Familiar Spirit

Sarah found herself in a small foyer which opened on one side into a living room, and onto a narrow hallway on the other. From the end of the hallway came a faint sound.

Sarah swallowed hard. She could not place the noise, which was soft and uncertain, but she knew she had heard something. She said, more loudly, “Mrs. Owens?”

There was no answer. By now, Sarah scarcely expected one. Her whole body prickled and crawled with unease, but she felt committed to going on, having come this far. She made herself step into the dim hallway and walk in the direction of the sound.

Doors opened off the hallway on either side, and Sarah glanced into each one as she approached: a bedroom, a bathroom, a sewing room, all empty and tidy and still. The last door on the right was closed. Sarah stared at the painted white wood and the glass doorknob. She raised her hand, hesitated; then raised it higher, and finally knocked.

“Mrs. Owens? Are you in there? Are you all right?”

She had come too far to go back. Her hand closed around the fluted glass knob, held tightly, then turned it.

The door opened on a white-walled bedroom with short, flowered curtains at the window and a bed with matching flower-print spread. Beside the bed, flat on the powder-blue rug, was a woman in a pale yellow dress. She lay on her back, her white hair making a halo around her head. The look on her face was one of mute, uncomprehending terror. Her bright blue eyes met Sarah’s, and her lips moved, but she made no sound.

Sarah crouched beside her on the floor. “Can you speak? Can you move?”

The muscles of the woman’s face contorted, as if she were struggling to scream. Her eyes conveyed an intense appeal. Sarah touched her shoulder. “All right. Take it easy. I’m going to call a doctor.”

The front door slammed jarringly, and Sarah jumped up and hurried into the hall. “Who’s there?”

She saw no one and heard no other sound, and when she opened the front door and looked out, there was no one in sight. The sky had grown darker, and there was a wind.

Sarah stepped back into the house and closed the door gently. Her throat was dry and her heart pounded. She went back to the bedroom hardly knowing what to expect. But nothing had changed: the white-haired woman still lay on the floor. Sarah tried to smile, hoping her expression was comforting. There was a telephone on the bedside table, and Sarah used it to call the emergency ambulance number which was given on a decal stuck to the receiver.

After the paramedics had taken the old woman away, and after Sarah had given her story to a sympathetic young policeman, she stood beside her car and debated what to do next. She had come to a dead end, no closer to Valerie than before. The only idea she could come up with was to wander around the campus in hopes of meeting her by accident—and that could take forever. Valerie might well be keeping out of her way deliberately.

Sarah looked around uneasily. The feeling of eyes watching her was not paranoia this time, she thought. She felt very conspicuous, standing in the street in the lull that followed the departure of an ambulance. Finally she got back into her car, deciding to go to the library, where at least she could work.

But at the corner of Jefferson and West 35th, Sarah took the wrong turn, realizing what she had done a few seconds later as she approached the expressway overpass. She grimaced at the mistake. It was her subconscious again, she thought—first warning her away from the house and then drawing her back.

And yet she wasn’t sorry she had taken the wrong turn. Her pulse speeded up at the thought of going back to the house, and it wasn’t fear she felt, but a more pleasurable anticipation. She felt a perverse desire to challenge the thing that had driven her away, to test herself against it in the same way that, as a child, she had dared herself again and again to do the things that frightened her most, deriving pleasure both from the fear and the conquering of it.

I won’t go into the house, she thought. I’ll just have a look at it. She turned the corner and drove towards the house.

There was a black Ferrari parked in back.

Sarah pulled up behind it, blocking it, feeling excitement knot her stomach and tighten her throat. What luck, to find her here.

But was it luck? It couldn’t be luck. Suddenly wary, Sarah emerged slowly from her car. What had made Valerie come here? What did she want?

The back door opened, and Valerie came out. She looked tense and nervous, jerking her head around to give Sarah a furious, watchful look. “What are you doing here?”

Sarah stepped away from her car, leaving the door hanging open, and said, in the gentle voice people affect with children and the mentally disturbed, “I live here, remember?”

Valerie snorted contemptuously. “No you don’t. Not anymore. Jade scared you off. I know that.”

“What do you mean, Jade?” Sarah felt a quickening of excitement, the sense of being on the trail. A name, she had now. Jade.