Strange Highways

by Dean Koontz

  BEN PARNELL LEFT THE ROADBLOCK NEAR THE MAIN GATE AND DROVE his Chevy Blazer to lab number three, the building deepest in the Biolomech complex. Snow melted off his toboggan cap and trickled under the collar of his sheepskin-lined flight jacket.

  All across the grounds, anxious searchers moved cautiously through the sulfur-yellow glow of the security lamps. In deference to the stinging wind, they hunched their shoulders and held their heads low, which made them appear less than human, demonic.

  In a strange way he was glad that the crisis had arisen. If he hadn’t been there, he would have been at home, alone, pretending to read, or pretending to watch television, but brooding about Melissa, his much-loved daughter, who was gone, lost to cancer. And if he could have avoided brooding about Melissa, he would have brooded instead about Leah, his wife, who had also been lost to …

  Lost to what?

  He still did not fully understand why their marriage had ended after the ordeal with Melissa was over. As far as Ben could see, the only thing that had come between him and Leah had been her grief, which had been so great and dark and heavy that she had no longer been capable of harboring any other emotion, not even love for him. Maybe the seeds of divorce had been there for a long time, sprouting only after Melissa succumbed, but he had loved Leah; he still loved her, not passionately any more, but in the melancholy way that a man could love a dream of happiness even knowing that the dream could never come true. That’s what Leah had become during the past year: not even a memory, painful or otherwise, but a dream, and not even a dream of what might be but of what could never be.

  He parked the Blazer in front of lab three, a windowless single-story structure that resembled a bunker. He went to the steel door, inserted his plastic ID card in the slot, reclaimed the card when the light above the entrance changed from red to green, and stepped past that barrier as it slid open with a hiss.

  He was in a vestibule that resembled the air lock of a spaceship. The outer door hissed shut behind him, and he stood before the inner door, stripping off his gloves while he was scanned by a security camera. A foot-square wall panel slid open, revealing a lighted screen painted with the blue outline of a right hand. Ben matched his hand to the outline, and the computer scanned his fingerprints. Seconds later, when his identity was confirmed, the inner door slid open, and he went into the main hall, off which led other halls, labs, and offices.

  Minutes ago Dr. John Acuff, head of Project Blackberry, had returned to Biolomech in response to the crisis. Now Ben located Acuff in the east-wing corridor where he was conferring urgently with three researchers, two men and a woman, who were working on Blackberry.

  As Ben approached, he saw that Acuff was half sick with fear. The director of the project—stocky, balding, with a salt-and-pepper beard—was neither absentminded nor coldly analytic, in no way a stereotypical man of science, and in fact he possessed a splendid sense of humor. There was usually a merry, positively Clausian twinkle in his eyes. No twinkle tonight, however. And no smile.

  “Ben! Have you found our rats?”

  “Not a trace. I want to talk to you, get some idea where they might go.”

  Acuff put one hand against his forehead as if checking for a fever. “We’ve got to get them, Ben. And quick. If we don’t recover them tonight … Jesus, the possible consequences … it’s the end of everything.”

  3

  THE DOG TRIED TO GROWL AT WHOEVER WAS IN THE DARKNESS BEYOND the archway, but the growl softened into another whine.

  Meg moved reluctantly yet boldly to the dining room, fumbling along the wall for the light switch. Clicked it. The eight chairs were spaced evenly around the Queen Anne table; plates gleamed softly behind the beveled panes of the big china cabinet; nothing was out of place. She had expected to find an intruder.

  Doofus remained in the kitchen, trembling. He was not an easily frightened dog, yet something had spooked him. Badly.

  “Mom?”

  “Stay there,” she said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Turning on lamps as she went, Meg searched the living room and the book-lined den. She looked in closets and behind large pieces of furniture. She kept a gun upstairs but didn’t want to get it until she was sure that no one was downstairs with Tommy.

  Since Jim’s death, Meg had been paranoid about Tommy’s health and safety. She knew it, admitted it, but could do nothing about her attitude. Every time he got a cold, she was sure it would become pneumonia. When he cut himself, no matter how small the wound, she feared the bleeding, as if the loss of a mere teaspoon of his blood would be the death of him. When, at play, he had fallen out of a tree and broken his leg, she’d nearly fainted at the sight of his twisted limb. If she lost Tommy, whom she loved with all her heart, she would not only be losing her son but the last living part of Jim, as well. More than her own death, Meg Lassiter had learned to fear the deaths of those she loved.

