by Dean Koontz
She stepped into the kitchen, turned and shut the door. She stepped quickly to the table in the center of the room, fumbled around until she found a wooden chair, turned and placed the chair against the door so that the back of it was braced under the knob.
She waited.
Slowly, her eyes adjusted to the darkness and fully used the shallow snowlight that came through the big windows.
Had she been imagining the stalker? Had there really been someone behind her, or had she-
Someone tried the door, not boldly, not normally- but stealthily, as if he half expected it to be locked.
Katherine turned and went quickly across the kitchen.
Behind her, someone was cautiously putting a shoulder to the door, trying to pop the brace loose with a minimum of noise.
You'll be with Michael in a few minutes, she told herself. Everything will be fine then. He'll take care of you; he'll joke with you; he'll make everything bright and fine.
She opened the kitchen door, stepped into the wind and snow, closed the door behind her, and was instantly relieved that she had taken the first major step in her flight from this strange house.
CHAPTER 15
When she had gone only twenty steps from the kitchen door, her eyes watering from the fierce assault of the wind, her face numb with cold, Katherine began to wonder if the loss of power had, after all, been due to the storm. Inside Owlsden, she had become accustomed to the continuous growl of the elements without really understanding how furious they really were. The first snow had been a spring shower compared to this thunderstorm of a buzzard. She could not see more than another step in front of her, and she guided herself as much by instinct as by anything she came across in the way of landmarks. The snow was well over her knees except where the wind had scoured it away to drift it elsewhere, and she was required to expand an enormous amount of energy to make any headway at all. Why hadn't Michael told her how rough it would be? The heavy insulation of her ski-suit did not keep her as toasty warm as usual; chills ran up her spine as the most severe blasts seemed somehow to cut right through the quilted fabric and dry the thin sheen of perspiration on her body.
Twice, she turned and looked back toward the house to see if anyone were following her, but the first time she knew she wouldn't have seen him even if he was-and the second time, she could not make out the lines of Owlsden, though it must have been fairly close still.
She doubted even Michael's driving ability to force the Rover up the mountain in this-and then she stopped thinking along those lines. She could not afford to doubt Michael. He might be her only chance.
She had been counting her steps in the event she had to attempt to retrace her path, and for this reason she knew that it was the fifty-seventh step on which she floundered and went down in the cold, soft snow. Her foot slipped on something beneath the snow and twisted under her just as the wind shifted slightly and pounded down on her in a brutal gust. She threw her arms out in a vain effort to break her fall, and she sprawled full-length in the snow.
For a moment, all sound ceased.
Everything was deadly silent.
She lay still, wondering what had happened, whether she was conscious and even, for a second, if she might be dead. But she could hear her heart thumping rapidly; she could hear that much, and that much was enough. She realized that she could not hear the wind because her head was cushioned in deep snow that filtered the keening wail above her.
She lay there for a moment, sucking in wet, cold breaths, recovering the strength to get up again.
This was only the second time she had faced a major battle with the elements, and her mind was suddenly drawn back to that other time, when she was seven years old... the water rising slowly across the farmyard and moving relentlessly in on the house... her father wading through it toward the barn, carrying the buckets with which he hoped to bail out the machinery pit where the tractor lay. At all costs, the machinery must remain dry, all thirty thousand dollars worth of it... everything in the house already moved to the second floor... her mother going after her father to help... Katherine alone at the second floor bedroom window, watching them... then the water... not just rising slowly any longer... a sudden wall of it, as if something had burst farther up the valley... her father looking up in horror... throwing the buckets down... yelling at her mother... her mother frozen there, watching it as her father ran toward her... then the water, everywhere the water, sweeping over the both of them... Windows shattering downstairs as it blasted into the house and gushed almost to the top of the stairs in one sudden explosion of terrifying noise...
In the snow outside Owlsden, Katherine got to her feet. It had occurred to her that she might find lying in the snow much too pleasant and, when the critical moment came, be as unwilling or as unable to move out of the path of death as her mother had been.
She started out again, colder than before, cold clear through to her bones. She was shivering so badly that her teeth chattered together, and there was nothing she could do to stop them.
Suddenly, ahead, a flashlight flickered in the darkness.
She stopped, squinted, lost sight of it.
"Hey!" she shouted.
She thought, for a moment, she might have circled back to Owlsden without being aware of it and might now be calling to those who were out searching for her from that end.
It didn't matter; she had to find help.
"Hey!"
She stumbled forward, went down to her knees again, struggled up and went on. "Michael!"
The light flicked again, closer.
"Hey!"
This tune, it stayed on.
A moment later, she nearly crashed into them and knocked them down as they loomed out of the snowstorm directly in front of her: Michael Harrison and the tall, blond friend of his whose name was Kerry Markwood. She went forward, into his arms, and leaned against him as she recovered her breath.
