Dance with the Devil

by Dean R. Koontz

  She did not dream but slept so deeply that she might never have awakened — except for the scream of agony that echoed through the house at shortly past two in the morning. It woke everyone and caused the owls to begin hooting in panic above her head…

  She was out of the bed and into her slippers and robe before half a minute had passed, though she made no move to unbolt the door.

  A moment later, someone rattled the knob, then knocked.

  “Who is it?” she asked, having a distinct feeling of deja vu.

  “Katherine?” Lydia asked.

  She went quickly to the door, threw the bolt back and opened it. Lydia was standing in the well-lighted corridor, wearing a flowing yellow bedgown, her face weary and lined more than it appeared to be in daylight. Alex stood behind her in a lounging robe and pajamas, his dark eyes swiftly assessing her condition and the state of the room beyond.

  “What was the scream?” Katherine asked.

  “I thought perhaps it was you,” Lydia said. She took Katherine's hand and squeezed it. “After that warning on your door last night…”

  Alex interrupted, speaking in a clipped, nervous tone. “I told you, Mother, that it was a man's scream.”

  To the left, Patricia Keene and her husband appeared, blinking sleepily, attired in nightclothes. “Is everyone all right?” she asked.

  “Fine here,” Lydia said. “What was the noise?”

  “Someone screamed,” Patricia Keene said. Her husband nodded.

  Alex said, “Where is Yuri?”

  “In his room?” Lydia suggested.

  As a group, they went down the corridor and knocked at his door. When he did not answer, they opened it and looked in. He was not there or, as Alex reported, in his private bath either.

  “I think the scream was downstairs,” Mason Keene said. His voice sounded thick, as if he had been drinking and was still a little tight, despite his sleep. Was that something else about Owlsden that had been hidden from her?

  “I'll go look,” Alex said.

  “No,” Lydia said. “We'll all go look.”

  In a close train, they went down the grand staircase and found, almost immediately, that the front door was standing open, a furious whirl of snow pouring in on the foyer carpet. Alex went and closed it, came back and said, “There are footprints in the snow, leading away from the house.”

  No one said anything until Katherine finally asked, “What next?”

  “We check the rooms down here,” Alex said, leading the way.

  They all knew what they were going to find. It was not any special extra-sensory perception, Katherine thought, not something you could call pre-cognition or “fey,” just a deep, animal dread that went even beyond the level of instinct.

  In the main drawing room, the furniture had been pushed back to make a circle for the ceremony. The wine-colored carpet was now marked with a number of chalk designs, and several thick, black candles burned on endtables all around. Yuri lay at the edge of the markings, sprawled on his face, his hands outstretched in front of him as if he were desperately reaching for something. He was clearly dead.

  Patricia Keene began to scream…

  CHAPTER 11

  “And then you found the body?” Cartier asked.

  Alex said, “Yes.”

  “Where it lies now?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn't move it at all?”

  “I didn't even touch it.”

  Constable Cartier consulted a small, black notebook which he had been glancing at throughout his interrogations of the people gathered in the library. Once, when he passed Katherine's chair and was holding the book lower than usual, she saw that it did not contain any writing at all, that his long and thoughtful glances at the supposedly incriminating list of facts it contained were nothing but staged expressions, phony. Ordinarily, she would have been amused by this, but she could not find a smile as long as Yuri was lying dead in the drawing room, currently guarded over by one of the two deputies that Cartier had brought with him.

  “Have you ever seen the knife before?” Cartier asked.

  “No.”

  “It is an antique knife, as you could have told from the handle, very ornate and lovely,” Cartier said. He looked in his notebook again, looked up when he adjudged a proper amount of time had passed. “It is just the sort of thing one might expect to find in the older rooms of Owlsden, the unremodeled rooms.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Alex asked. He was clearly angry at Cartier's smugness.

  “I am not suggesting anything,” the constable said, staring at the blank pages of the book. “All that I am doing is making an observation.”

  Alex snorted and shook his head. “And it's a muddle-headed observation,” he said. Patiently, as if he were talking to a child, he said, “That knife did not come from Owlsden.”

  “Alex, please see to it that you are more courteous to the constable,” Lydia said. She was sitting at her large desk, holding a cup of hot tea in both hands, though she had not, so far as Katherine had noticed, taken a single sip of the stuff.

  Alex flashed her an obvious look of exasperation, but he did not say anything further to Constable Cartier.

  The policeman turned to Katherine and said, “Miss Sellers, don't you find it odd that the devil's dances, the Satanic markings on your door, and now the murder of Yuri Selenov should all transpire in or around Owlsden?”

  “I don't understand what you mean?” She shifted in her chair, uncomfortable.

  He said, “Wouldn't it seem to you that there is more to this than a simple coincidence.”

  “Of course,” she said. Anyone could see it wasn't a coincidence that someone had been in the drawing room making Satanic ceremonial patterns on the carpet when Yuri surprised them.

  “Then, perhaps, someone in this house is a member of the cult that has, for eighteen months, been a nuisance around these parts.”