  She had been afraid that Tommy would succumb to disease or accident—but, although she’d bought a gun for protection, she had not given much thought to the possibility that her boy might fall victim to foul play. Foul play. That sounded so melodramatic, ridiculous. After all, this was the country, uninfected by the violence that had been such a part of life in New York City.

  But something had shaken the usually boisterous Labrador, a breed prized for gameness and courage. If not an intruder—what?

  She stepped into the front hall and peered up the dark stairs. She flicked a wall switch, turning on the second-floor lights.

  Her own courage was draining away. She had stormed through the first-floor rooms, driven by fear for Tommy’s welfare, giving no consideration to her safety. Now she began to wonder what she would do if she actually encountered an intruder.

  No sound descended from the second floor. She could hear only the keening and susurrant wind. Yet she was overcome by a prescient feeling that she should not venture into the upper rooms.

  Perhaps the wisest course would be to return with Tommy to the station wagon and drive to the nearest neighbors, who lived more than a quarter mile north on Black Oak. From there she could call the sheriff’s office and ask them to check out the house from attic to basement.

  On the other hand, in a rapidly escalating blizzard, travel could be hazardous even in a four-wheel-drive jeep.

  Surely if an intruder was upstairs, Doofus would be barking furiously. The dog was somewhat clumsy, but he was no coward.

  Maybe his behavior had not been indicative of fear. Maybe she had misinterpreted his symptoms. His tucked tail, hung head, and trembling flanks could have been signs of illness.

  “Don’t be such a wimp,” she said angrily, and she hurriedly climbed the stairs.

  The second-floor hall was deserted.

  She went to her room and took the 12-gauge, piston-grip, short-barreled Mossberg shotgun from under the bed. It was an ideal weapon for home protection: compact yet plenty powerful enough to deter an assailant. To use it, she didn’t have to be a marksman, for the spread pattern of the pellets guaranteed a hit if only she aimed in the general direction of an attacker. Furthermore, by using lightly loaded shells, she could deter an aggressor without having to destroy him. She didn’t want to kill anyone.

  In fact, hating guns, she might never have acquired the Mossberg if she’d not had Tommy to worry about.

  She checked her son’s room. No one there.

  The two bedrooms at the back of the house had been connected with a wide archway to make one studio. Her drawing board, easels, and white-enameled art-supply cabinets were as she had left them.

  No one lurked in either of the bathrooms.

  Jim’s office, the last place she searched, was deserted too. Evidently she had misinterpreted the Labrador’s behavior, and she felt a bit sheepish about her overreaction.

  She lowered the shotgun and stood in Jim’s office, composing herself. After his death, Meg had left the room untouched, so she could use his computer to write letters and do bookkeeping. In
fact, she also had sentimental reasons for leaving his things undisturbed. The room helped her to recall how happy Jim had been with a novel under way. He’d had a charmingly boyish aspect that was never more visible than when he was excited about a story, elaborating on a kernel of an idea, Since his funeral, she sometimes came to this room to sit and remember him.

  Often she felt trapped by Jim’s death, as if a door had slammed shut and locked after him when he had stepped out of her life, as if she were now in a tiny room behind that door, with no key to free herself, with no window by which she could escape.

  How could she build a new life, find happiness, after losing a man

  she had loved so deeply? What she’d had with Jim had been perfection. t

  Could any future relationship equal it?

  She sighed, turned off the light, and closed the door on her way out. She returned the shotgun to her own room.

  In the hall, as she approached the head of the stairs, she had the peculiar feeling that someone was watching her. This uncanny awareness of being under observation was so powerful that she turned to look back up the hall.

  Empty.

  Besides, she had searched everywhere. She was certain that she and Tommy were alone.

  You’re just jumpy because of that maniac jerk on Black Oak Road, driving as if he’s guaranteed to live forever.

  When she returned to the kitchen, Tommy was sitting in the chair where she’d left him. ”What’s wrong?” he asked worriedly.

  “Nothing, honey. The way Doofus was acting, I thought maybe we had a burglar, but no one’s been here.”

  “Did old Doofus break something?”’

  “Not that either,” she said. “Not that I noticed.”

  The Labrador was no longer slinking about with his head held low. He wasn’t trembling either. He was sitting on the floor beside Tommy’s chair when Meg entered the room, but he got up, padded to her, grinned, and nuzzled her hand when she offered it. Then he went to the door and scratched at it lightly with one paw, which was his way of indicating that he needed to go outside to relieve himself.

  “I’ll put the jeep away. Take off your coat and gloves,” she told Tommy, “but don’t you get out of that chair until I come back with your crutches.”

  She pulled her boots on again and went outside, taking the dog with her, into a storm that had grown more fierce. The snowflakes were smaller and harder, almost sandlike; they made millions of tiny, ticking sounds as they struck the porch roof.

