Dance with the Devil

air, abruptly metamorphosed from orange to green, a hellish sickly color that threw eerie shadows across the snow. Subsiding for a moment, they growled tall again, this time a bluish color like spears of summer sky stabbing at the snow-sodden branches of the nearest trees. Then they fell into orange and leapt up red. Then green again, higher than ever, brighter than before.
        “How do they make the flames change color?” she asked.
        He shrugged again. “Some special incantation, perhaps.”
        “That's silly.”
        “What else, then?”
        “A handful of some chemical powder might cause that,” she said, biting at her lower lip.
        He looked chagrined and said, “Possibly.”
        She could not believe, for a minute, that he had not thought of the same thing himself. What was he trying to prove by playing this superstitious Romanian role?
        The figures moved in a last frenzy of dance, too fast to make out the details. A moment later, the fire was put out and the night was back to blot out any traces of the ritual.
        “I didn't see Satan appear,” she said, watching Yuri closely for a reaction.
        “Perhaps the would-be cultist did not appeal to Satan and did not warrant a personal demonic visit. On the other hand, we might just have been too far away to see.”
        “Have you ever seen a wolflike creature, a leopard or panther?”
        “No more than this,” he said.
        “There you are.”
        “That doesn't mean there wasn't one down there.”
        She turned away from the window and said, “Well, I thank you for letting me know about the show-”
        “But you haven't changed your opinion,” he said, smiling sadly at her. “You still think that I'm a nice, quiet old crackpot.”
        “I don't think that.”
        “But you're not convinced.”
        “Not convinced,” she agreed.
        “Do you plan to lock your door?”
        “Yes,” she said. “I can do that much.”
        He nodded and went to the door. His entire attitude was one of the wise man trying to distribute a valued truth which no one else finds the least bit worthwhile. He did not belabor the point as a madman or fanatic might, but retired humbly to await another opportunity to make a point. Only a master actor would think to handle the role that way.
        What did that mean, then? That he wasn't acting at all. No, she decided, it simply meant that he is a master actor.
        “Goodnight, Miss Sellers,” he said. “I hope I haven't disturbed your sleep.”
        “Not at all.”
        He departed, closing the door quietly.
        Katherine looked at the bedside clock and saw that the time was 12:45. At the window, she tried to stare through the syrupy veil of darkness to see if anyone lingered at the perimeter of the woods, but she could not catch a glimpse of anything out of the ordinary, only the soft glow of moonlight caught in the snow.
        In bed again, with all of the lights out and her door locked, she finished listing the credits that accompanied her job and compared them with the previously listed debits. She could not decide which group outweighed the other. But, always optimistic, she finally chose to remain on the job for a few more days in order to see if the atmosphere changed at all.
        She never once considered that the atmosphere might change for the worse…
        On the edge of sleep, she had such a crazy idea that it woke her completely, and she sat up in bed. She felt certain that Yuri was playing some sort of game, was trying to convince her that he was something he really was not. Couldn't she also explain Alex's odd behavior in the same way? Couldn't his hatred for Michael Harrison be feigned, his abrupt moods carefully calculated? And couldn't Lydia's almost manic cheerfulness, her beatific acceptance of everything, be cultured, a facade? Everyone in Owlsden might be playing parts in some grand act of…
        Of what?
        Then she told herself this was silly paranoia, the kind of thing you might come up with when you were half asleep. Awake, you could see how absurd it was.
        She stretched out again, tossed her hair away from her face, hugged the second pillow to her and, listening to the hooting of the owls overhead, soon went to sleep. She had no nightmares.

CHAPTER 7
        
        Wednesday morning, she ate in her room again, dressed and was downstairs by a quarter of ten. Lydia