Dance with the Devil

a hand in front of Michael's eyes, grunted when they didn't blink. He said, “Mr. Harrison? Mike?”
        Mike did not respond.
        “Mike, can you hear me?”
        Harrison blinked rapidly, twice, as if something were in his eyes, but gave no indication that he even knew there were other people in the room with him-or, indeed, that he was in a room in Owlsden.
        Cartier put one hand on the man's shoulder and let it rest there a moment as if he hoped that alone would cause some reaction, then gently shook Michael until it was plain to everyone present that he was not going to generate a response that way.
        “Mike,” Alex said, leaning forward and assuming command of the interrogation without being asked.
        Harrison stared into another reality.
        “Mike, this is Alex Boland.”
        “Alex, please be careful,” Lydia said, pulling her robe closer to her. “Don't upset him.”
        Alex persisted. “Mike, are you listening? Do you know who I am?”
        Harrison's gaze appeared to shift, to draw back from the edge of eternity to a point much closer the reality of this moment, of this room and these awful circumstances. But that might have been a momentary illusion, something that they all wanted to see and therefore had thought they did see.
        “Mike?” Alex, continued. “Do you remember the fight we had in the woods, just a little while ago, when you were going to smash my head in with the butt of the shotgun?”
        Harrison smiled, only briefly, the corners of his mouth twisted up in a quirky show of humor, and then he subsided into his stupor again, his shoulders even more slumped.
        “You almost had me then,” Alex said. “Didn't you, Mike? You were only seconds away from killing me.”
        To everyone's surprise, Michael Harrison answered him, though his expression had not changed, remained static and flat like a painting on cardboard. “Almost had you.”
        “You're getting there!” Cartier whispered, excited at this very different sort of chase.
        Alex put his gun on the table and drew his chair closer to Michael, hunched his shoulders to make his manner more confidential.
        “Be careful,” Katherine said.
        Alex turned, looked at her, winked without humor, looked back at his subject. He thought a moment, phrasing his next question, and said, “You would have liked to kill me, wouldn't you, Michael?”
        “I've… always wanted to… kill you,” Michael said.
        His face was still bland, pale as snow, his stare distant and unrelated to his words. It was almost as if his eyes and his body existed on a different dimensional plane than this one, while his voice was the only projection of himself that could reach through the veil and contact them.
        In fact, Katherine thought uncomfortably, his whole demeanor was less like that of a man in a catatonic trance than like that of a soul halfway to hell, calling back across the abysses of death or possession…
        “Why did you want to kill me?” Alex asked.
        He got no answer.
        “Why, Michael?”
        As if it were an unspeakably agonizing chore to divulge his motives, but also as if he were compelled to do so, Michael began to speak, his voice low and tight, his eyes focused on hell. “They named the town after you, didn't they, after your grandfather? And there you were, on the old mountaintop, in this goddamned castle, looking down on all of it like a baron or a lord, respected by everyone. They don't respect my father, because they fear him. Fear and respect are two utterly different things, and neither thrives very well in the presence of the other, no matter what the armchair philosophers tell you. My father hires and fires, and they fear him and consequently respect none of us…” He paused, wrinkled his nose as if he had smelled something rancid. “Of course, my father generates fear in everyone he knows, whether or not he employs them. That was another thing I never could understand-why, on top of everyone's respect, you should have a family that loved you. My mother's dead, you know. And my father… doesn't love, not anyone. I still have marks on my back and bottom where he took the strap to me years ago…” Again, his voice trailed away, but again he began the subject anew. “In school, it was Alex Boland with the good grades, the best grades, always just a hair better than mine. I tried to beat you out in everything, but