Dance with the Devil

of getting away from this cold, dark house, but hope of returning to her former attitude of cheerfulness. Mike was always happy, it seemed, always full of hope for the best. Perhaps, with him, she could manage to regain her optimism and face life as she had always faced it before: with hope for the next day. With Michael, everything would return to normal again. She could still recall the warmth of his kiss…

As if she had been placed outside the normal stream of time, the minutes passed in agonizingly slow order, each one stretched into an hour.

She tried to read the book she had carried up from the library and could not get interested in it, tried to eat something and could not, tried to nap and could not keep her eyes closed. She kept wondering if someone had unlocked and opened her door while she was not looking, and she would open her eyes to survey the room and be certain of her solitude.

At a quarter past nine, only an hour and a half since she had spoken with Michael, the lights in her room shut off, plunging her into a deep and disquieting darkness.

She rolled out of bed and slipped into her shoes, felt her way to the door. Slowly, her eyes adjusted to the lack of light, though there was nothing out of the ordinary to be seen.

At the door, she listened carefully.

For a moment, there was only silence. Then, Lydia called out to someone — and was answered by Mason Keene.

“—all over the house,” he finished saying.

Katherine opened her door and found the second floor corridor in complete darkness.

“Lydia?” she called.

“Here,” the older woman said. She sounded as if she were only a few yards farther along the hallway. From the quaver in her voice, it appeared she was more than a little on edge. She sounded, too, as if she expected someone to leap at her from the unrelieved darkness in the almost windowless corridor.

“What's happened?” Katherine asked. She kept her back to the door of her room, her hand against the doorjamb to keep her position in mind.

“I think, perhaps, that a fuse has blown,” Mason Keene said, drawing closer to her, though still invisible.

She wished that she could see him. She did not like the idea that his eyes might have adjusted to the dimness more readily than hers and that he had an advantage, for she had now come to fear nearly everyone in Owlsden, even the reticent Keene couple.

“Or else the power lines are down,” Lydia said.

“Heaven forbid,” Keene said, almost at Katherine's side now.

“Has that happened before?” Katherine asked, squinting in the direction that Keene seemed to be coming from.

“Now and again, during the most rugged storms,” Lydia said. “And this one seems to be a beauty, doesn't it? Listen to that wind.”

Katherine realized how loud the wind was, even within the thick walls of the mansion. For a time, she had lost the sound of it, had let it become a gentle background roar of which she was unaware.

“Well,” Lydia said, “we'd best break out the supplies of candles and get used to living primitively for a while.”

“I've found a closet,” Mason Keene said a moment later, pulling open a poorly oiled door close at Katherine's left hand. “I'll have some light for us in a moment.”

“Poor light, but something anyway,” Lydia said. She sounded as if she would dearly welcome even the meagerest relief from this Stygian dark. What, exactly, was she afraid of? Alex?

“It's not the lack of light, but the lack of heat that we'll soon begin to notice,” Keene said. “The furnace starts up electrically, you see. So we'll have to build fires in the fireplaces downstairs and keep to as few rooms as possible.”

“How long will it take them to fix the lines?” Katherine asked.

Lydia sighed. “They can't start until the snow stops and the roads are at least partially cleared. We're going to have to rough it for a couple of days.”

“Isn't so bad, once the big fireplaces are in use,” Keene said. “And we have plenty of firewood to see us through. Yuri always made sure to keep a stock…” His voice ran out like an old-fashioned phonograph when he realized that Yuri was no longer among the living.

As they waited in silence and darkness for Mason Keene to strike a match over a candle wick, Katherine thought that the entire thing was more sinister than either Lydia or the servant realized. Just possibly, someone had deliberately stopped the power flow into Owlsden. Just possibly, someone wanted a dark house in which to operate. And, just possibly, she was not slated to finish out the night here, let alone a couple of cold days ahead…

A match lighted.

Orange flame cast light upwards over Mason Keene's features, twisting them into a parody of a human face. When he turned to them and smiled, the smile more resembled a leer than anything more reassuring. That was only the fault of the distorting flame, of course.

He touched the match to a candle wick and enlarged the circle of blessed light to include both of the women.

In a moment, they each had a candle, looking strangely like the celebrants in some religious rite.

“Let's go find Alex,” Lydia said. “He'll know what to do about this.”

Unless, Katherine thought, he's the one who already did it…

CHAPTER 14

“There we go!” Alex said, stepping back from the mammoth fireplace in the library.

Blue flames leapt up from the pile of twigs and danced across the bark of the larger logs, their strange color attributable to the chemical starter that Alex had used.

Katherine thought of the eerie blue flames that had soared out of the bonfire down by the woods when the Satanists had been engaged in their devil's dance…

“Heat!” Lydia said, rubbing her hands together. “You know, despite its elaborate design, Owlsden holds heat no better than a cardboard box — maybe worse. The furnace went off no more than half an hour ago, and already the place is freezing!”

“Imagine what it was like in the early days, before they even had an electric furnace,” Alex said.

“Father was slightly crazy,” Lydia said, shaking her head and laughing. The laughter seemed genuine, as if the adversity and the feeling of camaraderie that it generated had perked her considerably.

Everyone was in the room, except for Mason Keene who had found a flashlight and gone into the basement to check the fusebox. Now, he returned and said, “Power lines are down, unfortunately. All the fuses seem in order.”

“I was afraid of that,” Lydia said.

After a long moment of silence when everyone watched the bright flames beyond the hearthstones, Katherine said, “Is it really windy enough to bring the lines down?”

“More than enough,” Alex said. “Why do you ask?”

She shifted uncomfortably on the small sofa on which she sat and looked at him, trying to read the expression in his dark eyes. Then she said, “It occurred to me that someone might have cut the lines.”

“On purpose?” Lydia asked.

“Yes.”

“But whatever for?”

She shrugged. “Why would they want to use your drawing room to hold a Satanic ceremony? Why would they kill Yuri to keep him from identifying them? Nothing else these people have done makes a whole lot of sense.”

Patricia Keene made a moaning noise low in her throat and cuddled closer to her husband. He cradled her awkwardly, but he really looked as if he would have preferred to have the roles reversed and let her comfort him.

“It bears some thought,” Alex said, watching her intently.