  “Now just a damn minute—” Alex began, rising swiftly from his chair.

  “Sit down, please,” Cartier said, suddenly embarrassed, jolted out of his previous delight in this abrupt switch of roles between the once-rich and once-powerful, and himself. He seemed to realize that he was not being entirely fair to them and that his bluntness had over-stepped some invisible boundary or other.

  “You cannot—” Alex began.

  “Alex, sit down, please,” Lydia said.

  He looked at his mother, still furiously angry, then shrugged his shoulders and returned to his seat.

  “Do you think anyone in Owlsden might be connected with this cult?” Cartier asked Katherine.

  She barely managed to avoid looking at Alex as she said, “Perhaps not anyone here — but someone else who has a key.”

  “Oh, for Christsake, we went through all of that before, Katherine!” Alex said.

  “Go through it again, for me,” Cartier said. She did, and when she was finished, the constable turned to Alex and Lydia and said, “I would like to have a list of names, everyone who has a key to Owlsden.”

  “That can be arranged,” Lydia said.

  “To no purpose,” Alex mumbled.

  When the constable had gotten the list and had taken time to look it over carefully, he said, “It would seem unlikely, but if we have any lead so far, it is one of the names on this list.” He tucked the list neatly in the notebook and put the notebook in his hip pocket. “I suppose we ought to be going now.”

  “Mr. Cartier?” Katherine asked.

  He turned, looking infinitely wearier than he had looked only a moment ago, no longer getting much enjoyment out of interrogating the wealthy. “Yes?”

  “What will be done with — with the body?”

  “We'll take it along with us,” he said. “We'll have to put it on ice until the state police have a chance to get into town and take the case from us.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  He shook his head. “Eight inches of new snow down already and as much as twenty more predicted, all dry
as powder and blown by a good wind. In another couple of hours, no one could get up to Owlsden — and in another six hours, no one will be driving in or out of Roxburgh itself, not even the state police.”

  “When will they get here?” she asked.

  “Depends on the wind once the snow has stopped. Could be as much as a week if the weather's as bad as it sometimes gets.”

  “A week! But what if the same people who killed Yuri are—”

  “They won't come back here,” Cartier said.

  “You can't be sure.”

  He smiled. “I can be sure. They'll know how hot the place is, how dangerous it would be to come here again and cause trouble.”

  “But they'll also know there isn't anyone here protecting the place. Can't you go ahead with the investigation until—”

  Obviously embarrassed, Cartier interrupted her. “Neither I nor any of my men could handle it properly. We haven't been trained for things like this, because we aren't accustomed to anything more troublesome in Roxburgh than drunks and marital quarrels. I'm afraid that we'd only mess up the trail if we started stomping around after clues, and then we'd be in hot water with the state boys. I've chalked the outline of the body in the den, to show where it fell, and I'd be pleased if none of you touched anything in that room until the state police can go over it with all their machines. Other than that, we all have to sit and wait out the storm.”

  “Couldn't they send someone in by helicopter?” Katherine asked.

  “Perhaps they could, but they won't. It isn't that much of a crime to them, one murder. Like I said, a couple of days or a week. Then they'll be here to handle it.”

  He nodded to Lydia and left the room.

  “With this snow,” Katherine said, “the carpenter won't be able to come and change the locks tomorrow, will he?”

  “No,” Alex said.

  Lydia said, “Don't worry, dear. I'm sure that Constable Cartier is right. Those terrible people, whoever they were, aren't going to risk returning to Owlsden in the near future.”

  “I hope you're right,” Katherine said.

  “I know I am.”

  The police trundled Yuri's blanket-wrapped corpse past the library door. The sight of it, like a bundle of weeds, caused Patricia Keene to break into low, mournful sobs.

  “There now, there now,” her husband said, patting her shoulder and awkwardly trying to cradle her against his chest. He was not a man easily able to offer consolation or comfort. “It's going to be perfectly all right, Pat. Everything is going to be fine.”

  Katherine wished that he were right. But she knew that he was wrong…

  CHAPTER 12

  The following day, Owlsden was suffused with a morbid air of death, a deep mood of brooding expectancy that ruled out any quick resumption of the routines of daily life. Outside, the snow still fell hard, with nearly twelve inches of new snow draped across the old, softening the land and the house like a burial shroud softens the harsh realities beneath it. Inside, Lydia remained in her room, uninterested in conversation or in going about the details of correspondence. She seemed to have been stricken more brutally by Yuri's sudden death than she had evidenced the night before. Patricia and Mason Keene kept to the kitchen, drinking coffee and talking in low voices — conversations which they ceased immediately when anyone entered their private domain. They were not bothering to produce any culinary masterpieces, for everyone had made it clear that food was not of much interest after the bloody events of the last several hours. Alex Boland went into town, using the ski slope, around ten o'clock and looked to be gone until evening, though Katherine had no idea what he was doing down there. It seemed to her that his time might be better spent in finding some way to secure the doors to Owlsden before nightfall brought a new period of anxiety to all of them.

