Familiar Spirit

Chapter Six

“She’s a witch,” Sarah said. “She conjured up a demon, asked him something, and in return gave him me. I was supposed to be the payment in blood, only I turned out to be stronger than they had expected.” She stifled a yawn and leaned back, sinking a little more deeply into the Marchants’ large, overstuffed couch. Earlier, she had been half-wild, pounding on the door, waking Pete and Beverly and insisting that they listen to her story. But now, having told it all, Sarah felt relaxed, even ready to sleep. Sharing was such a relief.

She looked from Beverly’s face—pale, wide-eyed, and framed by sleep-mussed hair—to Pete’s faintly sad, serious one. She laughed softly, not amused but touched.

“All right,” she said. “I’m crazy. I’ve gone around the bend. Thwarted love has driven me mad.”

“Is that what you think?” Pete asked quietly.

Sarah made a face at him, but before she could answer, Beverly spoke.

“I saw that pentagram-thing on the floor. Whoever went to the trouble of painting it didn’t do it just for decoration. And Sarah said before that there was something very strange about what’s-her-name—Valerie.”

Pete nodded acceptingly. “It’s possible that Valerie is a practicing witch. Austin is full of people like that.”

“Nuts,” said Sarah. “That’s what you mean. The people exist, but not the things they believe in. It isn’t Valerie who has been bothering me, but this demon of hers. Do you believe in demons, and demonic possession?”

“I believe that something happened to you,” Pete replied. “I don’t know how to define it, but I’m not denying the validity of your experience.”

“Thanks a lot. I don’t need you humoring me . . . what I need to know is, am I crazy? I’m hearing things, seeing things, talking to a demon . . . I don’t even believe in demons! But this one . . . it’s too real to deny. I need someone else to tell me what’s real and what isn’t—am I crazy or not—and what should I do?”

Beverly moved closer to Sarah on the couch and took her hand. Pete sighed and looked directly into her eyes. “Move out of the house,” he said flatly.

“Then you believe it is haunted?”

“Is that important? I don’t know. I don’t believe in demons, but what I believe isn’t important. Magic works whether you believe in it or not. People do die of curses, even today. People are possessed by demons, or think they are, which amounts to the same thing. The results are the same, whether demons exist or not. I’ve read plenty of case histories, and I don’t think there’s any question but that these experiences are real.”

Sarah frowned. “But you’re talking about religious people, or primitives. I’ve read studies of witches and sorcerers in believing societies, too. But why should that affect me? Valerie, okay, she wanted to believe. She called up her demon. But I just stumbled onto this; I was her random choice for victim. I wasn’t expecting anything like this; I wasn’t raised to believe in demons.”

“Not consciously,” Pete said. He reached for his tea cup and found it empty.

“I’ll make some more tea,” Beverly said softly, leaping up. “Go on.”

Pete nodded. “Subconsciously is another story. The clues were all there for you. You noticed Valerie’s strangeness, how eager she was that you rent the house. She impressed you in a strongly negative way. Then, when you found the pentacle on the bedroom floor and a dead cat in the cellar, a picture formed in your mind of Valerie as a witch. You imagined her performing violent, magical rituals. Expectations were planted.”

“So you’re saying that my subconscious took a few clues and wove me this whole fantasy experience?”

“No, not at all. I’m just pointing out that if magic works because of shared expectations, because of small clues not immediately obvious to the outsider, then you had those clues to prepare you—and that perhaps on a subconscious level you do believe, despite all your intellectual rationalizations.”

Sarah thought of things she had read: an Australian abori­gine dying because a bone was pointed at him; a woman feeling pains because her enemy poked pins in an image; Aleister Crowley making people respond to him by an act of will; high school covens claiming credit for accidents and illnesses. She thought of all the books she had read, all the movies she had seen. Her mind was well-stocked with detail. Whether or not she wanted to believe in them, the images were there in her mind, and perhaps that very fact made her susceptible. She looked at Pete. “But what does it mean? Is there a real demon, or is it just my imagination?”

Pete shook his head. “It won’t go away because you decide it’s imaginary. Whatever it is, it’s serious, and you have to deal with it seriously.”

