Dance with the Devil

places where they had ceased their dance, like figures in a carved tableau. Slowly, the trance seemed to lift from them, weariness and anxiety settle in. They glanced at one another, shuffled their feet on the trampled snow and looked distinctly worried. Still, none of them appeared to have the slightest notion of rushing at the three men who were aligned against them. Either their Satanic religious fervor was not so strong as it had once seemed to be- or they were the sort who could not function as a group in the absence of a strong leader.
        And their leader was no longer strong.
        Michael had changed. When Katherine looked at him where he stood only a few feet away, she was shocked by the metamorphosis that had taken place in his face and in his carriage. His blue eyes only stared over her head now, glassy and faraway, as if they viewed another world than this one. His mouth was slightly open, his lips working even though he did not speak. He looked like a retarded child who could do nothing for himself, his hands at his sides, fingers slack, shoulders slumped forward. When faced with his final defeat, he had shattered.
        “Michael?” she said.
        He did not respond.
        “Michael?”
        “I don't think he hears you,” Alex said.
        Michael, as if in confirmation of what Alex said, did not even blink his large, blue eyes.
        “How awful,” Katherine said, looking away from him.
        Alex made his arm tighter about her waist, as if giving her a bit of his own strength. “Let's hope that he hasn't gone completely over the edge. I'd like to hear him explain what he thought he was doing with this whole Satanic thing. I'd like to know why he killed Yuri.”
        “We better be going,” Alton Harle suggested.
        Alex nodded, then turned to the cultists. “We're going out of the woods, toward the ski run, cut directly across that. It's hardly snowing at all now; we've only got the wind to fight. We'll be back in Owlsden in fifteen or twenty minutes. You will all stay in a group, well ahead of us. I urge you, please, to behave yourselves all the way home.”

CHAPTER 19
        
        Since the telephone wires were on the same poles as the power lines, Owlsden had been cut off from outside communications simultaneously with its loss of light and heat, and it was not possible for them to ring up Constable Carrier and arrange to have him assume responsibility for the prisoners. Leo Franks donned skis and went down the slopes into town to rouse the policeman from his bed and to arrange for a couple of deputies to make the return trip up on the ski lift.
        All of the cultists except Michael Harrison were herded into the library where Mason Keene and Alton Harle kept a watch over them with two loaded shotguns. Katherine thought that, from the expressions on their faces, it was clear that neither Keene nor Harle would hesitate in pulling the trigger if that was their last recourse to keep the mob in line. Michael was taken to the dining room downstairs, where the other fireplace was in operation, and he was placed in a chair against the wall where Alex could tram a rifle squarely on his chest.
        “Is that necessary?” Lydia asked.
        “Yes,” Alex said. The tone of his voice brooked no debate, but she was not the sort of woman to be easily dissuaded.
        She said, “But he doesn't even seem to be aware of us.”
        “It could be an act,” Alex said.
        Lydia said, “You can see that it is no act. It's genuine enough. That poor boy is no longer with us.”
        By heating the milk at the fireplace, Patricia Keene had made hot chocolate for those who wanted it. Katherine held a mug of it now and sipped cautiously at the steamy liquid, slowly thawing out as it ran down her throat and warmed her stomach.
        “How do you feel?” Lydia asked her.
        “Better,” she said.
        “What an ordeal!”
        “Less than it might have been if Alex hadn't chanced along.”
        Alex snorted good-naturedly. “It wasn't chance, believe me. I knew that something could happen tonight, what with a major snow coming, and Yuri dead only a day. I went into town this morning and brought Alton and Leo back with me after dark, hid them both upstairs so that, if the house was being watched, they might pass by unseen.”
        “Then it was one of them that followed me upstairs, when I was getting ready to leave Owlsden