Dance with the Devil

CHAPTER 6

She retired early that night, showered, dressed for bed and lay down to sort out the events of the long and complicated day, trying to put them into some reasonable perspective. She was close to exhaustion, but she felt that she had to come to terms with the rather unpleasant developments and decide what she was going to do next — remain in Owlsden as Lydia's secretary and try to weather these strange events, or leave soon and search for another job that might be far less remunerative but easier on the nerves.

One of the first things the constable had done was to call the Bolands and let them know that the Satanists had not only been at work again, but had violated the very church they attended regularly and which Lydia's father had planned and constructed with his own funds. In an hour, thanks to the quick work of the plow that had opened the road that morning and early afternoon, Lydia and Alex were there to look over the damage and assess the insanity of those who had been responsible. Throughout the re-examination of the church, Katherine had noticed a smug look on the constable's face. He was a thin, dark little man named Cartier, and he was not good at disguising an I-told-you-so self-righteousness Lydia had the good taste to ignore but which drew Alex's ire in short order.

The afternoon had been spent in making preliminary plans to catch the Satanists in their work if they dared be so bold about it again. Lydia pledged a substantial sum to the town treasury for the maintenance of a larger parttime deputy force to keep the streets and buildings of the town under constant observation during the night hours.

Michael Harrison, who was sitting beside Katherine in the conference room of the town hall, leaned toward her and whispered, “They made fun of all this until it touched something of theirs.”

Though Michael had been quiet, Alex heard him and challenged him on the point. The disagreement soon became a full-fledged argument — though the greatest part of the shouting and gesticulating was on Alex's side. Michael answered calmly, rationally, though sometimes a bit bitterly, only to further infuriate Alex by his reserved manner. At one point, Alex struck him as a challenge to a fight and had to be restrained by the constable who was clearly enjoying the confrontation.

After that, the meeting broke up, and Katherine rode back to Owlsden with the Bolands. Lydia attempted to relax everyone with gay observations on the weather and the efficiency of the plows but had to give up long before they reached the tall oak doors of the ancestral house. Alex, in a brooding mood, did not say anything at all.

At dinner, Alex had begun a rambling monologue whose subject was almost exclusively Michael Harrison, opening a vein of anger, dislike and bitterness that was unpleasant to behold. Too, he put forth the opinion that Harrison himself might very well be behind these recent Satanic ceremonies and felt — in some way that Katherine could not comprehend — that Harrison was doing this only as a means to get to the Roxburgh-Boland family and embarrass them.

When his mother asked him please to cease that line of conversation, he challenged her on her defense of Harrison and left the table in a huff after upsetting his water glass and breaking the tiny, fragile wine taster beside it.

Lydia apologized for Alex when he was gone and tried to pass off his maniac behavior as nothing more than a case of bad nerves. However, even she did not seem to believe that it was as simple as that, and she excused herself for the remainder of the evening as soon as dessert had been served.

Now, alone in her room, Katherine, considering the drawbacks to life in Roxburgh and Owlsden, began to make a mental list of debits that she had been willing to ignore until the events of the afternoon. First of all, there was this whole cult business, this sacrificing of animals and playing at devil worship. She now saw that it was far more serious than she had at first thought. As Michael said the first time they had talked about it, though Satanism was silly and unbelievable, the adherents of such an odd faith might very well be dangerously mentally unbalanced. And since they held some ceremonies in the forest behind Owlsden, perhaps one was not safe alone, at night, as Yuri had protested — though the danger lay in mortal agents, not in supernatural stalkers. Secondly, she thought she would not be able to abide Alex Boland's increasingly unpleasant temperament for long without telling him exactly what she thought of his childish outbursts. He seemed to get depressed too quickly, to react too suddenly to even the slightest irritant. And what was this obsession with Michael Harrison all about? At times, Alex was downright slanderous when he talked of Mike… Thirdly, there was the townspeople's underlying envy of the Roxburgh-Boland family which she had not noticed until this afternoon when the constable and various other town officials got such a kick out of proving that Lydia and Alex were wrong on the question of the Satanists. Katherine supposed that all wealthy people were subjected to this kind of attitude now and again, but, even so, she felt that it proved the existence of a minor streak of hypocrisy in what was reputedly a happy town. Fourthly, there was Alex's treatment of his mother which, at dinner this evening, had ceased to be exemplary and became inexcusably rude. His use of a few four-letter words at the table had visibly shaken his mother, and his overall temper had thoroughly blighted the evening. If this continued, Katherine could hardly hold her thoughts in, but would be forced to give him a hefty piece of her mind.

Something else that bothered her was the slowly developing relationship between Michael Harrison and herself. In just two days, they had progressed from a casual friendliness to a kiss in the vestibule of the church, a kiss he had seemed to mean whole-heartedly and which she had taken without reserve. She remembered, now, how her heart had beaten more quickly when he had kissed her and how the kiss had instantly calmed the terror generated by the discovery of the two sacrificed animals on the altar… She had never been one for forming such close attachments in so little time, and she was afraid that exterior circumstances were driving her into an affectionate relationship with Michael that she did not actually feel. Among strangers, disconcerted by the gruesome events of the past two days, perhaps she was too eager for companionship to think straight. Yet… yet a curious warmth stole over her even now, when she remembered his arm around her shoulders.

Add one more debit to the list. If she did find herself increasingly attracted to Michael Harrison— and if he became increasingly attracted to her as he already seemed to be — it would be all that much more difficult to listen to Alex and his anti-Harrison tirades.

She was about to begin listing the credits attached to remaining here at Owlsden when someone knocked lightly on her door.

“Yes?”

The knock came again, as softly as before.

