“Oh, thank God,” he said. “Sarah, is it really you? I’m back? It’s over now?”
She nodded tentatively and stepped forward to embrace him, but he made a sudden, frantic gesture and a long shudder rocked him. He turned his head to one side and was sick on the floor.
Feeling slightly sick herself, but relieved by the obvious return to reality, Sarah hurried away to fetch a towel and a bowl of water. But when she returned, Pete pushed her aside and cleaned up after himself. Afraid to argue, still shaken by the violence and hatred he had turned on her earlier, Sarah leaned against the wall and watched without speaking. She had never seen Pete look so ill and exhausted; he suddenly seemed very old and frail.
“Shall I make you some tea?” she asked, watching his unsteady progress to the kitchen sink. He shook his head.
Sarah bit her lip. She wanted to go to him and put her arms around him and comfort him, but she did not dare. He would probably push her away again, or worse . . . She touched her throat.
But that wasn’t Pete, she thought. At least—it wasn’t Pete seeing me.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said sharply. “All right? I just want to get out of here.”
“I’ll take you home.”
He looked at her with pained, exhausted eyes, and slowly nodded. “Please.” Then, as they were leaving the house, he stopped her. “I’m sorry, Sarah.”
“That’s all right,” she said quickly.
“No. I’m sorry I doubted you. I just didn’t know. I thought of it as a kind of game, or as something you were overreacting to. I’m sorry, now, that I didn’t believe you. You tried to protect me, and I still walked right into it.”
“You couldn’t have known,” Sarah said. “I’m not so sure I would have believed it, if anyone had told me.”
“I wish to God I’d never gone in there.”
“Well, it’s over now,” Sarah said briskly, helping him into her car. “You never have to go in there again.”
“Of course I will,” Pete said dully.
Sarah looked at him but started the car without speaking.
“I have to go back for the same reason that you do,” he said. “We can’t leave that—thing—in there, alive. Somehow, we have to destroy it. Otherwise the next person who goes in there may not come out the same.”
“You were the one who told me I wasn’t responsible,” Sarah pointed out.
“That was before I knew.” He sighed and rubbed his face. “I wish to God I didn’t. But knowing, I can’t pretend I don’t, any more than you can. That thing is too dangerous, too horrible. We have to stop it, somehow. We have to find out how to get rid of it. If we don’t, who will?”
Sarah was silent, feeling a sense of relief so powerful it made her eyes sting. She wasn’t alone anymore. She wasn’t crazy. Pete knew. He had been through it, just as she had, and he understood, and he was united with her in a common fight. And together they would win. They would conquer the demon.
“One thing,” said Pete. “One thing that gives me hope—it isn’t much, but it is something—is those words.”
“Words?”
“Arabic words of protection against evil. I’d seen them in a reference book and copied them down. I didn’t really expect to remember them off the top of my head, but suddenly, when I couldn’t think of any way out, I saw those words, just as if they were on a page in front of my face. And I said them aloud and then . . . it was all over. I was out of hell and back in the house with you. So it must have been the words. They must have worked.”
Sarah said nothing, but she wondered. Were words that powerful? Had they really had an effect? Or had Jade simply come to the end of his repertoire of tricks for the moment? Had Pete simply been stronger than Jade anticipated, as Sarah had been herself? Could words really be enough to fend off, and ultimately destroy, the demon?
“Did you see anything?” Pete asked.
Sarah glanced at him and saw that he was staring away from her, out the window. She cleared her throat. “Only you.”
“So none of it was real. It was all just hallucination.” His tone was bitter. “But it didn’t do me any good to tell myself that.”
“Believe me, it was real enough,” Sarah said. “I went through it myself, or something like it.”
“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.