Strange Highways

by Dean Koontz

  The fine hairs on the nape of Joey’s neck prickled, but he did not yet know why.

  She said, “I was depressed, feeling like the nerd of nerds, so I lost myself in books, which is what I always do when I have the blues. I was here in the library, in this very aisle, looking for a new novel … when I found your book.”

  “My book?”

  “I saw your name on the spine. Joseph Shannon.”

  “What book?” Puzzled, he scanned the shelves.

  “I thought it was someone else, a writer with your name. But when I took it off the shelf and checked the back of the jacket, there was a picture of you.”

  He met her eyes again. Those mysterious depths.

  She said, “It wasn’t a picture of you as you are now, tonight—but as you will be in about fifteen years. Still … it was recognizably you.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said, but he was beginning to think that he did.

  “I looked at the copyright page, and the book was published in 1991.”

  He blinked. “Sixteen years from now?”

  “This was in the spring of ‘73,” she reminded him. “So at that time I was holding a book that wouldn’t yet be published for eighteen years. On the jacket it said that you’d written eight previous novels and that six of them had been best-sellers.”

  The not unpleasant prickling sensation on the nape of his neck increased.

  “I took the book to the checkout desk. When I passed it to the librarian with my card, when she took it into her hands … it wasn’t your book any more. Then it was a novel by someone else, one that I’d read before, published in ‘69.”

  She raised the flashlight, directing the beam at the shelves behind him.

  “I don’t know if it’s too much to ask,” she said, “but maybe it’s here again tonight, here again for just one moment on this night of all nights.”

  Overcome by a growing sense of wonder, Joey turned to look at the stacks where the flashlight focused. He followed the beam as it slipped along one of the shelves.

  A small gasp of delight escaped Celeste, and the beam came to a halt on a book with a red spine.

  Joey saw his name turned on edge, in silver-foil letters. Above his name was a title in more silver foil: Strange Highways.

  Trembling, Celeste slid the book out from between two other volumes. She showed him the cover, and his name was in big letters at the top, above the title. Then she turned the book over.

  He stared in awe at the photo of himself on the dust jacket. He was older in the photograph, in his middle thirties.

  He was familiar with his appearance at that age, for he had already lived five years past it in his other life. But he looked better in this photograph than he had really looked when he’d been thirty-five: not prematurely aged, not dissipated by booze, not dead in the eyes. He appeared to be prosperous too—and best of all, he looked like a happy man.

  His appearance in the photograph, however, was not a fraction as important as who was shown with him. It was a group portrait. Celeste was at his side, also fifteen years older than she was now—and two children, a beautiful girl of perhaps six and a handsome boy who might have been eight.

  Unexpectedly filled with tears that he could barely repress, heart hammering with a wild joy that he had never known before, Joey took the book from her.

  She pointed to the words under the photograph, and he had to blink furiously to clear his vision enough to read them:

  Joseph Shannon is the author of eight other acclaimed novels about

  the joys and rewards of love and family, six of which have been national

  best-sellers. His wife, Celeste, is an award-winning poet. They live with

  their children, Josh and Laura, in Southern California.

  As he read, he followed the words with his trembling fingers, in precisely the way that he had done, as a child, when following the text in the missal at Mass.

  “And so,” she said softly, “ever since the spring of ‘73, I’ve known that you would come.”

  Some of the mysteries in her eyes were gone, but by no means all. He knew that regardless of how long a life they shared, she would be to some degree forever mysterious to him.

  “I want to take this,” he said of the book.

  She shook her head. “You know you can’t. Besides, you don’t need the book to be able to write it. You only need to believe that you will.”

  He let her take the novel out of his hands.

  As she returned the volume to the shelf, he suspected that he had been given a second chance not so much to stop P.J. as to meet Celeste Baker. While resistance to evil was essential, there could be no hope for the world without love.

  “Promise me you’ll believe,” she said, putting one hand to his face, tenderly tracing the line of his cheek.

  “I promise.”

  “Then all things,” she said, “are possible.”

  Around them, the library was filled with lives that had been lived, with hopes that had been realized, with ambitions that had been achieved, with dreams for the taking.

