Strange Highways

by Dean Koontz

  Something struck him painfully on the hip. Turning, he saw that the girl was wielding a heavy glass ashtray. Drawing her lips back from her teeth, she hissed at him as though she were an angry cat. She pounded his shoulders with the ashtray, struck him repeatedly with one tiny balled fist, kicked, and screeched. Then she lost her grip on the ashtray and sagged against him, exhausted, crying.

  He put his arm around her to comfort her, but she had enough energy to twist violently away. She turned, tried to reach the bed, stumbled, fell, and passed out.

  He lifted her and put her to bed.

  He pulled the covers around her, tucked her in, and sat down in his chair to wait for her to regain consciousness.

  When she awakened half an hour later, she was trembling and dizzy. He soothed her, smoothing her hair away from her face, wiping her teary eyes, placing cold compresses on her brow.

  In time, when she could speak, she asked, “Are you impotent or something?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then why? I wanted to repay you. That’s how I repay men. I don’t have anything else to give.”

  He touched her. Held her. With his expression and with his clumsy pantomime he tried to make her understand that she had a great deal to give. She was giving just by being here. Just by being here.

  That afternoon, he went out to buy her pajamas, street clothes, and a newspaper. She was amused by his chaste choice of pajamas: full-sleeved, long-legged flannels. She put them on, then read the newspaper to him—comics and human-interest stories. She seemed to think that he couldn’t read, and he was willing to play along with the misconception, since his illiteracy tended to reinforce his cover: Winos didn’t collect books.

  Besides, he liked to listen to her read. Her voice was sweet.

  The following morning, Annie dressed in her new blue jeans and sweater to accompany Ollie to the corner grocery store, although he tried to dissuade her. At the register, when he handed a nonexistent twenty-dollar bill to the cashier and collected change, he thought that Annie was looking elsewhere.

  Outside, however, as they walked home, she said, “How’d you do that?”

  He feigned perplexity. Do what?

  “Don’t try to fool Annie,” she said. “I almost croaked when he grabbed a handful of air and gave change.”

  He said nothing.

  “Hypnotism?” she pressed.

  Relieved, he nodded—Yes.

  “You’ll have to teach me.”

  He didn’t reply.

  But she was not going to be put off. “You have to teach me how you conned that guy. With that little trick I wouldn’t need to hustle my body any more, you know? Christ, he smiled at that handful of air! How? How? Teach me! You’ve got to!”

  Finally, at home, unable to tolerate her persistent pleading any longer, afraid that he would be foolish enough to tell her about his hands, Ollie shoved her away from him. The back of her knees caught the bed, and she sat down hard, surprised by his sudden anger.

  She said no more, and their relationship returned to an easier pitch. But everything had changed.

  Since she couldn’t nag him about learning the con game, she had time to think. Late in the evening, she said, “I had my last fix days ago, but I don’t feel any need for drugs. I haven’t been this long without the crap in at least five years.”

  Ollie held his guilty hands out to his sides to indicate his own puzzlement.

  “Did you throw away my tools, the skag?”

  He nodded.

  A while later, she said, “The reason I don’t need dope … is it you, something you did? Did you hypnotize me and make me not want it?” When he nodded, she said, “The same way you made the clerk see the twenty-dollar bill?”

  He agreed, using his fingers and eyes to do a comic imitation of a stage hypnotist hamming it up for an audience.

  “Not hypnotism at all,” she said, fixing him with her piercing eyes, seeing through his facade as no one had done in years. “ESP?”

  What’s that? he asked with gestures.

  “You know,” Annie said. “You know.”

  She was a more observant girl, a much brighter girl than he had thought.

  She began to nag again, but not about the con game any longer. “Come on! Really, what’s it like? How long have you had it, this power, this gift? Don’t be ashamed of it! It’s wonderful! You should be proud! You have the world on a string!”

  And so on.

  Sometime during the long night—later, Ollie could never recall the precise moment or understand what single telling argument she used to finally break him down—he agreed to show her what he could do. He was nervous, wiping his magical hands on his shirt. He was excited about showing her his abilities, felt like a young boy trying to impress his first date—but he also feared the consequences.

  First he handed her a nonexistent twenty-dollar bill, made her see it, and then made it disappear. Then, with a dramatic wave of his hand, he levitated a coffee cup (empty), a coffee cup (filled), the straight-backed chair, a lamp, the bed (empty), the bed (with Annie in it), and finally himself, floating off the floor as though he were an Indian fakir. The girl whooped and hollered with delight. She persuaded him to give her a ride around the room on a broomstick of air. She hugged him, kissed him, asked for more tricks. He turned on the water in the sink without touching the faucet, divided the stream into two streams that fell on both sides of the drain. He let her throw a cup of water at him and diverted it in a hundred different sprays, keeping himself dry.

