It was shockingly easy. Valerie had expected a queasy struggle of hacking and sawing, but the knife bit easily into the cat’s furred throat. Fur and skin parted before the sharp blade as if they were water. Warm blood ran over her hands and spattered everywhere. The cat jerked once and was still.
Valerie stared at the dead animal, hardly daring to believe. The golden eyes were blank and empty now. The demon was gone. A silvery-grey line moved through the fur, and Valerie realized she was watching the fleas abandon the body. Already they knew their host was dead.
Her voice trembling, Valerie recited the prayers and exhortations she had memorized for this moment, the formulae designed to lay evil spirits. Now he would show himself, she thought, and her body was tensed anticipating an attack. Now he would make a mockery of her attempt to escape.
But nothing happened. The cat stayed dead in her hand and the room was empty and still, filling gradually with the thin, grey light of early morning.
Valerie dropped the knife back into her purse, careless of the blood. Her arms and hands were sticky with it—some of it the cat’s, some her own—and her wounded arm throbbed with pain, but she did not care. She had won. The demon had needed a body to live, and she had killed that body. She was free.
As she stepped out of the circle, he struck.
She felt his return as a body-blow which knocked the breath out of her. She fell forward onto the floor, unable to cry out, or even to try to break her fall. The limp, warm body of the cat was crushed beneath her. Her body vibrated with agony. For a moment she knew she was dying, and she was grateful.
Then the pain subsided, and she knew he would not let her go so easily. Tears started to her eyes, and she gasped for air. The hated, familiar voice was in her ear.
“When will you learn it is useless to fight me? When will you learn that you are mine, to use as I will?”
She could not speak. If she could have made a sound it would have been an anguished scream. She would never have another chance. She had failed.
“You will obey me. You will bring me what I require.”
With one blow, he had knocked all the hope, all the will to fight out of her. Now she wished only to avoid his presence and to wait for oblivion. Of course she would obey him. She had no choice, no resistance left. Perhaps, if she served him well, he would let her die before too much longer.
The crushing weight lifted, and Valerie sat up, feeling like a mechanical doll. She didn’t mind the feeling. She would do what she was told. Nothing mattered.
“You learn slowly, but you learn,” said the voice. “You will bring someone to the house, someone young and physically healthy, but someone pliant. A woman, I think. An attractive young woman who is alone and unhappy. Someone who will be more receptive to me than you. After you have found her and brought her to me, I will let you go. Oh, and I will give you what you need for your new life. I will give you what you wanted. You will have the money, and the car, and the drugs . . . and there will be someone to look after you, to make sure you don’t take too many of those drugs, until I have done with you.”
She felt a pain as if a knife were cutting through her brain, but that didn’t matter. The dead cat, her painful, bleeding arm, her failure, the numbness inside—none of it mattered. Valerie nodded her acceptance.
“And to help you in your search—”
An invisible hand seemed to push her head to one side. Valerie looked towards the doorway that led into the kitchen and saw something out of place on the mottled pink and brown linoleum. Something about the size of her fist, something like a clod of earth—but it moved.
It hopped forward, over the threshold into the bedroom, and Valerie saw that it was a toad, grey-brown and hideous, glistening slightly as if it were wet.
At one time Valerie would have recoiled, scrambled to her feet and backed away, face twisted in disgust. Snakes, lizards, toads—whether harmless or not they were all the same, all horrible. The idea of touching one would make her skin crawl. But she didn’t move now as the toad came towards her. She felt as if she were very far away, watching this happen to someone utterly unimportant. And so she did not flinch when the toad came closer still and hopped onto her leg. She bent down to take a closer look. They stared at each other, eye to eye. The toad’s eyes were yellow. She knew them well.
Chapter One
The house was out of the way, on the west side of town, and much too large for one person, but Sarah wanted it.
It stood well back from the road on a huge corner lot, a weathered green frame house surrounded by trees. Even now, in mid-October, with the leaves beginning to fall, the house was nearly invisible from the street. Only the grey cement steps, a glimpse of the black tarpaper roof, and the bright red splotch of a crookedly leaning mailbox revealed the house to a passing observer.
The first sight of it made Sarah’s heart beat more quickly. She could live there, yes, she could. She responded to this solitary, unkempt house almost with recognition, a feeling more positive than any she’d had in a week of examining sterile apartments and dreary, refurbished duplexes. To have a whole house, all to herself . . . She followed the gleaming black Ferrari off the street and up a short concrete ramp, the merest fragment of a driveway, and parked behind the house.
Valerie, a thin, young redhead dressed in blue jeans, high leather boots and a dirty yellow sweater, climbed out of the Ferrari. Sarah switched off her engine, but didn’t get out of her car. Something about the other woman, something she couldn’t quite define, made her nervous. She wondered if she had made a mistake in coming here.
The house had been built on a slope, so that while the back door was only three wooden steps from the ground, an imposing flight of cement stairs rose more than ten feet to the sagging wooden porch and the front door. The lawn—if anything so wild and weedy could be called a lawn—rolled out before the house, down to the street below and vanished on either side into a little wilderness of bushes, trees and creeper vines. Behind the house there was only a small patch of bare ground, lightly sprinkled with gravel broken up by the occasional hardy plant, which provided space for cars to be parked. The back boundary was defined by a high wire fence.
Curious, nerves forgotten, Sarah got out of her car and nodded towards the fence. “What’s that?”
“Camp Mabry, National Guard,” the other woman said in a dull, uninflected voice. She gestured along the fence, westward. “All that down there is wilderness, government owned, no trespassing. You’ll hear them sometimes, on weekends, playing war games. Other than that, it’s very quiet here. Very quiet.”
Sarah nodded. The isolation pleased her. There were no near neighbors, the nearest house being on the other side of the four lanes of West 35th Street. Living here, she would never be bothered by the sound of neighbors quarrelling, never have to worry about keeping quiet herself, or suffer another’s fondness for high-volume disco. Here, she would have plenty of room, plenty of peace, plenty of the solitude she had always lacked.
I’ll be alone, she thought, and in that moment the idea of solitude became not a longed-for treat but a punishment. Why was she doing this, sentencing herself to loneliness? Did she have to look for the biggest, most isolated house she could find?
“Let’s go inside; you have to go inside.” Valerie had made another of her disturbing transfers from dullness into a feverish liveliness. Her voice had become shrill, and she was jigging slightly with impatience, or some other ill-repressed emotion. Sarah moved away, back towards her car, reluctant to follow this woman anywhere, fearful of some trap.