Familiar Spirit

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.