Strange Highways

by Dean Koontz

  a hermit any more, sealed off from experience. All that he wanted now was quietude, a chance for their love to develop, a life. Fauvel, the police, the press, and Richard Linski had not allowed him even that.

  Chase rose and went to the sink. He rinsed his mouth out until the bad taste was gone.

  He no longer had to be a hero.

  He left the bathroom.

  In the front room, he unwound the tape from Richard Linski’s wrists and ankles. He let the body slide out of the chair and sprawl onto the floor.

  When he considered the pistol, he realized that there would be three slugs missing from the clip. In the den he found a gun cabinet and drawers of ammunition. He reloaded the clip, leaving out only one round. In the kitchen, he put the gun on the floor, near the dead man’s right hand.

  In the living room, he searched for the two slugs that Judge had expended earlier. He found the one that had passed through his shoulder; it was embedded in the baseboard, and he dug it out without leaving a particularly noticeable mark. The other was on the floor behind the portable bar, where it had fallen after striking the bronze frame of the shattered bar mirror.

  It was a quarter of twelve when he reached the Mustang and put the garbage bag and the cotton gloves into the trunk.

  He drove past Linski’s bungalow. The lights were on. They would burn all night.

  * * *

  Ben knocked twice, and Glenda let him into the motel room.

  They held each other for a while.

  “You’re hurt.” When she realized the nature of the wound, she said, “I’d better get you back to my place. You’ll stay with me. I’ll have to nurse you through this. We can’t risk infection. Doctors have to report gunshot wounds to the police.”

  She drove the Mustang.

  He slumped in the passenger seat. A great weariness overcame him—not merely a result of the experiences of the past couple of hours but a weariness of years.

  Heroes need monsters to slay, and they can always find them—within if not without.

  “You haven’t asked,” he said as they rolled through the night.

  “I never will.”

  “He’s dead.”

  She said nothing.

  “I think it was the right thing.”

  “It was a door you had to go through, whether you wanted to or not,” she said.

  “Only the Karneses can connect me to him, and they’re never going to talk. The cops can’t nail me for it.”

  “Anyway,” she said, “you’ll make your own punishment.”

  A full moon rode the night sky. He stared at its cratered face, trying to read the future in the destruction of the past.

  NOTES TO THE READER

  1

  WHEN I WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD, I WROTE SHORT STORIES ON TABLET paper, drew colorful covers, stapled the left margin of each story, put electrician’s tape over the staples for the sake of neatness, and tried to peddle these “books” to relatives and neighbors. Each of my productions sold for a nickel, which was extremely competitive pricing—or would have been if any other obsessive-compulsive writers of grade-school age had been busily exercising their imaginations in my neighborhood. Other children, however, were engaged in such traditional, character-building, healthful activities as baseball, football, basketball, tearing the wings off flies, terrorizing and beating smaller kids, and experimenting with ways to make explosives out of ordinary household products such as laundry detergent, rubbing alcohol, and Spam. I sold my stories with such relentless enthusiasm that I must have been a colossal pest—like a pint-size Hare Krishna panhandler in a caffeine frenzy.

  I had no special use for the pittance that I earned from this activity, no dreams of unlimited wealth. After all, I had taken in no more than two dollars before savvy relatives and neighbors conducted a secret and highly illegal meeting to agree that they wouldn’t any longer permit trafficking in hand-printed fiction by eight-year-olds. This, of course, was at least restraint of trade, if not a serious abridgment of my First Amendment rights. If anyone in the United States Department of justice is interested, I think some of these co-conspirators are still around and available for prison.

  Although I had no intention of either investing the nickels in a playground loan-sharking operation or squandering them on Twinkie binges, I knew instinctively that I must charge something for my stories if I wanted people to take them seriously. (If Henry Ford had launched the automotive industry by giving cars away, people would have filled them with dirt and used them for planters. Today there would still be no federal highway system, no drive-in burger joints, a gajillion fewer chase movies than Hollywood has thus far churned out, and none of those aesthetically pleasing wobbly-headed dog statues with which so many of us accessorize the ledge between the backseat and the rear window.) Nevertheless, when the local fiction-consumer cartel tried to close me down at the age of eight, I continued to produce stories and gave them away without charge.

