He ignored her and said, “You will join the dance now. And when it is finished, you will be one of us, because you will have danced with Him, and you will want to be in the family.”
“I won't dance,” she said.
Gently, he pushed her forward, though she tried desperately to hold her ground.
“It will be a beautiful experience, Katherine,” Michael said, touching her gently on the cheek with the tips of his ungloved fingers, as if he were testing the unblemished texture of her skin.
“No.”
He shoved harder.
She stumbled forward, almost fell, regained her balance just as she was caught up in the ring of Believers, found herself moving along with them as they shrieked and moaned the odd litanies, though she was not able to maintain their neat rhythm.
She stopped and attempted to push through them toward the open space beyond the fire.
Abruptly, on either side of her, two cultists appeared, one woman and one man, both with a switch in hand. The switches were much like the one that Mrs. Coleridge, of the orphanage, had always been so quick to use: thin, long, dwindling at the tip, perhaps a stiffened willow lash or the younger shoot from a birch branch. They began to herd Katherine, swatting her repeatedly about the head and shoulders until she had no other choice but to continue around the fire with the worshipers.
“Help!” she shouted.
That was no good. Her throat was so dry, her energy levels so low, the noises of the chants and the storm so strong, that she could barely hear herself.
She struck out at the switch-bearers again and again, continually missed them.
The pace of the dance seemed to be picking up, as did the choppy rhythm of the religious chants. She was moving faster herself, her face and neck stung by the thin, hard, relentless reed whips; the bright fire whirled by on the lefthand, showering sparks up like bright ephemeral butterflies while the dark, black-brown-green forest passed in a jumble of stark impressions off to her right.
“Move!” the male herder said.
“Faster!” the woman said.
She was not so terrified as she had been at the start, for she was swiftly growing too weary for terror. Her arms felt like lead weights, while her legs seemed too insubstantial too support her at all. She barely had the energy to stay on her feet, after her battle with the wind and the snow when she had fought her way from Owlsden to the head of the ski run to keep her rendezvous with Michael Harrison. Too, she had the strong feeling that none of this could actually be transpiring, that it was all much too silly and childish to be real. A dream. A nightmare. And with that notion hovering at the back of her mind, the terror was cut even further until there was nothing at all to occupy her mind but the plodding steps of the dance. If she danced, if she cooperated and moved forward around the fire, then it would all be over sooner than it otherwise might, and she could go home and rest… and wake up from the dream…
“Move!”
“Faster!”
The chants were manic now, pitched in higher voices, the words coming so fast they tumbled over one another.
Then she saw something so incredible at the perimeter of the dancing circle that it shattered her mental lethargy in the instant and filled her with the energy of pure, unrelieved horror. Her heart speeded, and her throat constricted in the initial puckering of a scream.
“Faster!”
“Move!”
The flames danced along with the worshipers, rising and falling in their rhythm, surged higher and suddenly changed color: blue.
The thing that prowled beyond the dancing circle now kept pace with Katherine, with no other dancer but her, its fierce red eyes fixed upon her face. Its stare was obsessive, cold and patently evil. She did not want to think about it, to acknowledge it, but she had no choice in the matter. It was a wolf…
No, not a wolf, she told herself as it padded along beside her, not a dozen feet away. Just a dog.
The switches came down harder than ever.
“Faster!”
Just a dog.
She passed Michael. He was not dancing, but he was chanting even louder than the others, holding a book in his open hands as if he were a minister with the Bible. She was sure, whatever the nature of the tone, it was not the Bible.
“Move!”
The wolf seemed to be grinning at her. Its jaws gaped, revealing rows of huge, white teeth, the red maw beyond them, the lolling tongue. It was clearly a wolf, not a dog, and one of the largest wolves that she had ever seen, nearly as large as a man, with shoulders broad enough to carry the weight of a rider.
Now, that was an insane thought. Who would want to ride a wolf?
The fire changed color once again, crackling loudly as some chemical was tossed into it: green…
A nightmare, nothing more, had to be.
The wolf raised up onto its hind paws for a brief moment, quite as if it were attempting to stand like a man, and then it fell back, unable to perform the feat
Somewhere close at hand, something made a strange, low rumbling noise. When Katherine tried to locate it and understand it, she realized that she was listening to the scream that had been trapped in her throat but which was now issuing from her as an agonizingly hoarse moan.
Fire: orange.
“Move!”
She tripped, did not fall, wished that she had fallen, found herself moving forward again. Her body obeyed the thumping drive of the chants as if she had been entranced and had no control over herself.
The wolf tried to leap onto its hind feet again, failed again, dropped onto all fours.
It watched her.
She could sense an approaching end to the ceremony, and she did not want to face the ultimate moment. It couldn't happen, of course. The wolf was only a wolf, not a manifestation of a demon. Still, she did not want to reach the point of the ceremony.
The wolf tried to stand a third time. This time, it actually achieved its purpose, whirled about with the music of the worshipers' voices, leaping clumsily forward on its hind feet, watching her intently, watching…
She tried to mutter a prayer, but she could not get the words out — as if something were preventing her from praying.
The wolf howled and—
Everything came to a sudden, unexpected halt as a shotgun blast exploded in the trees and echoed deafeningly through the thick trunks of the pine trees. The moment the echo died sufficiently for him to be heard, Alex Boland shouted: “Don't move!”
CHAPTER 18
The fire continued to burn, though it did not leap quite so high or sputter nearly as bright as before, providing a properly eerie, flickering orange-yellow illumination for the final act of this unconventional drama. In its soft glow, the cultists stood with their hands at their sides, their faces slack, shoulders stooped forward as if they were weighted down with burdens that no one but themselves could see. They were physically exhausted from the long dance, emotionally exhausted by the frenzy that had so completely possessed them, and mentally disconcerted by the abrupt termination of the ritual which they had intellectually anticipated would reach a satisfying conclusion. Not a one of them made a move toward Alex where he stood directly behind Michael with a two-barrel shotgun slung across his arm and his finger on the trigger. It was not so much that they were afraid of him or of the gun, but more as if they did not even believe he was there. They had not caught up with the present, not mentally and emotionally, and they were still several minutes in the past, living through the colored flames, the heat that poured from the bonfire, the chants, the dance, the wolf…