Dance with the Devil

advice.
        She went to the window and looked out.
        The snow was still falling, more like a horizontal avalanche than a snowstorm as the wind drove it from left to right across the window. The view looked out from the back of the house on a lawn that was not clearly defined in the blizzard, toward an endless stretch of scraggly darkness which she took to be the forest.
        “It must be a beautiful view by daylight.”
        “Quite,” Yuri said. “But in darkness, at midnight and after, it is something else again.”
        “Are you trying to tell me its haunted or something?” she asked.
        “Something,” Yuri said, “but not exactly haunted.” He wiped a thick hand across the sweat-dotted expanse of his broad forehead, then continued, “Twice in the last several months, I have stood at the second floor windows and watched strange lights and stranger figures cavorting down by the pines, at the very edge of the forest, not more than seven hundred yards from this window.”
        Katherine felt chilled, though her room was adequately heated. She said, “What are you trying to tell me?”
        He sighed. “Miss Sellers, my home is Romania, a dark but beautiful land in Europe. I was born there and grew up there and did not leave until 1942 when I fled the influence of the Nazis. In Romania, indeed in much of Europe, the people do not scoff at many of the things that you in America find so amusing. A belief in evil spirits, possession and exorcism, werewolves and vampires is as common a part of their lives as the knowledge that they must one day die in the natural cycle of things. I am an educated man, as I hope is evident, and yet I can see the wisdom in many of these beliefs and accept the knowledge of generations even if science laughs at it.”
        “And you think there are werewolves in this forest?” she asked, trying to be light and airy, but not quite succeeding.
        “Worse than that,” he said, a flicker of a smile passing across his thick lips, a smile that contained more of a sense of irony than of good humor.
        “What, then?”
        “Twice, I have watched a devil's dance in progress.”
        “A dance?”
        “I know that you've heard about the Satanic cult that has been practicing its own brand of 'religion' in these hills during the last year and a half.”
        “Yes,” Katherine said, not bothering to explain about the cat she had found.
        “When these cultists welcome a new member to their ranks, a new soul designated for Satan, they perform a devil's dance that is not unlike those I witnessed as a child in Romania. It is an age-old ritual of evil with the most frighteningly powerful ceremonial frenzy I have ever seen. The cultists pray to Satan as the bonfire is lighted, then they slaughter an animal and cast its blood into the flames. Blood is also splashed upon the earth in a circle about the fire, a preliminary guide to the path the dancers will take. In the middle of the dance, if the cult is performing it sincerely and if the new member is a desirable soul to possess, the devil appears in some form or other-perhaps as a dog or wolf, perhaps as a great leopard or black panther with yellowed eyes. He rises on his hindpaws and dances with the new member, to welcome him to the legions of the damned.”
        “You can't be serious,” Katherine said. At first, he had frightened her with his warning about the locked door. Now, when she could see that he was merely superstitious, the warning was less unsettling. She could fear prowlers and other human agents, but not spirits of another world. It was almost comical.
        “I am very serious,” Yuri said.
        She realized that she had hurt his feelings, and she said, “And after the devil has danced with the new cultist?”
        “He punctures the throat of the newcomer with his fangs and drinks the blood-simultaneously spitting his own hideous plasma back into the tainted body.”
        “That's positively grotesque!” Katherine said, turning quickly away from the window and the forest beyond. “You Romanians have a morbid imagination, don't you?”
        “Perhaps it is not imagination at all,” he said, wiping at his face again, as if brushing off a cobweb that he had walked into. “Perhaps it is only observation”
        “I'm sorry, Yuri, but I think that sounds silly; I can't accept it. Understand that I wasn't born and raised in Europe, but here in the United