Beverly came back into the room with a pot of tea and refilled the cups on the coffee table. She sat down next to Sarah again and looked at her husband.

Pete stared into his steaming cup and then looked up at Sarah, a tentative expression on his face.

“What if I . . . why not let me stay a night in the house and see what happens?”

Beverly let out a small cry.

Sarah tensed. “Pete, no!” She bit her lip. “Don’t you see? That’s what it wants. That’s what it asked me for—a new victim.”

“You don’t think I could fight it off as you did?”

Sarah shrugged, then shook her head. “Look, don’t get offended. Maybe you could, maybe you couldn’t. I don’t know. Maybe being warned would help you, or it might make you more vulnerable. But even if you survived—Pete, you don’t know what it’s like, or you’d never suggest such a thing. It’s horrible, feeling that thing inside . . . feeling it clawing at your mind . . . I’ve never been so sick, so terrified, in so much pain . . . Believe me, you don’t want to go through that.”

“It wouldn’t prove anything, you know,” Pete said, in a too-casual voice. “Even if nothing happened to me. That wouldn’t mean that you were wrong, or crazy.”

Sarah expelled her breath in a sharp burst. “Do you think I’m afraid of that? Do you think it’s selfishness? Pete, I’d love for you to prove me wrong. I’d be happy to know I was hallucinating. But that’s not what I’m afraid of. I’m afraid that something would happen to you. I’m afraid . . .”

“He’s not going,” Beverly said flatly. “I won’t let him.”

Pete shrugged, the corners of his mouth twisting slightly down.

In a moment he’ll be pouting, Sarah thought, half amused and half dismayed. “Pete,” she said gently. “What good would it do?”

She saw him relax; the moment of childishness past, he looked at her openly and said, “None, I guess. I’m just jealous of your experience. After reading about these things, I’d love to have an experience of my own. I’d like to talk to your demon myself. But I don’t suppose I could. I’m too interested, and for the wrong reasons. I’m too skeptical.”

Sarah looked at her watch and winced at the time. Four a.m., and she’d had hardly any sleep. No wonder she was exhausted, and ready to snap at Pete for his selfishness.

“It’s not a game, Peter,” Beverly said low-voiced. “Sarah needs help.”

Pete nodded. He, too, looked weary. He picked up his cup and sipped the hot, black tea. “You want my advice? Get out of that house. Don’t go back. Find another place to live.”

Sarah frowned. “Just . . . run away from it?”

“Why not?”

“But what if . . . what if that doesn’t work? What if it is only in my mind? What if I take it with me wherever I go?”

“There’s no reason to think you will. It’s the obvious thing to do—at least, the first thing. You’ve only had trouble when you were in the house. So stay away from the house.”

“You can stay with us,” Beverly said. “I’ll help you look for a new place.”

“I don’t want to move again,” Sarah said.

“Of course you don’t,” Pete said gently. “But you don’t want to stay there.”

Sarah nodded her head hard. “Yes I do. I do want to stay.”

“Why?”

She sighed and held up her fingers to enumerate. “It’s incredibly cheap. I’ve just moved in and gotten settled. I like having so much room to myself.”

He cut her off. “That’s not the point. None of that has anything to do with what has happened.”

She glared at him. “All right, you tell me why I should move.”

“Sarah. Come on. What have we been talking about? Why did you come banging on our door in the middle of the night?” He met her glare with a steady, reproachful look. Sarah sank back on the couch, feeling a little ashamed.

“I guess I want you to talk me out of it,” she said quietly. “I want you to tell me I’m letting my imagination run away with me, and that if I go home believing that, everything will be all right.” She plucked idly at the cushion beside her. “But you can’t, and it won’t be. But there has to be something I can do, and I have to find it. I can’t move out.”

“Why not?” Beverly demanded. “You’re safe here, you know you are. If you stay away from there—”

“Listen. Either that thing that attacked me is real, or it’s not. Either it has some objective reality, or it’s all in my mind. If it is just a creation of my mind, some sort of . . . schizophrenic manifestation, say . . . then leaving the house will make no difference to it or to me. It will still be with me—my problems will still be with me, in my mind. And I’ll still have to deal with it, somehow, sooner or later. It won’t matter where I move to, because you can’t run away from your own mind.