  Katherine remained in her room, like Lydia, and tried to read. When she grew hungry enough to force food into her stomach and keep it there, she nibbled at the things in the refrigerator in her closet. She spent long periods of time at the window, staring out at the clean landscape, the sharp, relentless, white glare of the untouched snow. She found herself methodically adding up the credits and the debits of life at Owlsden, as she had done once before, but she had different results than the first time. The list of debits now far outweighed the credits. It seemed wiser to pack and leave, to go through the unsettling process of locating a new job, than to stay here.

  Of course, she would have to stay a while yet. The hard, snapping wind and the huge snowfall dictated a period of isolation before she could make her break for freedom. Even if she could somehow get her luggage down the ski slope, tote it to her Ford where it was still parked in that picnic area and get the car started after it had set several days in the snow, she could not drive out of the valley. She remembered the perilous descent into the valley her first day on the job, and she had no wish to try to make it back up that insanely steep roadway in even worse weather.

  And so the day passed.

  More wind.

  More snow.

  She watched them both, watched the woods, thought about the bonfire she had seen from this window, the dancing figures, the wolflike tracks in the snow…

  She washed her nylons in the sink, hung them on the shower rail to dry, painted her nails, nibbled at an apple.

  She found herself at the window again, attracted like a moth to a flame, staring at the site of the bonfire which was now covered with snow and as unremarkable as the rest of the land.

  She remembered Yuri saying that they had singled her out as the next convert to the beliefs which the cult held dear, that certain spells would be cast and that she would not be able to resist, that she might very well become as they…

  More wind.

  More snow.

  In the evening, when darkness had dropped across the snowscape without diminishing the speed of the falling flakes, she went downstairs to the library to choose a book from its richly stuffed shelves. The downstairs was as quiet and chilled as the second floor corridor had been, as if there were no one else in Owlsden but Katherine — or, even more exactly, as if this were not a house at all, but some ancient monument, a burial vault of pyramidal splendor. After twenty minutes of choosing one volume only to replace it when she leafed through it, she found a light romance which seemed just the thing to take her mind off the events in Owlsden. She was stepping out of the library into the downstairs corridor when the telephone rang, crying like a wounded bird in the dead silence.

  It rang twice before she picked it up from the table only a few steps to her right. “Hello?”

  “May I speak to Miss Sellers, please?” It was Michael Harrison.

  “This is me, Mike,” she said.

  “Katherine?”

  “Yes.”

  He sighed, relieved. “I was afraid that you'd be outside — or that they might not put you on the line.”

  She laughed softly. Just hearing his voice had done wonders for her, had recalled his warmth, the friendliness of his companions at the cafe — and had recalled, not least of all, the way he looked at her and the way he had kissed her only the night before.

  She said, “Why shouldn't they let me talk to you? Do you think they're all conspiring against me or something?”

  He paused too long for comfort and said, “Not Lydia, anyway.”

  “And what's that supposed to mean?”

  “I'm afraid to tell you,” he said, “for fear you won't believe me, that you'll get angry with me.”

  “Never,” she said, surprised at the boldness in her tone.

  Again he paused, considering his choice of words. “If I were to have the Rover up there at eleven this evening, do you think you could have your luggage outside, waiting for me — without letting anyone know what you are up to?”

  “Michael, this is hardly a time for jokes that—”

  “No jokes.”

  She thought a moment, said, “What is the matter?”

  “You know how Alex is prejud
iced against me,” he said.

  “Only too well.”

  “I hope you also understand that I would never talk against him just to ruin his character or for spite. I would not behave the way he does.”

  “I know you well enough to understand that,” she said.

  “Then understand that I fully believe what I'm about to tell you is the truth.”

  “Tell me, then, for heaven's sake!”

  Michael took a deep breath as if to fortify himself for the explanation, or as if he still was afraid she might not believe him. “I have some fairly convincing evidence that Alex Boland is a member of that Satanic cult which has been causing so much trouble lately.”

  “Alex?” she asked, stunned at the possibility. She had been willing to consider his friends — but not the son of her employer himself. Those who did awful things were always strangers, not people you knew. People you knew were better than that, unable to commit crimes. Or was that nothing more than her optimism working against her again?

  “Alex,” he confirmed. “And not only does it seem that he's a member of the cult, but that he's the head of it, the chief priest.”

  “I can hardly see why—”

  “These people don't need reasons that normal people would understand,” Michael said. “They operate in another dimension altogether, on a plane of lesser sanity.”

  “Still—”

  “Think, Katherine!” he demanded. He sounded desperately concerned for her. She remembered the kiss, the way he had been so protective about her in the cafe… “Think of all that's happened in Owlsden since you've come there — including Yuri's murder. Doesn't it seem likely that someone in the house is a cultist?”

  “You mean — Alex might have—”

  “Killed Yuri.”

  She did not reply.

  She could not reply.

  All that she could think of was Alex Boland's unpleasantly negative outlook on life and the strange, pessimistic conversation of his closest friends…

  “Are you there, Katherine?”