"It's worse up here than in the valley," he said, talking loudly so she could hear him above the storm. "When we got here and saw how awful it was, I began to worry."
Her mouth was dry. She wanted to scoop up a handful of snow and eat it, but she knew that was the wrong thing to do. She needed something hot, coffee or tea. She hoped it wouldn't take them long to get into town.
"Are you all right?" Kerry Markwood asked.
"Fine," she said.
Michael smiled. "I was afraid they might not let you go."
"I was followed," she said.
The two men looked at each other, obviously concerned by that.
"If s all right," she explained. "I lost him." She described, rapidly, how the stalker had followed her through the house and how she had foiled him at the kitchen door.
"Great girl!" Michael said. "You really are something!"
"Now," she said, "where's the Rover? I'm freezing to death out here." She shuddered to make her point.
Even with most of his face hidden by the red toboggan hat he had drawn firmly down around his ears, and even with the neck scarf that hid his entire chin, he managed to look embarrassed. "I'm afraid I am less of a driver than I thought," he said.
"You couldn't make it?"
"Only a third of the way."
"But how did you get here, then?"
"We picked up skis and used the lift."
"We can't ski down, though," Katharine said. "Not in this weather."
"We'll walk it."
"Are you serious?" she asked.
"It won't be hard," Kerry Markwood assured her. "I know these woods as well as my own back yard. We'll cut into the trees over there, until the pines are so thick that the snow isn't very deep under them. Then it ought to be a cinch to follow the mountain to its base and strike back to where the Rover is parked."
"Well..." she said, trying to express all of her doubts in the single word.
"Would you rather stay here?" Michael asked.
"I guess not."
"Come on, then," he said. "You follow Kerry, and I'l
l be right behind you."
The blond boy lead them across the brink of the mountain to the other side of the ski run, then into the trees. The sound of the wind changed, became a distant soughing high overhead, no longer a biting force on all sides.
Soon, they turned and struck down the slope, guided expertly around the worst briar patches and through the most confusing thrusts of limestone by the Markwood boy who moved as surely as if he were leading them across someone's living room. When the way grew treacherous, the two men helped Katherine forward, and she did not fall once under their careful ministrations.
In a few minutes, they came to a large circle in the trees where the snow seemed to have been beaten down by a number of booted feet, though Markwood kept the flashlight beam too high for her to be certain of that. Here, in the middle of nowhere, for no reason that she could readily discern, they stopped.
"I'm not tired," she said.
"Nor I," Markwood said cheerfully enough.
"Me either," Michael said, and laughed.
"Then why-"
Michael pulled off his scarf and pushed his toboggan hat slightly off his forehead now that the cold was not so fierce. He said, "This is as far as we go. For now, anyway."
"What do you mean?" she asked.
Somehow, she wished that the wind were not so distant, that it was still all around them and that it could drown out his words. She knew she was not going to appreciate what he had to say.
"This is where we meant to bring you," Markwood said. "Here and no farther."
"Is this where the evidence against Alex can be found?"
Abruptly, other people began to appear around them, stepping out from behind trees and rounded teeth of milestone. None of them spoke or made any noise as they came forth. She recognized many of them from the long afternoon of conversation in the cafe.
"Michael?" she asked, turning to him for an explanation.
"Meet the family," he said. "We don't go any farther, Katherine, because this is where the family is- and this is where the dance is soon going to take place."
CHAPTER 16
Katherine stared at him, sure that it must be a joke or that she had misunderstood. "The cult?" she asked, finally.
"The family," he corrected. "We are a family in Satan."
"It can't be!"
"But it is."
"Michael, you're too sensible to-"
He frowned. "What makes you think that Satanists are not sensible? Do you believe that Christianity holds the only true answers and that the rest of us are madmen? Well, it isn't so, not at all. There, are alternate paths through this life, and we have simply chosen one of them in preference to the road most traveled by."
She did not know whether he realized he was distorting a poem by Robert Frost, but the irony of the similarity of thought was almost funny. Almost.
"Let's begin," Michael said.
The others moved toward the center of the circle and began to clear away some of the snow. Still others carried in dry wood which they must have brought along with them, and they began to prepare material for a bonfire.
"Then Alex isn't anything you said he was."
"Not a Satanist, no."
"You lured me out of Owlsden on the pretext of-"
"Don't be indignant, Katherine," he said, smiling benignly on her. "You'll thank me later tonight, when you've been taken into the family."
"I don't want to be in your crazy family," Katherine said, taking a step toward him, hoping to plead a case he would listen to.
"Not now, of course. But later."
"Never."
"When you've seen Him, when you've understood Him, you will thank me, Katherine."
She ignored his rantings and said, "I fail to see how you can force me to become a member of the family against my will. When the ceremony is over, what's to keep me from leaving here and going straight into Roxburgh, to the authorities?"
"You won't."
"Will you-kill me? Like you killed Yuri?"
