Dean Koontz - Strange Highways

by Steven Leonard

  Red brake lights. Beacons. Shimmering in the delude.

  Joey capped the flask without drinking from it.

  He switched on the headlights and put the Chevy in gear.

  "Jesus, help me," he said.

  He drove across the intersection and onto Coal Valley Road.

  Ahead of him, the other car began to move again. It quickly picked up speed.

  Joey Shannon followed the phantom driver through a veil between reality and some other place, toward a town that no longer existed, toward a fate beyond understanding.

  8

  THE WIND AND THE RAIN SHOOK LEAVES FROM THE OVERHANGING TREES and hurled

  them onto the pavement. They smacked the windshield and clung briefly, batlike shapes that furled their wings and fell away when the wipers swept over them.

  Joey remained about a hundred yards behind the other car, not quite close enough to discern what make and model it was. He told himself that he still had time to turn around, drive to the county road, and go to Scranton as he had planned. But he might not have the option of turning back if he got a good look at the car ahead of him. Intuitively he understood that the more he learned about what was happening, the more thoroughly his fate would be sealed. Mile by mile he was driving farther away from the real world, into this otherworldly land of second chances, and eventually the intersection of the county route and Coal Valley Road would cease to exist in the night behind him.

  When they had gone only three miles, they came upon a white, two-door Plymouth Valiant - a car that Joey had admired as a kid but hadn't seen in ages. It was stopped at the side of the road, broken down. Three sputtering red flares had been set out along the shoulder of the highway, and in their intense light, as if by a dark miracle of transubstantiation, the falling rain appeared to be a downpour of blood.

  The vehicle that he was following slowed, almost halted beside the Valiant, then accelerated again.

  Someone in a black, hooded raincoat stood beside the disabled Plymouth, holding a flashlight. The stranded motorist waved at him, imploring him to stop.

  Joey glanced at the dwindling taillights of the car that he had been pursuing. It would soon pass around a bend, over a rise, out of sight.

  Coasting past the Plymouth, he saw that the person in the raincoat was a woman. A girl, really. Arrestingly pretty. She appeared to be no older than sixteen or seventeen'

  Under the hood of the coat, her flare-tinted face reminded him, curiously, of the haunting countenance on the statue of the Virgin Mother at Our Lady of Sorrows, back in Asherville. Sometimes the Virgin's serene ceramic face had just such a forlorn and spectral aspect in the crimson glow of the flickering votive candles arrayed in red glasses beneath it.

  As Joey rolled slowly past this girl, she stared entreatingly, and in her porcelain features he saw something that alarmed him: a disturbing premonition, a vision of her lovely face without eyes, battered and bloody. Somehow he knew that if he didn't stop to help her, she would not live to see the dawn but would die violently in some black moment of the storm.

  He parked on the shoulder ahead of the Valiant and got out of the rental car. He was still soaked from having stood in the cleansing downpour outside Henry Kadinska's office little more than twenty minutes ago, so the pounding rain didn't bother him, and the cold night air wasn't half as chilling as the fear that had filled him since he had learned of his inheritance.

  He hurried along the pavement, and the girl came forward to meet him at the front of her disabled Valiant.

  "Thank God, you stopped," she said. Rain streamed off her hood, a glistening veil in front of her face.

  He said, "What happened?"

  "It just failed."

  "While you were rolling?"

  "Yeah. Not the battery."

  "How do you know?"

  "I've still got power."

  Her eyes were dark and huge. Her face glowed in the flare light, and on her cheeks, raindrops glistened like tears.

  "Maybe the generator," he said.

  "You know cars?"

  "Yeah."

  "I don't," she said. "I feel so helpless."

  "We all do," Joey said.

  She gave him a peculiar look.

  She was just a girl, and at her age she was surely naive and not yet fully aware of the world's cruelty. Yet Joey Shannon saw more in her eyes than he could comprehend.

  "I feel lost," she said, evidently still referring to her lack of knowledge about cars.

  He unlatched and raised the hood. "Let me have your light."

  At first she seemed not to know what he meant, but then she handed the flashlight to him. "I think it's hopeless."

  While rain pounded against his back, he checked the distributor cap to be sure that it was seated securely, examined the spark-plug leads, scrutinized the battery cables.

  "If you could just give me a ride home," she said, "my dad and I can come back here tomorrow."

  "Let me try it first," he said, closing the hood.

  "You don't even have a raincoat," she worried.

  "Doesn't matter."

  "You'll catch your death."

