by Dean Koontz
"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.
CHAPTER 7
Wednesday morning, she ate in her room again, dressed and was downstairs by a quarter of ten. Lydia had left word that she would be in town, talking to the constable about the night patrols to be initiated and that Katherine was free until lunch at one.
Back in her room, she changed into her skiing outfit and went downstairs again, intent on visiting the site of the previous night's bonfire. She wondered what the cultists might have left behind. She did not think this had been a bloody ritual and besides, she was by now rather numbed to the remains of blood sacrifices.
In the kitchen, Patricia Keene was making a fruit salad out of strawberries, fresh peaches, fresh seedless grapes, apples, mandarin oranges and bananas.
"That looks delicious," Katherine said.
The woman smiled and thanked her. "Going skiing?" she asked. The effort of conversation, on even such a small scale, made her uneasy. She was used to being quiet and left alone and preferred that.
"No," Katherine said. "Just out for a walk."
"Not to the woods, I hope."
Surprised, Katherine said, "Yes, down to the woods."
"There was a dance there last night, you know."
"Does Yuri tell you his stories too?"
The woman immediately sensed the skepticism in Katherine's voice and, apparently hurt, lapsed into silence once more. Then she said, in a barely audible murmur, "Just be careful."
Outside, the air was perfectly still, undisturbed even by the smallest breeze, the snow lying at her feet like a burial shroud.
A flight of dark geese crossed the calm, quiet sky, heading north in a clearly defined wedge formation. They looked so free and aloof that she wished, for a moment, she could be one of them.
Even in daylight, the woods at the end of the lawn looked dark and foreboding, the trunks of the trees packed tightly together, forming pools of shadow so deep that they made the snow seem whiter by contrast.
Katherine started walking toward the place where the bonfire must have been and had gone a dozen steps before she realized that she was walking in another pair of footprints-footprints which lead from the trees to the back of Owlsden, marching in the opposite direction. Stooping, she examined the white crust close by and saw that there was no other set of prints that lead from the house to the woods. Besides, the edges of the prints were slightly drifted in-which meant they must have been made the previous night when there had yet been a ghost of a breeze to stir the snow... Standing, she placed her hand over her eyes to cut down on some of the intense snow-glare, but she could not see any prints leading from the house. Someone, then, had come out of the woods and entered Owlsden last night.
It appeared deceptively calm, smoke curling lazily out of a couple of fireplace chimneys.
Pondering the significance of her unsettling discovery and more than a little ill-at-ease, Katherine stepped aside of the second set of prints and followed them down the curve of the lawn to the perimeter of the woods where she found the site of the bonfire. The snow had been melted in a ten-foot radius, and nearby pine boughs had been badly singed. In the snow surrounding the bare circle, a dozen or more pairs of booted feet had tramped in agitation or excitement.
In the cold morning, with the harsh, snow-reflected sunlight behind her, Katherine found it difficult to believe that primitive rituals had been enacted here. Indeed, it was easier to believe that the bonfire was only a campfire and that the ceremony had merely been a hotdog and marshmallow roast.
She came across red-brown stains in the snow.
Blood.
She looked away from them and went on, slowly circling the site of the fire, staring intently at the ground for something less gruesome but ultimately more interesting.
The branches of the trees above her began to rustle slightly as the stillness was broken by cool breezes from the northwest.
When she had nearly gone all the way around the charred circle, she found something that stopped her cold and made her want to turn and bolt for the house: in the snow, in full impression, were the paw marks of some animal-a wolf or, more likely, a large cat. The prints lead on for a couple of yards, nine marks in all, then disappeared among the mass of other prints, human prints. She stared at them for a long while, remembering Yuri's warnings. Then since she could not establish any satisfactory explanation, she tried to forget them. It was better to dismiss them altogether, she decided, than to allow herself even to consider Yuri's absurd stories.
On her way back to Owlsden, she carefully quartered the large yard, striking first to the left and then back to the right, searching for a pair of footprints other than her own that lead from the house and into the forest. She gained the kitchen door without locating them, and she went reluctantly into the deserted kitchen.
It seemed fairly obvious to Katherine that one of the cultists had a key to the kitchen door and had come there directly after the conclusion of the Satanic ceremonies the previous night. That could indicate that a member of the household was a devil worshiper who had gone to the fire site by a different route in the company of his strange companions, but who had taken the more direct route home again when the ritual was over with.
But she didn't want to believe that. As she mentally reviewed the list of people who lived in Owlsden, she felt certain none of them could be cultists.
The only other possibility was that one of the devil worshipers had illegally obtained a key to the house and had come here last night on some private mission without the knowledge or consent of anyone in the household. A stranger with a key to Owlsden could be more easily dealt with than a member of the household who was also a cultist. One was simple criminal activity, open to the usual rules of deduction, while the other was a problem of psychology completely beyond her ken. She much preferred it to be this way-and, therefore, in her mind at least, it was.
She took off her wet boots and stood them on the rubber mat just inside the door, went upstairs and changed clothes again. As she stood at the full-length mirror, brushing her golden hair over her shoulders, she decided to tell Yuri what she had found at the earliest opportunity. He would know how to handle it without upsetting Lydia-unless the role he was playing required him to respond differently than she expected...
Later, when she started out of the room to keep her luncheon engagement with Lydia, she found that she had unconsciously locked her bedroom door, even though it was the middle of the day. She shook her head, silently berating herself, unlocked it and went on her way. Was she beginning to put credence in Yuri's tales?
