Dance with the Devil

different ways and, surely, lose them in the storm and the night. All she would need was a two minute head start, two minutes before they saw she was gone… But when she started to get cautiously to her feet, a hand grasped her shoulder from behind and pressed her back down.
        “Don't move, please,” a voice said behind.
        She was under the eye of a guard.
        After that, she could do little but watch Michael lead the cultists through their mad brand of worship. She made a genuine attempt to understand what he was saying, but she found the twisted, consonant-choked language he was using completely alien to her. It was not Latin, exactly, but something beyond Latin, something that sounded incredibly, incomprehensibly ancient.
        At regular intervals, the women in the cult came forth, one at a time, carrying small black jars from which they spooned herbs and incense into their priest's hands, then stepped quickly out of his way, bowing at him like an oriental woman in the presence of her most respected elder male relative. Then Michael said lines of verse over the handfuls of herbs and tossed them into the center of the bonfire while the rest of the celebrants echoed a chorus or two of a rhyming song in that same old language.
        Perhaps it was only her imagination, but Katherine thought that the fire, at times, bent, leaned towards Michael as if it were seeking the next batch of spices before he was ready to supply them. And when it consumed the herbs, it also seemed to expand as if pleased with the offering.
        That was impossible.
        She directed herself not to think like that any more, for she knew that she had no chance of escape if she once let herself be caught up in their fantasies.
        She wriggled her hands together in the rope that bound them, but she could not feel any loose ends.
        Uneasily, she wondered when the devil's dance would begin, and if anyone in Owlsden would notice her absence in time to come looking for her in the woods.
        One of those questions was answered a moment later as the cultists began slowly to form into a train that circled and re-circled the bonfire, one stationed just a few feet behind the other.
        Michael came to her and helped her to her feet.
        “You can still let me go,” she said. Her voice was weak, cracked with strain, the first indication she had given them that she was paralyzed with fear. She could remember, in all too gruesome detail, what they had done with the kitten in the barn, and she could not help but wonder if she were truly being initiated into the family or if she were being offered as their first human sacrifice.
        He ignored her and said, “You will join the dance now. And when it is finished, you will be one of us, because you will have danced with Him, and you will want to be in the family.”
        “I won't dance,” she said.
        Gently, he pushed her forward, though she tried desperately to hold her ground.
        “It will be a beautiful experience, Katherine,” Michael said, touching her gently on the cheek with the tips of his ungloved fingers, as if he were testing the unblemished texture of her skin.
        “No.”
        He shoved harder.
        She stumbled forward, almost fell, regained her balance just as she was caught up in the ring of Believers, found herself moving along with them as they shrieked and moaned the odd litanies, though she was not able to maintain their neat rhythm.
        She stopped and attempted to push through them toward the open space beyond the fire.
        Abruptly, on either side of her, two cultists appeared, one woman and one man, both with a switch in hand. The switches were much like the one that Mrs. Coleridge, of the orphanage, had always been so quick to use: thin, long, dwindling at the tip, perhaps a stiffened willow lash or the younger shoot from a birch branch. They began to herd Katherine, swatting her repeatedly about the head and shoulders until she had no other choice but to continue around the fire with the worshipers.
        “Help!” she shouted.
        That was no good. Her throat was so dry, her energy levels so low, the noises of the chants and the storm so strong, that she could barely hear herself.
        She struck out at the switch-bearers again and again, continually missed them.
        The pace of the dance seemed to be picking up, as did the choppy rhythm of the religious chants.