  “Hey,” she said, more flushed and excited than he had ever seen her, “no one is going to tramp on us again, not ever. No one!” She stood on her toes and hugged him. He was grinning so hard that his jaws ached. She said, “You’re fabulous!”

  He knew, with sweet anticipation and awful dread, that one day soon they would be ready to share a bed. Soon. From that moment his life would be changed. She still did not fully understand what his talent meant, what a wall between them his hands might soon become.

  She said, “I still don’t understand why you hide your—talent.”

  Eager that she understand, he forced himself to confront hideous memories of childhood that he had long suppressed. He tried to tell her, first with words that wouldn’t come and then with gestures, why he hid his abilities.

  Somehow she got the gist of it. “They hurt you.”

  He nodded. Yes. Very much.

  The talent came upon him without warning when he was twelve, as if it were a secondary sex characteristic accompanying puberty, manifested in modest ways at first, then increasingly strong and demanding. It was the sort of thing a boy knew must be concealed from adults. For months he even hid it from other children, from his friends, confused and frightened by his own hands, in which the power seemed to be focused. Slowly, however, he revealed himself, did tricks for his friends, performed, became their secret from the grown-up world. But it wasn’t long until they rejected him—subtly at first, then with increasing vigor until they beat and kicked him, knocked him in the mud, forced him to drink filthy water, all because of his talent. He could have used his power to protect himself from one of them, perhaps from two, but even he could not protect himself from a gang. For a time he hid his powers again, even from himself. But as the years passed, he learned that he could not conceal and deny the talent without causing himself physical and psychological damage. The urge to use the power was a need stronger than the need for food, for sex, for the breath of life itself. To refuse it was to refuse to live; he lost weight, grew nervous and ill. He was forced to use the power then, but refrained from exhibiting it in front of others. He began to understand that he would always be alone as long as he had the power—not from choice, from necessity. Like athletic agility or a cleverness with words, it could not be successfully hidden in company: It flowered unexpectedly, startling friends. And whenever he was found out, friends were lost, and the consequences were more dangerous than he cared to face. The only sensible life for him wa
s that of a hermit. In the city he naturally gravitated to the life of a vagrant, one of the invisible men of the concrete jungle—unnoticed, friendless, safe.

  “I can understand people being jealous or afraid of you,” she said. “Some of them … but not everyone. I think you’re great.”

  With gestures, he explained what little he could. Twice he grunted, trying words, without success.

  “You read their minds,” she interpreted. “So? I guess everyone has secrets. But to hurt you for it …” She shook her head sadly. “Well, you don’t have to run away from it any longer. Together, we can turn it into a blessing. Us against the world.”

  He nodded. But he was deeply sorry to have misled her, for at that moment the mesh occurred. Just like that: Flick! And he knew that this time would be no different from others. When she learned about the mesh, she would panic.

  In the past it had happened only when a relationship had progressed to intimacy. But Annie was special, and this time the mesh occurred even before they made love.

  The next day, Annie spent hours making plans for their future, while he listened. All day he enjoyed planning with her, for he knew that soon there would be no more joy to share, none at all, nothing. The mesh made joy impossible.

  After dinner, as they lay on the bed holding hands, the trouble began just as he had known it would. She was quiet, thinking, and then she said, “Have you been reading my mind today?”

  It was useless to lie. He nodded.

  “Very much?”

  Yes.

  She said, “You know everything before I say it.”

  He waited—cold and frightened.

  “Have you been reading my mind all day long?”

  He nodded.

  She frowned and spoke firmly this time: “I want you to stop it. Have you stopped?”

  Yes.

  She sat up, let go of his hand, and looked closely at him. “But you haven’t. I can almost feel you inside there, watching me.”

  He dared not respond.

  She took his hand again. “Don’t you understand? I feel silly, rambling on about things you’ve already seen in my head. I feel like an idiot hanging out with a genius.”

  He tried to calm her and to change the subject. He croaked at her like a magic frog with pretensions to princeship but then resorted again to gestures.

  She said, “If we both had the gift … But this one-way thing makes me feel … inadequate. Worse than that. I don’t much like it.” She waited. Then: “Have you stopped?”

  Yes.

  “You’re lying, aren’t you? I feel … yeah … I’m sure I can feel you … .” Then the terrible realization came to her, and she drew away from him. “Can you stop reading my mind?”

  He couldn’t explain the mesh: how, when he had come to care for her deeply enough, their minds had blended in some mystical fashion. He didn’t fully understand it himself—though it had happened to him before. He couldn’t explain that she was now almost an extension of him, forever a part of him. He could only nod in acknowledgment of the dreadful truth: I can’t stop reading your mind, Annie. It comer to me like air into my lungs.

