The Devil Dances (14 page)

I realized the sound of the bedroom door closing had woke me, and I felt an irrational sense of panic. Vivian was a notorious night owl. When we slept together—I mean really slept, not just had sex—she only slept for a few hours at a time, and I frequently found her fixing a midnight snack or watching Netflix at three o’clock in the morning. Problem was, I didn’t see her doing that here. Since we’d arrived, Vivian had been on her best behavior, happily talking with the women and helping in small ways with meals. She hadn’t even complained that her only means of washing up before bed was the wash basin of cold water pumped up from the well.

Would she really leave our room to go wandering around a strange house in the middle of the night? I seriously doubted it.

I got out of bed, grabbed my robe—flashing one of the Swartzcopf would likely earn me an instant shunning—and went to the door. When I got out into the long hall, lined on both sides by a number of closed bedroom doors, I realized someone was turning the bend and going downstairs. I followed, but not quickly enough. By the time I reached the vast living/meeting room below, I saw that Vivian, dressed in a long, white, cotton nightgown, was headed for the kitchen.

“Viv?” I said, keeping my voice low.

She didn’t answer me.

I followed her into the big country kitchen. It was dark, cool and deserted. I saw her unlatching the back door and letting herself out onto the stoop.

I started wondering about sleepwalking. Vivian had never done it for as long as I’d known her, but her brother, Josh, had mentioned she’d been a frequent sleepwalker when she was a young girl, not long after her sexual assault at the hands of her teacher, Mr. McCarty. It wasn’t like in the movies, he said. She hadn’t wandered around with her eyes closed, her arms extended. Instead, he would find her in the kitchen in the middle of the night, eyes open but completely unresponsive, cracking eggs into a bowl, whipping them, and putting batters together. I’d thought it was almost sweet, the way he’d described it, but apparently it had scared him to death. Each time, he’d cleaned up after her and gotten her back into bed before their parents had found her. Vivian’s parents hadn’t believed her about the attacks; they’d thought she was saying it to get attention.

After she’d let herself out into the garden behind the house, I slowed down and didn’t try to touch her—I’d heard that was a very bad thing to do to a sleepwalker. The full moon was casting so much light that it was easy for me to find my way. I shadowed her as she passed Mary’s huge vegetable and herbal garden. Vivian had asked to see it after dinner, but now she paid it no mind. She seemed to be on a mission.

She unlatched the garden gate and let herself out into the pastureland that the Knapp’s kept for their horses. It was about three acres across and abutted the edge of Mulberry Grove. I followed as she crossed it to the edge of their property, where the Knapp farm gave way to the darkness that was the grove. When she hit the salt line of my spell, she stopped like she’d hit a glass barrier. She was an other-creature like me; that meant she was particularly sensitive to my protection spell. Her love—or lust—for me was more than enough to empower the spell and keep her safe. Barring all that, I owned her soul. In essence, she belonged to me. She wasn’t going anywhere.

She moaned, and as I came abreast of her, my toes just touching the line of salt, I saw Vivian was touching herself through her nightgown, little strokes over her breasts that graduated downward until her hand was flat against her lower belly, her fingers sinking into the juncture between her legs, with only the thin cotton nightgown between her fingers and her pleasure.

I’d seen her masturbate before. I’d asked her to do it for my pleasure, and she’d been more than happy to comply, but she’d kept her eyes on me as she’d brought herself to fulfillment. This time her eyes were elsewhere, pinned to the darkness of the grove. She wasn’t looking at me. She might not even be thinking about me. That bothered me. A lot.

Hey, I can admit to being a little insecure about these things.

“Viv,” I said. And then louder: “Vivian.”

Vivian blinked and looked around at the woods with a dazed expression on her face. “Why did you bring me here, Nick?”

“I didn’t. You brought me here. Do you remember why?” I knew the first few seconds after a dream or an incident of sleepwalking ended were critical.

She shook her head, said, “I was listening to the music.”

“What music?”

She cocked her head. “You don’t hear it?”

I listened. I could hear the wind soughing mournfully through the boughs of the pine trees, the distant, muffled hoot of an owl, a horse whickering in the pens behind us. I didn’t hear anything else. “No. What music? What does it sound like?”

She listened. “It’s gone now. But it was like a flute playing.”

“A flute? And you heard it coming from the woods?”

She looked at me like I was insane. “It was pretty loud. You didn’t hear it at all?”

“A flute playing? No. I did hear the wind…”

“It wasn’t wind, Nick,” she said, getting agitated. “I know what wind sounds like. This was music.”

We both stopped speaking and turned back to the woods when we heard the laughter. Gruff, male laughter, deep and full of joy and life. Welcoming. The sound of it made me embarrassingly hard, something that had never happened before. I mean, I liked guys, sure, especially if they were cute and sweet, but hard from a single laugh? No.

“Someone’s out there,” I said. I crossed the protective line of salt and ventured a few feet into the woods. The trees closed over me and my bare feet stung from the pine needles I was tramping over. It was suddenly colder—much, much colder. Cold and black. Wind cut through my robe like a steak knife, snatching the tie away, ripping it open around me. I felt like I was standing in a cave, or some completely different dimension, a different planet, the full moon obliterated.

“Nick?” Vivian called from beyond the black wall of trees behind me. Her voice sounded more muffled than it should have, like she was underwater. “Nick!”

“
Nick.”
There was a second voice, but it was coming from the woods in front of me, and I couldn’t see the speaker. It was soft and plaintive, a woman’s voice. It sounded like Morgana. “Nick, help me please.”

No, I didn’t go rushing off after it. I’m not that stupid, thanks.

“Nick?” the voice in front of me said. It had changed. It sounded like my dad now, that soft, commanding voice that always made me both sad and angry to hear. “Nick, come over here, son. I have something to show you. Something important.”

