Familiar Spirit

Chapter Nine

Sarah sat at the Marchants’ table with the newspaper and a pen, going quickly and methodically through the rental listings, circling all the possibilities. They were all more expensive than her house, all smaller, and not one of them sparked any real interest in Sarah. But it had to be done. Sarah had made up her mind to get out of the house on West 35th Street as soon as possible.

She had accepted defeat. Earlier, she had been almost eager for battle, driven by a stubborn need to prove herself, against her fear. Now Sarah even mistrusted her own emotions, afraid they might be used against her. Jade didn’t fight fair; she didn’t even understand his strategy. She had brooded endlessly over what had happened at the house with Pete, the madness which had come over them both, and she wasn’t satisfied with the explanation that it had just been Jade’s way of distracting them from the spell they were trying to cast. Something more must have been intended—she was certain there was some meaning in Jade’s choice of weapons. What was it, though? What would have happened if she had given in to Jade’s illusions, if she and Pete had actually made love?

Sarah was on edge. How much of what she felt was fear, how much simply sexual frustration, she couldn’t judge. Her own emotions were suddenly as opaque to her understanding as those of the creature called Jade.

She had spent an uneasy night, full of vivid, fragmentary dreams. They were dreams full of sexual longing, but the man in her dreams was not Brian. The man was a stranger to her conscious mind, but in her dreams she knew him.

At one point, Sarah woke up to find herself out of bed, halfway across the Marchants’ guest room, hand outstretched to open the door. The one compelling thought in her mind was that she must get home to join her husband. But where that home was, or who she thought was her husband, Sarah could not remember.

She jumped at a sound behind her, and turned quickly away from the table. But it was only Beverly emerging from the bedroom.

“Peter’s still asleep,” Beverly said. “Poor thing, I guess he needs the rest.” She looked down at the page of newspaper Sarah had been marking, and nodded. “I’m sure you’re doing the right thing.”

Sarah sighed. “I’m not. Oh, yes, the right thing for me, but I’m still worried about someone else moving into that house . . . I still feel responsible in a way. But I’m going to talk to the woman who owns the house, and see if I can explain the situation. Maybe she’ll believe me, maybe she’ll understand.” An image of the old woman’s terrified face flashed into her mind. “I’m hoping she’ll agree to let the house stand empty.”

“Is she all right?” Beverly asked.

“I think so. I called the hospital, and they’re letting her receive visitors.” She sipped her coffee and found it cold. She pushed the cup away and folded the newspaper. “Do you think you’d have time to take me by the house so I can pick up my car?”

“You’re not coming to class?”

Sarah grimaced and shook her head. “I couldn’t concentrate. I’ll catch up once this stuff is out of the way.”

Beverly nodded. “We can leave now. I’m going to let Peter sleep. He looked terrible when he came in yesterday—I’d never seen him look so sick. What happened to him, Sarah?”

Sarah sighed, feeling guilty, and waited until they were out of the apartment before she answered. “He must have told you,” she said. “I don’t know how to describe it to you any better, even though it happened to me.”

“He said he didn’t want to think about it, he didn’t want to remember it, and anyway, he couldn’t describe it to me so I’d really understand,” Beverly said. “I didn’t want to nag him about it, but I want to know.”

Sarah nodded but said nothing. They walked out to the parking lot. “Peter told me that Jade tried to kill him,” Beverly said. “That even though it was all in his mind it was very real and seemed physical.”

“Yeah.”

Beverly looked at her as they got into the car. “You don’t want to talk about it either,” she said. “You know and Peter knows, but I don’t. I can’t. You won’t tell me.”

Sarah winced at the accusation, alert to a trace of jealousy in Beverly’s voice. “It’s hard to talk about,” she said. “Partly because it sounds crazy, partly because words don’t communicate what it was really like, and partly . . . because talking about it stirs up memories I’d rather forget. Pete may be able to discuss it with you after he’s rested more—after he’s feeling more himself. We’re not trying to leave you out, believe me.”

“I know,” said Beverly. “You’re just trying to protect me, both of you. But I wish it had happened to me. I wish I could have been there!”

Sarah looked at her uneasily. “No you don’t,” she said. “Believe me—you don’t ever want that to happen to you. Stay away from the house, Bev. It couldn’t have helped any of us if Jade had attacked you, too.”

“No, I suppose not. But then at least I’d know. I’d understand what Peter is going through. I know it’s selfish of me, but—I want to share everything with Peter. I feel so cut off from him now, Sarah! I look at him, and I see the pain in his eyes—and then he looks away from me, and I have no idea what he’s feeling, why he’s suffering so! I don’t know how to help him—maybe I can’t help him.”

