Strange Highways

by Dean Koontz

  “There’s nothing sacred here.”

  “Prove it. Put your fingers in the holy water.”

  P.J. turned his attention to the marble font at his right side. “It was dry before. You put the water there yourself.”

  “Did we?”

  “It hasn’t been blessed,” P.J. said. “You’re not a damn priest. It’s just ordinary water.”

  “Then put your fingers in it.”

  Joey had read of psychotics who, swept away by delusions that they possessed Satanic power, were capable of literally blistering when they put their fingers into holy water or touched a crucifix. The injuries they suffered were real, although induced entirely by their own powers of suggestion, by the depth of their belief in their own sick fantasies.

  When P.J. continued to regard the shallow pool of holy water with trepidation, Joey said, “Go on, touch it, go on—or are you afraid it’ll eat into your hand, burn like an acid?”

  P.J. reached hesitantly toward the marble bowl. Like a dragonfly, his spread fingers hovered over the water. Then he pulled his hand back.

  “Jesus,” Celeste said softly.

  They had found a way to use P.J.’s madness to protect themselves from him.

  The first time that he had lived through this night, Joey had been little more than a boy, just out of his teens, up against not merely an older brother but a psychopath of extreme cunning and high intelligence. Now, he had twenty years of experience on P.J., which gave him the psychological advantage this time.

  “You can’t touch us,” Joey said. “Not here in this sacred place. You can’t do anything that you planned to do here, P.J. Not now, not since we’ve let God back inside these walls. All you can do now is run for it. Morning will roll around eventually, and we’ll just wait here until someone comes looking for us or until someone finds the Bimmers.”

  P.J. tried again to put his hand in the water, but he couldn’t do it. Crying out wordlessly in fear and frustration, he kicked the font.

  The wide marble bowl crashed off the fluted pedestal, and P.J. took sufficient courage from that destruction to rush forward into the nave while the font was still toppling.

  Joey stooped and reached for the 20-gauge.

  Even as the contents of the bowl spilled onto the floor, P.J. stepped into the spreading puddle, and a cloud of sulfurous steam erupted around his feet as if the water had indeed been blessed and had reacted with fierce corrosive power upon encountering the shoe of a demon-ridden man.

  Joey realized that the floor must have been much hotter at the back of the nave than in the sanctuary, fearfully hot.

  Having noticed the extreme and increasing heat in the church, P.J. should have realized as much himself; however, in his dementia, he reacted not with reason but with superstitious panic. The gush of steam from the “holy” water reinforced his bizarre delusion, and he screamed as if he’d actually been burned. In fact, he surely was suffering, because to anyone afflicted with psychosomatic pain, it seemed as genuine as the real thing. P.J. let out a shriek of abject misery, slipped and fell in the water, into more steam, landing hard on his hands and

  knees, wailing, squealing. He raised his hands, fingers smoking, and then put them to his face but tore them away at once, as though the beads of water on them were indeed the tears of Christ and were searing his lips, his cheeks, half blinding him. He thrashed to his feet, stumbled out of the nave into the narthex, to the front doors, into the night, alternately shouting in rage and bleating in purest anguish, like neither a man nor a man possessed but like a wild beast in excruciating torment.

  Joey had only half raised the Remington. P.J. had never come close enough to warrant the use of the gun.

  “My God,” Celeste said shakily.

  “That was amazing luck,” Joey agreed.

  But they were talking about different things.

  She said, “What luck?”

  “The hot floor.”

  “It’s not that hot,” she said.

  He frowned. “Well, it must be a lot hotter back there than at this end of the building. In fact, I’m wondering how long we’ll even be safe here.”

  “It wasn’t the floor.”

  “You saw-“

  “It was him.”

  “Him?”

  She was as deathly pale as one of the distorted, ghostly faces of condensation on the church windows. Staring at the shallow puddle that was still lightly steaming at the far end of the center aisle, she said, “He couldn’t touch it. Wasn’t worthy.”

  “No. Nonsense. It was just the hot floor meeting the cool water, steam-“

  She shook her head vigorously. “Corrupt. Couldn’t touch something holy.”

  “Celeste-“

  “Corrupt, foul, tainted.”

  Worried that she was on the brink of hysteria, he said, “Have you forgotten?”

  Celeste met his eyes, and he saw such an acute awareness in her that he dismissed all concerns about panic attacks and hysteria. In fact, there was a curiously humbling quality about her piercing stare. She’d forgotten nothing. Nothing. And he sensed that her perception was, in fact, clearer than his.

  Nevertheless, he said, “We put the water in the font.”

  “So?”

  “Not a priest.”

  “So?”

  “We put it there, and it’s just ordinary water.”

  “I saw what it did to him.”

  “Just steam-“

  “No, Joey. No, no.” She spoke rapidly, running sentences together, frantic to convince him: “I got a glimpse of his hands, part of his face, his skin was blistered, red and peeling, the steam can’t have been that hot, not off a wooden floor.”

  “Psychosomatic injury,” he assured her.

  “No.”

  “The power of the mind, autohypnosis.”

