Familiar Spirit

“I suppose it didn’t really take much time? It felt like days, inside. It was like being smothered. There was the most horrible smell. And nasty, sharp claws scraping at my head, trying to scoop out my brain. And those things, all around me. Gibbering at me, trying to touch me. I was turning into one of them. I couldn’t get away. I—” From the corner of her eye, Sarah saw Pete shudder and press a hand to his mouth. After a moment he took it away again, leaned back in his seat, and breathed in a shaky sigh. “It was all so real. And then, at the end, to have been able to make it all vanish with a few magic words. Hell!” He lurched forward in his seat.

“What is it?”

“The License to Depart. I forgot all about it. That’s what I went over there to do. Let’s go back.”

“Pete, not now! You’re in no shape to face Jade again. You need to rest. Tomorrow, or the next day—”

“Now, Sarah. We have to strike now.” She could feel his excitement filling the car. He was revitalized, his former sickness forgotten, pushed aside, by a sudden surge of hope and energy.

“My God, Pete, after what just happened to you? What if he attacks again? You might not be able to—”

“If anything, I feel stronger now than I did before, because I know what to expect. But the same won’t be true for Jade. I think that attack must have taken a lot out of him. He won’t be expecting us back. We’re probably safer right now than we would be if we gave him a few days to recover.”

Sarah turned and drove into the parking lot of a convenience store. There she stopped, letting the car idle. She looked at Pete, seeing how his weariness seemed to have been burned away. She wondered how far his excitement could propel him before he collapsed. She remembered the profound sleep which had followed her own battle with Jade.

“This is the time to strike,” Pete said. “I think we’ve got a damn good chance of winning. Why did Jade attack when he did? I think it was to keep me from saying the License to Depart. It was self-preservation, to distract me. If we go back now, we may catch him off guard—say the right words, and he’ll have to obey. If we give him more time to recover—”

Sarah nodded and shifted into drive. It made sense, what Pete had said, and they had to try anything that might work. She pulled back into traffic, now heading west.

Pete reached over and put his hand on top of Sarah’s, where it rested on the steering wheel. “We’ll do it,” he said.

While Sarah drove, Pete explained his plan. They would draw a protective circle on the floor with chalk, stand within it and recite the License to Depart and some other Words of Power that Pete had copied into his notebook. As he spoke, Sarah felt her spirits rise, and by the time they reached the house she was almost giddy with hope. They would do it, she thought. Of course they would do it! She had Pete with her now, actively believing. She wasn’t alone anymore. With the magic words and their combined strengths, they would send Jade back where he had come from.

As they got out of the car, Pete handed Sarah a piece of ruled paper covered with his neat, black printing. “These are Words of Power,” he said. “You might try to remember them—they could be useful.”

The words were many-syllabled, like children’s nonsense: Anrehakatha-sataiu, Senentuta-batetsataiu, Sabaoth . . . Sarah doubted that in a moment of crisis any such words would come to her lips. One, however, was simple enough. “Bast.” Beside it, in parentheses, Pete had written “to make all spirits depart.” That sounded promising, and the word was easy enough to remember. Bast. She moved her lips, pronouncing it silently.

Pete had already gone ahead of her, into the house, and Sarah followed after, in no hurry. She found him on the living room floor, crouching with a stick of chalk in one hand and an open book before him, copying a magic protective figure. She stood a moment, watching him, feeling detached. The house was quiet and peaceful, the sun filtered through leaves, making patterns on the wall. The air was humid, but it was not unpleasantly warm. Autumn afternoon edging towards a cool evening, her favorite time, her favorite season. It would be so nice, she thought, to sit on the porch and drink a glass of wine, enjoying the end of the day and waiting for the sun to go down. No worries, nothing to do. And afterwards, she and Brian, wrapped in one another’s arms—

Brian looked up from whatever he was doing on the floor and smiled at her seductively. “Come over here,” he said.

She couldn’t move.

It wasn’t Brian, she told herself; although she heard Brian’s voice and saw him there, and ached to touch him—that wasn’t Brian. Hard to believe that when she saw him smiling at her; hard to remember that she had come into the house with Pete, and that there was no one else in the house, when memory shifted and she saw Brian.

“Pete,” she said, pleading.

“What is it?”