Dance with the Devil Read Free Page A

it.
        The snow veiled the house once more; it might just as well never have existed at all.
        Who would build such a fantastic home here, in the mountains, away from everyone and everything, away from the high society types who might appreciate its cumbersome, costly majesty? What sort of man had Lydia Boland's husband been-a madman? A dreamer with no regard for reality, with no love of common sense?
        As she drove down toward the village, her optimism had not been turned off, even though she was now thinking in terms of dragons and madmen. Instead, her optimism had been dampened slightly, as curbed as it would ever be. She realized that she was among strangers where the customs and daily routines might be alien to her. Alien enough, she suddenly thought with a dismayingly morbid turn of mind, to include blood sacrifices and the worship of the devil?

CHAPTER 2
        
        Descending the ridge into Roxburgh was such a hair-raising feat that Katherine nearly forgot about the dead cat, the Satanic markings on the floor of the barn and the fact that she was in a strange land. The tiny grain of fear in the back of her mind became even tinier as a new fear rose to take all of her attention: she was going to kill herself in this descent. She wondered if the same madman who had designed the rococo Owlsden had also had a hand in the planning of the only road that entered Roxburgh from the east. Surely, no sane highway engineer would have made the grade as steep as this or would have carved the two-lane so narrow that it looked more like a lane and a half. On the left, a rock wall jutted up fifteen feet to the edge of the ridge and then fell away, a constant reminder that she had only two or three feet of berm to use in case another car approached on its way out of the valley. On the right, the land dropped away for two thousand feet in the space of a yard, the way strewn with boulders and trees and tangled brush. No guard rails dotted that far berm to give even the illusion of safety; a slide on the icy pavement could very well end in a fiery tumble to the bottom of the gorge.
        Without the snow, it would have been a simple matter. But the white flakes had mounted on the macadam, as yet undisturbed by a plow or even by another vehicle that had gone this way ahead of her, and it hissed across the windscreen, obscuring her view even as it lay like greased glass under her wheels. She did not use the gas at all and tapped the brake carefully, gently, keeping as steady a pressure on it as she could.
        Over the top of the ridge, too, the wind blew harder than it had on the top of the mountain where the trees and the contour of the land bled its force. It gusted in like blows from a giant, invisible hammer. When she was a third of the way down the tortuous track, a violent blast struck the car from the direction of the precipice, startling her. Involuntarily, she stamped on the brake pedal, jolting herself forward as the Ford went into a perilously swift slide toward the right. The smooth gray stone wall, flecked with growing patches of snow and marred only occasionally by the twisted root of a hearty locust tree, rolled toward her as if the car were standing still and the wall itself was the motivated object.
        She almost pulled the wheel to the left, realized that would be the worst thing to do and would only aggravate the slide-perhaps even send the car completely out of her control. Worse than the stone wall was the precipice on the left.
        She let go of the wheel, except to touch it lightly with her fingertips and take advantage of the first loosening she might feel.
        The nose of the Ford turned at the very brink of a collison and angled back in the proper direction. Her right, rear fender scraped the stone so softly that it could have been mistaken for the asthmatic wheeze of an old man…
        Another explosion of wind boomed in from the abyss.
        This time, she