When Katherine spoke again, her voice sounded faint, very distant and weary, almost as if it were someone else's voice issuing from her throat. “I know that you're lying, and Alex knows it. It can't do you any good now.”
“I am not lying!” He spoke slowly, enunciating each word with care, clearly on the brink of complete insanity. His plans had been brought down around his shoulders, his schemes demolished in one penultimate moment, and he could not cope.
“Yes,” Katherine said gently, as if she were talking to a child. “Yes, Michael, you are.”
His face suddenly twisted into the ugly lines that she had seen earlier in the evening, during the ceremony. He turned to look at Alex and then began to shout at him. Unexpectedly, he tossed the Satanic bible into Alex's face and simultaneously dived forward.
“Alex, look out!” Katherine shouted, too late to warn him.
Alex went down as Harrison twisted his legs out from under him, struck the ground hard, his head bouncing on the needle-carpeted, snow-sifted turf. The shotgun angled crazily upwards as it went off the second time; the shot pellets tore through the low branches with a crackling noise like crumpled cellophane, and a shower of pine needles fell down on the grappling men.
Katherine looked around the bonfire at the other cultists, wondering how long it would take them to realize that they could rush the struggling pair, separate them and quickly subdue Alex. He would not have a chance against nearly a dozen of them. For the moment, however, the cultists seemed mesmerized by the battle between the two men, their arms still limp at their sides, their faces oddly colored by the dwindling fire, their breaths beginning to make smoke rings on the swiftly chilling winter air.
She looked around for a club, an unburned log or something pointed that would do as a weapon, but she could not see anything that might help her.
Alex had rolled, carrying himself atop Michael Harrison, and was trying to get his hands around the larger man's throat. Harrison's neck scarf, however, was a perfect shield against strangulation. In a moment, Harrison had turned the tables again, kicking up, throwing Alex sideways and coming down hard atop him again.
Katherine took a step toward them, realized she would only get in Alex's way and hinder him.
She looked back at the cultists. They did not move, but how long would they refrain from taking part in it?
Michael struck Alex full in the face with his fist, reared back and struck again.
For a moment, it seemed as if Alex sagged into unconsciousness, but then he screeched inhumanly and heaved up, freed his hands which had been pinned under Harrison's weight, and tore at the man's scarf, found the ends of it and began to pull them in opposite directions.
Almost strangled, Michael Harrison yelped sickly and reared back, tearing loose of Alex's grip and rocking onto his feet. He turned, bent to the ground and came up with the unloaded shotgun, reversing it in his hands so that he held the end of the long barrel and could use the heavy stock as a club. As he raised it, preparatory to striking down at Alex's head, another shot slammed through the dense woods like a mallet against a block of iron — a rifle shot this time, not the louder boom of a shotgun.
Michael froze with the gun raised in the air and looked beyond Alex at the woods. Two other men had stepped out of hiding, training loaded weapons on him.
The first was Alton Harle.
The second was Leo Franks.
“That's enough,” Harle said to Michael. “Drop the gun to your side, please, without making any quick moves.”
Michael still held the gun, disbelieving.
“Drop it,” Franks said.
Finally, he did.
“You all right, Alex?”
Alex got to his feet, shook his head and wiped absentmindedly at the blood that trickled out of his nose. “Okay, I guess.”
“Better get the shotgun.”
“Right.” Michael made no move to harm him as he bent and picked it up, brushed the snow from it and slung it under his arm,
“And you better join us, Katherine,” Harle said.
Numb, Katherine walked across the clearing and stood next to Alex. She felt him put his arm around her waist to help support her, and she realized that she must look as exhausted as she felt. She leaned against him, looked up at him and smiled, though she could not be sure if the smile was more of a grimace than intended. She said, “Thank you.” In the face of all that he had just been through, most of it on her account, that seemed like a painfully inadequate response. Unfortunately, she couldn't think of anything else to say.
“Are you okay?”
“Fine.”
“We'll be in a warm house soon.”
“I'd like that.”
She realized that she would like it, even if it was Owlsden that they were returning to. Suddenly, the old mansion had become a haven from the world, no longer a place to be left behind at any cost. How could she ever have been so foolish as to flee it in the first place? Its walls offered a security that, at the moment, she could not imagine finding anywhere else in the world.
The cultists were still ranged around the almost depleted fire, in the same places where they had ceased their dance, like figures in a carved tableau. Slowly, the trance seemed to lift from them, weariness and anxiety settle in. They glanced at one another, shuffled their feet on the trampled snow and looked distinctly worried. Still, none of them appeared to have the slightest notion of rushing at the three men who were aligned against them. Either their Satanic religious fervor was not so strong as it had once seemed to be— or they were the sort who could not function as a group in the absence of a strong leader.
And their leader was no longer strong.
Michael had changed. When Katherine looked at him where he stood only a few feet away, she was shocked by the metamorphosis that had taken place in his face and in his carriage. His blue eyes only stared over her head now, glassy and faraway, as if they viewed another world than this one. His mouth was slightly open, his lips working even though he did not speak. He looked like a retarded child who could do nothing for himself, his hands at his sides, fingers slack, shoulders slumped forward. When faced with his final defeat, he had shattered.
“Michael?” she said.
He did not respond.
“Michael?”
“I don't think he hears you,” Alex said.
Michael, as if in confirmation of what Alex said, did not even blink his large, blue eyes.
“How awful,” Katherine said, looking away from him.
Alex made his arm tighter about her waist, as if giving her a bit of his own strength. “Let's hope that he hasn't gone completely over the edge. I'd like to hear him explain what he thought he was doing with this whole Satanic thing. I'd like to know why he killed Yuri.”
“We better be going,” Alton Harle suggested.
Alex nodded, then turned to the cultists. “We're going out of the woods, toward the ski run, cut directly across that. It's hardly snowing at all now; we've only got the wind to fight. We'll be back in Owlsden in fifteen or twenty minutes. You will all stay in a group, well ahead of us. I urge you, please, to behave yourselves all the way home.”
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 downs
tairs, 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 w
hile, 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.”
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