Familiar Spirit

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?”