Familiar Spirit

“I’m sorry,” Sarah said quietly. She looked at Pete, wondering how she could reach him, and if he would let her. “Jade is not a demon,” she said. “That was my mistake. Our mistake. We tried to deal with him as if he were a traditional demon, something that would obey a set of rules and respond to traditional spells. But we were wrong. Valerie thought he was a demon—it was in Jade’s interest to mislead us, to make us all feel powerless against him. It wasn’t that Valerie called him up—he must have been there all the time, in a kind of hibernation, waiting for someone who was receptive to him, someone who could give him what he needed. I think he probably fed off of Valerie somehow—and he’s probably been doing the same thing to me. He’s been gaining power from his contact with us. But he’s not all-powerful—he has limitations and weaknesses—he must. He was human once, and he can be destroyed.”

“How did he survive?” Beverly asked. “After she stabbed him.”

“There was a little stone figure, a woman carved out of jade. He called it his immortality. Somehow, he put a part of himself into that figure. He trapped a spark of his soul, or whatever you want to call it, in the stone, so that no matter how many bodies died—and I’m sure he had no intention of stopping at two!—he would go on, ready to be reborn again and again. He preserved the essence of himself in stone.”

“Have you seen it?” asked Pete.

“No. But I’m sure it exists. And I think it must be in the house somewhere. Maybe it’s in the cellar, buried under the house. I think it’s there, and it is holding Jade to the house. That has to be it. Nancy Owens took it away with her after she killed the man called Jade. If she had destroyed the statue—but she thought that she could use its power for herself. It destroyed her. I don’t think she realized that as long as it existed, so would Jade. I’m going to find it, if I have to dig up the whole cellar. And then I’ll smash it. There won’t be anything left of Jade.”

“In other words, you’ve found your excuse to stay on in the house,” Pete said flatly.

Sarah stared at him. “You don’t believe me. You think I’ve created this whole thing out of my head, that Jade is a fantasy of mine, don’t you? Did you just forget what happened to you? How could you forget? Yesterday you believed me—yesterday you knew.”

He sighed. “I believe you, Sarah. I know this is very real to you—”

“Will you stop playing psychiatrist for a minute and tell me how you explain what happened to you? Or did you conveniently forget all that?”

“I haven’t forgotten anything,” he said. His voice had taken on an edge. “But I don’t think it explains anything or does any good for me to say that I was possessed by a demon, or by the spirit of a dead man! That’s just not . . . very useful, Sarah. I don’t live my life according to the dictates of devils and angels; they may be real to other people, but not to me. I had some kind of hallucinatory experience, some sort of mental . . . aberration. I don’t know what to call it, or where it came from. Possibly it was suggestion—I might have picked it up from you, somehow. I was in a weak and suggestible state—”

“You were weak afterwards—you were perfectly okay when you came over meaning to exorcise the demon. If you’re denying it now, I don’t know what to—” She chewed her lip, trying not to cry.

Pete started to reach out for her, then drew his arm back. “Look, Sarah, don’t get upset. What I think doesn’t matter. If you’ve figured out a way of handling this thing, whatever it is, fine. You have to do what feels right to you. It’s not my fight. I think you should leave the house, but if you feel you have to stay, if you think there is something you have to do to conquer this demon, then do it. You don’t need my approval.”

Sarah thrust the leather-bound book at him. “Here. Read it. Please. It explains everything. Even what happened to us when we tried to say the License to Depart. Jade believed magic was sexual in nature, that for a magic ritual to work there must be a kind of orgasm—either in sex, or in a violent action. He focused his will through sexual energy—he had sex with Nancy Owens while he was trying to possess her. When that didn’t work, he killed another woman who was there. Both sex and violence made him more powerful—and that’s still true. The part of Jade that’s left has to increase his power however he can. He was trying to use us—he excited us, trying to get us to make love because he could feed on our sexual energies and grow stronger. That’s why we—” She faltered. Pete’s look was ice, and Beverly was much too still.

Beverly broke the silence. “I knew there was something,” she said in a small voice, not looking at either of them. “I knew there was something.” She stood up, jarring the edge of the table.