  Later, as an adult (or as close as I have gotten to being one), I began to write stories that were published by real publishers in New York City, who didn’t bind them with staples and electrician’s tape and who actually produced more than a single copy of each tale. They paid me more than nickels too—although, at first, not a lot more. In fact, for years, I wasn’t convinced that it was possible to make a living as a writer without a second source of income. Aware that second occupations for writers need to be colorful in order to make good biographical copy, I considered bomb disposal and hijacking airliners for ransom. Fortunately, my wonderful wife’s earning capacity, frugality, and awesome common sense prevented me from becoming either a resident of a federal penitentiary or a pile of unidentifiable remains.

  Eventually, as my books became best-sellers, the nickels piled up, and one day I was offered a substantial four-book deal that was as lucrative as any airliner hijacking in history. Though writing those four books was hard work, at least I didn’t have to wear Kevlar body armor, carry heavy bandoliers of spare ammunition, or work with associates named Mad Dog.

  When word of my good fortune got around, some people—including a number of writers—said to me, “Wow, when you finish this contract, you’ll never have to write again!” I expected to deliver all four novels before I turned forty-two. What was I then supposed to do? Start frequenting bars that feature dwarf-tossing contests? That is exactly the kind of aberrant and socially unacceptable activity that guys like me are liable to slide into if we don’t keep busy.

  More to the point, I had written most of my life, undeterred when the pay was poor, unfazed when writing didn’t even pay nickels, so I was unlikely to stop when, at last, I found an audience that liked my work. It isn’t the money that motivates: It’s the love of the process itself, the storytelling, the creation of characters who live and breathe, the joy of struggling to take words and make a kind of music with them as best I can.

  Writing fiction can be grueling when I’m on, say, the twenty-sixth draft of a page (some go through fewer than twenty-six, some more, depending on the daily fluctuation in my insanity quotient). After endlessly fussing with syntax and word choice, after having been at the computer ten hours, there are times when I’d much rather be working as a stock clerk in a supermarket warehouse or washing dishes in a steam-filled institutional kitchen—jobs that I’ve held, though as briefly as possible. In my worst moments, I’d even rather be gutting halibut in the reeking hold of an Alaskan fishing trawler or, God help me, assisting space aliens with those proctological examinations that they seem intent on giving to hapless, abducted Americans from every walk of life.

  But understand: Writing fiction is also intellectually and emotionally satisfying—and great fun. If a writer isn’t having fun when he’s working, the stories that he produces are never going to be a pleasure to read. No one will buy them, and his public career, at least, will soon end.

  For me, that is the secret to a successful, prolific career as a writer: Have fun, entertain yourself with your work,
make yourself laugh and cry with your own stories, make yourself shiver in suspense along with your characters. If you can do that, then you will most likely find a large audience; but even if a large audience is never found, you’ll have a happy life. I don’t measure success by the number of copies sold but by the delight that I get from the process and the finished work.

  Oh, yes, from time to time, a rare disturbed individual with a public forum does measure my success by what I earn—and gets really steamed about it. The fact that people take pleasure in my work becomes an intolerable personal affront to this odd duck, and he (or she) periodically produces long paragraphs of execrable syntax in support of the proposition that the world is going to hell simply because I am in it and doing all right for myself. (I’m not talking here of genuine critics; critics are a different group, and ninety percent of them like what I do; the other ten percent manage to dislike it without implying either that I have deadly body odor or that I’m an undiscovered serial killer.) Although the work of brilliant medical researchers is routinely reported on page twenty-three, if at all, and although millions of acts of courage and gratuitous kindness go unreported every day, one of these crusaders nevertheless fills astounding amounts of newspaper space with claims, ipse dixit, that I am the literary Antichrist.

