Dance with the Devil

them.
        If she ever got hold of them, they wouldn't sit down for a week, and they would be made to know, deep down, what a terrible, ugly thing they had done.
        She went inside the old barn, hoping to find a shovel or the remnants of some tool with which she could dig a shallow grave. The gloomy structure contained only the light that was emitted through the ground door and the open loft doors above. She was halfway across the main floor before she realized the nature of the chalk markings on the hard earth. She had seen their like in books and magazines: a huge, white chalk circle spotted with pentagrams in some pattern that she could not discern; words scribbled in Latin, some of which she understood and some of which were alien to her. These were the marks of devil worshippers, people who paid homage to Scratch, Satan, the same demon in a thousand names.
        The wind screamed across the roof in an abnormally strong gust, rattled the loose shingles.
        She found that she was shivering, although the air inside the barn was not all that cold.
        She stared at the floor more closely until her eyes had adjusted to the poor light. In a few moments, she found the place where the cat had been tortured: exactly in the center of the huge circle, in the center of the smaller pentagram, where the earth was stained with blood. To either side of the pentagram, puddles of pale, hardened wax indicated where burning candles had been placed for the ceremony.
        This is New York, she thought, stepping slowly back from the traces of evil. This is not some South-seas Island, some haven of voodooism and the black arts. This isn't some Louisiana bayou country where the old myths still have power over the minds of men.
        But she could not reason the evidence out of existence, for she could see it there in chalk and in blood, in white and black-red, before her eyes and within her reach. If she wished, she could touch it and stain her fingers.
        A moment earlier, she had been hoping to run across those who had perpetrated this atrocity. She had not thought of them as adults; indeed, she still found it difficult to believe that grown men and women would indulge in such debased activities. People were nicer than that, smarter than that, saner too. Yet, while her optimism and her natural love of people made it difficult for her to accept the truth, her intellect knew that this was so. She prayed, suddenly, that her wish would not be granted, that she would never ever in a thousand years meet the people who had done this thing.
        She left the barn and stood in the snow again, permitting Nature's breath, the cool wind, to cleanse her of the taint of evil which she felt she had taken on from the very air of that room. Her long, yellow hair streamed behind her like a flag, dazzling in the gloomy world around it.
        Away from those odd markings on the barn floor, her back to the dead animal lying in the snow, the terror should have left her, but it did not. It abated, certainly, but an abiding fear remained where the terror had been and would remain for a long while yet. She did not particularly believe in such nonsense as devil worship and the calling forth of unclean spirits. That was all just so much superstition. To Katherine, all spirits were good, the spirits of angels. But she did believe, now and very reluctantly, in people so warped that they could conduct such ugly ceremonies, and she wished to have the taint these people had left behind blown loose of her.
        She could not go away without burying the cat, even more than she could not have done so before. If burying the creature did anything to upset the intent of the Satanic rituals, she was going to be sure to put it beneath the ground! In five minutes, she was on her way back from the car with a lug wrench which was used for changing flat tires. Its one end was sharply bladed for prying loose stubborn hubcaps, and it chipped into the frozen earth quite efficiently. In fifteen minutes, the cat was buried, snow thrown over its shallow grave to conceal its exact whereabouts. The ever-increasing storm would further cover all signs of her work.
        She hoped that, if cats had souls-as she was sure they must-this cat's soul was now at rest, that she had saved it from whatever spiritual limbo the Satan-ists had wanted for it.
        Returning hurriedly to the car, her coat frosted with snow, her hair now hanging