"Of course not! Yuri got in the way when he wasn't supposed to be. You're different. We want you. And once you've danced with Him, you'll be happy to belong to the family, to be constantly possessed by Him and to face the future as His."
"I don't believe I'll feel that way at all."
"Just wait."
She saw, in Michael's eyes, the flame of the fanatic which cool reason could never hope to quench. Why hadn't she seen that same flame before? Why had she only seen love, affection, understanding and good humor in those incredibly blue eyes? Had he been a tremendously good actor or-and she felt this was more likely-had she been too blind to see anything but what she wanted to see?
As hard as it was to face, that last must be true, for she had not only misjudged Michael Harrison. She had misjudged his friends. And she had apparently misjudged Alex and his friends also. And, finally, she had misjudged Yuri, poor Yuri. She had been so certain that he had been playing a role that she had easily overlooked the real man. He was a college graduate who still believed in ghosts and demons and vampires. That had seemed like such an odd combination that it had to be false, and instead of trying to understand why he should be a man of such conflicting facets, she had discarded the notion that he might really be what he appeared to be.
How could she have been so wrong, so often? In the back of her mind, a tiny grain of an idea began to form, so small she could not make much of it. But she knew that, if she survived this night, she would see that idea flower and would come to understand herself better than she ever had before.
"Already," Michael said, "you seem softened to the idea."
"No."
He looked beyond her, at the members of the family who were making the arrangements. As he did so and his eyes seemed to glaze for a moment in a curious look of mindless anticipation, Katherine steeled herself to break through any interference she might receive, and she ran past him toward the edge of the forest and the open expanse of the ski run which she knew lay just beyond.
She got a dozen steps before someone shouted.
She kept running, pumping her legs up and down, came out of the trees and plowed into the thick blanket of snow on the run, bulled her way ahead despite the resistance she received. Fear drove her, and that might give her an edge over the rest of them.
Hands grasped desperately for her, snagged at her clothes but were torn loose as she ran even faster, sending up a thick, white spray of snow in her wake.
"Damn you!" someone hissed close by her right hand.
She looked over as she ran, and she saw Kerry Markwood keeping pace with her, his face strained tight, lips skinned back over a set of white, even teeth.
When she looked to the left, she saw another young man on that side. He was tall and muscular, easily over six feet and over two hundred pounds, and he did not seem to mind the chase at all. Indeed, he seemed to be enjoying it, because he nodded his head and smiled at her as he put on a burst of speed and pulled ahead of her.
Suddenly, the ground turned up, rolled above her, slammed down hard upon her face, placing the sky at her back like a heavy bowl of water.
She shook her head, blew snow from her nostrils and got her hands under herself, palms flat on the snow. She sucked in a deep breath and pushed herself up.
Kerry Markwood and the muscular boy took hold of her, one on either arm, and they would not be shaken loose.
"Damn you," Markwood said, though not as furiously as he had when he was giving chase.
"Easy girl, easy," the muscular boy said. His fingers dug into her arm nice spikes into soft wood.
They lead her back to Michael who stood at the edge of the woods, his hands limp at his sides.
"Almost," she said.
She felt better for having tried something, anything, even though it had not worked.
"Where did you hope to get to?" he asked.
"Anywhere else," she said.
"Back to Alex?"
"It would be better with him than with you," she said
.
"That's a lie!" he snapped, his face suffusing with blood in the white glow of the flashlight. In his voice, she heard a more obsessive hatred than she had ever heard from Alex Boland. He said, "I told you we wouldn't hurt you." His voice was so cold and brittle that it frightened Katherine.
She did not respond.
Michael raised his hand and, in one utterly vicious sweep that was too fast for her to avoid, he slapped her across the face.
Her head jerked back. Her mouth sagged open as a flash of white and yellow pain exploded across her forehead. That was the first time she had ever realized that pain had a color. She wondered if there were different colors for different kinds of pain.
The hand came around again and struck her more gently than it had the first time. At least, it seemed to strike with less force, though that might only have been because she was too numb to properly interpret its impact.
However hard it had been, it was quite hard enough, for it knocked her down as if her knees were jelly. The two boys let go of her arms.
"Sisters!" Michael called to some of the women in the cult. "Come fetch your future relative."
She tried to get up again.
She couldn't manage it.
Darkness fell around her like the great, black wings of a bird, and she did not know anything else that happened for a while...
CHAPTER 17
Fire.
Heat, little smoke.
Figures moving in the rippling currents of hot air, distorted like figures in funhouse mirrors...
Voices.
Singing? No, chanting.
Katherine came fully awake and found that she was sitting in the snow not half a dozen steps away from the bonfire. The heat from it had flushed her face. Her hands were behind her, as if propping her up, but when she tried to move them, she found that they were tied together rather securely. The circulation in her hands had been affected, and her fingertips tingled unpleasantly.
