Dance with the Devil

rolled over Katherine as she pushed open the heavy door, so near that she jumped involuntarily, as if the sound had possessed a sharp physical impact.
        “Who is it?” she asked.
        She was answered only by silence.
        She took a step forward.
        “Is anyone here?”
        She waited, took another step.
        “Are you hurt?”
        The cry came again.
        She directed the flashlight beam to the left, passed it along the empty floorboards and undecorated walls where the antique, flowered wallpaper was peeling away in long, yellow-brown, snaky strips.
        This time, when the noise came, she realized that it was more to her right, and she began to turn that way when she saw the yellow eyes watching her with cold, evident malevolence, each eye as large as a quarter and as fixed on her as if they were painted.
        She almost screamed, but found that her throat constricted so tightly that she could do nothing more than emit a weak, hissing sound that would attract no one to her aid.
        The creature moaned again.
        Its cry suddenly sounded naggingly familiar, although she could not place it.
        The eyes blinked, opened on her again, watching.
        Back-stepping toward the door, she finally managed to put the light on the thing and, as she did so, to overcome the unreasonable, clutching fear that had so swiftly taken control of her. She was glad that she had not been able to scream, for she would only have made a fool of herself. All that she faced was a small, brown owl that sat on the bare floor with its wings hunched and its beak open, working out that soft, ululating whoing noise.
        “Owlsden,” Katherine said to the owl.
        It blinked.
        She laughed just a trifle nervously, then shone the beam of the light around the room again. The ceiling here was open-beamed, taking advantage of the magnificent, polished oak rafters. Two places in those rafters, owls sat looking down at her, chinless as their white chests puffed up over the straight columns of their necks.
        They cried out in unison, the great, empty room giving their voices an echo-chamber effect that explained how they had carried to her so well and had pulled her out of sleep.
        One of the things she had meant to ask Lydia, but had forgotten, was why the house was so curiously named. Now she would not have to ask. It was a haven for owls, providing in its abandoned third floor a place of refuge from foul weather.
        She left the room, closed the door behind her, went to the stairs and descended to the second floor. In a few moments, she was in her room again, tucked beneath the covers.
        The owls hooted, as if sending her a special message of their friendship.
        As sleep crept up on Katherine once more, she speculated that this small event was representative of the larger conflict of two main approaches to life-her optimism for which she had now and then been chided by other students in college, and Yuri's pessimism which easily made possible the silly superstitions he said he believed. There was nothing in Owlsden to harm anyone. Yes, there were Satanists in Roxburgh or somewhere in the outlying districts, holding their rituals of blood and hate, but one only had to think of them and deal with them as one would with spoiled, nasty children, and there would be nothing whatsoever to worry about.
        She was not going to worry about demons, devils, and ceremonial dances of evil.
        The owls hooted.
        She realized, as she drifted into sleep, that she had already become accustomed to them and that she found the sound of their nocturnal cries somewhat comforting…

CHAPTER 5
        
        In the morning, the storm was gone, leaving more than twenty inches of fresh, blindingly white snow dumped on Roxburgh and the surrounding countryside. The trees were hung with it, the pines bent under their hoary load, a few of the birches even snapped in two under the tremendous weight. The drifts on the west side of the house were swept up over most of the first floor windows, while the lawn behind was nearly scraped barren of its share of whiteness. The sky was bright and blue, cut through here and there by gray remnants of the storm, or by cloudy premonitions of another snow.
        Katherine took breakfast in her own room, some fruit juice and a sweet roll. She had never been one for eating heavily in the morning, preferring to