Dance with the Devil

CHAPTER 19

Since the telephone wires were on the same poles as the power lines, Owlsden had been cut off from outside communications simultaneously with its loss of light and heat, and it was not possible for them to ring up Constable Carrier and arrange to have him assume responsibility for the prisoners. Leo Franks donned skis and went down the slopes into town to rouse the policeman from his bed and to arrange for a couple of deputies to make the return trip up on the ski lift.

All of the cultists except Michael Harrison were herded into the library where Mason Keene and Alton Harle kept a watch over them with two loaded shotguns. Katherine thought that, from the expressions on their faces, it was clear that neither Keene nor Harle would hesitate in pulling the trigger if that was their last recourse to keep the mob in line. Michael was taken to the dining room downstairs, where the other fireplace was in operation, and he was placed in a chair against the wall where Alex could tram a rifle squarely on his chest.

“Is that necessary?” Lydia asked.

“Yes,” Alex said. The tone of his voice brooked no debate, but she was not the sort of woman to be easily dissuaded.

She said, “But he doesn't even seem to be aware of us.”

“It could be an act,” Alex said.

Lydia said, “You can see that it is no act. It's genuine enough. That poor boy is no longer with us.”

By heating the milk at the fireplace, Patricia Keene had made hot chocolate for those who wanted it. Katherine held a mug of it now and sipped cautiously at the steamy liquid, slowly thawing out as it ran down her throat and warmed her stomach.

“How do you feel?” Lydia asked her.

“Better,” she said.

“What an ordeal!”

“Less than it might have been if Alex hadn't chanced along.”

Alex snorted good-naturedly. “It wasn't chance, believe me. I knew that something could happen tonight, what with a major snow coming, and Yuri dead only a day. I went into town this morning and brought Alton and Leo back with me after dark, hid them both upstairs so that, if the house was being watched, they might pass by unseen.”

“Then it was one of them that followed me upstairs, when I was getting ready to leave Owlsden tonight,” Katherine said.

“Alton, in fact,” Alex said. “He admitted to me that he had been clumsy about it, and he looked like a whipped dog when he reported that you'd fooled him at the kitchen door. God, did we scramble then!”

“How did he know to follow me, though?” she asked.

“It was easy enough to see that Michael had contacted you on the phone, just before the power blackout, and that he had told you something to get you out of Owlsden. I heard enough of the conversation to tell that, and I guessed that he was warning you against me.”

“He was.”

“He's always hated me,” Alex said.

Katherine said, “It seemed to be the other way around, though, as if you hated him for no reason.”

“I disliked him, because I knew that he couldn't be trusted. All through school, I'd been the subject of his scorn and his clever plots to humiliate me. No one ever believed he was purposefully humiliating me, because he was so careful and so cunning about it.”

“Like when he knocked you down during our walk the other day,” she said, holding the warm mug in both hands.

“Like then, yes.”

“I thought you were crazy for thinking it was more than an accident.”

“I know what you thought, and I was angry with you for siding with him, even though I should have realized how bad I was making myself look and how logical his story seemed to be. But you can be sure that he saw us going up that street, circled to another block, went up faster than we did, turned a corner as planned and — boom, down I go in the snowbank.”

Michael appeared not to hear any of it, and he stared at that other world more intently than ever.

“He seemed so positive, so cheerful,” Katherine said. She was still having a battle with herself, trying to come to terms with herself and gain an understanding of why she had so woefully misjudged nearly everyone involved in this affair.

“And you are naturally disposed to like everyone with that sort of attitude,” Alex said. He was not being sarcastic or even scornful, but genuinely sympathetic.

“Isn't everyone?” she asked.

“To some degree.”

“Well, then—”

“But not to the degree you are so disposed,” he added. He looked at her and smiled, his dark eyes flickering with a reflection of the fire in the hearth. “Or to the degree that mother is. You are both chronic optimists, two of a kind.”

“Alex, really! Give us more credit for judgment than that!” Lydia said a bit huffily. “Not chronic optimists.”

“Yes, chronic. Neither of you wants to admit that there could be anything nasty in anyone. You want to see the world as one big rosy playground where everyone loves everyone else and where the evil people are always strangers that you'll never meet.”

Katherine was struck by his concise summation of her entire life-philosophy, but Lydia was less impressed. She said, “Isn't that a nice way to see the world, though?”

“No,” he said. “Because the world really isn't that way, and wishing that it were will not change it one little bit.”