“Just accept it, Bev,” Sarah said quickly. “Just be there for him. That’s a help. It helped me, to have you and Pete caring about me. It would have helped more if—”

“I know.” Beverly took one hand from the wheel to touch Sarah’s arm. “It’s just that being here feels too much like doing nothing. I hate to see Peter in pain, but the worst part is that I don’t understand it. It’s so hard to accept. I mean, demons . . .” She cast Sarah an apologetic glance, then looked back at the road.

“It does sound crazy,” Sarah admitted. “I’m grateful for your belief—it’s more than I could have expected. I didn’t believe my own experience, at first. I thought I was going crazy, because that made more sense than the idea of evil spirits at large. But I experienced Jade’s power at firsthand. You’ve had to accept it all on faith.”

“I never thought you were crazy, Sarah,” Beverly said earnestly. “I believed everything you told us.”

“Pete didn’t. He had to experience it for himself before he could believe. My word wasn’t enough.”

“Peter’s like that,” Beverly said. “He can’t take anything on faith—he always wants to see the proof.”

“Well, it nearly destroyed him this time,” Sarah said. “I hope it was worth it to him.”

Beverly pulled up behind Sarah’s house. Her face was tense and unhappy. “I don’t like leaving you here,” she said.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going inside. I don’t want to give Jade another chance. Although . . . I’ll have to go in to get my things when I move. I wonder if he’ll let me go, or try to stop me?”

“We’ll come with you then,” said Beverly.

“No!” Sarah looked at Beverly uneasily and then managed to smile. “I’d be more worried about you than about myself, you see. Jade would see you as a new victim. Or he might try to use us against each other, to hurt ourselves. It’ll be a problem, moving out, but I think it would be best if I did it all myself.”

“But the furniture . . . you couldn’t move that couch by yourself.”

“All right. We’ll talk about it later. Maybe there’s still something we can do . . .” She glanced up at the house and twitched her shoulders uneasily. Then she leaned across to give Beverly a hug. “You go on now. Don’t worry about me—I’m not going in there. I’ll probably be out late, so don’t bother fixing dinner for me. I’ll get a bite to eat somewhere and then probably head over to the library.”

“You’ve still got your key?”

“Yeah, so don’t wait up for me, Mom.” Sarah gave Beverly a big, mocking grin as she got out of the car and was pleased when her friend returned it. Still, it was a relief to watch Beverly drive away. In conversation with her, Sarah had felt she was walking a mine field, afraid at any moment a chance word would set off an explosion of insecurity. It was obvious that Beverly had picked up reverberations of Pete’s guilt, and knew, without understanding, that he was hiding something from her.

Sarah stopped as she was about to mount the wooden steps leading to the back porch. Preoccupied with thoughts of Beverly, she had walked towards the house unconsciously, realizing what she was doing just in time to stop herself from going in.

Was it an unconscious mistake? Or was Jade calling her, reeling in the line? Sarah shivered, remembering Valerie’s words again. Was it true? Did Jade have a hold over her that she had not recognized? Looking at the house, Sarah realized that she still felt the desire to go inside, although she could not justify it to herself.

A dream-fragment flashed vividly into her mind. She had been married, and living in this house. The house had been furnished differently, with chintz curtains and rag rugs on polished, new wooden floors, and there had been an open fireplace, and, in the dining room, behind the glass-fronted doors, pink and white china had been on display. And in that proper, old-fashioned household, she, Sarah, she, the dreamer, had been down on the floor, on her hands and knees on one of the rag rugs, her skirt and petticoat pushed up to her waist while behind her, thrusting himself into her with groans and curses, was a man she could feel but not see, a stranger, her husband.

“You whore,” he whispered furiously. “You like this, don’t you?”

Yes, yes, she did. She liked this brutal act, being driven like an engine, every thrust pushing her closer to the edge, to the end, when she would take leave of her senses, fly out of herself . . .

Her hand was on the kitchen door.

Sarah came back to herself with a shudder, almost leaping off the porch in her haste to get away. Her heart was pounding painfully and she felt feverish. It was a dream, that was all, only a dream. It had never happened.

You need a new boyfriend, she told herself grimly. Celibacy is driving you crazy.

Keeping her thoughts under strict control, Sarah went to her car, got in, and drove away from the house to Seton Hospital, where Mrs. Owens was resting in a private room.

“She’s doing much better, but she tires easily and her mind wanders,” explained the nurse who escorted Sarah. “So you mustn’t get upset if she seems to forget who you are, or talks about the past as if it has just happened.”

“Does she remember what happened to her? When she had her stroke.”

