Dance with the Devil

for so few as a thousand. The lights twinkled in the blanket of gauze that draped everything; smoke rose from the chimneys; here and there, a car moved on the narrow streets.

Roxburgh was such a pretty place, pervaded by such a sense of quietude, that her fears were further dispelled until the terror the Satanists had left with her was only a black grain of sand in the back of her mind, niggling at her. She could be happy in a place like this, away from the frantic pace of the modern world, among simple people with simple dreams.

She looked up from the town and searched the far ridge for Owlsden. For a long moment, she could not see anything but swirling snow, the skirts of ghosts, cold sheets flapping in the wind and beating across the rocky hillsides and the bare branches of the dark trees. Then she saw it thrusting up against the slopes, huge. The house was like a phantom ship, some abandoned Spanish galley which still bore on through the turbulent sea and poked its prow through the fog at night to frighten sailors on passing ships.

The snow obscured it again.

And then it was back, jumping into detail as if it had advanced on her across the gap of the valley. It dominated the land, held forth like a sovereign on a throne. Its windows, in a few places, glowed from within, yellow and harsh. They should have seemed warm and welcoming, especially to a natural optimist like Katherine, but they were more like the eyes of dragons. The house appeared to be three stories high and as long as a regulation football field. It was half-hidden by elms and pine trees, and its black slate, peaked roof jutted above anything that Nature had placed near it.

The snow veiled the house once more; it might just as well never have existed at all.

Who would build such a fantastic home here, in the mountains, away from everyone and everything, away from the high society types who might appreciate its cumbersome, costly majesty? What sort of man had Lydia Boland's husband been — a madman? A dreamer with no regard for reality, with no love of common sense?

As she drove down toward the village, her optimism had not been turned off, even though she was now thinking in terms of dragons and madmen. Instead, her optimism had been dampened slightly, as curbed as it would ever be. She realized that she was among strangers where the customs and daily routines might be alien to her. Alien enough, she suddenly thought with a dismayingly morbid turn of mind, to include blood sacrifices and the worship of the devil?

CHAPTER 2

Descending the ridge into Roxburgh was such a hair-raising feat that Katherine nearly forgot about the dead cat, the Satanic markings on the floor of the barn and the fact that she was in a strange land. The tiny grain of fear in the back of her mind became even tinier as a new fear rose to take all of her attention: she was going to kill herself in this descent. She wondered if the same madman who had designed the rococo Owlsden had also had a hand in the planning of the only road that entered Roxburgh from the east. Surely, no sane highway engineer would have made the grade as steep as this or would have carved the two-lane so narrow that it looked more like a lane and a half. On the left, a rock wall jutted up fifteen feet to the edge of the ridge and then fell away, a constant reminder that she had only two or three feet of berm to use in case another car approached on its way out of the valley. On the right, the land dropped away for two thousand feet in the space of a yard, the way strewn with boulders and trees and tangled brush. No guard rails dotted that far berm to give even the illusion of safety; a slide on the icy pavement could very well end in a fiery tumble to the bottom of the gorge.

Without the snow, it would have been a simple matter. But the white flakes had mounted on the macadam, as yet undisturbed by a plow or even by another vehicle that had gone this way ahead of her, and it hissed across the windscreen, obscuring her view even as it lay like greased glass under her wheels. She did not use the gas at all and tapped the brake carefully, gently, keeping as steady a pressure on it as she could.

Over the top of the ridge, too, the wind blew harder than it had on the top of the mountain where the trees and the contour of the land bled its force. It gusted in like blows from a giant, invisible hammer. When she was a third of the way down the tortuous track, a violent blast struck the car from the direction of the precipice, startling her. Involuntarily, she stamped on the brake pedal, jolting herself forward as the Ford went into a perilously swift slide toward the right. The smooth gray stone wall, flecked with growing patches of snow and marred only occasionally by the twisted root of a hearty locust tree, rolled toward her as if the car were standing still and the wall itself was the motivated object.

She almost pulled the wheel to the left, realized that would be the worst thing to do and would only aggravate the slide — perhaps even send the car completely out of her control. Worse than the stone wall was the precipice on the left.

She let go of the wheel, except to touch it lightly with her fingertips and take advantage of the first loosening she might feel.

The nose of the Ford turned at the very brink of a collison and angled back in the proper direction. Her right, rear fender scraped the stone so softly that it could have been mistaken for the asthmatic wheeze of an old man…

Another explosion of wind boomed in from the abyss.

This time, she did not over-react, but let the car move gently down the snowy track toward the bottom of the valley.

Five minutes more, and she was on level land, ready to get out and pray at the nearest church. She felt she ought to thank someone for helping her down that awful incline.

The roughly made highway fed into a more clearly defined street which she saw, shortly, was called Costerfeld Avenue. It was a somewhat grandiose title for a half mile of curbed macadam, but she would not have traded it for the poorly maintained state highway she had just left — not for a guarantee of wealth, health or immortality!

In half a block, the mountain behind her was cut off by the great shafts of enormous pine trees which thrust up on either side of Costerfeld Avenue like sentinels guarding the approach to the town. Already, they were laden with soft, white snow like mounds of cotton or the gush of shaving foam from a spray can. Also, on either side of the street, small, snugly built houses were tucked back at the ends of short walks, slid in among stands of lesser trees — birch, elm, dwarf pine, dogwood. Perhaps, without the snow, it was a dirty place, as scarred and spread over with grime as any other neighborhood. In the snow, however, it was transformed into an almost fairylike scene, a cut of the North Pole straight out of a child's storybook. Snow hung from porch railings, softened the sharp angle of steps, whitened dark roofs and made marshmallows out of stubby chimneys. Indeed, it was all so still and lovely that it slowly ameliorated the fear she had felt in the descent of the mountain, just as the descent had shoved her fear of the Satanists to the background of her mind.

Katherine Sellers wanted to be happy. It took very little, therefore, to influence her always-ready streak of optimism.

Apparently, there were four main streets in Roxburgh, made up of the arms of two major roads which crossed in the center of the town to form a traditional “town square” with a small park in the center of it and stores on the outside of the circle. It would be interesting to explore the side streets and the curious little backwoods shops when she got a chance. But not now. Right now, the only thing that mattered was getting across the small town and finding the road that lead up the other side of the valley towards Owlsden.

Even as she thought that, the street broke from the pine boughs and began to angle up the other valley wall, only a few miles from the place where she had come down. Owlsden house waited at the top, looming over her, looking almost sentient, its dragon eyes glowing more fiercely the closer she drew to its gates.

But, in the end, she did not get very close at all. Though driving up the icy slope was a good deal less trying than the uncontrolled descent had been, it was not nearly so easy on the Ford which fought the ascent at every turn. The tires spun in the dry snow and, at times, she found she was losing two feet of ground for every one that she surged forward. Again and again, she would gain a hundred yards on the slope, only to lose it in bits and pieces as the car slid inexorably backwards toward the village.

If she had been superstitious, she would have said that this was an omen, a sign that she was not meant to reach Owlsden house.

At last, wearier than she had realized, she let the Ford drift to the very bottom of the slope and backed it