“He's right,” Katherine said. “I disliked him and his friends solely because they were more pessimistic than optimistic. And because of that difference, I immediately categorized them, labeled them, decided they were capable of evil only because they were different than I was. And because Michael was so friendly, so optimistic, I liked him and thought he could do only good. I wasn't using my head, just my heart, and I see now that's no way to get through the world.”

“Because,” Alex elaborated, “not everyone who smiles and is nice to you has decent human motives. A smile can be a front far more easily than a frown can be, a prop to make you think the way the other person wants you to think.”

“You sound positively cynical,” Lydia said.

“No, just realistic,” he said.

Katherine said. “I think it's going to be good for me to be around you, Alex. You'll provide me with an outlook that I obviously need.”

“And it'll be good for me to be around you,” he said, smiling at her. “Sometimes, my pessimism may get just a bit too strong, as you have pointed out.”

She blushed but could not control it and quickly took a sip of her hot chocolate.

Then she looked at Harrison.

His mouth was open, and he was breathing heavily, but his eyes still dwelt beyond the walls of the room.

There was a sudden resurgence of the sound of wind as the kitchen door was opened at the end of the corridor only a few feet beyond the room in which they waited, then the sound of several men slapping themselves to beat the cold from their clothes, then voices.

“They're here,” Alex said. “Patricia, would you go see to heating more milk for the Constable and his men?”

“Right away,” the pretty woman said, leaving the dining room in a rustle of pajamas and fluffy dressing robe.

A moment after she had gone, Constable Cartier entered the room, followed by two deputies and Leo Franks. “Colder than the North Pole out there,” he said, nodding at Lydia.

“Patricia's gone to make hot chocolate,” Lydia said. “She'll have it in a few minutes.”

Cartier smiled, then looked at Alex who held the rifle in his lap, pointed at Michael “I hope you know what you've done, son.”

“And what have I done?” Alex asked.

“For one thing, you've taken the law into your own hands,” Cartier said, unzipping his thermal jacket.

Alex tensed visibly, then slowly relaxed as he said, “And what would you have had me do, wait until they had a chance to murder Katherine like they did Yuri?”

“Be careful of your accusations,” Cartier said.

“They're facts.”

“I hope you have proof—”

Leo interrupted. “I didn't take the time to tell him the whole story, Alex. Perhaps you'd better fill him in.”

“Sit down,” Alex directed. “It'll take a minute or two.”

Cartier looked directly at Michael for the first time and said, “Mr. Harrison, you'll have your own chance to tell us what happened whenever this one is finished with his…” His voice trailed out as he saw the vacant stare in Michael's eyes.

“You see?” Alex asked.

Cartier nodded and sat down, while his deputies remained standing on either side of the dining room doors. “You had better tell me everything that happened,” the policeman said, as if it were his own idea to begin that way.

Alex did just that, told it concisely and finished just as Patricia returned with four mugs of hot chocolate for the newcomers. For a while, no one said very much as the cold men sipped the chocolate and let the shivers drain out of them.

Then the constable turned toward Katherine and said, “Will you verify what he's said — in court if necessary?”

“It's all true,” Katherine replied. “Of course I'll verify it.”

“Well, well, well,” he said, raising his mug and finishing the hot chocolate in several long gulps.

“What now?” Lydia asked.

Cartier looked at Michael. “I supposed we have to transport him and his entire crew down the mountain — though I'd like to wait here until morning before trying that.”

“No problem,” Lydia said. “There are plenty of bedrooms if you don't mind sleeping in the cold — or you can curl up on the divans down here.”

Cartier nodded, yawned. “I dread telling his father,” he said. “I'm going to have a fight on my hands to make him believe a word of it.”

“He'll believe,” Lydia said. “He only has to look.”

“Well…” Cartier said, standing up, stretching.

Alex said, “Wait.”

“Yes?”

“Aren't you forgetting something?” Alex asked.

Cartier wrinkled his brow in concentration, wiped a hand across his face as if to pull off some film that was keeping him from seeing things properly. “What?” he finally asked.

“Aren't you going to question him?”

“Right now?”

“Yes.”

“I thought it could wait.”

“I'd prefer to hear what he'll say now.”

Cartier looked at Michael. “Maybe he won't say anything.”

“Maybe. But if s worth a try. I want to know why he was messed up in the Satanic stuff.”