  THE BLACK PUMPKIN

  1

  THE PUMPKINS WERE CREEPY, BUT THE MAN WHO CARVED THEM WAS far stranger than his creations. He appeared to have baked for ages in the California sun, until all the juices had been cooked out of his flesh. He was stringy, bony, and leather skinned. His head resembled a squash, not pleasingly round like a pumpkin, yet not shaped like an ordinary head, either: slightly narrower at the top and wider at the chin than was natural. His amber eyes glowed with a sullen, smoky, weak—but dangerous—light.

  Tommy Sutzmann was uneasy the moment that he saw the old pumpkin carver. He told himself that he was foolish, overreacting again. He had a tendency to be alarmed by the mildest signs of anger in others, to panic at the first vague perception of a threat. Some families taught their twelve-year-old boys honesty, integrity, decency, and faith in God. By their actions, however, Tommy’s parents and his brother, Frank, had taught him to be cautious, suspicious, and even paranoid. In the best of times, his mother and father treated him as an outsider; in the worst of times, they enjoyed punishing him as a means of releasing their anger and frustration at the rest of the world. To Frank, Tommy was simply—and always—a target. Consequently, deep and abiding uneasiness was Tommy Sutzmann’s natural condition.

  Every December this vacant lot was full of Christmas trees, and

  during the summer, itinerant merchants used the space to exhibit DayGlo stuffed animals or paintings on velvet. As Halloween approached, the half-acre property, tucked between a supermarket and a bank on the outskirts of Santa Ana, was an orange montage of pumpkins: all sizes and shapes, lined in rows and stacked in neat low pyramids and tumbled in piles, maybe two thousand of them, three thousand, the raw material of pies and jack-o’-lanterns.

  The carver was in a back corner of the lot, sitting on a tube-metal chair. The vinyl-upholstered pads on the back and seat of the chair were darkly mottled, webbed with cracks—not unlike the carver’s face. He sat with a pumpkin on his lap, whittling with a sharp knife and other tools that lay on the dusty ground beside him.

  Tommy Sutzmann did not remember crossing the field of pumpkins. He recalled getting out of the car as soon as his father had parked at the curb—and the next thing he knew, he was in the back of the lot just a few feet from the strange sculptor.

  A score of finished jack-o’-lanterns were propped atop mounds of other pumpkins. This artist did not merely hack crude eye holes and mouths. He carefully cut the skin and the rind of the squash in layers, producing features with great definition and surprising subtlety. He also used paint to give each creation its own demonic personality: Four cans, each containing a brush, stood on the ground beside his chair—red, white, green, and black.

  The jack-o’-lanterns grinned and frowned and scowled and leered. They seemed to be staring at Tommy. Every one of them.

  Their mouths were agape, little pointy teeth bared. None had the blunt, g
oofy dental work of ordinary jack-o’-lanterns. Some were equipped with long fangs.

  Staring, staring. And Tommy had the peculiar feeling that they could see him.

  When he looked up from the pumpkins, he discovered that the old man was also watching him intently. Those amber eyes, full of smoky light, seemed to brighten as they held Tommy’s own gaze.

  “Would you like one of my pumpkins?” the carver asked. In his cold, dry voice, each word was as crisp as October leaves wind-blown along a stone walk.

  Tommy could not speak. He tried to say, No, sir, thank you, no, but the words stuck in his throat as if he were trying to swallow the cloying pulp of a pumpkin.

  “Pick a favorite,” the carver said, gesturing with one withered hand toward his gallery of grotesques—but never taking his eyes off Tommy.

  “No, uh … no, thank you.” Tommy was dismayed to hear that his voice had a tremor and a slightly shrill edge.

  What’s wrong with me? he wondered. Why am I hyping myself into a fit like this? He’s just an old guy who carves pumpkins.

  “Is it the price you’re worried about?” the carver asked.

  “No.”

  “Because you pay the man out front for the pumpkin, same price as any other on the lot, and you just give me whatever you feel my work is worth.”

  When he smiled, every aspect of his squash-shaped head changed. Not for the better.

  The day was mild. Sunshine found its way through holes in the overcast, brightly illuminating some orange mounds of pumpkins while leaving others deep in cloud shadows. In spite of the warm weather, a chill gripped Tommy and would not release him.

  Leaning forward with the half-sculpted pumpkin in his lap, the carver said, “You just give me whatever amount you wish … although I’m duty-bound to say that you get what you give.”

