Dance with the Devil

CHAPTER 1

Katherine Sellers was sure that, at any moment, the car would begin to slide along the smooth, icy pavement and she would lose control of it. She had not had that much driving experience; this was her first time on really bad winter roads.

The sky was a gray metal lid clamped on the pot of the world, so low and flat that it looked as if she could just reach up and tap a fingernail against it. A fine, heavy snowfall — as if someone were adding salt to the stew in this pot — shrouded the Adirondack countryside and swept across the hood of the old Ford, lacing over the windshield. The wipers thumped steadily, a pleasantly reassuring sound, but not reassuring enough to calm her queasy stomach and her bad case of nerves.

Katherine hunched over the steering wheel and peered ahead, straining to part the white curtain that seemed always to be advancing towards her, though it actually arrived and passed her by many times. In the city, cindering crews would have been at work long ago, spreading salt crystals and ashes in the wake of the big, thundering plows. But here, in the boondocks, the situation was something else again!

She was driving off the slope of a mountain, and the trees were breaking into open land on either side. Here, the snow seemed even worse, for the wind howled through the bare land as it could not in the trees, and it whipped the white flakes into thick clouds, and it buffeted the car and cut her vision to less than thirty feet. The road had more than two inches of snow across it, and her car's tracks were the first to mar that virgin blanket. Now and again, the Ford slid and shimmied as if it were dancing, though it had not yet gone far out of control. Each time she felt that sickening lurch of spinning tires, her throat constricted and her heart thumped maniacally.

It was not only the snow that bothered her, but the desolation, the empty look of the landscape. If anything happened to her here, on this narrow country road in the middle of nowhere, she might not be found for hours — and perhaps not for days.

It was not a very reassuring prospect, to say the least. It had the effect, though, of making her sit up just a bit straighter and stare just a little more deeply into the snow.

All things considered, however, Katherine felt positively exhilarated. The few moments of clutching terror, when the car wanted to be a sleigh, only served to heighten, by contrast, the delight and excitement with which she looked forward to the days that lay ahead of her at Owlsden house. She was beginning a new life with a somewhat glamorous job and unlimited possibilities, new friends and new sights. No snowstorm could thoroughly dampen her soaring spirits.

Gazing upon the world out of such optimistic eyes, she was certain to be more shocked than most by what she saw in the open doorway of the abandoned, half-ruined old barn at the base of the mountain. It was so awful, so disgusting, that it drained away her previously unshakeable exhilaration like icy water flowing from a tap.

In the door of the ancient, long unused barn, which lay back from the road about fifteen or twenty feet, what looked like a cat dangled at the end of a rope, strangled by the tightly pulled noose.

She drove to the side of the roadway and stopped the car directly across from that hideous spectacle. She could not bring herself to look that way, to see if what she had glimpsed at first was real or a trick of her imagination. Heaven only knew, the weather was bad enough to distort things, to make one think one had seen something different than what was actually there. But even as she tried to convince herself of that, she knew she had not been mistaken.

The open land hereabouts had been strung across with rail fences in some more optimistic age, but it had proven economically unsalvageable. It had the stamp of desolation now, unused and unuseable in the midst of normally abundant country. She had passed many trim, pleasant, prosperous farms on the trip up from Philadelphia; this pocket of decay looked even more forbidding by comparison. The trees suddenly seemed craggy, hard and black and leafless, reaching for her with abruptly animated branches. The snow, now that the wipers were not running, had drifted over the windscreen and appeared to be seeking a way to get through the glass and cover her up in soft, suffocating cold.

“Oh,” Katherine told the warm air inside the car, “I'm really being silly now!” She grinned and shook her head. Moving trees, malicious snow! What would she be thinking of next?

The cat.

When she looked at the barn, the snow was falling even more heavily than before, so that she could not be certain if the dark object dangling in the center of the open doorway was really what she had thought at first. It could be a trick of shadows.

She preferred to think that it was.

