Dance with the Devil Read Free

intelligent enough to like books and understand them. Someone, in short, like you.”
        The salary was excellent, the fringe benefits fine as well. It was a dream job.
        She asked Syverson: “What's the catch? Is there one?”
        He smiled again. “Yes, but just a little one. Lydia insists on spending summers and winters in the family house not far from Long Lake in the Adirondacks. It's a somewhat isolated place to want to live, especially for a young and pretty girl. She says the summers are mild enough for her with a great deal of greenery and that she would be lost without living through the normal whiter blizzards she has known since her childhood. Unless you would find the atmosphere too rural, too lacking in diversions for-”
        But she had assured him it would be just fine. And here she was with a degree in literature, a broken-down old Ford, four suitcases of clothes and belongings and a very bright future.
        No number of devil worshippers were going to dissuade her from what she saw as a predestined future full of nothing but good.
        Besides, she asked herself, where else would I go but to the Roxburgh House, to Owlsden?
        She had no close relatives, and her parents had died long ago, longer than seemed possible. The only stable reference point she had was her life in the orphanage, but she knew that would have changed, her friends gone into the adult world. She had no place to return to, and it was partly out of this personal isolation that her optimism grew.
        She started the car and drove back onto the roadway. The storm was now more furious than ever and had added an extra inch of powdery snow to the macadam. The wipers thumped at their top speed but were barely able to keep up with the whirling snow. As the light seeped from the sky and visibility grew even less conducive to travel, she tried to maintain her speed to cover the last miles to the village of Roxburgh-which had been named for Lydia's father before the turn of the century-before darkness crept in completely.
        Dusk lay on the land like a brown cloak as she topped the ridge and looked down on the small town of one thousand souls which constituted Roxburgh. The town was nestled in the snow and pines, a tight little place even for so few as a thousand. The lights twinkled in the blanket of gauze that draped everything; smoke rose from the chimneys; here and there, a car moved on the narrow streets.
        Roxburgh was such a pretty place, pervaded by such a sense of quietude, that her fears were further dispelled until the terror the Satanists had left with her was only a black grain of sand in the back of her mind, niggling at her. She could be happy in a place like this, away from the frantic pace of the modern world, among simple people with simple dreams.
        She looked up from the town and searched the far ridge for Owlsden. For a long moment, she could not see anything but swirling snow, the skirts of ghosts, cold sheets flapping in the wind and beating across the rocky hillsides and the bare branches of the dark trees. Then she saw it thrusting up against the slopes, huge. The house was like a phantom ship, some abandoned Spanish galley which still bore on through the turbulent sea and poked its prow through the fog at night to frighten sailors on passing ships.
        The snow obscured it again.
        And then it was back, jumping into detail as if it had advanced on her across the gap of the valley. It dominated the land, held forth like a sovereign on a throne. Its windows, in a few places, glowed from within, yellow and harsh. They should have seemed warm and welcoming, especially to a natural optimist like Katherine, but they were more like the eyes of dragons. The house appeared to be three stories high and as long as a regulation football field. It was half-hidden by elms and pine trees, and its black slate, peaked roof jutted above anything that Nature had placed near