  Thoughtfully, she said, “No secrets, surprises, nothing I can keep from you.”

  Minutes passed.

  Then she said, “Do you begin to run my life, make my decisions, push me this way or that, without me knowing? Or have you already begun to do that?”

  Such control was beyond his power, although she would never be convinced of that. Breathing rapidly, she succumbed to that naked fear that he’d seen often before in others.

  She said, “I’ll leave right now … if you’ll let me.”

  Sadly, he put one trembling hand to her head and gave her deep but temporary darkness.

  That night, while she slept, he sensed into her mind and erased certain memories. He kept the wine jug at his feet and drank while he worked. Before dawn, he was done.

  The streets were bleak and empty when he carried her back to the alley where he’d found her, put her down, and placed her purse beneath her. She was still purged of all desire for drugs, and in possession of a new self-confidence and a profound sense of her value as a person that might help her make a new life. His gifts to her.

  Ollie returned home without taking a last look at her clear, perfect face.

  He opened a jug of wine. Hours later, drunk, he unaccountably remembered what a childhood “friend” had said when he first displayed his power: “Ollie, you can rule the world! You’re a superman!”

  He laughed out loud, now, spitting wine. Rule the world! He couldn’t even rule himself. Superman! In a world of ordinary men, a superman was no king, not even a romantic fugitive. He was simply alone. And alone, he could accomplish nothing.

  He thought of Annie, of dreams and love unshared, of futures destroyed. He continued to drink.

  After midnight of that day, he returned to Staznik’s Restaurant to check the garbage for discarded tableware. At least that was what he intended to do. Instead, he spent the night walking swiftly down a succession of dark, twisting alleyways and side streets, his hands held out before him, a blind man trying to find his way. As far as Annie was concerned, he’d never existed.

  Never.

  SNATCHER

  BILLY NEEKS HAD A FLEXIBLE PHILOSOPHY REGARDING PROPERTY rights. He believed in the proletarian ideal of shared wealth—as long as the wealth belonged to someone else. On the other hand, if the property belonged to him, Billy was prepared to defend it to the death. This was a simple, workable philosophy for a thief—which Billy was.

  Billy Neeks’s occupation was reflected in his grooming: He looked slippery. His thick black hair was slicked back with enough scented oil to fill a crankcase. His coarse skin was perpetually pinguid, as if he suffered continuously from malaria. He moved cat quick on well-lubricated joints, and his hands had the buttery grace of a magician’s hands. His eyes resembled twin pools of Texas crude, wet and black and deep—and utterly untouched by any human warmth or feeling. If the route to Hell were an inclined ramp requiring a hideous grease to facilitate descent, Billy Neeks would be the devil’s choice to pass eternity in the application of that noxious, oleaginous substance.

  In action, Billy could bump into an unsuspecting woman, separate her from her purse, and be ten yards away and moving fast by the time she realized that she’d been victimized. Single-strap purses, double-strap purses, clutch purses, purses carried over the shoulder, purses carried in the hand—all meant easy money to Billy Neeks. Whether his target was cautious or careless was of no consequence. Virtually no precautions could foil him.

  That Wednesday in April, pretending to be drunk, he jostled a well-dressed elderly woman on Broad Street, just past Bartram’s Department Store. As she recoiled in disgust from that oily contact, Billy slipped her purse off her shoulder, down her arm, and into the plastic shopping bag that he carried. He reeled away from her and took six or eight steps in an exaggerated stagger before she realized that the collision had not been as accidental as it seemed. Even as the victim shrieked, “police,” Billy had begun to run, and by the time she added, “help, police, help,” Billy was nearly out of earshot.

  He raced through a series of alleyways, dodged around garbage cans and Dumpsters, and leaped across the splayed legs of a sleeping wino. He sprinted across a parking lot and fled into another alley.

  Blocks from Bartram’s, Billy slowed to a walk. He was breathing only slightly harder than usual. Grinning.

  Stepping out of the alley onto Forty-sixth Street, he spotted a young mother carrying a baby, a shopping bag, and a purse. She looked so defenseless that Billy couldn’t resist the opportunity, so he flicked open his switchblade and, in a wink, cut the thin straps on her bag, a stylish blue-leather number. Then he dashed off again, across the street, where drivers braked sharply and blew their horns at him, into another network of alleyways, all familiar to him.

  As he ran, he giggled. His giggle was neither shrill nor engaging, but more like
the sound of ointment squirting from a tube.

  When he slid on spilled garbage—orange peels, rotting lettuce, mounds of molding and soggy bread—he was not tripped up or even slowed down. The disgusting muck seemed to facilitate his flight, and he came out of the slide moving faster than he had gone into it.

