The Devil Dances by K.H. Koehler Page A

others like this.”
    “Pregnant girls? Pregnant little girls?” I swallowed against the knot in my throat. “How many? How many girls are like this?”
    “There were eight. Sarah is the ninth.”
    We stopped in the kitchen. I’d found it too warm for my liking when we’d first arrived, but now it was just right to chase away my bone chills. The scratches on my faces were starting to hurt, and Mrs. Knapp instinctively went to retrieve some astringent from the cupboards. I went to the kitchen window over the sink and looked out at the growing darkness and the clouds scuttling across the distant Lehigh Mountains. “Have you considered that someone in the community is responsible?”
    “That was our first fear,” Mrs. Knapp said, returning and asking me to sit at the table so she could doctor my wounds. “The men were interviewed. The boys, too. But when the first children were born, we knew it was no one in the colony.”
    “How do you mean?”
    “They weren’t right, like. Not… correct. Deformed.”
    “How?” I was almost too afraid to ask.
    She closed her eyes tight. “The little ones had hooves. And other terrible things.” She swallowed hard. “Most died, but some survived…”
    “What happened to the survivors?”
    “The parents… well, they took care of them.” Mrs. Knapp lowered her head as if she was praying, or as if the burden of her life had become too much. “Nicholas, we don’t believe this is the work of any earthly power.”
    “You think some unseen satanic power is impregnating your children?”
    She went over my face with the cotton ball, slowly swabbing at my scratches. “I don’t know what to think.” When she was done, she went back to nervously playing with the ties on her cap once more. After a moment she seemed to realize what she was doing. Rising, she moved around the kitchen, fixing and rearranging things, busy work. “Can they do such things? Do you know?”
    “This?” I indicated the stairs leading up. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”
    “But demons do tarry with humans, yah?” She looked me up and down as if to question my very existence.
    I bit my lip. “Demons and humans can mate, yes. Obviously. But the circumstances have to be right, and it doesn’t happen like this.” I snorted air through my nostrils as I sought the proper answer. I was supposed to be the expert on these things, after all. “For one thing, the demon needs to take on some form of corporal existence. And the woman must not be an innocent. She must be of child-bearing age, and be a willing consort. It’s a consensual act of will between the woman and the demon. Demons don’t have
carte blanche
to do just whatever the hell they want, or else the world would be hip-deep in daemons.”
    Mrs. Knapp nodded. “My Sarah is a good girl, a righteous girl.” There were tears in her eyes. “She reads books and rides horses. She helps me make schnitz pies. She helps her father in the fields. She would not consent to this. Before this, she did not even understand the ways between men and woman.”
    “When did she get pregnant?”
    She grabbed up the kitchen broom as she spoke. “Three months past. We found her wandering in the grove behind the house, delirious and in a state of half-sleep. She was not the first. They say the grove is haunted, that it does things to the children.”
    I nodded as I stood and reached for my coat. “Let me do some research on this. If I can figure out what’s going on, maybe I can find a way of stopping it.”
    “Please,” she said. “Stay with us a while. Do not leave this farm, no matter what becomes of me.”
    I stopped and looked at her.
    Mrs. Knapp stopped lifelessly sweeping the perfectly clean floor and set the broom aside. She came to me then, the way she had in the beginning. Fearlessly. She looked up at me from her bent angle and said, “I know who you are, Son of Ha-Satan. We have prayed to God for an answer, and He has seen fit