Dance with the Devil

CHAPTER 1
        
        Katherine Sellers was sure that, at any moment, the car would begin to slide along the smooth, icy pavement and she would lose control of it. She had not had that much driving experience; this was her first time on really bad winter roads.
        The sky was a gray metal lid clamped on the pot of the world, so low and flat that it looked as if she could just reach up and tap a fingernail against it. A fine, heavy snowfall-as if someone were adding salt to the stew in this pot-shrouded the Adirondack countryside and swept across the hood of the old Ford, lacing over the windshield. The wipers thumped steadily, a pleasantly reassuring sound, but not reassuring enough to calm her queasy stomach and her bad case of nerves.
        Katherine hunched over the steering wheel and peered ahead, straining to part the white curtain that seemed always to be advancing towards her, though it actually arrived and passed her by many times. In the city, cindering crews would have been at work long ago, spreading salt crystals and ashes in the wake of the big, thundering plows. But here, in the boondocks, the situation was something else again!
        She was driving off the slope of a mountain, and the trees were breaking into open land on either side. Here, the snow seemed even worse, for the wind howled through the bare land as it could not in the trees, and it whipped the white flakes into thick clouds, and it buffeted the car and cut her vision to less than thirty feet. The road had more than two inches of snow across it, and her car's tracks were the first to mar that virgin blanket. Now and again, the Ford slid and shimmied as if it were dancing, though it had not yet gone far out of control. Each time she felt that sickening lurch of spinning tires, her throat constricted and her heart thumped maniacally.
        It was not only the snow that bothered her, but the desolation, the empty look of the landscape. If anything happened to her here, on this narrow country road in the middle of nowhere, she might not be found for hours-and perhaps not for days.
        It was not a very reassuring prospect, to say the least. It had the effect, though, of making her sit up just a bit straighter and stare just a little more deeply into the snow.
        All things considered, however, Katherine felt positively exhilarated. The few moments of clutching terror, when the car wanted to be a sleigh, only served to heighten, by contrast, the delight and excitement with which she looked forward to the days that lay ahead of her at Owlsden house. She was beginning a new life with a somewhat glamorous job and unlimited possibilities, new friends and new sights. No snowstorm could thoroughly dampen her soaring spirits.
        Gazing upon the world out of such optimistic eyes, she was certain to be more shocked than most by what she saw in the open doorway of the abandoned, half-ruined old barn at the base of the mountain. It was so awful, so disgusting, that it drained away her previously unshakeable exhilaration like icy water flowing from a tap.
        In the door of the ancient, long unused barn, which lay back from the road about fifteen or twenty feet, what looked like a cat dangled at the end of a rope, strangled by the tightly pulled noose.
        She drove to the side of the roadway and stopped the car directly across from that hideous spectacle. She could not bring herself to look that way, to see if what she had glimpsed at first was real or a trick of her imagination. Heaven only knew, the weather was bad enough to distort things, to make one think one had seen something different than what was actually there. But even as she tried to convince herself of that, she knew she had not been mistaken.
        The open land hereabouts had been strung across with rail fences in some more optimistic age, but it had proven economically unsalvageable. It had the stamp of desolation now, unused and unuseable in the midst of normally abundant country. She had passed many trim, pleasant, prosperous farms on the trip up from Philadelphia; this pocket of decay looked even more forbidding by comparison. The trees suddenly seemed craggy, hard and black and leafless, reaching for her with abruptly animated branches. The snow, now that the wipers were not running, had drifted over the windscreen and appeared to be seeking a way to get through the glass and cover her up in soft, suffocating cold.
        “Oh,”