  Undaunted by the storm, Doofus dashed into the yard.

  Meg parked the station wagon in the barn, which served as a garage. When she got out of the jeep, she glanced up at half-seen rafters in the gloom above; they creaked as gusts of wind slammed into the roof. The place smelled of oil drippings and grease, but the underlying sweet scent of hay and livestock had not entirely dissipated even after all these years.

  As she took Tommy’s crutches out of the wagon, she again felt that creepy prickling at the back of her neck—an awareness of being watched. She surveyed the dim interior of the old barn, which was illuminated only by the inadequate bulb on the automatic door opener. Someone could have been lurking behind one of the board dividers that separated the area along the south wall into horse stalls. Someone might be crouching in the loft above. But she saw no evidence of an intruder to justify her suspicion.

  “Meg, you’ve been reading too many mysteries lately,” she said aloud, seeking reassurance from the sound of her own voice.

  Carrying Tommy’s crutches, she stepped outside, pushed the automatic door button, and watched the segmented metal panels roll down until they met the concrete sill with a solid clunk.

  When she reached the middle of the yard, she stopped, struck by the beauty of the winter nightscape. The scene was revealed primarily by the ghostly radiance of the snow on the ground, a luminescence akin to moonlight but more ethereal and, in spite of the ferocity of the storm, more serene. Marking the northern end of the yard were five leafless maples, stark black branches spearing the night; wind-hammered snow had begun to plate the rough bark.

  By morning she and Tommy might be snowbound. A couple of times every winter, Black Oak Road was closed for a day or two by drifts. Being cut off from civilization for short periods wasn’t particularly inconvenient and, in fact, had a certain appeal.

  Though strangely lovely, the night was also hard. The tiny pellets of snow stung her face.

  When she called Doofus, he appeared around the side of the house, half seen in the dimness, more a phantom than a dog. He seemed to be gliding over the ground, as if he were not a living creature but a dark revenant. He was panting, wagging his tail, unbothered by the weather, invigorated.

  Meg opened the kitchen door. Tommy was still sitting at the table. Behind her, Doofus had halted on the top porch step.

  “Come on, pooch, it’s cold out here.”

  The Labrador whined, as if afraid to return to the house.

  “Come on, come on. It’s suppertime.”

  He climbed the last step and hesitantly crossed the porch. He put his head in the open door and studied the kitchen with suspicion. He sniffed the warm air—and shuddered.

  Meg playfully bumped one boot against the dog’s bottom.

  He looked at her reproachfully and did not move.

  “Come on, boy. You going to leave us in here unprotected?” Tommy asked from his chair by the table.

  As if he understood that his reputation was at stake, the dog reluctantly slunk across the threshold.

  Meg entered the house and locked the door behind them.

  Taking the dog’s towel off a wall hook, she said, “Don’t you dare shake your coat till I’ve dried you, pooch.”

  Doofus shook his coat vigorously as Meg bent to towel his fur, spraying melted snow in her face and over nearby cabinets.

  Tommy laughed, so the dog looked at him quizzically, which made Tommy laugh harder, and Meg had to laugh too, and the dog was buoyed by all the merriment. He straightened up from his meek crouch, dared to wag his tail, and went to Tommy.

  When she and Tommy had first come home, perhaps they had been tense and frightened because of the crash they’d narrowly avoided at the blind curve on Black Oak Road, and maybe their residual fear had been communicated to Doofus, just as their laughter now lifted his spirits. Dogs were sensitive to human moods, and Meg saw no other explanation for Doofus’s behavior.

  4

  THE WINDOWS WERE FROSTED OVER, AND THE WIND WAS WAILING outside as if it would abrade the whole planet down to the size of a moon, then an asteroid, then a speck of dust. The house seemed all the cozier by contrast.

  Meg and Tommy ate spaghetti at the kitchen table.

  Doofus wasn’t acting as strangely as he had earlier, but he was not himself. More than usual, he sought companionship, even to the extent that he didn’t want to eat by himself. Meg watched with surprise and amusement as the dog pushed his dish of Alpo across the floor with his nose, to a spot beside Tommy’s chair.

  “Next thing you know,” Tommy said, “he’s going to want to sit in a chair and have his plate on the table.”

  “First,” Meg said, “he’ll have to learn to hold a fork properly. I hate it when he holds a fork backward.”

  “We’ll send him to charm school,” Tommy said, twirling long strands of spaghetti onto his fork. “And maybe he can learn to stand on his hind feet and walk like a real person.”

  “Once he can stand erect, he’ll want to learn to dance.”