  “There’s not much time,” she said urgently, looking around at the crucifix and then at the candles, as if to make sure that their stage setting was still in order.

  “I don’t think he’ll be back,” Joey said.

  “He will.”

  “But when we played straight into his fantasy, we scared the bejesus -

  “No. He can’t be frightened. Nothing can scare him.”

  Even in her urgency, she seemed mildly dazed, in shock. But Joey was overcome by the odd certainty that she was not distracted, as she seemed, but was functioning at a level of awareness and with a degree of insight that he had never known. Heightened perceptions.

  She crossed herself. ” … in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti … “ She was spooking Joey worse than P.J. had done.

  “A homicidal psychotic,” Joey said nervously, “is full of rage, sure, but he can be as susceptible to fear as any sane person. Many of them-“

  “No. He’s the father of fear-“

  “—many of them live in constant terror-“

  “—the father of lies, such inhuman fury-“

  “—even when they’re on power fantasies like he is, they live in fear of-“

  “—fury driving him for eternity.” Her expressive eyes were glazed, haunted. “He never gives up, never will, nothing to lose, in a perpetual state of hatred and rage ever since the Fall …. “

  Joey glanced toward the spilled water in which P.J. had slipped. The church was hotter than ever, sweltering, but steam had stopped rising from the puddle. Anyway, that wasn’t the fall she meant.

  After a hesitation, he said, “Who’re we talking about, Celeste?”

  She appeared to be listening to voices that only she could hear. “He’s coming,” she whispered tremulously.

  “You’re not talking about P.J., are you?”

  “He’s coming.”

  “What? Who?”

  “The companion.”

  “Judas? There’s no Judas. That’s fantasy.”

  “Beyond Judas.”

  “Celeste, be serious, the devil himself isn’t really in P.J.”

  As alarmed by his insistence on reason as
he was alarmed by her sudden descent into full-blown mysticism, she gripped him by the lapels of his denim jacket. “You’re running out of time, Joey. Not much time left to believe.”

  “I believe-“

  “Not in what matters.”

  She let go of him, vaulted over the presbytery balustrade into the choir enclosure, landing solidly on both feet.

  “Celeste!”

  Rushing to the sanctuary gate, she shouted, “Come touch the floor, Joey, touch where the water spilled, see whether it’s hot enough for steam, hurry!”

  Frightened for her, frightened by her, Joey also vaulted the balustrade. “Wait!”

  She shoved through the sanctuary gate.

  Over the incessant drumming of the rain on the roof, another sound arose. An escalating roar. Not from under them. Outside.

  She hurried into the center aisle.

  He looked toward the windows on the left. Toward the windows on the right. Darkness on both sides.

  “Celeste!” he shouted as he pushed through the sanctuary gate. “Show me your hands!”

  She was halfway down the aisle. She turned toward him. Her face was slick with sweat. Like a ceramic glaze. Glistening with candlelight. The face of a saint. A martyr.

  The roar swelled. An engine. Accelerating.

  “Your hands!” Joey shouted desperately.

  She raised her hands.

  In her delicate palms were hideous wounds. Black holes thick with blood.

  From out of the west, shattering windows, smashing through clapboard and wall studs and old wood paneling and stations of the cross, the Mustang exploded into the church, headlights unlit but engine screaming, horn suddenly blaring, tires popping like balloons as the floor splintered under them, driving forward with tremendous power, plowing into the pews, unstoppable. Those benches cracked free of their moorings, tilted up, slammed into one another—pews and kneelers erupting and crashing together and piling one atop the next in a cresting wave of wood, in a geometry of penitence—and still the Mustang surged forward, engine racing, gears grinding, trumpeting as it came.

  Joey fell to the floor in the center aisle and shielded his head with his folded arms, certain that he was going to die in the tsunami of pews. He was even more certain that Celeste would die, whether crushed to death now or, later, after being nailed to the floor or to the wall by P.J. Joey had utterly failed her, failed himself. Following the storm of broken glass, the ,hail of plaster, the avalanche of wood, there would be a rain of blood. Over the roar of the Mustang, over the banshee horn, over the crack-split-shatter of wood, over the ringing of falling glass, over the ominous creak of sagging ceiling beams, he heard one special sound separate and eerily distinct from all others, and instantly he knew what it was: the bronze clatter and thud of the crucifix dropping off the back wall of the sanctuary.

  17

  THE COLD WIND WAS IN THE CHURCH NOW, SNIFFING AND PANTING, LIKE a pack of dogs through the ruins.

  Joey lay facedown under a stack of tumbled pews and shattered wall beams, and although he felt no pain, he was afraid that his legs were crushed. When he dared to move, however, he discovered that he was neither injured nor pinned in place.

  The rubble was a multitiered, three-dimensional maze. Joey was forced to crawl, writhe, and squirm through it as though he were a rat-seeking ferret exploring the depths of an ancient timberfall.

  Shingles, laths, and chunks of other debris still dropped out of the demolished wall and from the damaged ceiling, clattering into the wreckage. The wind played the narrow twisting passages in the destruction as though they were flutes, piping an eerie, tuneless music. But the car engine had died.

