Dance with the Devil

CHAPTER 13

When Katherine had first entered the orphanage at the age of eight, she had had a run-in with Mrs. Coleridge on her third day there.

Mrs. Coleridge was a heavy set, severe woman who wore her hair drawn away from her face pinned in a bun on top of her head. Her eyebrows were thick, her lips thin and set. She never smiled at anyone, and she had a long list of dos and don'ts by which every child in the institution had to abide or suffer punishment. One of her rules was that every child should go through a period of mourning after they arrived, before actually entering into any of the activities of their new life. While Katherine had looked forward eagerly to a picnic scheduled for the third day of her stay, Mrs. Coleridge was shocked to find that she had any notion of enjoying herself so soon.

In her large, dimly lighted office on the ground floor of the main residence hall, Mrs. Coleridge took the young Katherine to task. “Your mother and father have only been gone a little more than a week,” she said, looking meaningfully at the child.

Katherine said nothing.

“You know our rules here?”

“Some of them,” Katherine said quietly.

“Maybe you know that we feel that two weeks of mourning are required before you can join right in with the other children.”

Katherine had nothing to say.

“You'll go to chapel, of course, and to Sunday evening prayer, but as for a picnic…”

“I want to go too,” Katherine said.

The woman looked at her, scowled. “I don't think that I have made myself perfectly clear, child.”

“I'll sneak along, even if you won't let me go,” Katherine said. She was growing bolder now, and she stood up in front of her chair, as if to confront the older woman. She was a small, delicate girl with a wistful look about her that 'made her seem somehow older than she was. She was so delicate, however, that she looked as if a strong wind might crush her.

“You'll do just what you're told to do,” Mrs. Coleridge replied. She was more than ready to be the crushing wind in this case, for she actually enjoyed disciplining the children, enjoyed it more than anyone but Mrs. Coleridge herself could know. She stood up too, fingering the handle of the desk drawer where she kept the switch she used on unruly children.

“I'll go,” Katherine insisted.

Screwing up her face, Mrs. Coleridge said, “Don't you have any respect for the dead, child? Don't you miss and love your parents?”

Tears had come into Katherine's eyes then, and she said, quietly, “I loved them a lot, a whole lot.”

“Then—”

“I have to go on the picnic,” Katherine cried. “You have to let me! If I'm not happy, I'll be sad. And when you're sad, awful things happen. If you're happy, if you stay happy, nothing can go wrong!”

Mrs. Coleridge took the switch from her drawer. “Don't yell at me, young lady.”

“Daddy was always looking out for bad things, expecting bad things,” she went on. “He said the flood would ruin the farm if it came, ruin everything for us. He was sad all the time. And then — then it came and was even worse than he expected.”

Mrs. Coleridge tested the switch against her palm, and she said, “Be quiet, Katherine.”

“No! You have to understand, Mrs. Coleridge! Don't be so sad, don't always think that bad things will happen, because — then they will!” It was not easy for a child, almost eight years old, to frame the essence of such a philosophy, and she was frustrated with herself for not being able to reach the older woman with the truth of what she thought.

“Come here,” Mrs. Coleridge said, frowning. Her face was full of ugly lines when she frowned.

Katherine got her spanking shortly thereafter.

But the next day, she sneaked away on the picnic with the others. The house parents chaperoning the affair never reported her disobedience to Mrs. Coleridge, for they sympathized with her desperate search for happiness.

From that moment on, Katherine's life had been shaped by the principle of optimism.

Until Owlsden.

Owlsden had bled away her positive outlook over the period of only a few days until now, alone in her room, she could summon forth only one optimistic image: Michael Harrison. He represented hope to her — not only hope of getting away from this cold, dark house, but hope of returning to her former attitude of cheerfulness. Mike was always happy, it seemed, always full of hope for the best. Perhaps, with him, she could manage to regain her optimism and face life as she had always faced it before: with hope for the next day. With Michael, everything would return to normal again. She could still recall the warmth of his kiss…

As if she had been placed outside the normal stream of time, the minutes passed in agonizingly slow order, each one stretched into an hour.