“Those people won't have good reasons,” Cartier said. “You expect them to have it all logically worked out? They won't. They're a bunch of crazies, more or less.”

“Just a few questions,” Alex insisted.

Cartier looked at Lydia, saw that she was not going to help him this time, hitched a chair up in front of Michael Harrison and said, “Okay, just a few. Got any in mind?”

“See if you can get him to talk first.”

Cartier passed a hand in front of Michael's eyes, grunted when they didn't blink. He said, “Mr. Harrison? Mike?”

Mike did not respond.

“Mike, can you hear me?”

Harrison blinked rapidly, twice, as if something were in his eyes, but gave no indication that he even knew there were other people in the room with him — or, indeed, that he was in a room in Owlsden.

Cartier put one hand on the man's shoulder and let it rest there a moment as if he hoped that alone would cause some reaction, then gently shook Michael until it was plain to everyone present that he was not going to generate a response that way.

“Mike,” Alex said, leaning forward and assuming command of the interrogation without being asked.

Harrison stared into another reality.

“Mike, this is Alex Boland.”

“Alex, please be careful,” Lydia said, pulling her robe closer to her. “Don't upset him.”

Alex persisted. “Mike, are you listening? Do you know who I am?”

Harrison's gaze appeared to shift, to draw back from the edge of eternity to a point much closer the reality of this moment, of this room and these awful circumstances. But that might have been a momentary illusion, something that they all wanted to see and therefore had thought they did see.

“Mike?” Alex, continued. “Do you remember the fight we had in the woods, just a little while ago, when you were going to smash my head in with the butt of the shotgun?”

Harrison smiled, only briefly, the corners of his mouth twisted up in a quirky show of humor, and then he subsided into his stupor again, his shoulders even more slumped.

“You almost had me then,” Alex said. “Didn't you, Mike? You were only seconds away from killing me.”

To everyone's surprise, Michael Harrison answered him, though his expression had not changed, remained static and flat like a painting on cardboard. “Almost had you.”

“You're getting there!” Cartier whispered, excited at this very different sort of chase.

Alex put his gun on the table and drew his chair closer to Michael, hunched his shoulders to make his manner more confidential.

“Be careful,” Katherine said.

Alex turned, looked at her, winked without humor, looked back at his subject. He thought a moment, phrasing his next question, and said, “You would have liked to kill me, wouldn't you, Michael?”

“I've… always wanted to… kill you,” Michael said.

His face was still bland, pale as snow, his stare distant and unrelated to his words. It was almost as if his eyes and his body existed on a different dimensional plane than this one, while his voice was the only projection of himself that could reach through the veil and contact them.

In fact, Katherine thought uncomfortably, his whole demeanor was less like that of a man in a catatonic trance than like that of a soul halfway to hell, calling back across the abysses of death or possession…

“Why did you want to kill me?” Alex asked.

He got no answer.

“Why, Michael?”

As if it were an unspeakably agonizing chore to divulge his motives, but also as if he were compelled to do so, Michael began to speak, his voice low and tight, his eyes focused on hell. “They named the town after you, didn't they, after your grandfather? And there you were, on the old mountaintop, in this goddamned castle, looking down on all of it like a baron or a lord, respected by everyone. They don't respect my father, because they fear him. Fear and respect are two utterly different things, and neither thrives very well in the presence of the other, no matter what the armchair philosophers tell you. My father hires and fires, and they fear him and consequently respect none of us…” He paused, wrinkled his nose as if he had smelled something rancid. “Of course, my father generates fear in everyone he knows, whether or not he employs them. That was another thing I never could understand — why, on top of everyone's respect, you should have a family that loved you. My mother's dead, you know. And my father… doesn't love, not anyone. I still have marks on my back and bottom where he took the strap to me years ago…” Again, his voice trailed away, but again he began the subject anew. “In school, it was Alex Boland with the good grades, the best grades, always just a hair better than mine. I tried to beat you out in everything, but I was always second best — unless I tied you in a test with a perfect score, and that wasn't the same as triumph, not at all…”

Katherine listened, feeling sad and slightly ill as Michael catalogued all the things in which he had taken a second place to Alex, listing things that others would have considered triumphs of a first order but which he — in his obsessive competition of which Alex was never fully aware — put down as defeats.

“But why the Satanism?”

Michael licked his lips. “It was a way.”

“A way to what?”

“Strike back.”

“At me?” Alex asked.

“Yes.”

