Familiar Spirit

Chapter Twelve

Pete and Beverly looked up from their dinner in surprise as Sarah burst in. The apartment was dimly lit, with candles on the glass-topped table, so as she crossed the room Sarah turned on a lamp, then flung herself into the large chair that faced the dining area.

“I thought you were going to eat out,” Beverly said. She moved in her chair as if uncertain whether to rise.

Sarah waved a hand at her. “Dinner? Sure, I had a hamburger. Don’t worry about it.” She grinned broadly, feeling she was about to burst with her discovery. “You’re not going to believe what I just found out. It’s fantastic—”

“Sarah,” Pete said. “Do you think it could wait until after dinner? We’ve just started eating and Beverly went to some trouble with this meal.”

Sarah looked at him, unperturbed by his coolness. Wait until he heard. “Don’t mind me,” she said. “You guys go ahead and eat, and I’ll do all the talking. You can listen while you chew, can’t you?”

Beverly moved her mouth the way she did when she was nervous, and darted a glance at her husband, then looked at Sarah. “We didn’t expect you until much later,” she said. “You said you’d be out late.”

“God, isn’t it late?” Sarah said. “I’ve lost all track of time. I suppose it is still early, but after what I went through—Jade just tried another of his games on me. Ambulatory corpses. Really horror-movie stuff. Straight out of my own, sick, predictable imagination, and of course I fell for it.” She laughed and got to her feet. She was feeling good, the fear far away and unreal in these familiar surroundings, among friends. “Could I have some of that wine?” She saw Pete and Beverly exchange a look before she went into the kitchen for a glass.

Pete filled her glass in silence, and Sarah looked at the dishes spread out on the table: chicken kiev, wild rice, rolls, artichokes with drawn butter. Beverly was wearing a long, slinky, blue velvet dress Sarah had seen her wear only a few times before. Raising the full glass of wine to her lips, Sarah suddenly understood. Pete and Beverly wanted a quiet, romantic evening alone together. Judy Collins on the stereo. Candles on the table. She took a too-large gulp of wine, wondering if she were blushing, and backed away from the table.

“So what’s this exciting discovery?” Pete asked.

She could excuse herself, go spend a few hours at the library, and talk to them in the morning. She knew she should—they had put up with her moods and intrusions for so long that she owed them at least one evening to themselves.

But she didn’t want to wait; she couldn’t. She wanted to bounce her ideas off them, wanted to have her cleverness applauded. She needed to talk about it, to discover if there were flaws she hadn’t thought of. It was important, damn it. Certainly more important in the long run than the spoiling of one romantic evening. Surely they would see it that way once they knew.

More restrained now, Sarah settled back in the big chair, placing the diary on her knees. She tapped it. “This is the diary of Nancy Owens, who was the original owner and inhabiter of the house on West Thirty-fifth Street. Her daughter-in-law, my landlady, let me have it, and I read it today. And now I know that the trouble in that house didn’t start with Valerie’s witchcraft—in fact, I wonder now if that witchcraft was Valerie’s idea in the first place. I think she was used. This woman, Nancy Owens, had the house built in the nineteen-twenties. Her husband had left her, and she was miserable about it. She met some people who were into magic—some kind of disciples of Aleister Crowley, I think—and they let her believe that if she helped them in their rituals that they would teach her how to win her husband back. One of these people was a woman called Yolanda Ferris, and the other was a man, a powerful magician who called himself Jade.”

She paused for effect, watching Pete expectantly. He went on eating methodically, dipping artichoke leaves in butter and biting the ends off. Sarah grimaced. Perhaps she should have let them finish their dinner in peace. But she had started and could not stop now, merely because Pete was refusing to respond. Beverly met her eyes and nodded encouragingly.

“Nancy Owens became more and more involved with Jade, and more convinced of his tremendous powers. He was supposed to be more powerful than Crowley, and less cautious. He was ready to crush anyone who got in his way—he was the only being in the world who mattered to himself. His plan, which he kept from Nancy until the last minute, was to survive death. To inhabit more than one body and, that way, to become immortal. Through a sexual and magical ritual he meant to destroy her soul. Or to absorb it. Anyway, he meant to become her while still remaining himself. One mind in two bodies. He’d had some practice with splitting off a part of himself to take over the bodies of various animals, but this was to be his first trial with another human being. Either he overestimated his own power, or he underestimated hers. It didn’t work.

“She managed to fend him off with her mind, the way you and I did, Pete. And then she killed him—killed his body, anyway. She stabbed him to death. That should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t.

“Jade survived his own death.”

Again Sarah paused, and again she was disappointed. Pete simply ate, as if there were nothing more important on his mind, and she could see by the stiff way he held himself that he was still angry with her for altering the mood of the evening. Beverly had been listening with her usual sympathy, but Sarah could tell by her anxious glances at her husband that she longed to placate him.

“Was that a pause for our gasps of amazement?” Pete asked sourly, not looking at Sarah.

“I thought you would be interested in this,” Sarah said. “I thought it concerned you, too.”

Pete swallowed some wine and then looked around at her. “Sarah, of course I’m interested in your concerns. But this hardly seems the time—I don’t see the overwhelming importance of this diary. So the woman who used to live in your house was involved in magic rituals, like Valerie. So what?”

“It’s about Jade,” Sarah said, annoyed by his obtuseness. “That’s what I’ve been telling you! It explains everything.”

