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.
“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.
“Sweetheart,” said Pete. Beverly evaded his arms and ran from the room. The bedroom door slammed. Pete stood up, nearly overturning his chair, and disappeared down the hall without looking at Sarah. She heard the door open and close again quietly, and she was alone.
Chapter Thirteen
The next morning they were as polite and indifferent to one another as strangers. Tension hummed beneath every word and gesture, and none of them dared break the surface.
Instead of lingering to talk, as she usually did on mornings when she didn’t have an early class, Beverly was brisk and efficient, out the door after only half a cup of coffee. Pete hurried after her as if afraid of being alone with Sarah.
Sarah had no appetite for breakfast. When the Marchants had gone, she made herself a cup of tea and sat watching the steam rise from the cup. She told herself that it would pass. Beverly would listen to her, and understand, and the wounds would quickly heal. Their friendship would survive. It was very hard, now, to be so alone, but the misunderstanding—the hurt in Beverly’s eyes and the guilt in Pete’s—was not the worst of it. Much worse was Pete’s defection, his disbelief and retreat to the role of rational, uninvolved observer. She understood, recalling her own initial refusals, that he had found forgetting to be the simplest way of coping with his experience, but understanding made it no easier to bear. She felt abandoned.
She pushed her untasted tea away and stood up. Feeling sorry for herself wouldn’t change anything. She had something to do, and she might as well do it now.
During the night, lying awake and brooding, Sarah had realized that the cellar was not the only possible hiding place for Jade’s statue. The image of the two red-brick chimneys, chimneys without fireplaces, had leaped vividly to mind. The fireplaces which had been there in Nancy Owens’ day must still exist beneath sheetrock and plaster. There might have been a loose brick, or a hidden ledge within the chimney, where a small carved figure might have been hidden away. There was also, she reflected, that built-in cabinet in the dining room, and the drawer where she had found the old photograph. But it was the image of the fireplace that drew her.