse what you did. We can’t give in to him. There has to be a way to beat him, and we’ll find it.”

Sarah drove back to the house. During the drive, both women were silent, lost in their own thoughts. But as she pulled up behind the house and parked beside the Ferrari, Sarah remembered something Valerie had said and never explained. “When you said that Jade called you, how did you mean? On the telephone?”

Valerie released a brief, shrill laugh. “No. He has a better way than that. You’ve heard of witches’ familiars?”

“You mean like cats and things?”

“Like cats . . . and things.” Valerie giggled and scrabbled in her large purse. She withdrew something and held it out towards Sarah. “Meet my familiar—Lunch the toad.”

Sarah recoiled. Squatting on Valerie’s open palm was a live toad. It had bumpy, brown-mottled skin and two liquid, yellow-brown eyes.

“Don’t you like my precious Lunch, then?” As Sarah stared in queasy fascination, Valerie pulled the toad to her lips and kissed it.

Valerie’s grey-green eyes glittered. She caught Sarah’s look and giggled again. “Jade gave him to me, to be my companion. There’s a little bit of Jade in him. He controls Lunch, and Lunch lets me know when Jade wants me . . . and he lets me know other things, too.”

“You mean that all the while I’ve been talking to you about destroying Jade, all the while you’ve been offering to help me, you’ve had that . . . thing in your bag, listening to us? Just what do you want, Valerie? Whose side are you on?”

Valerie looked confused. Her lower lip sagged, and she looked away from Sarah’s angry face to the still, silent toad. “Lunch? I didn’t think . . .”

“A part of Jade,” Sarah said bitterly. “How many parts are there? What do we have to do to defeat him? How many scattered parts do we have to find and destroy? Get rid of that toad, Valerie! What the hell are you thinking of, to keep it? What kind of a hold does Jade have over you?”

Valerie stared at her, confusion battling resentment in her thin, sharp face. She held the toad clutched close to her heart. “He’s mine,” she said at last, her voice pitched defensively high. “I won’t hurt him, I love him. He doesn’t do any harm. He’s not powerful, not like Jade. He’s only my little familiar spirit; my little Lunch.” She bent her face close to the creature again and crooned, “Want your lunch, my pretty Lunch?”

She flashed Sarah a hostile, mocking glance and then, still holding the toad on one hand at chest-level, extended a finger of her free hand towards it. The toad opened its mouth and the end of Valerie’s finger vanished inside. Valerie gave a small gasp, and her eyelids fluttered.

“There, dear,” she murmured. “Suckle well.”

A few, interminable seconds later, Valerie withdrew her finger from the toad’s mouth. A drop of blood glistened on the end of her finger, like misapplied nail polish.

Sarah opened the car door violently and got out into the cool, fresh air, fighting the urge to be sick. A moment later, Valerie got out, too, and stood regarding Sarah across the top of the car.

“You see,” she said. “He’s like my own child, Lunch is. He’s a part of me, as well.”