“Does it?” He raised his eyebrows. “Really?” He pushed his chair away from the table and moved around to face her. “What do you think it explains?”

“Jade. It explains who he is, what he is. He’s not a demon. He’s not the devil. He’s a spirit, the leftover force of a very powerful man who lived in the 1920s.” Her voice softened then, pleading. “Pete, this book explains what we experienced.”

He looked at her calmly and as he spoke Sarah realized how far he had distanced himself from the events of the previous day. “I doubt it. Perhaps it explains it to you, but I don’t think it would help me. I don’t deny that I experienced something very disturbing and completely outside my usual experiences. I don’t pretend I can explain it. I can’t label it. But I don’t know that having a name for what happened would help very much.”

“Of course it would help,” Sarah said desperately. “Naming is the first step. If you don’t know who your enemies are, how can you fight them?”

Pete shrugged. “If it is a matter of enemies . . . But I don’t see that it helps very much to say that your enemy is a demon.”

“No!” Sarah shouted.

Beverly flinched and silverware rattled against the glass.

“I’m sorry,” Sarah said quietly. She looked at Pete, wondering how she could reach him, and if he would let her. “Jade is not a demon,” she said. “That was my mistake. Our mistake. We tried to deal with him as if he were a traditional demon, something that would obey a set of rules and respond to traditional spells. But we were wrong. Valerie thought he was a demon—it was in Jade’s interest to mislead us, to make us all feel powerless against him. It wasn’t that Valerie called him up—he must have been there all the time, in a kind of hibernation, waiting for someone who was receptive to him, someone who could give him what he needed. I think he probably fed off of Valerie somehow—and he’s probably been doing the same thing to me. He’s been gaining power from his contact with us. But he’s not all-powerful—he has limitations and weaknesses—he must. He was human once, and he can be destroyed.”

“How did he survive?” Beverly asked. “After she stabbed him.”

“There was a little stone figure, a woman carved out of jade. He called it his immortality. Somehow, he put a part of himself into that figure. He trapped a spark of his soul, or whatever you want to call it, in the stone, so that no matter how many bodies died—and I’m sure he had no intention of stopping at two!—he would go on, ready to be reborn again and again. He preserved the essence of himself in stone.”

“Have you seen it?” asked Pete.

“No. But I’m sure it exists. And I think it must be in the house somewhere. Maybe it’s in the cellar, buried under the house. I think it’s there, and it is holding Jade to the house. That has to be it. Nancy Owens took it away with her after she killed the man called Jade. If she had destroyed the statue—but she thought that she could use its power for herself. It destroyed her. I don’t think she realized that as long as it existed, so would Jade. I’m going to find it, if I have to dig up the whole cellar. And then I’ll smash it. There won’t be anything left of Jade.”

“In other words, you’ve found your excuse to stay on in the house,” Pete said flatly.

Sarah stared at him. “You don’t believe me. You think I’ve created this whole thing out of my head, that Jade is a fantasy of mine, don’t you? Did you just forget what happened to you? How could you forget? Yesterday you believed me—yesterday you knew.”

He sighed. “I believe you, Sarah. I know this is very real to you—”

“Will you stop playing psychiatrist for a minute and tell me how you explain what happened to you? Or did you conveniently forget all that?”

“I haven’t forgotten anything,” he said. His voice had taken on an edge. “But I don’t think it explains anything or does any good for me to say that I was possessed by a demon, or by the spirit of a dead man! That’s just not . . . very useful, Sarah. I don’t live my life according to the dictates of devils and angels; they may be real to other people, but not to me. I had some kind of hallucinatory experience, some sort of mental . . . aberration. I don’t know what to call it, or where it came from. Possibly it was suggestion—I might have picked it up from you, somehow. I was in a weak and suggestible state—”

“You were weak afterwards—you were perfectly okay when you came over meaning to exorcise the demon. If you’re denying it now, I don’t know what to—” She chewed her lip, trying not to cry.

Pete started to reach out for her, then drew his arm back. “Look, Sarah, don’t get upset. What I think doesn’t matter. If you’ve figured out a way of handling this thing, whatever it is, fine. You have to do what feels right to you. It’s not my fight. I think you should leave the house, but if you feel you have to stay, if you think there is something you have to do to conquer this demon, then do it. You don’t need my approval.”

Sarah thrust the leather-bound book at him. “Here. Read it. Please. It explains everything. Even what happened to us when we tried to say the License to Depart. Jade believed magic was sexual in nature, that for a magic ritual to work there must be a kind of orgasm—either in sex, or in a violent action. He focused his will through sexual energy—he had sex with Nancy Owens while he was trying to possess her. When that didn’t work, he killed another woman who was there. Both sex and violence made him more powerful—and that’s still true. The part of Jade that’s left has to increase his power however he can. He was trying to use us—he excited us, trying to get us to make love because he could feed on our sexual energies and grow stronger. That’s why we—” She faltered. Pete’s look was ice, and Beverly was much too still.

Beverly broke the silence. “I knew there was something,” she said in a small voice, not looking at either of them. “I knew there was something.” She stood up, jarring the edge of the table.

“Sweetheart,” said Pete. Beverly evaded his arms and ran from the room. The bedroom door slammed. Pete stood up, nearly overturning his chair, and disappeared down the hall without looking at Sarah. She heard the door open and close again quietly, and she was alone.