Dance with the Devil

him light. “Enough so that I have a general idea of the purpose.”
        She waited.
        “They've decided that you will be their next-associate.”
        “Who has decided?” she asked.
        Their voices sounded uncommonly sharp in the quiet of the long corridor.
        “The cult,” he said.
        “Associate?” she asked, though she knew just what he meant. It was, however, much easier to let him put it into clearer language than to say it herself.
        “They've looked you over, passed judgment on you and marked you as a potential convert to their cause.”
        “I think their cause is silly.”
        “Do you?” he asked. Before she could answer, he said, “If you'll excuse my saying so, it's evident that you've been deeply upset by all of this and that, maybe, you're beginning to wonder whether there could be any truth in it.”
        “You're wrong,” she said. “I'm not worried about devils and demons. Just about the people who believe in them, what they might do, what extremes they might go to.”
        He shrugged, as if to say that she might not really understand her motives as well as she thought she did.
        “Besides,” she said, “I don't even believe, want to believe, or even symphathize.”
        “Sympathy with the devil is not required,” he said. “If they can manage to put you under the proper spell-”
        “I reject that,” she interrupted.
        Yuri sighed and said, “Well, then, let me get tissues and water from your room, to clean your door before the blood dries.”
        When he had removed the mess and was ready to • return to bed, she asked, “Yuri, why have you been pretending with me?”
        “Pretending, Miss Sellers?”
        “Yes, like you are now. I don't believe this superstitious streak of yours for one minute, and I think you know I don't. Yet you go on playing this role. What do you hope to gain by it?”
        He was upset out of all proportion to the question. “I haven't been playing any role,” he said. “I deeply believe the things I told you. I not only believe in them, but I know they are facts. I've seen all this as a child in my mountain village.”
        “Okay,” she said, confused by the earnestness of his response.
        “Not okay,” he said. “You don't believe me yet. But there is nothing more that I can tell you to change your mind.”
        “I'm sorry I upset you,” she said.
        As she closed her door, he said, “Bolt it, please.”
        She did.
        Then she went to bed and turned out the light. She told herself jokes and tried to remember what a bright future she had ahead of her. But the depression remained this time, stubborn, more deeply entrenched than any bad mood she had ever experienced before.
        During the night, the owls hooted eerily in the rafters above.

CHAPTER 10
        
        A light but steady snowfall had begun early the following morning, coming straight down in the absence of any wind. It gradually smoothed out the tracks and spots in the earlier ground cover, padded the corners of windows and doors.
        Yuri knocked on Katherine's door shortly after nine and informed her that Lydia would like her to join the family breakfast at ten. She wished to hear Katherine's story, in detail. According to Yuri, she was terribly upset to think that an intruder had so easily gained entrance to Owlsden.
        In the smallest dining room, over shirred eggs, toast, fresh fruit and pastries, Katherine discovered that, though both Lydia and Alex seemed upset over the notion that the sanctity of Owlsden could be so off-handedly violated, neither of them wanted to face up to the most likely explanation for that violation.
        “How do you suppose they got in?” Lydia asked at one point, when the discussion had been just about exhausted of new insights. “I checked all of the windows-rather, Yuri checked them-and reported they were still locked from the inside. He says he locked all the doors last night, and he is not likely to forget something like that. Indeed, he almost has a mania about locks.”
        “Perhaps one of the cultists is a lock-picker,” Alex suggested.
        “That sounds too melodramatic,” Lydia said.
        “Perhaps, then,” Katherine said, “the intruder was a friend of the family.”
        They looked at her as if she had not finished a sentence, or as if what she had said was utterly incoherent.
        Alex said,