She tried to read the book she had carried up from the library and could not get interested in it, tried to eat something and could not, tried to nap and could not keep her eyes closed. She kept wondering if someone had unlocked and opened her door while she was not looking, and she would open her eyes to survey the room and be certain of her solitude.

At a quarter past nine, only an hour and a half since she had spoken with Michael, the lights in her room shut off, plunging her into a deep and disquieting darkness.

She rolled out of bed and slipped into her shoes, felt her way to the door. Slowly, her eyes adjusted to the lack of light, though there was nothing out of the ordinary to be seen.

At the door, she listened carefully.

For a moment, there was only silence. Then, Lydia called out to someone — and was answered by Mason Keene.

“—all over the house,” he finished saying.

Katherine opened her door and found the second floor corridor in complete darkness.

“Lydia?” she called.

“Here,” the older woman said. She sounded as if she were only a few yards farther along the hallway. From the quaver in her voice, it appeared she was more than a little on edge. She sounded, too, as if she expected someone to leap at her from the unrelieved darkness in the almost windowless corridor.

“What's happened?” Katherine asked. She kept her back to the door of her room, her hand against the doorjamb to keep her position in mind.

“I think, perhaps, that a fuse has blown,” Mason Keene said, drawing closer to her, though still invisible.

She wished that she could see him. She did not like the idea that his eyes might have adjusted to the dimness more readily than hers and that he had an advantage, for she had now come to fear nearly everyone in Owlsden, even the reticent Keene couple.

“Or else the power lines are down,” Lydia said.

“Heaven forbid,” Keene said, almost at Katherine's side now.

“Has that happened before?” Katherine asked, squinting in the direction that Keene seemed to be coming from.

“Now and again, during the most rugged storms,” Lydia said. “And this one seems to be a beauty, doesn't it? Listen to that wind.”

Katherine realized how loud the wind was, even within the thick walls of the mansion. For a time, she had lost the sound of it, had let it become a gentle background roar of which she was unaware.

“Well,” Lydia said, “we'd best break out the supplies of candles and get used to living primitively for a while.”

“I've found a closet,” Mason Keene said a moment later, pulling open a poorly oiled door close at Katherine's left hand. “I'll have some light for us in a moment.”

“Poor light, but something anyway,” Lydia said. She sounded as if she would dearly welcome even the meagerest relief from this Stygian dark. What, exactly, was she afraid of? Alex?

“It's not the lack of light, but the lack of heat that we'll soon begin to notice,” Keene said. “The furnace starts up electrically, you see. So we'll have to build fires in the fireplaces downstairs and keep to as few rooms as possible.”

“How long will it take them to fix the lines?” Katherine asked.

Lydia sighed. “They can't start until the snow stops and the roads are at least partially cleared. We're going to have to rough it for a couple of days.”

“Isn't so bad, once the big fireplaces are in use,” Keene said. “And we have plenty of firewood to see us through. Yuri always made sure to keep a stock…” His voice ran out like an old-fashioned phonograph when he realized that Yuri was no longer among the living.

As they waited in silence and darkness for Mason Keene to strike a match over a candle wick, Katherine thought that the entire thing was more sinister than either Lydia or the servant realized. Just possibly, someone had deliberately stopped the power flow into Owlsden. Just possibly, someone wanted a dark house in which to operate. And, just possibly, she was not slated to finish out the night here, let alone a couple of cold days ahead…

A match lighted.

Orange flame cast light upwards over Mason Keene's features, twisting them into a parody of a human face. When he turned to them and smiled, the smile more resembled a leer than anything more reassuring. That was only the fault of the distorting flame, of course.

He touched the match to a candle wick and enlarged the circle of blessed light to include both of the women.

In a moment, they each had a candle, looking strangely like the celebrants in some religious rite.

“Let's go find Alex,” Lydia said. “He'll know what to do about this.”

Unless, Katherine thought, he's the one who already did it…