Dance with the Devil

hours.”
        Katherine looked at her watch and saw the time was ten minutes after ten o'clock. She said, “I think I'll go up to my room and get into some warmer clothes. I feel pretty chill right now.”
        Alex turned away from the fireplace and picked up the flashlight that Mason Keene had been using earlier. He approached her, smiling, and said, “I'll help you find your way upstairs, Katherine.”
        “That's not necessary.”
        “But I don't mind. I don't want you tripping and falling. If anyone hurt himself here, we'd be hard-pressed to get him medical help.”
        “I'll take a candle,” she said. “I'll be just fine.” She hoped she didn't sound as desperate as she felt. The last thing she wanted was to be alone with Alex Boland, in a darkened house, for even a brief moment.
        “Don't be stubborn,” he said, taking her elbow in a gentlemanly manner. “It will only take a minute to-”
        “I insist,” Katherine said, pulling her arm away from him. “You and Mason have to see to the other fires. That's the most important thing right now, isn't it?”
        He didn't say anything but looked down at her wrist -at her watch. Had he seen her glancing at the time a moment ago? And what could he make of that, even if he had seen it?
        “Okay,” he said at last.
        “Be back in a minute,” Katherine told Lydia.
        She picked up one of the candles in a brass holder with a wax-catch that flared out around its hilt, and she left the room. She walked sedately toward the stairs but, once on them, took the risers two at a time.
        Strange shadows played on the walls around her, loomed in front and shrank into blackness behind.
        At the top of the staircase, she turned around and held the candle out before her, barely lighting the last flight of steps. If anyone had followed her, he was now waiting beyond the turn at the landing, on the flight below this last one, where she could not see him . She turned and started down the hall toward her room, the candlelight carrying only six or seven feet in front of her.
        She was halfway down the hall when she heard something close at hand: a floorboard squeaking as someone stepped on it without being aware that it was loose beneath the carpet. She stopped, stood very still and slowly turned in every direction, looking for movement, a glimpse of light.
        She could not see anyone.
        “Anybody there?”
        When she got no answer, she went on.
        She closed and bolted the door to her room and lighted the ornamental candles on her hutch and triple dresser. Satisfied that there was no one in the room, closets and attached bath, she began to change clothes.
        Her watch told the time: 10:22, little more than half an hour until she must meet Michael Harrison at the top of the ski run. If she had previously had any doubts about sneaking away from Owlsden during the night, they had been destroyed by this sudden deprivation of light and by Alex's increasingly suspicious behavior-Where had he been all day, until after darkness had fallen, in town arranging something with his friends? And why his insistence to accompany her to the second floor, to get her alone long enough to…?
        She zipped up her ski jacket and pulled the toboggan cap down over her ears. She was ready to go.
        Picking up the candle in the brass holder, she blew out those that burned on the hutch and the dresser, and she went to the door. As she slid the iron bolt out of place, she heard someone on the other side of the door-taken quite by surprise as he had been listening at the keyhole-scurrying quickly down the long corridor. When she swung her door open and stepped into the hall, she heard another door swing shut farther along toward the head of the stairs. Though the sound had carried well in the still house, it was not possible to figure out which door it had been.
        The stairs seemed an eternity away, but she struck out for them just the same, flinching uncontrollably as she passed each room and expected to be accosted by someone hiding in one of them.
        She was halfway along the corridor when, not so very far behind her, a door squeaked open and someone stepped into the hall, hot on her trail again.
        She turned swiftly and held the candle high and forward, but she was too far away to illuminate anything. For a moment, she considered taking several quick steps back the way she