  Another smile. Worse than the first one.

  Tommy said, “Uh …”

  “You get what you give,” the carver repeated.

  “No shit?” brother Frank said, stepping up to the row of leering jack-o’-lanterns. Evidently he had overheard everything. He was two years older than Tommy, muscular where Tommy was slight, with a self-confidence that Tommy had never known. Frank hefted the most macabre of all the old guy’s creations. “So how much is this one?”

  The carver was reluctant to shift his gaze from Tommy to Frank, and Tommy was unable to break the contact first. In the man’s eyes Tommy saw something he could not define or understand, something that filled his mind’s eye with images of disfigured children, deformed creatures that he could not name, and dead things.

  “How much is this one, gramps?” Frank repeated.

  At last, the carver looked at Frank—and smiled. He lifted the half-carved pumpkin off his lap, put it on the ground, but did not get up. “As I said, you pay me what you wish, and you get what you give.”

  Frank had chosen the most disturbing jack-o’-lantern in the eerie collection. It was big, not pleasingly round but lumpy and misshapen, narrower at the top than at the bottom, with ugly crusted nodules like ligneous fungus on a diseased oak tree. The old man had compounded the unsettling effect of the pumpkin’s natural deformities by giving it an immense mouth with three upper and three lower fangs. Its nose was an irregular hole that made Tommy think of campfire tales about lepers. The slanted eyes were as large as lemons but were not cut all the way through the rind except for a pupil—an evil elliptical slit—in the center of each. The stem in the head was dark and knotted as Tommy imagined a cancerous growth might be. The maker of jack-o’-lanterns had painted this one black, letting the natural orange color blaze through in only a few places to create character lines around the eyes and mouth as well as to add emphasis to the tumorous growths.

  Frank was bound to like that pumpkin. His favorite movies were The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and all the Friday the 13th sagas of the mad, murderous Jason. When Tommy and Frank watched a movie of that kind on the VCR, Tommy always pulled for the victims, while Frank cheered the killer. Watching Poltergeist, Frank was disappointed that the whole family survived: He kept hoping that the little boy would be eaten by some creepazoid in the closet and that his stripped bones would be spit out like watermelon seeds. “Hell,” Frank had said, “they could’ve at least ripped the guts out of the stupid dog.”

  Now, Frank held the black pumpkin, grinning as he studied its malevolent features. He squinted into the thing’s slitted pupils as if the jack-o’-lantern’s eyes were real, as if there were thoughts to be read in those depths—and for a moment he seemed to be mesmerized by the pumpkin’s gaze.

  Put it down, Tommy thought urgently. For God’s sake, Frank, put it down and let’s get out of here.

  The carver watched Frank intently. The old man was still, like a predator preparing to pounce.

  Clouds moved, blocking the sun.

  Tommy shivered.

  Finally breaking the staring contest with the jack-o’-lantern, Frank said to the carver, “I give you whatever I like?”

  “You get what you give.”

  “But no matter what I give, I get the jack-o’-lantern?”

  “Yes, but you get what you give,” the old man said cryptically.

  Frank put the black pumpkin aside and pulled some change from his pocket. Grinning, he approached the old man, holding a nickel.

  The carver reached for the coin.

  “No!” Tommy protested too explosively.

  Both Frank and the carver regarded him with surprise.

  Tommy said, “No, Frank, it’s a bad thing. Don’t buy it. Don’t bring it home, Frank.”

  For a moment Frank stared at him in astonishment, then laughed. “You’ve always been a wimp, but are you telling me now you’re scared of a pumpkin?”

  “It’s a bad thing,” Tommy insisted.

  “Scared of the dark, scared of high places, seared of what’s in your bedroom closet at night, scared of half the other kids you meet—and now scared of a stupid damn pumpkin,” Frank said. He laughed again, and his laugh was rich with scorn and disgust as well as with amusement.

  The carver took his cue from Frank, but the old man’s dry laugh contained no amusement at all.

  Tommy was pierced by an icy needle of fear that he could not explain, and he wondered if he might be a wimp after all, afraid of his shadow, maybe even unbalanced. The counselor at school said he was “too sensitive.” His mother said he was “too imaginative,” and his father said he was “impractical, a dreamer, self-involved.” Maybe he was all those things, and perhaps he would wind up in a sanitarium someday, in a boobyhatch with rubber walls, talking to imaginary people, eating flies. But, damn it, he knew the black pumpkin was a bad thing.

