Dance with the Devil

CHAPTER 17

Fire.

Heat, little smoke.

Figures moving in the rippling currents of hot air, distorted like figures in funhouse mirrors…

Voices.

Singing? No, chanting.

Katherine came fully awake and found that she was sitting in the snow not half a dozen steps away from the bonfire. The heat from it had flushed her face. Her hands were behind her, as if propping her up, but when she tried to move them, she found that they were tied together rather securely. The circulation in her hands had been affected, and her fingertips tingled unpleasantly.

“How are you feeling?” Michael asked, appearing suddenly before her and smiling as if they were still close, as if nothing untoward had past between them.

“You hit me.”

“I truly do apologize for that,” he said, the smile fading to be replaced by an expression of shame.

“I'm sure.”

“But I am!” he said. “You see, I was so certain you would welcome the family, be enthusiastic about joining it. I was willing to accept a slight rejection. But a major denial got to me. Again, I apologize.”

“You're insane.”

He laughed again. “Why? because I believe in Satan? You really don't think that He will show up tonight, that He will rise out of the earth to dance with you.”

“No. Not for a minute.”

“But He will. And once He has, there will be no more misunderstandings between us.”

She said nothing.

He stood up. “I have to begin the main part of the ceremony now. Are you comfortable enough?”

“Untie my hands.”

“In a while,” he said.

“When?”

“When the dance begins.” He turned and walked away from her, took a position in a circle of crimson cloth which had been stretched out in the snow on the north side of the fire.

Katherine wondered if anyone in Owlsden could see the glow from the fire, then decided there was no hope of that. It was not only shielded by the trees on this side of the ski run and the trees on the other side, but by the dense sheets of snow as well. If they stood by the windows for an hour, they would be lucky to see even a spark. Michael had been careful to place this devil's dance farther away from Owlsden than the previous three had been.

Michael had begun to chant, his arms raised in a pleading gesture to the leaping flames before him, his toboggan hat off, his yellow hair lying wetly across his broad, handsome forehead.

The other cultists seemed absorbed in the crazy rituals, and Katherine wondered if it would be possible to rise up and edge carefully backwards into the shadows of the trees, out of the circle of the bonfire's glow. If she could slip out of their sight, she could go any of half a dozen different ways and, surely, lose them in the storm and the night. All she would need was a two minute head start, two minutes before they saw she was gone… But when she started to get cautiously to her feet, a hand grasped her shoulder from behind and pressed her back down.

“Don't move, please,” a voice said behind.

She was under the eye of a guard.

After that, she could do little but watch Michael lead the cultists through their mad brand of worship. She made a genuine attempt to understand what he was saying, but she found the twisted, consonant-choked language he was using completely alien to her. It was not Latin, exactly, but something beyond Latin, something that sounded incredibly, incomprehensibly ancient.

At regular intervals, the women in the cult came forth, one at a time, carrying small black jars from which they spooned herbs and incense into their priest's hands, then stepped quickly out of his way, bowing at him like an oriental woman in the presence of her most respected elder male relative. Then Michael said lines of verse over the handfuls of herbs and tossed them into the center of the bonfire while the rest of the celebrants echoed a chorus or two of a rhyming song in that same old language.

Perhaps it was only her imagination, but Katherine thought that the fire, at times, bent, leaned towards Michael as if it were seeking the next batch of spices before he was ready to supply them. And when it consumed the herbs, it also seemed to expand as if pleased with the offering.

That was impossible.

She directed herself not to think like that any more, for she knew that she had no chance of escape if she once let herself be caught up in their fantasies.

She wriggled her hands together in the rope that bound them, but she could not feel any loose ends.

Uneasily, she wondered when the devil's dance would begin, and if anyone in Owlsden would notice her absence in time to come looking for her in the woods.

One of those questions was answered a moment later as the cultists began slowly to form into a train that circled and re-circled the bonfire, one stationed just a few feet behind the other.

Michael came to her and helped her to her feet.

“You can still let me go,” she said. Her voice was weak, cracked with strain, the first indication she had given them that she was paralyzed with fear. She could remember, in all too gruesome detail, what they had done with the kitten in the barn, and she could not help but wonder if she were truly being initiated into the family or if she were being offered as their first human sacrifice.

He ignored her and said, “You will join the dance now. And when it is finished, you will be one of us, because you will have danced with Him, and you will want to be in the family.”

“I won't dance,” she said.

Gently, he pushed her forward, though she tried desperately to hold her ground.

“It will be a beautiful experience, Katherine,” Michael said, touching her gently on the cheek with the tips of his ungloved fingers, as if he were testing the unblemished texture of her skin.

“No.”

He shoved harder.

She stumbled forward, almost fell, regained her balance just as she was caught up in the ring of Believers, found herself moving along with them as they shrieked and moaned the odd litanies, though she was not able to maintain their neat rhythm.