  After wriggling through an especially cramped space between slabs of prayer-polished oak, Joey came to the front wheel of the Mustang. The tire was flat, and the fender had crumpled around it like paper.

  From the undercarriage, greenish antifreeze drizzled like dragon’s blood. The radiator had burst.

  He squeezed farther along the side of the car. Just past the driver’s door, he reached a place where he was able to stand up between the vehicle and the surrounding rubble.

  He hoped to see his brother dead in the Mustang, the shaft of the steering wheel driven through his chest by the impact or his body pitched halfway through the windshield. But the driver’s door was open just wide enough to allow escape, and P.J. was gone.

  “Celeste!” Joey shouted.

  No answer.

  PT would be looking for her.

  “Celeste!”

  He smelled gasoline. The fuel tank had burst.

  The surrounding pews and slabs of wood paneling and sheared-off two-by-fours had tilted up higher than the car. He couldn’t see much of the church.

  Joey levered himself onto the roof of the Mustang. He rose to his feet, turning his back to the damaged wall and the rain-slashed night.

  St. Thomas’s was filled with strange light and swarming shadows. Some ceiling bulbs were still on, but others were out. Toward the rear of the church, showers of white-gold-blue sparks cascaded from a damaged overhead fixture.

  In the sanctuary, the candles had toppled when the building had been shaken by the impact of the hurtling car. The sheets on the altar platform were afire.

  Shuttling, weaving shadows made a fabric of confusion, but one among them moved with a linear purpose that snapped Joey’s attention to it. Coming off the ambulatory onto the presbytery was P.J. He was carrying Celeste. She was unconscious, cradled in his arms, head tilted back, tender throat exposed, black hair trailing almost to the floor.

  Christ, no!

  For an instant, Joey couldn’t breathe.

  Then he was gasping.

  He plunged off the roof of the Mustang onto the crumpled hood and clambered up from the car onto the surrounding jumble of pews and beams and buckled wallboard. The wreckage shifted under him, threatening to open and swallow him in a maw of wickedly splintered boards and twisted nails, but he kept moving, wobbling and lurching, arms spread like those of a lumberjack trying to maintain his balance in a logrolling contest.

  At the three altar steps, P.J. ascended.

  The back wall of the sanctuary, without crucifix, crawled with images of fire.

  Joey jumped down from the pile of rubble into an open space in front of the sanctuary railing.

  On the altar, P.J. dropped Celeste onto the burning sheets, as though she were not a persona special and needed person—but only an armful of trash.

  “No!” Joey shouted, leaping across the sanctuary railing, stumbling into the curving ambulatory that would take him around the choir and up to the high altar.

  Her raincoat caught fire. He saw the flames leap hungrily from that new fuel.

  Her hair. Her hair!

  Stung by the flames, she regained consciousness and screamed.

  Rounding the ambulatory, reaching the presbytery walkway, Joey saw P.J. standing over Celeste, on the burning sheets, oblivious of the fire around his feet, hunched like some round-backed beast, the hammer in one hand and raised high to strike.

  With his heart knocking as loud as Death’s fist on a door, Joey crossed the presbytery, toward the altar steps.

  The hammer arced down.

  Her cry of terror. Heart piercing. Cut off by the sound of the steel hammer crushing her skull.

  A bleat of misery tore free of Joey as he reached the foot of the altar steps.

  P.J. whipped around. “Little brother.” He was grinning. Eyes adance with reflections of fire. Face blistered by water burns. He triumphantly raised the blood-wet hammer. “Now let’s nail her down.”

  “Noooooooo!”

  Something fluttered across Joey’s vision. No. Nor across. The flutter wasn’t anything in the church, nothing real. Behind his eyes. Like a darting shadow of wings on rippled, sun-spangled water.

  Everything had changed.

  The fire was gone.

  So was P.J.

  The crucifix hung on the back wall again. The candle
s were all upright, the makeshift altar cloth unburned.

  Celeste grabbed him by the shoulder, spun him, seized the lapels of his denim jacket.

  He gasped in surprise.

  She said, “You’re running out of time, Joey. Not much time left to believe.”

  He heard himself say, “I believe-“

  “Not in what matters,” she interrupted.

  She let go of him and vaulted over the presbytery balustrade into the choir enclosure, landing solidly on both feet.

  There was as yet no ragged breach in the west wall. The Mustang had not yet exploded into the church.

  Replay.

  Joey had been thrown back in time again. Not twenty years as before. Only a minute. Two minutes at most.

  A chance to save her.

  He’s coming.

  “Celeste!”

  Running to the sanctuary gate, she shouted, “Come touch the floor, Joey, touch where the water spilled, see whether it’s hot enough for steam, hurry!”

  Joey put a hand on the balustrade, ready to vault across it and go after her.

  No. Do it right this time. Last chance. Do it right.

  Celeste shoved through the sanctuary gate.

  Over the incessant drumming of the rain on the roof, another sound arose. An escalating roar. The Mustang.

  He’s coming.

  With a terrifying conviction that he was wasting precious seconds and that this replay was running faster than the original event, Joey snatched the 20-gauge shotgun from the presbytery floor.