  He slowed to a normal pace when he reached Prospect Boulevard. The switchblade was in his pocket again. Both stolen purses were concealed in the plastic shopping bag. He projected what he believed to be an air of nonchalance, and although his calculated expression of innocence was actually a dismal failure, it was the best that he could do.

  He strolled to his car, which he had parked at a meter along Prospect. The Pontiac, unwashed for at least two years, left oil drippings wherever it went, just as a wolf in the wilds marked its territory with dribbles of urine. Billy put the stolen purses in the trunk of the car and, whistling happily, drove away from that part of the city, toward yet untouched prowling grounds in other neighborhoods.

  Of the several reasons for his success as a purse snatcher, mobility was perhaps the most important. Many snatchers were kids seeking a few fast bucks, young hoods without wheels. Billy Neeks was twenty-five, no kid, and possessed reliable transportation. He usually robbed two or three women in one neighborhood and then quickly moved on to another territory where no one was looking for him and where more business waited to be done.

  To him, this was not small-time thievery committed either by impulse or out of desperation. Instead, Billy saw it as a business, and he was a businessman, and like other businessmen he planned his work carefully, weighed the risks and benefits of any opportunity, and acted only as a result of careful, responsible analysis.

  Other snatchers—amateurs and punks, every one of them—paused on the street or in an alley to hastily search purses for valuables, risking arrest because of their inadvisable delays, at the very least creating a host of additional witnesses to their crimes. Billy, on the other hand, stashed the stolen purses in the trunk of his car to be retrieved later for more leisurely inspection in the privacy of his home.

  He prided himself on his methodicalness and caution.

  That cloudy and humid Wednesday in late April, he crossed and recrossed the city, visiting three widely separated districts and snatching six purses in addition to those that he had taken from the elderly woman outside Bartram’s and from the young mother on Forty-sixth Street. The last of the eight also came from an old woman. At first he thought that it was going to be an easy hit, and then he thought that it was going to get messy, and finally it just turned out to be weird.

  When Billy spotted her, she was coming out of a butcher’s shop on Westend Avenue, clutching a package of meat to her breast. She was old. Her brittle white hair stirred in the spring breeze, and Billy had the curious notion that he could hear those dry locks rustling against one another. Her crumpled-parchment face, her slumped shoulders, her pale withered hands, and her shuffling step combined to convey the impression not only of extreme age but of frailty and vulnerability—which drew Billy Neeks as if he were an iron filing and she a magnet. Her purse was big, almost a satchel, and the weight of it—in addition to the package of meat—seemed to bother her, because she was shrugging the straps farther up on her shoulder and wincing in pain, as if suffering from a flare-up of arthritis.

  Although it was spring, she was dressed in black: black shoes, black stockings, black skirt, dark gray blouse, even a heavy black cardigan sweater unsuited to the mild day.

  Billy looked up and down the street, saw no one else nearby, and quickly made his move. He did his drunk trick: staggering, jostling the old biddy. But as he pulled the purse down her arm, she dropped the package of meat, seized the bag with both hands, and for a moment they were locked in an unexpectedly fierce struggle. Ancient as she was, she possessed surprising strength. He tugged at the purse, wrenched and twisted it, desperately attempted to rock her backward off her feet, but she stood her ground and held on with the tenacity of a deeply rooted tree resisting a storm wind.

  He said, “Give it up, you stupid old bitch, or I’ll bust your face.”

  And then a strange thing happened:

  She changed before Billy’s eyes. She no longer appeared frail but steely, no longer weak but darkly energized. Her bony, arthritic hands suddenly looked like the dangerous talons of a powerful bird of prey. That singular face—pale yet jaundiced, nearly fleshless, all wrinkles and sharp pointy lines—was still ancient, but it no longer seemed quite human to Billy Neeks. And her eyes. God, her eyes. At first glance, Billy saw only the watery, myopic gaze of a doddering crone; but abruptly they were eyes of tremendous power, eyes of fire and ice, simultaneously boiling his blood and freezing his heart, eyes that saw into him and through him, not the eyes of a helpless old granny but those of a murderous beast that had the desire and ability to devour him alive.

  He gasped in fear, and he almost let go of the purse, almost ran. In a blink, however, she was transformed into a defenseless old woman again. Abruptly she capitulated. Like pop beads, the swollen knuckles of her twisted hands seemed to come apart, and her finger joints went slack. She lost her grip, releasing the purse with a small cry of despair.

  Emitting a menacing snarl that served not only to frighten the old woman but also to chase away Billy’s own irrational terror, he shoved her backward into a curbside trash container, and he bolted past her with the satchel-size purse under his arm. He glanced back after several steps, half expecting to see that she had fully assumed the form of a great dark bird of prey, flying at him, eyes aflame, teeth bared, talon-hands spread and hooked to tear him to bits. But she