  I’m not the only target of such stuff, of course; every successful writer is stalked by such weird fauna on occasion. In our house, being a charitable bunch, we kindly refer to these folks as “spiteful malcontents” or “humorless scum.” (In more enlightened centuries than ours, they were correctly seen as being possessed by demons and were dealt with accordingly.)

  My point—have faith; one exists—is that writing for the sheer love of it is even a defense against unprovoked assaults by the spawn of Satan. What these occasional ink-stained stalkers never understand is that even if they were to get their wish, even if no publisher on earth would issue my work, I’d be compelled to write, to make my little books with staples and electrician’s tape if necessary—and give them copies to annoy them. There is no escape from me. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

  2

  MOST LITERARY AGENTS ADVISE YOUNG WRITERS TO AVOID WRITING short stories. Spending time on short fiction is widely considered dumb, unproductive, self-destructive, the sure sign of a hopeless amateur, and a reliable indicator that the writer is the progeny of a marriage between first cousins.

  This prejudice arises from the hard fact that there are very few markets for short stories. Most magazines do not use them, and annually only a handful of anthologies are published with all-new material. If Edgar Allan Poe were alive today, his agent would be constantly slapping him upside the head with tightly rolled copies of his brilliant short stories and novelettes, yelling, “Full-length novels, you moron! Pay attention! What’s the matter with you—are you shooting heroin or something? Write for the market! No more of this midlength ‘Fall of the House of Usher’ crap!”

  Furthermore, existing markets for short fiction don’t pay well. Generally, a short story will earn only a few hundred dollars. If the writer manages to place the piece with Playboy, he might actually make a few thousand bucks for it—and for the extra compensation, he will happily delude himself into believing that at least one of the magazine’s millions of oglers will, in fact, read it. Nevertheless, a short story can take two or three weeks—or two months!—to write, so even with an occasional Playboy sale, any author concentrating on short fiction will eat a lot of rice and beans—and even, from time to time, less costly food like hay. After mercilessly pummeling poor troubled Poe with the manuscript of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” his agent would no doubt shriek at him, “Novels! Novels, novels, you moron! Writing novels is where the money is, Eddie! Listen, take that weird ‘Masque of the Red Death’ thing, shorten the title to something punchier like ‘Red Death,’ pump it up to at least three hundred thousand words, make a doorstop out of it, and then you’ll have something! We might even get a film sale! And will you write in a role for Jim Carrey, for God’s sake? Couldn’t this Red Death character be a little less solemn, Eddie? Couldn’t he be a little goofy?”

  In spite of the risk of being pummeled by our agents and being seen as fools-dreamers-amateurs-geeks by other writers smart enough not to waste their time on short fiction, some of us still manage to squeeze in a short story or a novelette from time to time. That’s because ideas come to us that simply will not fly at a hundred and fifty thousand words or more but that haunt us, won’t let go of us, demand to be written. So we get out our tablets, our staplers, our rolls of electrician’s tape ….

  This book contains fourteen pieces of fiction shorter than my usual novels. Many of you would probably prefer to have another novel, and one is coming along later in the year (remember, there is no escape from me), but in the meantime, I think you’ll enjoy this collection. Actually, a lot of you have been asking for it. Anyway, I had as much fun writing the stories herein as I have writing a novel, so if my aforementioned theory is correct, you’ll have fun reading them. I sure hope so. You are the reason that I have a career, and when you lay your money down, you have a right to expect some fun in return. Besides, I don’t want any of you to feel that you have to smack me upside the head with this volume; it must weigh a couple of pounds, and if I’m smacked with it too often, I’m going to wind up writing even stranger stories than I already do.