“But if this thing is real—and that’s the assumption I’m going on now—then I can run away from it. I can leave it behind in the house, just as I did tonight. If there is a demon in that house, it is still there. And when someone new comes through the door, when someone new moves in, it will attack. And I can’t be responsible for that. I can’t run away and let some innocent person be destroyed without even warning them—”

“Warning them would probably be the wrong thing to do,” Pete said. “You might just make trouble, by planting the suggestion. Someone else might be totally unaffected as long as they had no reason to expect anything unusual. There are haunted houses, you know—supposedly haunted houses, anyway—where nothing happens for years, but where certain people, certain families, will stir up the forces that had been sleeping before. I’m not saying that you imagined the demon, but you might have been more receptive to it—in a way, Valerie prepared you for it. You had a strong, negative response to her, and then when you found the pentacle, you were receptive to thoughts of demons and magic.”

“In other words, it’s all in my mind,” Sarah said wearily.

“No. I’m not saying that. But I thought we agreed that when magic works it’s because of shared expectations. Your demon is real, but it doesn’t have an objective, physical reality. Someone else could probably coexist in the same house with it, never suspecting anything otherworldly.”

“We don’t know that,” Sarah said.

“No, but it’s logical . . . And you can’t hold yourself responsible for anything that might happen to anyone who moves in after you’re gone. You’ve got to look out for yourself. It’s not your house—you can’t know what will happen—you can’t take on that responsibility—”

“But I am responsible,” Sarah said. “I have to be. There’s no one else who can be. Valerie may have let it loose on the world, but I’m responsible for what happens next, because I know about it, and I know what might happen. It’s not just the life of the next person to move in there I have to worry about, because if the demon manages to get a human form, who knows what it might do, what horrors—I can’t wash my hands of it. I can’t run away. That’s what it’s counting on. It wants someone else to live in that house so it can try again, and succeed where it failed with me. If I went away, knowing that, I’d be just as responsible for the results as I would be if I saw a rabid dog and didn’t tell anyone, but left it to bite the next unsuspecting person who came along.”

“Do you think telling people would help?” Pete asked. “What do you plan to do, call your landlord about it?”

“I don’t expect anyone would believe me,” Sarah said. “You two, maybe, because you’re my friends, and you’re receptive to bizarre ideas . . . I can imagine what my landlady would say if I went to her with some crazy story about an evil spirit. I don’t imagine she would leave the house empty at my request. Anyway, that’s not enough. This thing has got to be destroyed. There must be some way of destroying it.”

“You could call an exorcist,” Beverly suggested.

Sarah shrugged. “Well, maybe, but the idea gives me shivers. I can just imagine some poor innocent priest getting savaged by that thing—maybe if I was religious myself I’d believe in the power of prayer, but as it is—”

“We just don’t know what the rules are,” Pete said. “Still, there must be things we could try, old spells in ancient books or something.”

“We?”

He grinned. “As if I’d let you fight it alone! You need reinforcements. Maybe we could recruit some more friends . . .”

“Pete, it isn’t a game,” Beverly said again.

“I’m serious,” Pete said, looking steadily at Sarah. “I want to help. Many hands make light work, and all that. I can help you research, if nothing else. I once took a course on magic and religion from Dr. Fischer—you know, the head of the anthro department? He’s something of an expert on magic rituals, so it might make sense to talk to him. I don’t know how much he believes in them, but he can certainly rattle off some spells. And while we’re doing all this, I think you should stay away from the house. Stay with us, just until you have a plan of action.”

Sarah nodded. “Yes, I . . . don’t really like the idea of going back there just yet. But I’m sure we’ll come up with something. There has to be a way to send it back, or destroy it. There have to be rules in magic like everything else. And if Valerie—who frankly didn’t strike me as being all there—could figure out the way to call up a demon, I’m sure we can figure out the way to vanquish it.”

“Why not ask Valerie what she did?” Beverly suggested.

Sarah stared at her. A grin dawned on her face, and she slowly nodded. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s exactly what I’ll do. I’ll find Valerie and make her tell me.”