Yeah, right. Like my dad would be caught dead in the woods at night.

“Nick, get your fucking ass over here.”

I shuddered a little inside. The voice had changed once more. Now it sounded like my foster father in one of his drunken rages. I sucked in a deep breath, then jumped when I felt Vivian’s hand close over my arm.

“Are you okay, Nick? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“You could say that.”

A part of me wanted to step further into the woods, to find the origin of this trickery, but a larger and more basic part told me to wait things out, let it come to me. You don’t fight an unseen enemy on unknown territory. That’s just stupid. I’m pretty sure Sun Tzu stated that much more eloquently in
The Art of War
than I did, but you get the point.

I grabbed Vivian by the hand and dragged her from the woods with me. “Let’s go back to bed.”

That gruff, echoing laughter followed us all the way back to the house.

I should have known that it—whatever it was—would get even with me. I had thwarted it. Harmed it. I had perhaps even made it afraid. I had taken away its victims. And, like creatures everywhere who are suddenly afraid, supernatural or not, it lashed out at me.

When John, wan-faced, his mouth set in a trembling line, woke me the following morning by knocking on our door, I thought for sure that he was going to tell me that Sarah’s health had taken a turn for the worse. I slipped out of bed, trying not to disturb Vivian, who looked exhausted, dark rings lurking under her eyes, and quickly threw some clothes on.

He led me, barefoot and half-dressed in jeans and an unbuttoned chambray shirt, down the long hallway crowded with several generations of Knapps. I saw, to my relief, that little Sarah was among them. She stood solemnly beside her mother, dressed in her long, dark dress and black cap, her head down, looking like she might be sick. As I passed her, she grabbed my hand. I turned to her and she nodded her solemn thanks to me before lowering her head once more.

John led me to his mother’s bedroom.

I stepped inside and I saw.

“Do you want me to call the State Police?” I offered, reaching for my cell in my jeans pocket.

“I have already sent my eldest, Thomas, down to phone the coroner. We must do that, you understand. State law.”

Down to phone
meant that John’s son had gone down to the general store on the very outer edges of the colony to inform the authorities. There was a phone there that the Swartzcopf used in emergencies, but it wasn’t like that scene in
Witness
, which was made way back in 1985, Harrison Ford nervously stuffed into a phone booth. The English proprietor kept a disposable cell phone under the front desk that anyone in the colony could use, if the situation warranted it. That way, it was available for emergencies like this, but still far enough away to dissuade any misuse or mischief. This situation warranted it. Despite being a secluded and very private Amish community, it was still illegal to bury someone in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania without a coroner filling out a death report.

I finished tucking my half-open shirt into my jeans and approached the bed where old Mrs. Knapp lay in her nightgown and cap. I felt my heart flit once, then settle down into a vast, familiar cavern deep inside of myself, the way it used to do when I worked as a cop and came upon a particularly grisly ordeal. I’d seen enough crap on the streets of New York that I used to have to compartmentalize the violence so I could analyze it at some later point in order to do my job correctly. Mad skills, as it were.

Elsie Knapp had used a steak knife to saw both forearms open, from roughly the middle of her arm to her wrist. She had done it the right way, going “down the road” instead of “across the street,” the way the goths down in the Philly clubs liked to say. Her left arm wound was much deeper than her right, the cut almost to the bone, testifying to the fact that she’d done such a good job with the one wrist that she’d had very little strength left to do the other. I had, literally, never seen anyone so committed to a suicide in my life. Her face was contorted, her mouth hanging open in a scream she had muffled by biting on a horse’s bit. Elsie Knapp seemed to have known instinctively that she didn’t have the strength to cut through her leathery old skin with a regular knife, which might have been less traumatic; thus, she had used the much more painful, serrated steak knife.

I thought about all this wonderful, logical cop stuff even as the remnants of last night’s dinner lurched up my throat and into my mouth. I swallowed it down, closed my eyes, found my center of calmness, and opened them again.

I looked over the scene, analyzing it; something in the back of my mind bothered me, but before I could give it any further thought, John started barking orders, getting everyone out who didn’t need to be there. His wife stood at the window with her back to me, weeping into her hands. John closed the door and went to Mary, hugging the distraught woman against himself. “She didn’t leave a note,” he said without looking at me. “How could she do this? Has our God finally forsaken us? She won’t be buried with the others… they will shun her even in death…”

He was getting himself hysterical by degrees, not that I could blame him. I thought of sweet Mrs. Knapp, who had begged me for help—on her goddamn knees, no less. How could such a strong, fearless old woman do this? I asked John and Mary to give me a few minutes alone in the room before the coroner arrived and threw everyone out. With a nod, they left me with the remnants of this sad old woman, the blood splattered over her clothes and quilt, the cruel metal bit stuck in her teeth.

I went over the scene of the crime, not touching Elsie, but analyzing everything I could. I even went through her drawers and chest. Everything seemed to be in order. I didn’t see signs of a struggle—no hair or blood under the fingernails, no obvious bruising, though a full coroner’s report would confirm all that. Mrs. Knapp had done this entirely of her own free will. Why? Because she despaired? Because something had prompted her to do it?

She’d requested my help. Why hadn’t she waited to see if the spells would work?

I found only one clue. On the desk across the room was Mrs. Knapp’s Bible. It was open to Genesis, Chapter 9, the page marked. I looked down at the passage circled by Mrs. Knapp:

Surely for your lifeblood I will demand a reckoning; from the hand of every beast I will require it, and from the hand of man. From the hand of every man’s brother I will require the life of man. Whoever sheds man’s blood, by man his blood shall be shed; for in the image of God He made man.