Dance with the Devil

Kids! Katherine thought. Whining little brats who had never been brought up right, selfish children who had no respect for life or beauty. She had known children like that both in and out of the orphanage, spoiled by parents or by the lack of them.

If she ever got hold of them, they wouldn't sit down for a week, and they would be made to know, deep down, what a terrible, ugly thing they had done.

She went inside the old barn, hoping to find a shovel or the remnants of some tool with which she could dig a shallow grave. The gloomy structure contained only the light that was emitted through the ground door and the open loft doors above. She was halfway across the main floor before she realized the nature of the chalk markings on the hard earth. She had seen their like in books and magazines: a huge, white chalk circle spotted with pentagrams in some pattern that she could not discern; words scribbled in Latin, some of which she understood and some of which were alien to her. These were the marks of devil worshippers, people who paid homage to Scratch, Satan, the same demon in a thousand names.

The wind screamed across the roof in an abnormally strong gust, rattled the loose shingles.

She found that she was shivering, although the air inside the barn was not all that cold.

She stared at the floor more closely until her eyes had adjusted to the poor light. In a few moments, she found the place where the cat had been tortured: exactly in the center of the huge circle, in the center of the smaller pentagram, where the earth was stained with blood. To either side of the pentagram, puddles of pale, hardened wax indicated where burning candles had been placed for the ceremony.

This is New York, she thought, stepping slowly back from the traces of evil. This is not some South-seas Island, some haven of voodooism and the black arts. This isn't some Louisiana bayou country where the old myths still have power over the minds of men.

But she could not reason the evidence out of existence, for she could see it there in chalk and in blood, in white and black-red, before her eyes and within her reach. If she wished, she could touch it and stain her fingers.

A moment earlier, she had been hoping to run across those who had perpetrated this atrocity. She had not thought of them as adults; indeed, she still found it difficult to believe that grown men and women would indulge in such debased activities. People were nicer than that, smarter than that, saner too. Yet, while her optimism and her natural love of people made it difficult for her to accept the truth, her intellect knew that this was so. She prayed, suddenly, that her wish would not be granted, that she would never ever in a thousand years meet the people who had done this thing.

She left the barn and stood in the snow again, permitting Nature's breath, the cool wind, to cleanse her of the taint of evil which she felt she had taken on from the very air of that room. Her long, yellow hair streamed behind her like a flag, dazzling in the gloomy world around it.

Away from those odd markings on the barn floor, her back to the dead animal lying in the snow, the terror should have left her, but it did not. It abated, certainly, but an abiding fear remained where the terror had been and would remain for a long while yet. She did not particularly believe in such nonsense as devil worship and the calling forth of unclean spirits. That was all just so much superstition. To Katherine, all spirits were good, the spirits of angels. But she did believe, now and very reluctantly, in people so warped that they could conduct such ugly ceremonies, and she wished to have the taint these people had left behind blown loose of her.

She could not go away without burying the cat, even more than she could not have done so before. If burying the creature did anything to upset the intent of the Satanic rituals, she was going to be sure to put it beneath the ground! In five minutes, she was on her way back from the car with a lug wrench which was used for changing flat tires. Its one end was sharply bladed for prying loose stubborn hubcaps, and it chipped into the frozen earth quite efficiently. In fifteen minutes, the cat was buried, snow thrown over its shallow grave to conceal its exact whereabouts. The ever-increasing storm would further cover all signs of her work.

She hoped that, if cats had souls — as she was sure they must — this cat's soul was now at rest, that she had saved it from whatever spiritual limbo the Satan-ists had wanted for it.

Returning hurriedly to the car, her coat frosted with snow, her hair now hanging wetly across her shoulders and no longer dry enough to be blown about by the wind, she put the lug wrench in the trunk again and got back into the Ford. She sat behind the wheel for a long moment, wondering about the grisly scene she had just encountered and letting the cold seep out of her like syrup from a tree. If this were New York State, if this kind of thing was common in these Adirondack wildernesses, then she was crazy for going any further. Sure, this was the chance of a lifetime, but…

Snap out of it, she told herself. Think of what this job means to you in terms of your future, think of the interesting people you'll be working with.

Five days before her graduation, just after Christmas vacation and during the final burst of studying for end- of-semester exams, Katherine was called into the office of the Dean of Student Personnel, a small and cheery man named Syverson who wore a mustache and a chin beard and looked, she thought, like a leprechaun. She did not know what to expect, but she automatically expected something good. That was her way.

As it turned out, her optimism had been well-founded, for Syverson had gotten her the job she was now traveling to take. Companion and secretary to Lydia Roxburgh Boland, one of the dozen wealthiest women in the country. Her duties would consist of traveling with the old woman in the spring and fall, reading to her, discussing books with her and, in general, making her feel less lonely than she otherwise might. According to Syverson, the woman was sixty-four but quick, lively and a joy to be around.

“But why me?” she asked.

Syverson turned a bright smile on her and said, “Mrs. Boland is an alumnus of our school. She and I have known each other for a long time, before she met and married Roy Boland, when she was a graduate student and I was a sophomore.” He sighed at the passage of the years, then continued: “Later, when I joined the administration, I handled many of Mrs. Boland's endowments to the school, set up the trusts as she wished them and established a system of auditing to be certain that her wishes were carried out even after her death. She trusts me and, as she says, respects my judgment. When she called and asked for a companion from the graduating class this first semester, she left it up to me to choose a girl who would most suit her temperament. Someone attractive, someone with a pleasant disposition and an interest in meeting other people, someone intelligent enough to like books and understand them. Someone, in short, like you.”

The salary was excellent, the fringe benefits fine as well. It was a dream job.

She asked Syverson: “What's the catch? Is there one?”

He smiled again. “Yes, but just a little one. Lydia insists on spending summers and winters in the family house not far from Long Lake in the Adirondacks. It's a somewhat isolated place to want to live, especially for a young and pretty girl. She says the summers are mild enough for her with a great deal of greenery and that she would be lost without living through the normal whiter blizzards she has known since her childhood. Unless you would find the atmosphere too rural, too lacking in diversions for—”

But she had assured him it would be just fine. And here she was with a degree in literature, a broken-down old Ford, four suitcases of clothes and belongings and a very bright future.

No number of devil worshippers were going to dissuade her from what she saw as a predestined future full of nothing but good.

Besides, she asked herself, where else would I go but to the Roxburgh House, to Owlsden?

She had no close relatives, and her parents had died long ago, longer than seemed possible. The only stable reference point she had was her life in the orphanage, but she knew that would have changed, her friends gone into the adult world. She had no place to return to, and it was partly out of this personal isolation that her optimism grew.

She started the car and drove back onto the roadway. The storm was now more furious than ever and had added an extra inch of powdery snow to the macadam. The wipers thumped at their top speed but were barely able to keep up with the whirling snow. As the light seeped from the sky and visibility grew even less conducive to travel, she tried to maintain her speed to cover the last miles to the village of Roxburgh — which had been named for Lydia's father before the turn of the century — before darkness crept in completely.

Dusk lay on the land like a brown cloak as she topped the ridge and looked down on the small town of one thousand souls which constituted Roxburgh. The town was nestled in the snow and pines, a tight little place even