She was especially fond of cats. She had been permitted a cat at the orphanage, as a child, and she had owned a second cat, Mr. Phooey, when she was in college. The first had died a natural death; the second had been struck and killed by an automobile. Both times, she had found acceptance of the death hard.

And now this… Well, this was clearly none of her business, of course. Even if that were a dead cat up there, she had no reason to call anyone to account for it. Still, a cat was a cat, and all cats held a mystic bond with her Spike and Mr. Phooey.

She looked both ways, hoping to see another car approaching. This was the sort of thing a man should handle.

The road was deserted in both directions.

She got out of the Ford, pulled her coat collar up under her chin. Still, the wind bit her cheeks, turned her pert nose a bright red, and managed to force a few cold flakes down her neck. She closed the door and leaned against it, looking at the thing hanging in the doorway. She shuddered and looked away from it again.

Where the farmhouse had once been, there was now nothing but a burned-out foundation of charred field-stones and crumbling mortar. Weeds had sprung up in the man-made pit, evidence that the disaster had taken place a good many years before.

On her side of the road, there was nothing but open land, some crippled length of fence. She had not passed any homes for several miles, but she thought there might be a few ahead on the road. All of which was an excuse to keep from going up to that barn and looking at what hung in its doorway. She forced herself to stop pretending, to stop looking at the scenery, and to get on with it. The poor thing, if it was a poor thing, shouldn't have to hang there like that.

She walked away from the car, crossed the slippery road and stepped over another broken rail fence. The land, beneath the snow, was rocky and all but sent her tumbling several times.

Why don't I stop right here? she asked herself. What can I do, anyway? If it really is a cat, who could I find to take responsibility for its murder, and who would care to prosecute them? A cat, after all, is only an animal. That might sound cruel, but it was a fact.

Even an animal, however, deserved a proper burial. Suppose she had let Mr. Phooey out in the cold, to rot when summer came around? No, she could not turn away. Even an animal deserved privacy in its death.

When she was ten feet from the doorway, she knew beyond doubt that it was a cat and not some trick of light or her imagination. Each step closer was painful. When she was directly beneath it, she could see what had been done to it, and she turned away, staggering into the snow. She bent over and was very sick.

A while later, she came back, white-faced and trembling. Her revulsion at the brutality had now turned to anger, and anger as hot as a July day, here in the cold of January. She did not think there were any limits to what she would be capable of if she ever got her hands on the ugly, sick people who had mutilated the animal.

Gently, gently, she untied the cord knotted at a nail above the doorway. The noose had dug so deeply into the cat's body that she could not easily have loosened that.

She laid the little creature on the purity of the driven snow by the barn door.

Both of its eyes had been taken out. Its forepaws were bound together by heavy wire, and clasped in them was a tiny, silver crucifix which had been broken in two. Three hatpins marred its belly. It had, to be mercifully short, been tortured without conscience before its tormentors had seen fit to let it die of strangulation.

Kids! Katherine thought. Whining little brats who had never been brought up right, selfish children who had no respect for life or beauty. She had known children like that both in and out of the orphanage, spoiled by parents or by the lack of them.

If she ever got hold of them, they wouldn't sit down for a week, and they would be made to know, deep down, what a terrible, ugly thing they had done.

She went inside the old barn, hoping to find a shovel or the remnants of some tool with which she could dig a shallow grave. The gloomy structure contained only the light that was emitted through the ground door and the open loft doors above. She was halfway across the main floor before she realized the nature of the chalk markings on the hard earth. She had seen their like in books and magazines: a huge, white chalk circle spotted with pentagrams in some pattern that she could not discern; words scribbled in Latin, some of which she understood and some of which were alien to her. These were the marks of devil worshippers, people who paid homage to Scratch, Satan, the same demon in a thousand names.

The wind screamed across the roof in an abnormally strong gust, rattled the loose shingles.

She found that she was shivering, although the air inside the barn was not all that cold.

She stared at the floor more closely until her eyes had adjusted to the poor light. In a few moments, she found the place where the cat had been tortured: exactly in the center of the huge circle, in the center of the smaller pentagram, where the earth was stained with blood. To either side of the pentagram, puddles of pale, hardened wax indicated where burning candles had been placed for the ceremony.