  "It's only water - they baptize babies in it."

  Overhead, the branches of the mountain laurels clattered in a bitter gust of wind, shaking loose a flock of dead leaves that whirled briefly but then settled to the ground as spiritlessly as lost hopes sifting down through the darkness of a troubled heart.

  He opened the driver's door, got behind the steering wheel, and put the flashlight on the seat beside him. The keys were in the ignition. When he attempted to start the engine, there was no response whatsoever. He tried the headlights, and they came on at full power.

  In front of the car, the girl was caught in the bright beams. She was no longer tinted red. Her black raincoat hung like a cowled robe, and in its folds, her face and hands were white and gloriously radiant.

  He stared at her for a moment, wondering why he had been brought to her and where they would find themselves by the time this strange night had ended. Then he switched off the headlights.

  The girl stood once more in the lambent light of the flares, lashed by crimson rain.

  After leaning across the seat to lock the passenger door, Joey got out of the Valiant, taking the flashlight and the keys with him. "Whatever's wrong, I don't have what's needed to fix it." He slammed the driver's door and locked it as well. "You're right - the best I can do is give you a lift. Where do you live?"

  "Coal Valley. I was on my way home when the trouble started."

  "Hardly anyone lives there any more."

  "Yeah. We're one of the last three families. It's almost like a ghost town."

  Thoroughly soaked and cold to the bone, he was eager to get back to the rental car and switch the heater to its highest setting. But when he met her dark eyes again, he felt more strongly than ever that she was the reason that he had been given another chance to take the road to Coal Valley, as he should have done twenty years ago. Rather than run with her to the shelter of the Chevy, he hesitated, afraid that whatever he did - even taking her home - might be the wrong thing to do, and that in choosing a course of action, he would be throwing away this last, miraculous chance at redemption.

  "What's wrong?" she asked.

  Joey had been staring at her, half mesmerized, contemplating the possible consequences of his actions. His empty gaze must have disconcerted her every bit as much as the concept of consequences disconcerted him.

  Speaking without thinking, surprised to hear these particular words issuing from himself, he said, "Show me your hands."

  "My hands?"

  "Show me your hands."

  The wind sang epithalamion in the trees above, and the night was a chapel in which they stood alone.

  With a look of puzzlement, she held out her delicate hands for his inspection.

  "Palms up," he said.

  She did as he asked, and her posture made her resemble more than ever the Mother of Heaven entreating all to c
ome unto her, into the bosom of everlasting peace.

  The girl's hands cupped the darkness, and he couldn't read her palms.

  Trembling, he raised the flashlight.

  At first her hands were unblemished. Then a faint bruise slowly appeared in the center of each rain-pooled palm.

  He closed his eyes and held his breath. When he looked again, the bruises had darkened.

  "You're scaring me," she said.

  "We should be scared."

  "You never seemed strange."

  "Look at your hands," he said.

  She lowered her eyes.

  "What do you see?" he asked.

  "See? Just my hands."

  The storm wind crying in the trees was the voice of a million victims, and the night was filled with their pathetic pleas for mercy.

  He would have been shaking uncontrollably if he had not been paralyzed by fear. "You don't see the bruises?"

  "What bruises?"

  Her gaze rose from her hands, and her eyes met his again.

  "You don't see?" he asked.

  "No."

  "You don't feel?"

  In fact, the bruises were not merely bruises any more but had ripened into wounds from which blood began to ooze.

  "I'm not seeing what is," Joey told her, overcome by dread. "I'm seeing what will be."

  "You're scaring me," she said again.

  She wasn't the dead blonde in the bloodstained plastic shroud. Under her hood, her face was framed by raven-black hair.

  "But you might end up like her," he said more to himself than to the girl.

  "Like who?"

  "I don't know her name. But she wasn't just an hallucination. I see that now. Not a drunk's delirium. More than that. She was something ... else. I don't know."

  The grievous stigmata in the girl's hands became more terrible by the second, though she continued to be unaware of them and seemed to feel no pain.

  Suddenly Joey understood that the increasing grisliness of his paranormal vision meant that this girl was in growing danger. The fate for which she had been destined - the fate that he had postponed by taking Coal Valley Road and stopping to assist her - was grimly reasserting itself. Delaying by the side of the road was apparently the wrong thing to do.

  "Maybe he's coming back," Joey said.

  She closed her hands, as if shamed by the intensity with which he stared at them. "Who?"

  "I don't know," he said, and he looked into the distance along Coal Valley Road, into the impenetrable gloom that swallowed the two rain-swept lanes of blacktop.

