Dance with the Devil

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 while, 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.”

Cartier passed a hand in front of Michael's eyes, grunted when they didn't blink. He said, “Mr. Harrison? Mike?”

Mike did not respond.

“Mike, can you hear me?”

Harrison blinked rapidly, twice, as if something were in his eyes, but gave no indication that he even knew there were other people in the room with him — or, indeed, that he was in a room in Owlsden.

Cartier put one hand on the man's shoulder and let it rest there a moment as if he hoped that alone would cause some reaction, then gently shook Michael until it was plain to everyone present that he was not going to generate a response that way.

“Mike,” Alex said, leaning forward and assuming command of the interrogation without being asked.

Harrison stared into another reality.

“Mike, this is Alex Boland.”

“Alex, please be careful,” Lydia said, pulling her robe closer to her. “Don't upset him.”

Alex persisted. “Mike, are you listening? Do you know who I am?”

Harrison's gaze appeared to shift, to draw back from the edge of eternity to a point much closer the reality of this moment, of this room and these awful circumstances. But that might have been a momentary illusion, something that they all wanted to see and therefore had thought they did see.

“Mike?” Alex, continued. “Do you remember the fight we had in the woods, just a little while ago, when you were going to smash my head in with the butt of the shotgun?”

Harrison smiled, only briefly, the corners of his mouth twisted up in a quirky show of humor, and then he subsided into his stupor again, his shoulders even more slumped.

“You almost had me then,” Alex said. “Didn't you, Mike? You were only seconds away from killing me.”

To everyone's surprise, Michael Harrison answered him, though his expression had not changed, remained static and flat like a painting on cardboard. “Almost had you.”

“You're getting there!” Cartier whispered, excited at this very different sort of chase.

Alex put his gun on the table and drew his chair closer to Michael, hunched his shoulders to make his manner more confidential.

“Be careful,” Katherine said.

Alex turned, looked at her, winked without humor, looked back at his subject. He thought a moment, phrasing his next question, and said, “You would have liked to kill me, wouldn't you, Michael?”

“I've… always wanted to… kill you,” Michael said.

His face was still bland, pale as snow, his stare distant and unrelated to his words. It was almost as if his