  “Here, gramps,” Frank said, “here’s a nickel. Will you really sell it for that?”

  “I’ll take a nickel for my carving, but you still have to pay the usual price of the pumpkin to the fella who operates the lot.”

  “Deal,” Frank said.

  The carver plucked the nickel out of Frank’s hand.

  Tommy shuddered.

  Frank turned from the old man and picked up the pumpkin again.

  Just then, the sun broke through the clouds. A shaft of light fell on their corner of the lot.

  Only Tommy saw what happened in that radiant moment. The sun brightened the orange of the pumpkins, imparted a gold sheen to the dusty ground, gleamed on the metal frame of the chair—but did not touch the carver himself. The light parted around him as if it were a curtain, leaving him in the shade. It was an incredible sight, as though the sunshine shunned the carver, as though he were composed of an unearthly substance that repelled light.

  Tommy gasped.

  The old man fixed Tommy with a wild look, as though he were not a man at all but a storm spirit passing as a man, as though he would at any second erupt into tornadoes of wind, furies of rain, crashes of thunder, lightning. His amber eyes were aglow with promises of pain and terror.

  Abruptly the clouds covered the sun aga
in.

  The old man winked.

  We’re dead, Tommy thought miserably.

  Having lifted the pumpkin again, Frank looked craftily at the old man as if expecting to be told that the nickel sale was a joke. “I can really just take it away?”

  “I keep telling you,” the carver said.

  “How long did you work on this?” Frank asked.

  “About an hour.”

  “And you’re willing to settle for a nickel an hour?”

  “I work for the love of it. For the sheer love of it.” The carver winked at Tommy again.

  “What are you, senile?” Frank asked in his usual charming manner.

  “Maybe. Maybe.”

  Frank stared at the old man, perhaps sensing some of what Tommy felt, but he finally shrugged and turned away, carrying the jack-o’-lantern toward the front of the lot where their father was buying a score of uncarved pumpkins for the big party the following night.

  Tommy wanted to run after his brother, beg Frank to return the black pumpkin and get his nickel back.

  “Listen here,” the carver said fiercely, leaning forward once more. The old man was so thin and angular that Tommy was convinced he’d heard ancient bones scraping together within the inadequate padding of the desiccated body.

  “Listen to me, boy … .”

  No, Tommy thought. No, I won’t listen, I’ll run, I’ll run.

  The old man’s power was like solder, however, fusing Tommy to that piece of ground, rendering him incapable of movement.

  “In the night,” the carver said, his amber eyes darkening, “your brother’s jack-o’-lantern will grow into something other than what it is now. Its jaws will work. Its teeth will sharpen. When everyone is asleep, it’ll creep through your house … and give what’s deserved. It’ll come for you last of all. What do you think you deserve, Tommy? You see, I know your name, though your brother never used it. What do you think the black pumpkin will do to you, Tommy? Hmmm? What do you deserve?”

  “What are you?” Tommy asked.

  The carver smiled. “Dangerous.”

  Suddenly Tommy’s feet tore loose of the earth to which they had been stuck, and he ran.

  When he caught up with Frank, he tried to persuade his brother to return the black pumpkin, but his explanation of the danger came out as nothing more than hysterical babbling, and Frank laughed at him. Tommy tried to knock the hateful thing out of Frank’s hands. Frank held on to the jack-o’-lantern and gave Tommy a hard shove that sent him sprawling backward over a pile of pumpkins. Frank laughed again, purposefully tramped hard on Tommy’s right foot as the younger boy struggled to get up, and moved away.

  Through the involuntary tears wrung from him by the pain in his foot, Tommy looked toward the back of the lot and saw that the carver was watching.

  The old man waved.

  Heart beating double time, Tommy limped out to the front of the lot, searching for a way to convince Frank of the danger. But Frank was already putting his purchase on the backseat of the Cadillac. Their father was paying for the jack-o’-lantern and for a score of uncarved pumpkins. Tommy was too late.

  2

  AT HOME, FRANK TOOK THE BLACK PUMPKIN INTO HIS BEDROOM AND stood it on the desk in the corner, under the poster of Michael Berryman as the demented killer