CHAPTER 8
Lydia was in an exceptionally cheerful mood at lunch, quite as if she had never heard a single word about the devil worshipers who had defiled her father's church, and as if the confrontation the evening before between her and her son had never taken place. She and Katherine ate lunch alone in the smallest of the three dining rooms: cottage cheese and cinnamon, fruit salad and English muffins, all light but filling.
Katherine did not mention the bonfire or the things she had found during her morning inspection, but she was coincidentally afforded the opportunity to learn how many people had keys to the mansion. At the very beginning of the meal, Lydia handed her a set of keys to all the main locks in the house and said, "Now you can come and go as you please."
"I'll guard them well," Katherine said, tucking them immediately into her purse.
Lydia laughed. "Actually, if Yuri didn't insist, we'd probably have the doors standing open all the time. Locks are a bother in a town the size of Roxburgh where your criminals are numbered on one hand-and are usually nothing more serious than chronic drunkards. As it is, we're always having to order new sets of keys to hand out to friends."
"People outside the household have keys to the doors?" Katharine asked, trying to keep her voice light so that the question would seem more like conversational banter than anything more serious.
"My, yes!" Lydia said. "I have a couple of friends that knew my husband when he was alive, and I see they have keys so they can use the books in the library even when the household is closed up for our spring and fall holidays. Then, half a dozen or so of Alex's friends have keys so they can use the projection room or the library or the pool while we're gone. We take three weeks off in May and three in September, to travel."
"I see," Katherine said. Eight keys outside the household. Even if those eight people did not share their keys with others, there were now thirteen suspects who had easy access to the mansion, thirteen including the family and servants who could have been at that bonfire the night before. "Do you think that's wise?" Katherine asked.
"To give out keys?"
"Yes."
"My dear, don't start talking at me like Constable Cartier. I've had enough of him this morning!"
"How did it go in town?"
"Tooth and nail," Lydia said, chuckling. "He would have preferred to have a free reign on who would be earning the overtime money I've put up for increased patrols. Interestingly enough, he already had every man on both sides of his family listed for duty. I had to straighten him out on that, but now I think well actually get some good men working. If you can imagine, he even had his ninety-eight-year-old grandfather listed for six hours overtime duty a night!"
"Sounds like you need a more reliable constable," Katherine said, grinning.
"Cartier is fine," Lydia said. "He is not particularly clever. But he can handle the drunks and the fist-fights, and he can organize a strawberry festival in the square with more aplomb than anyone I can imagine. In this case, he saw a chance to benefit by the community's need, but he was properly embarrassed and penitent when I helped him to see the light." She chuckled again, having obviously enjoyed the morning.
They finished lunch and retired to the library where Lydia looked over the day's mail she had picked up while in town. She dictated two personal notes and signed three blank checks which Katherine was to fill out and mail in payment of bills received. While Katherine was working, Lydia read from a novel she had bought a week ago and was just now getting around to. Afterwards, they talked, mostly about books, until Lydia went upstairs for a pre-dinner nap.
"Dinner will be earlier tonight, at six-thirty," she said before she left. "Some of Alex's friends are due for cocktails and conversation in the recreation room at eight. Alex asked me to invite you in his behalf."
"I'm afraid I'd be out of place-"
"Nonsense," Lydia said. "I am not going, because I would certainly be out of place in a roomful of energetic young people. But I know Alex would be hurt if you did not attend."
"All right," she said.
"Don't be glum about
it," Lydia said. "They're a likeable bunch and easy to get to know. It won't take you long to break the ice."
Katherine said, "Are these the friends who have keys to Owlsden?"
"Why do you ask?" Lydia inquired, a puzzled frown on her face.
Katherine realized that her approach had not been nearly so subtle as she would have liked-had not been subtle at all, in fact. She said, in an effort to qualify her curiosity, "I just wondered if these were Alex's very best friends..."
Lydia accepted that as sufficient explanation. "Oh, I'd say most of these kids have keys," she said. "But I never thought that they might regard them as status symbols, signs of favor or what-have-you. Perhaps Alex will have to hand out a larger number of keys in order to avoid hurting anyone's feelings. It's silly that such a thing could be considered a sign of special favor instead of a convenience, but I can see that some people might be upset at remaining-unkeyed."
After Lydia had gone upstairs to take her nap, and after Katherine had finished her secretarial chores- addressing envelopes for the letters she had written, filling out checks and balancing the figures in the household accounts ledger-she went looking for Yuri and discovered that he was in town on business. She was irritated at not being able to tell him about the footprints and about her suspicions that unwanted persons had entered the house during the night, then decided that suppertime would be soon enough.
The information was not that urgent, after all.
"-has no less than five and no more than twenty years to do something about the population problem."
"Nothing will be done."
"I agree. Nothing will be done until it's too late for-"
"You're expecting too much of the world leaders when you suppose they're even going to let us all survive long enough to face a desperate population problem. I tell you that-"
Katherine sat in a large, brown crushed velvet easy chair near the fireplace in the recreation room, listening to Alex's friends as they argued about a handful of the world's problems as if they actually had some special sort of answers for them. But that was the bad part of it: they had no answers. All they had was a deep-seated pessimism, always expecting the worst, making gloomy predictions of doom. She did not like them, chiefly for this reason.