Familiar Spirit

Sarah struggled to sit up, but she could not move. It was as if she were utterly paralyzed. She realized she could not even feel her body. Only the muscles of her face seemed responsive, and she could turn her head. She had the choice to look at the rat or not to look at it, but no more than that.

The rat had reached the couch now and she heard it scrabbling at the base. In a moment she would feel it on her, and those horrible teeth would close on her flesh. Sarah opened her mouth to scream, knowing how useless a scream would be, in this house where no one could hear—

And she woke, heart thumping wildly and breath sounding harshly in her ears. And she could move. Relief flooded through her, relief beyond words that she was not paralyzed. And there was no rat. It had been a dream.

But as her breathing slowed Sarah could hear another sound. The sound came from within the room, just as in her dream. It was the very same sound she had heard in her dream, in fact—a scuffling, scratching noise. The sort of noise a rat might make.

The breath caught in her throat, and Sarah sat up and grabbed for the lamp beside the couch. Squinting against the sudden brightness, she looked around the room for the source of the noise. She saw nothing and gradually, as the sound continued, realized that it did not come from within the room, but from the far wall. The noises came from that odd, protruding corner which covered the old fireplace. That made sense, Sarah thought, relaxing slightly at the understanding that there was nothing actually in the room with her. Something—a rat, a bird, a bat—could be trapped in the old chimney.

The noise stopped.

Sarah continued to stare at the wall as she waited for it to begin again, but she was no longer frightened. It would not be a rat like the one in her nightmare, and she was not paralyzed. Real rats could be dealt with easily enough. On Monday she would buy poison and traps. If it became a major problem, she would call an exterminator. Still she hesitated to turn out the light and go back to sleep. She waited to hear the rat again. It was ridiculous, of course, but she had the unnerving feeling that it was waiting her out, holding still and keeping silent until she went back to sleep.

Sarah shivered, realizing that the room was much colder than it had been when she had gone to bed. The cold front must have come in with the rain. She closed the window behind the couch, which she had left partially open, and then turned out the light and burrowed back into the warmth of her sleeping bag.

After the nightmare, sleep was a long time coming, and, when it came, was fragmentary. Nightmare images of rats kept jarring her awake. She heard sounds—or thought she did—and felt tiny claws scraping at the fabric of her sleeping bag. Something was hunting her—the rat was coming to get her. She had to be alert, on her guard. Half-asleep, Sarah moaned and twisted about within the confines of the sleeping bag, trying to escape the rat, trying to order her dreams. Dawn came and filled the room with cold, early light before Sarah finally sank into untroubled sleep.

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.