  3

  OF THE STORIES HEREIN, TWO ACTUALLY ARE NOVELS, SINCE A “NOVEL-length” work is usually defined as anything at least fifty thousand words long. The first of those—the title story, “Strange Highways” appears for the first time here. It’s one of my rare ventures into supernatural fiction: At novel length, the list of supernatural tales on my resume includes only Darkfall, The Funhouse, The Mask, Hideaway, and maybe The Servants of Twilight. Although as a reader I love such stories, I tend not to write about vampires, werewolves, haunted houses, or house pets that die and then return from the Other Side with a maniacal determination to wreak vengeance for having been forced to eat out of a bowl on the floor all those years instead of at the table with the rest of the family. “Strange Highways” was an idea I couldn’t shake, however, and I’ve got to admit that a certain inherent power in stories of the supernatural makes them terrific fun to write.

  The other novel-length piece included here is “Chase.” A version of this story was published by Random House, under the pen name K. R. Dwyer, when I was just a puppy. As Dwyer, I also wrote Shattered, which has been available under my real name for years. When I reread “Chase” for possible inclusion in this collection, I blushed and groaned nonstop because it had “beginner” written all over it—also “meandering” and “sloppy”—although it had been well reviewed in many places at the time of publication. The character of Ben Chase still intrigued me, however, and the basic story still had power. So, before packing it up and sending it off to Warner Books, I revised it. The revision resulted in the cutting of at least twenty-five percent of the original text, the addition of new scenes, and a thorough cleanup of the prose and dialogue. As always happens when I revisit a work from early in my career, I was tempted to change the entire intent of the story, the style, the characters, the plot—and turn it into a piece that would read exactly as if I had written it today. That isn’t the point of collecting previous work, of course; a book like Strange Highways is supposed to show the author’s range of interests and various approaches over the years. Consequently, I restrained myself. “Chase” is straight psychological suspense, with no hint of the supernatural; it’s also character driven, relying almost entirely on the character of Benjamin Chase for its effect, so if he doesn’t intrigue you, I’m in deep trouble. One warning: This is a fairly dark piece, and some of Ben Chase’s moral choices may startle you, Gentle Reader—though they’re virtually the only ones he could have made.

  I won’t write notes on each story in Strange Highways. If you want to be bored by literary analysis, you can always take a college course. A few pieces, howeve
r, require a word or two:

  “Kittens” is the first short story that I ever sold. It was written while I was in college, won a prize in an annual fiction competition for college students sponsored by the Atlantic Monthly, and then earned me fifty dollars when it was bought by a magazine called Readers & Writers. As I recall, Readers & Writers went belly up soon thereafter. Over the years, I have had books released by the following publishers that also went out of business: Atheneum, Dial Press, Bobbs-Merrill, J. P. Lippincott, Lancer, and Paperback Library. I informed Warner Books of this unsettling fact, but brave souls that they are, they accepted Strange Highways with enthusiasm.

  “Bruno,” a science-fiction parody of a private-eye story (!), is just meant to be a hoot. I revised and updated it from the original text and had a darn good time with it. As you know, virtually all my novels since Watchers have included substantial comic elements. Since most of the stories in this book do not have comic elements, I was itching to balance the tone with some flat-out silliness, and “Bruno” seemed to do the trick.

  “Twilight of the Dawn” is my personal favorite of all the short fiction that I have written—and the piece that has generated the most mail in spite of appearing in a relatively obscure anthology. I think it appeals to people because it is about faith and hope—but is not in the least sentimental. The narrator is a cold fish for most of the story, and when he is eventually humanized through personal suffering and tragedy, his grudging admission that life may have meaning is effective. At least it was for me when I was writing the piece.

  Finally, “Trapped” originally appeared in an anthology titled Stalkers, with an introduction that some readers say they enjoyed a great deal. So here’s what I said about it then:

  A major national magazine, which shall remain nameless, asked my agent if I would be willing to write a two-part novella dealing with genetic engineering, scary but not too bloody, incorporating a few of the elements of Watchers (my novel that dealt with the same subject). They offered excellent pay; furthermore, the appearance of the piece in two successive issues would reach many millions of readers, providing considerable exposure. I’d long had the idea for “Trapped.” In fact, it predated Watchers, and after writing that novel, I figured that I’d never do the novella because of the similarities. Now someone wanted the piece precisely because of those similarities.