She got out of bed, drew on her robe and went to the door. She opened it to find Yuri standing in the dimly-lighted hallway.

“What is it, Yuri?”

“There's something I want you to see, if you haven't already.”

“What's that?”

“May I come in?” he asked. He wiped at his forehead, pulling off a film of perspiration. A great deal of white showed around his eyes, and a nervous tic had begun to distort the left corner of his mouth.

Another debit. She had forgotten that Yuri must have some ulterior motive for trying to convince her that he believed in these superstitions.

She opened the door wider, motioned him inside, and closed it after him.

“Come to the window,” he said, “and turn out the lamp as you do.”

She did both things and immediately saw what had brought him here. Down by the edge of the woods, a fire glowed among the trees, and a number of dark figures stood around it. From this distance, it was difficult to see what they were doing, though they all appeared to have their hands raised to the sky as if summoning a spirit from the void.

“How long have they been there?” she asked.

“I think not long — fifteen minutes or half an hour.”

The figures around the fire moved.

“What are they doing?”

He said, “Dancing.”

“They're initiating a new member?”

“So it would seem,” he said. His voice was quavery, as if he were genuinely terrified of the spectacle. His acting was good, she decided, almost too good not to be real.

“If this has happened here twice before,” Katherine said, “why didn't Lydia and Alex call the constable?”

“I don't think they've been aware of the dances,” Yuri said.

“You didn't tell them?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, Alex was in town with his friends on the first two occasions, and I did not want to excite Lydia while she was alone.”

“And for another?”

“If I told Alex that the cultists were down there, he'd want to barge in on them by himself. He doesn't fear them, and he's — impulsive. If anything happened to him, I'd have to blame myself for getting him into the act.”

“But surely they've seen these fires—”

“Their bedrooms face the front of the house,” Yuri said. “Besides, even if they were in rooms from which they could watch this — this dance, they might not notice the flames because of the draperies.”

“Let's go get Alex now,” she said.

“I can't allow that,” Yuri said. “If he goes down there and gets hurt—”

“Call the constable then.”

Yuri shrugged wearily. “The cultists will be gone by then. Look, even now the bonfire dances higher, brighter. That always happens just toward the end of the ceremony.”

She saw that what he said was true as the flames leapt high in the cold air, abruptly metamorphosed from orange to green, a hellish sickly color that threw eerie shadows across the snow. Subsiding for a moment, they growled tall again, this time a bluish color like spears of summer sky stabbing at the snow-sodden branches of the nearest trees. Then they fell into orange and leapt up red. Then green again, higher than ever, brighter than before.

“How do they make the flames change color?” she asked.

He shrugged again. “Some special incantation, perhaps.”

“That's silly.”

“What else, then?”

“A handful of some chemical powder might cause that,” she said, biting at her lower lip.

He looked chagrined and said, “Possibly.”

She could not believe, for a minute, that he had not thought of the same thing himself. What was he trying to prove by playing this superstitious Romanian role?

The figures moved in a last frenzy of dance, too fast to make out the details. A moment later, the fire was put out and the night was back to blot out any traces of the ritual.

“I didn't see Satan appear,” she said, watching Yuri closely for a reaction.

“Perhaps the would-be cultist did not appeal to Satan and did not warrant a personal demonic visit. On the other hand, we might just have been too far away to see.”

“Have you ever seen a wolflike creature, a leopard or panther?”

“No more than this,” he said.

“There you are.”

“That doesn't mean there wasn't one down there.”

She turned away from the window and said, “Well, I thank you for letting me know about the show—”

“But you haven't changed your opinion,” he said, smiling sadly at her. “You still think that I'm a nice, quiet old crackpot.”

“I don't think that.”

“But you're not convinced.”

“Not convinced,” she agreed.

“Do you plan to lock your door?”

“Yes,” she said. “I can do that much.”

He nodded and went to the door. His entire attitude was one of the wise man trying to distribute a valued truth which no one else finds the least bit worthwhile. He did not belabor the point as a madman or fanatic might, but retired humbly to await another opportunity to make a point. Only a master actor would think to handle the role that way.

What did that mean, then? That he wasn't acting at all. No, she decided, it simply meant that he is a master actor.

“Goodnight, Miss Sellers,” he said. “I hope I haven't disturbed your sleep.”

“Not at all.”

He departed, closing the door quietly.

Katherine looked at the bedside clock and saw that the time was 12:45. At the window, she tried to stare through the syrupy veil of darkness to see if anyone lingered at the perimeter of the woods, but she could not catch a glimpse of anything out of the ordinary, only the soft glow of moonlight caught in the snow.

In bed again, with all of the lights out and her door locked, she finished listing the credits that accompanied her job and compared them with the previously listed debits. She could not decide which group outweighed the other. But, always optimistic, she finally chose to remain on the job for a few more days in order to see if the atmosphere changed at all.

She never once considered that the atmosphere might change for the worse…

On the edge of sleep, she had such a crazy idea that it woke her completely, and she sat up in bed. She felt certain that Yuri was playing some sort of game, was trying to convince her that he was something he really was not. Couldn't she also explain Alex's odd behavior in the same way? Couldn't his hatred for Michael Harrison be feigned, his abrupt moods carefully calculated? And couldn't Lydia's almost manic cheerfulness, her beatific acceptance of everything, be cultured, a facade? Everyone in Owlsden might be playing parts in some grand act of…

Of what?

Then she told herself this was silly paranoia, the kind of thing you might come up with when you were half asleep. Awake, you could see how absurd it was.

She stretched out again, tossed her hair away from her face, hugged the second pillow to her and, listening to the hooting of the owls overhead, soon went to sleep. She had no nightmares.