This is New York, she thought, stepping slowly back from the traces of evil. This is not some South-seas Island, some haven of voodooism and the black arts. This isn't some Louisiana bayou country where the old myths still have power over the minds of men.

But she could not reason the evidence out of existence, for she could see it there in chalk and in blood, in white and black-red, before her eyes and within her reach. If she wished, she could touch it and stain her fingers.

A moment earlier, she had been hoping to run across those who had perpetrated this atrocity. She had not thought of them as adults; indeed, she still found it difficult to believe that grown men and women would indulge in such debased activities. People were nicer than that, smarter than that, saner too. Yet, while her optimism and her natural love of people made it difficult for her to accept the truth, her intellect knew that this was so. She prayed, suddenly, that her wish would not be granted, that she would never ever in a thousand years meet the people who had done this thing.

She left the barn and stood in the snow again, permitting Nature's breath, the cool wind, to cleanse her of the taint of evil which she felt she had taken on from the very air of that room. Her long, yellow hair streamed behind her like a flag, dazzling in the gloomy world around it.

Away from those odd markings on the barn floor, her back to the dead animal lying in the snow, the terror should have left her, but it did not. It abated, certainly, but an abiding fear remained where the terror had been and would remain for a long while yet. She did not particularly believe in such nonsense as devil worship and the calling forth of unclean spirits. That was all just so much superstition. To Katherine, all spirits were good, the spirits of angels. But she did believe, now and very reluctantly, in people so warped that they could conduct such ugly ceremonies, and she wished to have the taint these people had left behind blown loose of her.

She could not go away without burying the cat, even more than she could not have done so before. If burying the creature did anything to upset the intent of the Satanic rituals, she was going to be sure to put it beneath the ground! In five minutes, she was on her way back from the car with a lug wrench which was used for changing flat tires. Its one end was sharply bladed for prying loose stubborn hubcaps, and it chipped into the frozen earth quite efficiently. In fifteen minutes, the cat was buried, snow thrown over its shallow grave to conceal its exact whereabouts. The ever-increasing storm would further cover all signs of her work.

She hoped that, if cats had souls — as she was sure they must — this cat's soul was now at rest, that she had saved it from whatever spiritual limbo the Satan-ists had wanted for it.

Returning hurriedly to the car, her coat frosted with snow, her hair now hanging wetly across her shoulders and no longer dry enough to be blown about by the wind, she put the lug wrench in the trunk again and got back into the Ford. She sat behind the wheel for a long moment, wondering about the grisly scene she had just encountered and letting the cold seep out of her like syrup from a tree. If this were New York State, if this kind of thing was common in these Adirondack wildernesses, then she was crazy for going any further. Sure, this was the chance of a lifetime, but…

Snap out of it, she told herself. Think of what this job means to you in terms of your future, think of the interesting people you'll be working with.

Five days before her graduation, just after Christmas vacation and during the final burst of studying for end-of-semester exams, Katherine was called into the office of the Dean of Student Personnel, a small and cheery man named Syverson who wore a mustache and a chin beard and looked, she thought, like a leprechaun. She did not know what to expect, but she automatically expected something good. That was her way.

As it turned out, her optimism had been well-founded, for Syverson had gotten her the job she was now traveling to take. Companion and secretary to Lydia Roxburgh Boland, one of the dozen wealthiest women in the country. Her duties would consist of traveling with the old woman in the spring and fall, reading to her, discussing books with her and, in general, making her feel less lonely than she otherwise might. According to Syverson, the woman was sixty-four but quick, lively and a joy to be around.

“But why me?” she asked.

Syverson turned a bright smile on her and said, “Mrs. Boland is an alumnus of our school. She and I have known each other for a long time, before she met and married Roy Boland, when she was a graduate student and I was a sophomore.” He sighed at the passage of the years, then continued: “Later, when I joined the administration, I handled many of Mrs. Boland's endowments to the school, set up the trusts as she wished them and established a system of auditing to be certain that her wishes were carried out even after her death. She trusts me and, as she says, respects my judgment. When she called and asked for a companion from the graduating class this first semester, she left it up to me to choose a girl who would most suit her temperament. Someone attractive, someone with a pleasant disposition and an interest in meeting other people, someone intelligent enough to like books and understand them. Someone, in short, like you.”