She stopped and attempted to push through them toward the open space beyond the fire.

Abruptly, on either side of her, two cultists appeared, one woman and one man, both with a switch in hand. The switches were much like the one that Mrs. Coleridge, of the orphanage, had always been so quick to use: thin, long, dwindling at the tip, perhaps a stiffened willow lash or the younger shoot from a birch branch. They began to herd Katherine, swatting her repeatedly about the head and shoulders until she had no other choice but to continue around the fire with the worshipers.

“Help!” she shouted.

That was no good. Her throat was so dry, her energy levels so low, the noises of the chants and the storm so strong, that she could barely hear herself.

She struck out at the switch-bearers again and again, continually missed them.

The pace of the dance seemed to be picking up, as did the choppy rhythm of the religious chants. She was moving faster herself, her face and neck stung by the thin, hard, relentless reed whips; the bright fire whirled by on the lefthand, showering sparks up like bright ephemeral butterflies while the dark, black-brown-green forest passed in a jumble of stark impressions off to her right.

“Move!” the male herder said.

“Faster!” the woman said.

She was not so terrified as she had been at the start, for she was swiftly growing too weary for terror. Her arms felt like lead weights, while her legs seemed too insubstantial too support her at all. She barely had the energy to stay on her feet, after her battle with the wind and the snow when she had fought her way from Owlsden to the head of the ski run to keep her rendezvous with Michael Harrison. Too, she had the strong feeling that none of this could actually be transpiring, that it was all much too silly and childish to be real. A dream. A nightmare. And with that notion hovering at the back of her mind, the terror was cut even further until there was nothing at all to occupy her mind but the plodding steps of the dance. If she danced, if she cooperated and moved forward around the fire, then it would all be over sooner than it otherwise might, and she could go home and rest… and wake up from the dream…

“Move!”

“Faster!”

The chants were manic now, pitched in higher voices, the words coming so fast they tumbled over one another.

Then she saw something so incredible at the perimeter of the dancing circle that it shattered her mental lethargy in the instant and filled her with the energy of pure, unrelieved horror. Her heart speeded, and her throat constricted in the initial puckering of a scream.

“Faster!”

“Move!”

The flames danced along with the worshipers, rising and falling in their rhythm, surged higher and suddenly changed color: blue.

The thing that prowled beyond the dancing circle now kept pace with Katherine, with no other dancer but her, its fierce red eyes fixed upon her face. Its stare was obsessive, cold and patently evil. She did not want to think about it, to acknowledge it, but she had no choice in the matter. It was a wolf…

No, not a wolf, she told herself as it padded along beside her, not a dozen feet away. Just a dog.

The switches came down harder than ever.

“Faster!”

Just a dog.

She passed Michael. He was not dancing, but he was chanting even louder than the others, holding a book in his open hands as if he were a minister with the Bible. She was sure, whatever the nature of the tone, it was not the Bible.

“Move!”

The wolf seemed to be grinning at her. Its jaws gaped, revealing rows of huge, white teeth, the red maw beyond them, the lolling tongue. It was clearly a wolf, not a dog, and one of the largest wolves that she had ever seen, nearly as large as a man, with shoulders broad enough to carry the weight of a rider.

Now, that was an insane thought. Who would want to ride a wolf?

The fire changed color once again, crackling loudly as some chemical was tossed into it: green…

A nightmare, nothing more, had to be.

The wolf raised up onto its hind paws for a brief moment, quite as if it were attempting to stand like a man, and then it fell back, unable to perform the feat

Somewhere close at hand, something made a strange, low rumbling noise. When Katherine tried to locate it and understand it, she realized that she was listening to the scream that had been trapped in her throat but which was now issuing from her as an agonizingly hoarse moan.

Fire: orange.

“Move!”

She tripped, did not fall, wished that she had fallen, found herself moving forward again. Her body obeyed the thumping drive of the chants as if she had been entranced and had no control over herself.

The wolf tried to leap onto its hind feet again, failed again, dropped onto all fours.

It watched her.

She could sense an approaching end to the ceremony, and she did not want to face the ultimate moment. It couldn't happen, of course. The wolf was only a wolf, not a manifestation of a demon. Still, she did not want to reach the point of the ceremony.

The wolf tried to stand a third time. This time, it actually achieved its purpose, whirled about with the music of the worshipers' voices, leaping clumsily forward on its hind feet, watching her intently, watching…

She tried to mutter a prayer, but she could not get the words out — as if something were preventing her from praying.

The wolf howled and—

Everything came to a sudden, unexpected halt as a shotgun blast exploded in the trees and echoed deafeningly through the thick trunks of the pine trees. The moment the echo died sufficiently for him to be heard, Alex Boland shouted: “Don't move!”