“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.
“Why did you erase my magic circle?” Valerie asked, her voice plaintive. “Did he make you do it?”
“I got rid of it because I thought it might help banish the . . . demon. You called it Jade? Is that its name? I thought it might be holding the spirit to this house, somehow, providing a link.”
Valerie shrugged. “It was supposed to protect me. It didn’t work well enough. But I thought I might be safer if I stayed there. Oh, well, I don’t guess it matters. I’m going.” She came down the steps.
Sarah moved quickly to block her way. “Wait a minute. I’ve got some questions . . . you’ve got to help me.”
Valerie stopped short. She looked bewildered. “Me, help you? What do you mean?”
“You can help me get rid of the demon . . . Jade, you call it?”
“It’s what he told me to call him. I don’t know what it means.”
“Well, it’s a name, and names are important. It might be useful,” Sarah said. “All right, that’s a good start. I want you to tell me everything you know about Jade, and how you summoned him.”
“Why do you care?”
“Because he’s evil, and we have to destroy him.”
Valerie shrugged. “I don’t see . . . you got away.”
“Yes, I got away, but the next person might not be so lucky. As long as that thing is loose in this world, it’s like . . . like the germ of some horrible disease. And if his power grows, he might not be restricted to this house, as he seems to be now. There’s no telling what he might not do.”
A faint, unpleasant smile appeared on Valerie’s narrow face. “Well, he’s not in the house now,” she said. “He’s got a body, not that it will do him much good.”
Sarah felt a mental chill, and moved away from Valerie. “What do you mean?”
“I mean he’s trapped. Jade’s trapped in a sick, dying body, and when it dies . . . well, I hope he dies, too. If he doesn’t, I don’t want to be here to find out what happens. I’m going.”
She walked past Sarah towards her car, but Sarah grabbed her arm. “Wait a minute. You’ve got to tell me what you mean.”
Valerie looked down at Sarah’s fingers and she pulled away, her whole body seeming to shrink and recoil from contact.
“Let me go,” she said sullenly. “I’ll tell you.”
“Not here,” Sarah said. Her eyes went to the house, half expecting to find some visible sign of Jade’s presence, like a face at the window. But if the demon still lurked in the form of a rat or a cat or some other animal, it was not showing itself. “We have a lot to talk about. Let’s go somewhere . . . I know a coffee shop nearby.”
Valerie gave her head a jerk, presumably in agreement. She was staring fixedly at the ground, her body rigidly pulling away from Sarah’s grasp. Feeling a little sorry for her, Sarah let go her arm. Immediately, Valerie went to the gleaming black Ferrari.
“Let’s go in my car,” Sarah said quickly. “I’ll bring you back here afterwards.” She saw Valerie’s bony shoulders hunch, and then she backed away from the car. Feeling like a teacher with a backward child, Sarah said, “Don’t you want to bring your purse?” She could see the soft brown leather bag on the front seat. She remembered it from the first time she had seen Valerie because, along with Valerie’s knee-high boots, it was obviously expensive, and she had envied it.
But instead of simply reaching into the car for the bag, as Sarah expected, Valerie turned around to face Sarah, a look of dumb suffering on her face. “Yes,” she said. “Of course I do.” As if in slow motion, she leaned back into the car and got the purse. Slipping the strap over her shoulder, she held the bag close, almost cradling it against her body.