The salary was excellent, the fringe benefits fine as well. It was a dream job.

She asked Syverson: “What's the catch? Is there one?”

He smiled again. “Yes, but just a little one. Lydia insists on spending summers and winters in the family house not far from Long Lake in the Adirondacks. It's a somewhat isolated place to want to live, especially for a young and pretty girl. She says the summers are mild enough for her with a great deal of greenery and that she would be lost without living through the normal whiter blizzards she has known since her childhood. Unless you would find the atmosphere too rural, too lacking in diversions for—”

But she had assured him it would be just fine. And here she was with a degree in literature, a broken-down old Ford, four suitcases of clothes and belongings and a very bright future.

No number of devil worshippers were going to dissuade her from what she saw as a predestined future full of nothing but good.

Besides, she asked herself, where else would I go but to the Roxburgh House, to Owlsden?

She had no close relatives, and her parents had died long ago, longer than seemed possible. The only stable reference point she had was her life in the orphanage, but she knew that would have changed, her friends gone into the adult world. She had no place to return to, and it was partly out of this personal isolation that her optimism grew.

She started the car and drove back onto the roadway. The storm was now more furious than ever and had added an extra inch of powdery snow to the macadam. The wipers thumped at their top speed but were barely able to keep up with the whirling snow. As the light seeped from the sky and visibility grew even less conducive to travel, she tried to maintain her speed to cover the last miles to the village of Roxburgh — which had been named for Lydia's father before the turn of the century — before darkness crept in completely.

Dusk lay on the land like a brown cloak as she topped the ridge and looked down on the small town of one thousand souls which constituted Roxburgh. The town was nestled in the snow and pines, a tight little place even for so few as a thousand. The lights twinkled in the blanket of gauze that draped everything; smoke rose from the chimneys; here and there, a car moved on the narrow streets.

Roxburgh was such a pretty place, pervaded by such a sense of quietude, that her fears were further dispelled until the terror the Satanists had left with her was only a black grain of sand in the back of her mind, niggling at her. She could be happy in a place like this, away from the frantic pace of the modern world, among simple people with simple dreams.

She looked up from the town and searched the far ridge for Owlsden. For a long moment, she could not see anything but swirling snow, the skirts of ghosts, cold sheets flapping in the wind and beating across the rocky hillsides and the bare branches of the dark trees. Then she saw it thrusting up against the slopes, huge. The house was like a phantom ship, some abandoned Spanish galley which still bore on through the turbulent sea and poked its prow through the fog at night to frighten sailors on passing ships.

The snow obscured it again.

And then it was back, jumping into detail as if it had advanced on her across the gap of the valley. It dominated the land, held forth like a sovereign on a throne. Its windows, in a few places, glowed from within, yellow and harsh. They should have seemed warm and welcoming, especially to a natural optimist like Katherine, but they were more like the eyes of dragons. The house appeared to be three stories high and as long as a regulation football field. It was half-hidden by elms and pine trees, and its black slate, peaked roof jutted above anything that Nature had placed near it.

The snow veiled the house once more; it might just as well never have existed at all.

Who would build such a fantastic home here, in the mountains, away from everyone and everything, away from the high society types who might appreciate its cumbersome, costly majesty? What sort of man had Lydia Boland's husband been — a madman? A dreamer with no regard for reality, with no love of common sense?

As she drove down toward the village, her optimism had not been turned off, even though she was now thinking in terms of dragons and madmen. Instead, her optimism had been dampened slightly, as curbed as it would ever be. She realized that she was among strangers where the customs and daily routines might be alien to her. Alien enough, she suddenly thought with a dismayingly morbid turn of mind, to include blood sacrifices and the worship of the devil?