Dance with the Devil

snow from his face. Despite the cold, his skin was pallid, white with anger.
        “It was an accident,” Mike said.
        Alex turned to Katherine. “Come on. What I wanted to show you is only a block further on.”
        Katherine felt that she was witnessing something that had a history beyond her understanding, but she said, “Alex, I'm sure Mike wouldn't-”
        “He would, believe me.”
        “I'm truly sorry that-” Harrison began.
        Alex interrupted him. “Oh, shut up, Harrison.”
        Mike shut up, though he looked baffled.
        “It wouldn't be the first time he's taken an opportunity to humiliate me,” Alex told her, teeth clenched through the last few words.
        “Really, if-” Mike began, still baffled.
        “Come on,” Alex said, rudely grasping her arm and trying to propel her past Harrison.
        “Wait a minute,” she said, holding her ground on the steep walk. She turned and faced Harrison whom they had passed and said, “I don't think the two of you should be fighting, even if you think you have a reason for it. Alex, if Michael apologized-”
        “Of course I apologize,” Harrison said. “I hadn't meant to-”
        “Apologies come easily when they aren't genuine,” Alex said. He looked at Katherine, at Harrison, back at the girl again. “But if you would prefer his company to mine-as it suddenly seems to me is the case-then be my guest.” He let go of her arm, turned and stalked down the incline toward the center of town which they had already explored, his face twisted in fury.
        “Alex!” she called.
        He did not turn.
        In a moment, he was out of sight around the corner.
        “I'm sorry to have caused trouble,” Michael said.
        “It wasn't your fault.” She smiled at him. “Whatever does he hold against you?”
        “I don't know,” Michael said glumly. “I've never known-unless it's that his grandfather started the town, but my father is the one who keeps it alive with his forests and mills.”
        “But that's a silly thing to hold against you-to make him blow up like he did.”
        “You know that, and I know that, but try to explain it to Alex. He's a strange man.” He looked the way Alex had gone, then turned to her again. “I hope I haven't put you in a bind with your employer.”
        “He isn't my employer,” Katherine said. “Lydia is. And she seems to like you quite a bit-at least to the extent that she always counters his remarks about you.”
        “That's like Lydia,” he said. “Now, you were on a tour of the town?”
        “Yes, was.”
        “Let me finish it with you.”
        She frowned. “Maybe I should be getting back-”
        “Plenty of day left,” he said. “Where were you headed for?”
        “The church,” she said. “The one that Alex's grandfather built.”
        “Straight up here,” he said, linking arms with her. His manner was warm and confident, and she found herself going with him happily.
        The Presbyterian church was of brick, colonial in style, very compact with white trim at the windows and door, and a white wooden cap on the slim, brick bell tower.
        “It was the second building in town,” Michael explained, “after the grocery and post office-and after Owlsden, of course. It was called something other than Owlsden then, though.”
        He opened the church door and ushered her into a darkened vestibule, found a light switch.
        “It's very pretty,” she said.
        He closed the door behind them. “It is, isn't it? Very simple and yet somehow reverent. Amazing that the same man could have approved the design for this- and for Owlsden too.”
        Katherine walked into the church proper ahead of him, moving down the shadowed center aisle between the two sections of high-backed pews, squinting to see in the dim light that washed out of the vestibule behind her. The only other sources of light, even less illuminating than the bare, seventy-five watt bulb in the first chamber, were the tall, extremely narrow, darkly-stained glass windows on either side. The church was rich with the odor of furniture polish and candle wax and worn leather cushions.
        She would never have thought, for a moment, that there could be anything in a church to terrify her. Perhaps she should have thought through some relationship between Christianity and Satanism and, therefore, should have recalled the aftermath of the Satanic