“No. She understands what has happened to her because we told her, but her memories are confused and mixed up with dreams. I’m not certain whether or not she’ll ever remember exactly what happened, but it won’t hurt to ask. It may come back to her. It’s often the case that stroke and accident victims suffer a partial amnesia.”

The door to the room was open. Knocking lightly on it, the nurse led Sarah inside.

“Well, Helen,” she said brightly. “You have a visitor this morning! This is Sarah Cole, the young lady who found you and called the ambulance when you had your stroke.”

Sarah stepped forward and saw a frail, white-haired woman lying in bed. She looked smaller than Sarah remembered, and her skin was grey against the white sheets. But her blue eyes were still bright and alert in the old, sagging face.

At a nod from the smiling nurse, Sarah reached out and lifted a limp hand from the bed. “Hello, Mrs. Owens,” she said. “I’m Sarah. Do you remember me?”

“I’ll leave you two alone,” the nurse said softly. And, pressing Sarah’s shoulder quickly, she was gone.

Mrs. Owens moved her head on the pillow: a bare shake of negation. There was no recognition in her eyes.

Sarah said, “I live in the house on West Thirty-fifth Street. The one you rented to Valerie.”

Something sparked in the eyes: alarm. “Valerie,” said the woman in a faint voice. She shuddered. “Valerie, the spiders! They’re on my face—” Her voice rose in pitch, although not in strength, and she pulled her hand out of Sarah’s and made swiping motions at her face, as if brushing something away.

“It’s all right,” Sarah said. “There aren’t any spiders here. You’re safe—you’re in the hospital.”

The panic faded. “I know.”

“But you were remembering something just now, something that happened to you. Something about Valerie. What did you mean about the spiders?”

“All over me,” Mrs. Owens murmured. “On my face, spinning . . . I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. I fell down, and they were all over me . . .”

“Where was this?”

“The house . . . my husband’s house. On West Thirty-­fifth Street. The rent-house. We always rented it out. He would never go there, because of the awful things that happened there when he was a child. You couldn’t blame him. Such things make a terrible impression on a young mind. And it was his own mother, after all. He never would live there, afterwards. But he didn’t want to sell it, either. So we always rented it out.”

“Why? What awful things happened there?”

“There was never any trouble. We rented it out for years and years without any complaints or trouble. And why should there be? I don’t believe in ghosts. Only memories can haunt, and they don’t haunt places—they haunt people. My husband doesn’t believe—didn’t—” Her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, my dear. I forgot. I’m always forgetting. I can see him so clearly, still, in my mind, that it’s like he’s alive. But my husband has been dead for five years. I’m alone now. All alone.”

Sarah squeezed the old woman’s hand, trying to be sympathetic, trying to control her impatience. But she had to know. “Mrs. Owens. You were telling me about the house on West Thirty-fifth Street. What was it that happened there? What awful thing frightened your husband?”

“He was only a child then, of course.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.” Mrs. Owens smiled—a crooked smile, since only the right half of her mouth lifted. “I keep forgetting. So foolish of me. What’s your name again?”

“Sarah.”

“Sarah. Yes. Of course. And you’re a friend of . . .”

Sarah sighed. “I live in the house on West Thirty-fifth Street,” she said. “I rent from you. You were going to tell me about the house.”

Mrs. Owens frowned. “Now, what stories did you hear? We don’t generally tell people. You know how it is. Rumors and gossip. And people don’t feel comfortable. Although there has never been any trouble. Some people won’t live in a house where there has been a murder. They just don’t like the idea. But the house isn’t haunted, you know. It was only my late husband who felt that. It was a personal thing, because it was his mother. And his father.”

“When did this happen?”

“Oh, a long time ago. Back in the Twenties. And no one who lived there ever since—although it was empty for awhile after, I believe—ever had any trouble. There was never any reliable report of . . . ghosts, or anything like that. My husband found it too painful to go back to the house where his parents had died so horribly, but that was understandable. No one else ever saw or felt anything in the house, despite all the talk about witchcraft and black magic, and the nasty rumors . . .” Mrs. Owens moved up on her pillows slightly, seeming more alert than she had been yet.

Sarah stared at her, questions bubbling in her mind, but did not speak. She was afraid of asking the wrong question and sending Mrs. Owens off on a tangent, slipping and sliding among all her memories of years past.

“You mentioned black magic and witchcraft,” Sarah said carefully. “What did that have to do with the murders?”

“It was the reason for it. That’s what they said. She—Albert’s mother—she was involved in some sort of magical practices.” Mrs. Owens sighed and closed her eyes. Then she opened them again and smiled her lopsided smile at Sarah. “Sorry, dear. I don’t mean to bore you.”

