Deanna Dwyer (Dean Koontz)
Dance with the Devil
CHAPTER 1
Katherine Sellers was sure that, at any moment, the car would begin to slide along the smooth, icy pavement and she would lose control of it. She had not had that much driving experience; this was her first time on really bad winter roads.
The sky was a gray metal lid clamped on the pot of the world, so low and flat that it looked as if she could just reach up and tap a fingernail against it. A fine, heavy snowfall — as if someone were adding salt to the stew in this pot — shrouded the Adirondack countryside and swept across the hood of the old Ford, lacing over the windshield. The wipers thumped steadily, a pleasantly reassuring sound, but not reassuring enough to calm her queasy stomach and her bad case of nerves.
Katherine hunched over the steering wheel and peered ahead, straining to part the white curtain that seemed always to be advancing towards her, though it actually arrived and passed her by many times. In the city, cindering crews would have been at work long ago, spreading salt crystals and ashes in the wake of the big, thundering plows. But here, in the boondocks, the situation was something else again!
She was driving off the slope of a mountain, and the trees were breaking into open land on either side. Here, the snow seemed even worse, for the wind howled through the bare land as it could not in the trees, and it whipped the white flakes into thick clouds, and it buffeted the car and cut her vision to less than thirty feet. The road had more than two inches of snow across it, and her car's tracks were the first to mar that virgin blanket. Now and again, the Ford slid and shimmied as if it were dancing, though it had not yet gone far out of control. Each time she felt that sickening lurch of spinning tires, her throat constricted and her heart thumped maniacally.
It was not only the snow that bothered her, but the desolation, the empty look of the landscape. If anything happened to her here, on this narrow country road in the middle of nowhere, she might not be found for hours — and perhaps not for days.
It was not a very reassuring prospect, to say the least. It had the effect, though, of making her sit up just a bit straighter and stare just a little more deeply into the snow.
All things considered, however, Katherine felt positively exhilarated. The few moments of clutching terror, when the car wanted to be a sleigh, only served to heighten, by contrast, the delight and excitement with which she looked forward to the days that lay ahead of her at Owlsden house. She was beginning a new life with a somewhat glamorous job and unlimited possibilities, new friends and new sights. No snowstorm could thoroughly dampen her soaring spirits.
Gazing upon the world out of such optimistic eyes, she was certain to be more shocked than most by what she saw in the open doorway of the abandoned, half-ruined old barn at the base of the mountain. It was so awful, so disgusting, that it drained away her previously unshakeable exhilaration like icy water flowing from a tap.
In the door of the ancient, long unused barn, which lay back from the road about fifteen or twenty feet, what looked like a cat dangled at the end of a rope, strangled by the tightly pulled noose.
She drove to the side of the roadway and stopped the car directly across from that hideous spectacle. She could not bring herself to look that way, to see if what she had glimpsed at first was real or a trick of her imagination. Heaven only knew, the weather was bad enough to distort things, to make one think one had seen something different than what was actually there. But even as she tried to convince herself of that, she knew she had not been mistaken.
The open land hereabouts had been strung across with rail fences in some more optimistic age, but it had proven economically unsalvageable. It had the stamp of desolation now, unused and unuseable in the midst of normally abundant country. She had passed many trim, pleasant, prosperous farms on the trip up from Philadelphia; this pocket of decay looked even more forbidding by comparison. The trees suddenly seemed craggy, hard and black and leafless, reaching for her with abruptly animated branches. The snow, now that the wipers were not running, had drifted over the windscreen and appeared to be seeking a way to get through the glass and cover her up in soft, suffocating cold.
“Oh,” Katherine told the warm air inside the car, “I'm really being silly now!” She grinned and shook her head. Moving trees, malicious snow! What would she be thinking of next?
The cat.
When she looked at the barn, the snow was falling even more heavily than before, so that she could not be certain if the dark object dangling in the center of the open doorway was really what she had thought at first. It could be a trick of shadows.
She preferred to think that it was.
She was especially fond of cats. She had been permitted a cat at the orphanage, as a child, and she had owned a second cat, Mr. Phooey, when she was in college. The first had died a natural death; the second had been struck and killed by an automobile. Both times, she had found acceptance of the death hard.
And now this… Well, this was clearly none of her business, of course. Even if that were a dead cat up there, she had no reason to call anyone to account for it. Still, a cat was a cat, and all cats held a mystic bond with her Spike and Mr. Phooey.
She looked both ways, hoping to see another car approaching. This was the sort of thing a man should handle.
The road was deserted in both directions.
She got out of the Ford, pulled her coat collar up under her chin. Still, the wind bit her cheeks, turned her pert nose a bright red, and managed to force a few cold flakes down her neck. She closed the door and leaned against it, looking at the thing hanging in the doorway. She shuddered and looked away from it again.
Where the farmhouse had once been, there was now nothing but a burned-out foundation of charred field-stones and crumbling mortar. Weeds had sprung up in the man-made pit, evidence that the disaster had taken place a good many years before.
On her side of the road, there was nothing but open land, some crippled length of fence. She had not passed any homes for several miles, but she thought there might be a few ahead on the road. All of which was an excuse to keep from going up to that barn and looking at what hung in its doorway. She forced herself to stop pretending, to stop looking at the scenery, and to get on with it. The poor thing, if it was a poor thing, shouldn't have to hang there like that.
She walked away from the car, crossed the slippery road and stepped over another broken rail fence. The land, beneath the snow, was rocky and all but sent her tumbling several times.
Why don't I stop right here? she asked herself. What can I do, anyway? If it really is a cat, who could I find to take responsibility for its murder, and who would care to prosecute them? A cat, after all, is only an animal. That might sound cruel, but it was a fact.
Even an animal, however, deserved a proper burial. Suppose she had let Mr. Phooey out in the cold, to rot when summer came around? No, she could not turn away. Even an animal deserved privacy in its death.
When she was ten feet from the doorway, she knew beyond doubt that it was a cat and not some trick of light or her imagination. Each step closer was painful. When she was directly beneath it, she could see what had been done to it, and she turned away, staggering into the snow. She bent over and was very sick.
A while later, she came back, white-faced and trembling. Her revulsion at the brutality had now turned to anger, and anger as hot as a July day, here in the cold of January. She did not think there were any limits to what she would be capable of if she ever got her hands on the ugly, sick people who had mutilated the animal.
Gently, gently, she untied the cord knotted at a nail above the doorway. The noose had dug so deeply into the cat's body that she could not easily have loosened that.