Dance with the Devil

colors for different kinds of pain.

The hand came around again and struck her more gently than it had the first time. At least, it seemed to strike with less force, though that might only have been because she was too numb to properly interpret its impact.

However hard it had been, it was quite hard enough, for it knocked her down as if her knees were jelly. The two boys let go of her arms.

“Sisters!” Michael called to some of the women in the cult. “Come fetch your future relative.”

She tried to get up again.

She couldn't manage it.

Darkness fell around her like the great, black wings of a bird, and she did not know anything else that happened for a while…

CHAPTER 17

Fire.

Heat, little smoke.

Figures moving in the rippling currents of hot air, distorted like figures in funhouse mirrors…

Voices.

Singing? No, chanting.

Katherine came fully awake and found that she was sitting in the snow not half a dozen steps away from the bonfire. The heat from it had flushed her face. Her hands were behind her, as if propping her up, but when she tried to move them, she found that they were tied together rather securely. The circulation in her hands had been affected, and her fingertips tingled unpleasantly.

“How are you feeling?” Michael asked, appearing suddenly before her and smiling as if they were still close, as if nothing untoward had past between them.

“You hit me.”

“I truly do apologize for that,” he said, the smile fading to be replaced by an expression of shame.

“I'm sure.”

“But I am!” he said. “You see, I was so certain you would welcome the family, be enthusiastic about joining it. I was willing to accept a slight rejection. But a major denial got to me. Again, I apologize.”

“You're insane.”

He laughed again. “Why? because I believe in Satan? You really don't think that He will show up tonight, that He will rise out of the earth to dance with you.”

“No. Not for a minute.”

“But He will. And once He has, there will be no more misunderstandings between us.”

She said nothing.

He stood up. “I have to begin the main part of the ceremony now. Are you comfortable enough?”

“Untie my hands.”

“In a while,” he said.

“When?”

“When the dance begins.” He turned and walked away from her, took a position in a circle of crimson cloth which had been stretched out in the snow on the north side of the fire.

Katherine wondered if anyone in Owlsden could see the glow from the fire, then decided there was no hope of that. It was not only shielded by the trees on this side of the ski run and the trees on the other side, but by the dense sheets of snow as well. If they stood by the windows for an hour, they would be lucky to see even a spark. Michael had been careful to place this devil's dance farther away from Owlsden than the previous three had been.

Michael had begun to chant, his arms raised in a pleading gesture to the leaping flames before him, his toboggan hat off, his yellow hair lying wetly across his broad, handsome forehead.

The other cultists seemed absorbed in the crazy rituals, and Katherine wondered if it would be possible to rise up and edge carefully backwards into the shadows of the trees, out of the circle of the bonfire's glow. If she could slip out of their sight, she could go any of half a dozen different ways and, surely, lose them in the storm and the night. All she would need was a two minute head start, two minutes before they saw she was gone… But when she started to get cautiously to her feet, a hand grasped her shoulder from behind and pressed her back down.

“Don't move, please,” a voice said behind.

She was under the eye of a guard.

After that, she could do little but watch Michael lead the cultists through their mad brand of worship. She made a genuine attempt to understand what he was saying, but she found the twisted, consonant-choked language he was using completely alien to her. It was not Latin, exactly, but something beyond Latin, something that sounded incredibly, incomprehensibly ancient.

At regular intervals, the women in the cult came forth, one at a time, carrying small black jars from which they spooned herbs and incense into their priest's hands, then stepped quickly out of his way, bowing at him like an oriental woman in the presence of her most respected elder male relative. Then Michael said lines of verse over the handfuls of herbs and tossed them into the center of the bonfire while the rest of the celebrants echoed a chorus or two of a rhyming song in that same old language.

Perhaps it was only her imagination, but Katherine thought that the fire, at times, bent, leaned towards Michael as if it were seeking the next batch of spices before he was ready to supply them. And when it consumed the herbs, it also seemed to expand as if pleased with the offering.

That was impossible.

She directed herself not to think like that any more, for she knew that she had no chance of escape if she once let herself be caught up in their fantasies.

She wriggled her hands together in the rope that bound them, but she could not feel any loose ends.

Uneasily, she wondered when the devil's dance would begin, and if anyone in Owlsden would notice her absence in time to come looking for her in the woods.

One of those questions was answered a moment later as the cultists began slowly to form into a train that circled and re-circled the bonfire, one stationed just a few feet behind the other.

Michael came to her and helped her to her feet.

“You can still let me go,” she said. Her voice was weak, cracked with strain, the first indication she had given them that she was paralyzed with fear. She could remember, in all too gruesome detail, what they had done with the kitten in the barn, and she could not help but wonder if she were truly being initiated into the family or if she were being offered as their first human sacrifice.

He ignored her and said, “You will join the dance now. And when it is finished, you will be one of us, because you will have danced with Him, and you will want to be in the family.”

“I won't dance,” she said.

Gently, he pushed her forward, though she tried desperately to hold her ground.

“It will be a beautiful experience, Katherine,” Michael said, touching her gently on the cheek with the tips of his ungloved fingers, as if he were testing the unblemished texture of her skin.

“No.”

He shoved harder.

She stumbled forward, almost fell, regained her balance just as she was caught up in the ring of Believers, found herself moving along with them as they shrieked and moaned the odd litanies, though she was not able to maintain their neat rhythm.

She stopped and attempted to push through them toward the open space beyond the fire.

Abruptly, on either side of her, two cultists appeared, one woman and one man, both with a switch in hand. The switches were much like the one that Mrs. Coleridge, of the orphanage, had always been so quick to use: thin, long, dwindling at the tip, perhaps a stiffened willow lash or the younger shoot from a birch branch. They began to