  Well, hey, kismet. I seemed destined to write the story. It would be a nice break between long novels. Nothing could be easier, huh?

  Every writer is an optimist at heart. Even if his work trades in cynicism and despair, even if he is genuinely weary of the world and cold in his soul, a writer is always sure that the end of the rainbow will inevitably be found on the publication date of his next novel. “Life is crap,” he will say, and seem to mean it, and a moment later will be caught dreamily ruminating on his pending elevation by critics to the pantheon of American writers and to the top of the New York Times best-seller list.

  The aforementioned magazine had certain requirements for the novella. It had to be between twenty-two and twenty-three thousand words. It had to divide naturally into two parts, slightly past the midpoint. No problem. I set to work, and in time I delivered to specifications, without having to strain or contort the tale.

  The editors loved the piece. Couldn’t wait to publish it. They virtually pinched my cheeks with pleasure, the way your grandma does when she hears that you received a good report card and that you are not into satanic rock ‘n’ roll or human sacrifices, the way that other eight-year-olds are.

  Then a few weeks passed, and they came back and said, “Listen, we like this so much that we don’t want the impact of it to be diluted by spreading it over two issues. It should appear in a single issue. But we don’t have room for quite this much fiction in one issue, so you’ll have to cut it.” Cut it? How much? “In half.”

  Having been commissioned to produce a two-parter of a certain length, I might have been justified if I had responded to this suggestion with anger and a sullen refusal to discuss the matter further. Instead, I banged my head against the top of my desk, as hard as I could, for … oh, for about half an hour. Maybe forty minutes. Well, maybe even forty-five minutes, but surely no longer. Then, slightly dazed and with oak splinters from the desk embedded in my forehead, I called my agent and suggested an alternative. If I put in another week or so on the piece, with much effort, I might be able to pare it down as far as eighteen to nineteen thousand words, but that would be all I could do if I was to hold fast to the story values that made me want to write “Trapped” in the first place.

  The magazine editors considered my proposal and decided that if the story could be printed in slightly smaller type than they usually employed, the new length would fit within their space limitations. I sat down at my word processor again. A week later the work was done—but I had even more oak splinters in my head, and the top of the desk looked like hell.

  When the new version was finished—and just as it was being submitted—the editors decided that eighteen to nineteen thousand words were still too many, that the solution offered by a smaller than usual type size was too problematic, and that about four or five thousand more words would have to come out. “Not to worry,” I was assured, “we’ll cut it for you.”

  Fifteen minutes later, my desk collapsed from the additional pounding (and to this day, it is necessary for me to apply lemon-oil polish to my forehead once a week, because the ratio of wood content to flesh is now so high that the upper portion of my facial structure is classified as furniture by federal law).

  Apparently, major magazines often fiddle with writers’ prose, and writers don’t care much. But I sure care, and I can’t bear to relinquish authorial control to anyone. Therefore, I asked that the script be returned, told them that they could keep their money, and put “Trapped” on the shelf, telling myself that I had not really wasted weeks and weeks of my time but had, in fact, come out of the affair with a valuable lesson: Nota bene—never write for a major national magazine, on commission, unless you are able to hold the editor’s favorite child hostage through publication date of the issue that contains your work.

  Shortly thereafter, a fine suspense writer named Ed Gorman called to say that he was editing an anthology of stories about stalkers and people being stalked. “Trapped” came instantly to my mind.

  Kismet.

  Maybe it makes sense to be an eternal optimist.

  Anyway, that’s how “Trapped” came to be written, that’s why it contains elements familiar to readers of Watchers, and that’s why, if you see me some day, you’ll notice that my forehead has a lovely oaken luster.