She opened the door wider, motioned him inside, and closed it after him.
“Come to the window,” he said, “and turn out the lamp as you do.”
She did both things and immediately saw what had brought him here. Down by the edge of the woods, a fire glowed among the trees, and a number of dark figures stood around it. From this distance, it was difficult to see what they were doing, though they all appeared to have their hands raised to the sky as if summoning a spirit from the void.
“How long have they been there?” she asked.
“I think not long — fifteen minutes or half an hour.”
The figures around the fire moved.
“What are they doing?”
He said, “Dancing.”
“They're initiating a new member?”
“So it would seem,” he said. His voice was quavery, as if he were genuinely terrified of the spectacle. His acting was good, she decided, almost too good not to be real.
“If this has happened here twice before,” Katherine said, “why didn't Lydia and Alex call the constable?”
“I don't think they've been aware of the dances,” Yuri said.
“You didn't tell them?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“For one thing, Alex was in town with his friends on the first two occasions, and I did not want to excite Lydia while she was alone.”
“And for another?”
“If I told Alex that the cultists were down there, he'd want to barge in on them by himself. He doesn't fear them, and he's — impulsive. If anything happened to him, I'd have to blame myself for getting him into the act.”
“But surely they've seen these fires—”
“Their bedrooms face the front of the house,” Yuri said. “Besides, even if they were in rooms from which they could watch this — this dance, they might not notice the flames because of the draperies.”
“Let's go get Alex now,” she said.
“I can't allow that,” Yuri said. “If he goes down there and gets hurt—”
“Call the constable then.”
Yuri shrugged wearily. “The cultists will be gone by then. Look, even now the bonfire dances higher, brighter. That always happens just toward the end of the ceremony.”
She saw that what he said was true as the flames leapt high in the cold air, abruptly metamorphosed from orange to green, a hellish sickly color that threw eerie shadows across the snow. Subsiding for a moment, they growled tall again, this time a bluish color like spears of summer sky stabbing at the snow-sodden branches of the nearest trees. Then they fell into orange and leapt up red. Then green again, higher than ever, brighter than before.
“How do they make the flames change color?” she asked.
He shrugged again. “Some special incantation, perhaps.”
“That's silly.”
“What else, then?”
“A handful of some chemical powder might cause that,” she said, biting at her lower lip.
He looked chagrined and said, “Possibly.”
She could not believe, for a minute, that he had not thought of the same thing himself. What was he trying to prove by playing this superstitious Romanian role?
The figures moved in a last frenzy of dance, too fast to make out the details. A moment later, the fire was put out and the night was back to blot out any traces of the ritual.
“I didn't see Satan appear,” she said, watching Yuri closely for a reaction.
“Perhaps the would-be cultist did not appeal to Satan and did not warrant a personal demonic visit. On the other hand, we might just have been too far away to see.”
“Have you ever seen a wolflike creature, a leopard or panther?”
“No more than this,” he said.
“There you are.”
“That doesn't mean there wasn't one down there.”
She turned away from the window and said, “Well, I thank you for letting me know about the show—”
“But you haven't changed your opinion,” he said, smiling sadly at her. “You still think that I'm a nice, quiet old crackpot.”
“I don't think that.”
“But you're not convinced.”
“Not convinced,” she agreed.
“Do you plan to lock your door?”
“Yes,” she said. “I can do that much.”
He nodded and went to the door. His entire attitude was one of the wise man trying to distribute a valued truth which no one else finds the least bit worthwhile. He did not belabor the point as a madman or fanatic might, but retired humbly to await another opportunity to make a point. Only a master actor would think to handle the role that way.
What did that mean, then? That he wasn't acting at all. No, she decided, it simply meant that he is a master actor.
“Goodnight, Miss Sellers,” he said. “I hope I haven't disturbed your sleep.”
“Not at all.”
He departed, closing the door quietly.
Katherine looked at the bedside clock and saw that the time was 12:45. At the window, she tried to stare through the syrupy veil of darkness to see if anyone lingered at the perimeter of the woods, but she could not catch a glimpse of anything out of the ordinary, only the soft glow of moonlight caught in the snow.
In bed again, with all of the lights out and her door locked, she finished listing the credits that accompanied her job and compared them with the previously listed debits. She could not decide which group outweighed the other. But, always optimistic, she finally chose to remain on the job for a few more days in order to see if the atmosphere changed at all.
She never once considered that the atmosphere might change for the worse…
On the edge of sleep, she had such a crazy idea that it woke her completely, and she sat up in bed. She felt certain that Yuri was playing some sort of game, was trying to convince her that he was something he really was not. Couldn't she also explain Alex's odd behavior in the same way? Couldn't his hatred for Michael Harrison be feigned, his abrupt moods carefully calculated? And couldn't Lydia's almost manic cheerfulness, her beatific acceptance of everything, be cultured, a facade? Everyone in Owlsden might be playing parts in some grand act of…
Of what?
Then she told herself this was silly paranoia, the kind of thing you might come up with when you were half asleep. Awake, you could see how absurd it was.
She stretched out again, tossed her hair away from her face, hugged the second pillow to her and, listening to the hooting of the owls overhead, soon went to sleep. She had no nightmares.
CHAPTER 7
Wednesday morning, she ate in her room again, dressed and was downstairs by a quarter of ten. Lydia had left word that she would be in town, talking to the constable about the night patrols to be initiated and that Katherine was free until lunch at one.
Back in her room, she changed into her skiing outfit and went downstairs again, intent on visiting the site of the previous night's bonfire. She wondered what the cultists might have left behind. She did not think this had been a bloody ritual and besides, she was by now rather numbed to the remains of blood sacrifices.
In the kitchen, Patricia Keene was making a fruit salad out of strawberries, fresh peaches, fresh seedless grapes, apples, mandarin oranges and bananas.
“That looks delicious,” Katherine said.
The woman smiled and thanked her. “Going skiing?” she asked. The effort of conversation, on even such a small scale, made her uneasy. She was used to being quiet and left alone and preferred that.
“No,” Katherine said. “Just out for a walk.”
“Not to the woods, I hope.”
Surprised, Katherine said, “Yes, down to the woods.”
“There was a dance there last night, you know.”
“Does Yuri tell you his stories too?”
The woman immediately sensed the skepticism in Katherine's voice and, apparently hurt, lapsed into silence once more. Then she said, in a barely audible murmur, “Just be careful.”