  “He’ll cut a fine figure on the ballroom floor.”

  They grinned at each other across the dinner table, and Meg relished the special closeness that came only from being silly together. In the past two years Tommy had too seldom been in the mood for frivolity.

  Lying on the floor by his dish, Doofus ate his Alpo but didn’t gobble it as usual. He nibbled daintily, frequently lifting his head and raising his floppy ears to listen to the wind moaning at the windows.

  Later,
as Meg was washing the dinner dishes and as Tommy was sitting at the table reading an adventure novel, Doofus suddenly let out a low woof of alarm and sprang to his feet. He stood rigidly, staring at the cabinets on the other side of the room, those between the refrigerator and the cellar door.

  As she was about to say something to soothe the dog, Meg heard what had alarmed him: a rustling inside the cabinets.

  “Mice?” Tommy said hopefully, for he loathed rats.

  “Sounds too big for mice.”

  They’d had rats before. After all, they lived on a farm that had once been attractive to rodents because of the livestock feed stored in the barn. Although the barn housed only a jeep now, and though the rats had sought better scavenging elsewhere, they returned once every winter, as if the long-ago status of Cascade Farm as a rat haven still stirred in the racial memory of each new generation.

  From within the closed cabinet came the frenzied scratching of claws on wood, then a thump as something was knocked over, then the unmistakable sound of a rat—thick, sinuous body slipping along one of the shelves, rattling the stacks of canned goods as it passed between them.

  “Really big,” Tommy said, wide-eyed.

  Instead of barking, Doofus whined and padded to the other end of the kitchen, as far from the rat-inhabited cabinet as he could get. At other times he had been eager to pursue rats, although he was not especially successful at catching them.

  As she dried her hands on the dishtowel, Meg wondered again about the dog’s loss of spirit. She went to the cabinet. There were three sets of doors, top to bottom, and she put her head against the middle set, listening. Nothing.

  “It’s gone,” she said after a long silence.

  “You’re not going to open that, are you?” Tommy asked when she put her hand on one of the door handles.

  “Well, of course I am. I have to see how it got in, if maybe it’s chewed a hole in the cabinet backing.”

  “But what if it’s still in there?” the boy asked.

  “It’s not, honey. Anyway, it’s disgusting and filthy, but it’s not dangerous. Nothing’s more cowardly than a rat.”

  She thumped the cabinet with one fist to be sure she scared off the foul thing if in fact it was in there. She opened the middle doors, saw everything was in order, got on her hands and knees, and opened the lower doors. A few cans were knocked over. A new box of Saltines was chewed open, the contents plundered.

  Doofus whimpered.

  She reached into the lower cupboard and pushed some of the canned goods aside. She removed several boxes of macaroni and put them on the floor beside her, trying to get a look at the back wall of the cabinet. Just enough light from the kitchen seeped into that secluded space to reveal a rigged-edged hole in the plywood backing, where the rat had chewed through from the wall behind. A vague, cool draft was flowing out of the hole.

  She got up, dusting her hands together. “Yep, it’s definitely not Mickey Mouse stopping by for a visit. This is a genuine capital R, capital A, capital T. Better get the traps.”

  As Meg stepped to the cellar door, Tommy said, “You’re not leaving me alone?”

  “Just till I get the traps, honey.”

  “But … but what if the rat comes around while you’re gone?”

  “It won’t. They like to stay where it’s dark.”

  The boy was blushing, embarrassed by his fear. “It’s just … with this leg … I couldn’t get away if it came after me.”

  Sympathetic but aware that coddling him would encourage his irrational fear, she said, “It won’t come after you, skipper. It’s more scared of us than we are of it.”

  She switched on the cellar lights and went down the stairs, leaving him with Doofus. The shadowy basement was lighted by two bulbs dimmed by dust. She found six heavy-duty traps on the utility shelves, rat breakers with steel hammers, not flimsy mousetraps—and a box of warfarin-poisoned food pellets—and she took them upstairs without seeing or hearing the unwelcome houseguest.

  Tommy sighed with relief when she returned. “There’s something weird about these rats.”

  “There’s probably only one,” she said as she put the traps down on the counter by the sink. “What do you mean—weird?”

  “They’ve got Doofus jumpy, like he was when we came home, so it must’ve been rats that spooked him then too. He doesn’t spook easy, so what is it about these rats that have him so nervous?”

  “Not rats, plural,” Meg corrected. “There’s probably just the one. And I don’t know what’s gotten under that pooch’s skin. He’s just being silly. Remember how he used to be scared witless by the vacuum cleaner?”

  “He was just a puppy then.”