“You don't believe in that stuff—”

Michael's voice changed, grew more urgent, even while his gaze remained distant, unseeing. “I do believe. We have successfully summoned Him forth many times.”

“Satan?”

“Yes.”

“I don't believe it.”

Michael shifted in his chair, as if he were sitting on tacks and was in considerable pain. “You saw the wolf.”

“Did I?”

“K-Katherine did.”

“What wolf is this?” Alex asked.

“The wolf at the dance, in the woods, earlier tonight. It's Him, a manifestation that human eyes can accept.”

Cartier drew back, blinked, looked at Katherine and then, clearly not believing a word Michael said, shook his head sadly.

“Suppose you actually did summon the devil,” Alex said. “How could you use him to hurt me?”

“By having Him possess Katherine, to begin with,” Michael said.

Katherine shivered, tipped her mug of hot chocolate to her mouth and found that it was empty, put the mug on the table and looked back at the interrogation.

Michael said, “From the moment I watched you showing her the town, being oh so solicitous, I knew you were interested in her, that you liked her more than a little.”

Alex looked down at the floor, glanced quickly at Katherine and then away. “And you'd steal her away. That was my first punishment.”

“Yes.”

“What else?”

“When we had enough members in the cult,” he said, “I planned to summon up fire spirits. I planned to destroy Owlsden.”

“I see,” Alex said.

“It would have been a pleasure to watch all of you burn to death,” Michael said. He laughed shortly, like the bark of a dog, then slipped back into his semi-coma.

“Enough?” Carrier asked.

“Almost.”

“Finish it, then.”

Alex said, “Where did you get the key to Owlsden?”

“The carpenter in Saxonby, the one who does your work here, makes your keys.”

“He gave them to you?”

“Hardly,” Michael said. “But he orders his lumber from my father. I delivered it a few times, learned where he kept his master keys, found the one tagged for Owlsden and, when he was out of the shop, stole in and made myself a few duplicates.”

Michael sighed and turned away from the other man. He said, to Carrier, “Okay. He's yours from now on.”

Later that same evening, Alex asked Katherine into the kitchen, where they sat alone at the table, in the glow of the fireplace, and sipped two more mugs of hot chocolate. At first, she thought that there was something he wanted to discuss with her, but soon she realized that he just enjoyed her company and that he wanted to ramble on about anything that came to mind.

They had been there about an hour when she said, “Did you see a wolf in the woods tonight?”

He looked at her, held her gaze. “I saw a dog, a German Shepherd.”

“It looked more like a wolf to me,” she said.

He shook his head negatively, insistently. “It was a dog, probably belonged to one of them. We'll know in a couple of days, when they've all been properly questioned.”

“But,” she persisted, “it acted so strangely for a dog, getting onto its hind feet like that. It almost seemed to be — dancing.”

Alex rose and went to the window, looked out at the mounds of snow. She joined him as he said, “A trained dog, then.”

“Perhaps it really—”

Without warning, he turned and slipped both arms around her, drew her against him. “Am I being too bold?” he asked.

She laughed softly. “No.”

He leaned forward, placed his lips on hers and kissed her for a long while. “Too bold now?”

“No,” she said.

He kissed her again.

When they broke apart this second time, she said, “I can't help but feel that the wolf was more than a dog that—”

“Now,” he said, interrupting her, “you're the pessimist, and I'm the optimist. How did this reversal of roles come about so quickly?”

“Really, Alex, the whole thing scares me.”

“Let me tell you an old superstition.”

“I've heard enough of those lately, thank you.”

He kissed her nose and said, “This one is different. There is an old superstition that states that no evil can touch a man — no werewolf claw him, no vampire bite him, no devil claim him — if he loves someone and if someone loves him in return. Therefore, with a little time and a little trust, I think we can safely forget about the wolf. It won't be able to touch us.”

“Now,” she said, “you're getting a bit too bold.”

“I am?”

“Yes,” she said. “But tell me the same story tomorrow and see if I find it less forward than I do now.”

“Do you think you will?”

“That's a distinct possibility,” she said.

“I'll tell you that story every day from now on, if necessary,” Alex said. “Since you work here, I've got a captive audience.”

The snow had ceased altogether, and the wind was far less furious than it had been a few hours earlier. A pair of owls departed the rafters of the house, hooting as they began a search for prey. The sound of their hollow voices carried to Katherine and Alex and seemed, in their gentle way, to be presentiments for a more peaceful, happy future.