“You aren’t boring me. I want to know about it,” Sarah said. “You were telling me about your husband’s mother. Was she a witch?”

“Oh, my, no, she was a very sweet woman, from what I understand. But different. Perhaps overeducated for her time. Interested in things which weren’t common for Texas in the Twenties. Imaginative, sensitive, but very strong-willed. When her husband ran off she took it very hard, and the people she turned to for friendship were not . . . ordinary folks. They involved her in strange things. Magic, they called it. Shocking things . . . It’s all in her diary. What happened, or what she thought happened. Perhaps she was crazy, but it wasn’t her own craziness. It was those people, that man she got involved with, a sorcerer or magician or whatever he was. That man who called himself Jade.”

It changed everything. Mrs. Owens’ story created a new picture. A man called Jade in the 1920s—a demon called Jade nearly sixty years later—they were connected, possibly even the same being. What did it mean?

Sarah hoped the diary Mrs. Owens had spoken of would tell her more. Perhaps it held the clue to what Jade was, and how he could be destroyed.

Mrs. Owens had expressed a sleepy, drifting surprise at Sarah’s interest but had agreed that she might borrow and read the diary. Impulsively, Sarah planted a kiss on Mrs. Owens’ thin, dry cheek.

“Thank you,” she said. “You don’t know how this may help! I’ll be back to see you after I’ve read it. Maybe I’ll have a story to tell you!”

But in spite of her impatience to read the diary, Sarah had to wait. Several hours passed before she was able to find the neighbor who could open Mrs. Owens’ house for her, and then she spent a frustrating half-hour searching for the book. She found it at last, not in the drawer where Mrs. Owens had thought it would be, but on a shelf between two Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. It was a small volume covered in dark red leather. The diary of Nancy Willis Owens for the year 1923.

Sarah felt excitement rising in her as she held the book. Flipping through it, the name Jade seemed to leap off the handwritten pages at her. But she restrained herself; she didn’t want to read it in bits and pieces, but all at once. There was an answer in this book; maybe the answer she was looking for. Just as it had seemed most hopeless, she had been presented with a new weapon against her enemy.

Realizing she’d had nothing to eat all day, Sarah drove by the Burger King. Impatience to read the diary made her eat quickly, but something still nagged at her mind.

And then she had it. That photograph—the torn snapshot which she had found the day she had taken the house. She remembered now where she had seen the face of the man in her dream, the stranger she had recognized. He had been the man in the photograph.

But what had she done with it? Sarah scrabbled through her purse without success before remembering—seeing the image so clearly she could not doubt it—that she had put the torn picture away in her desk drawer. It was in the house.

Shoving aside her half-eaten hamburger, Sarah gnawed her lip instead. Now that she had thought of it, she was certain that the photograph was yet another connection—not merely with her dream, but with Nancy Willis Owens and the murders that had taken place there decades earlier, and with the man or the spirit called Jade. She had to see it again. Clear as it was in her memory, Sarah knew she would not be content until she had held it in her hand again.

So despite her promise to Beverly, despite her promise to herself, Sarah drove back to the house on West 35th Street, and this time she went inside.

Nothing happened. All was calm.

Sarah looked around the familiar, empty kitchen, her mind alert for signals of another presence. Jade, wherever he was, made no sign. Sarah wandered through the house, wondering where he was. In the air? In the walls? As well ask where the soul resided in the body, she thought, and yet the mind demanded a material answer.

She found the photograph in the desk drawer where she remembered putting it, and she gazed at it eagerly. The shadowed face, the faintly glinting eyes, told her nothing, did not even mock her.

Sarah suppressed a faint feeling of disappointment, and made another slow circuit of the house, both the diary and the snapshot clutched together in one hand. It was still daylight, and the slanting rays of the sun lit the high-ceilinged rooms gently, making the worn wooden floors gleam. It was a comfortable house, Sarah thought with regret, but it wasn’t hers. It belonged to Jade, even if she could not feel his presence.

She told herself to go. She knew she should leave the house, drive across town to the library, find a comfortable chair and settle down to read the diary. But the stifled, public air of a library did not appeal to her; nor did the idea of returning to the Marchants’ apartment to face Pete’s guilty hostility and Beverly’s bewilderment.

What she wanted was to stay here. To curl up on her own couch in her own house, in comfort and privacy. Why shouldn’t she do something so simple? She felt safe, and why shouldn’t she trust her own feelings? If there was a trap in her logic, Sarah didn’t want to know about it. She would stay.

Feeling pleased with herself, Sarah took a beer from the refrigerator and settled down on the couch to read.