  "You mean that other car?" she asked.

  "Yeah. Did you get a glimpse of whoever was in it?"

  "No. A man. But I didn't see him clearly. A shadow, a shape. Why does it matter?"

  "I'm not sure." He took her by the arm. "Come on. Let's get out of here."

  As they hurried toward the Chevy, she said, "You sure aren't anything like I thought you'd be."

  That struck him as a peculiar statement. Before he could ask her what she meant, however, they reached the Chevy - and he stumbled to a halt, stunned by what stood before him, her words forgotten.

  "Joey?" she said.

  The Chevy was gone. In its place was a Ford. A 1965 Mustang. His 1965 Mustang. The wreck that, as a teenager, he had lovingly restored with his dad's help. Midnight blue with white-wall tires.

  "What's wrong?" she asked.

  He had been driving the Mustang that night twenty years ago. It had sustained major body damage when he had spun out on the interstate and collided with a signpost.

  There was no body damage now. The side window, which had shattered when his head hit it, was intact. The Mustang was as cherry as it had ever been.

  The wind picked up, shrieking, so the night itself seemed mad. Silvery whips of rain lashed around them and snapped against the pavement.

  "Where's the Chevy?" he asked shakily.

  "What?"

  "The Chevy," he repeated, raising his voice above the storm.

  "What Chevy?"

  "The rental car. The one I was driving."

  "But ... you were driving this," she said.

  He looked at her in disbelief.

  As before, he was aware of mysteries in her eyes, but he had no sense that she was trying to deceive him.

  He let go of her arm and walked to the front of the Mustang, trailing one hand along the rear fender, the driver's door, the front fender. The metal was cold, smooth, slick with rain, as solid as the road on which he stood, as real as the heart that knocked in his chest.

  Twenty years ago, after he'd hit the signpost, the Mustang had been badly scraped and dented, but it had been drivable. He had returned to college in it. He remembered how it had rattled and ticked all the way to Shippensburg - the sound of his young life falling apart.

  He remembered all the blood.

  Now, when he hesitantly opened the driver's door, the light came on inside. It was bright enough to reveal that the upholstery was free of bloodstains. The cut that he'd suffered in his forehead had bled heavily until he'd driven to a hospital and had it stitched, and by that time the bucket seat had been well spattered. But this upholstery was pristine.

  The girl had gone around to the other side of the car. She slipped into the passenger seat and slammed the door.

  With her inside, the night seemed as utterly empty of life as a pharaoh's crypt undiscovered beneath the sands of Egypt. All the world might have been dead, with only Joey Shannon left to hear the sound and know the fury of the storm.

  He was reluctant to get behind the steering wheel. It was all too strange. He felt as though he had surrendered entirely to a drunkard's delirium - although he knew that he was stone sober.

  Then he remembered the wounds that he'd foreseen in her delicate hands, the premonition that the danger to her was increasing with every second they remained at the roadside. He got in behind the wheel, closed the door, and gave her the flashlight.

  "Heat," she said. "I'm freezing."

  He was barely aware of being sodden and cold himself. For the moment, numb with wonder, he was sensitive only to the deepening mystery, to the shapes and textures and sounds and smells of the mystical Mustang.

  The keys were in the ignition.

  He started the engine. It had a singular pitch, as familiar to him as his own voice. The sweet, strong sound had such nostalgic power that it lifted his spirits at once. In spite of the flat-out weirdness of what was happening to him, in spite of the fear that had dogged him ever since he'd driven into Asherville the previous day, he was filled with a wild

  elation.

  The years seemed to have fallen away from him. All the bad choices that he'd made were sloughed off. For the moment, at least, the future was as filled with promise as it had been when he was seventeen.

  The girl fiddled with the heater controls, and hot air blasted from the vents.

  He released the emergency brake and put the car in gear, but before he pulled onto the highway, he turned to her and said, "Show me your hands."

  Clearly uneasy, regarding him with understandable wariness, she responded to his request.

  The nail wounds remained in her palms, visible only to him, but he thought that they had closed somewhat. The flow of blood had diminished.

  "We're doing the right thing now, getting out of here," he said, although he knew that he was making little - if any - sense to her.

  He switched on the windshield wipers and drove onto the two-lane blacktop, heading toward the town of Coal Valley. The car handled like the fine-tuned masterpiece that he remembered, and his exhilaration intensified.

  For a minute or two he was entirely possessed by the thrill of driving - just driving - that he had known as a teenager but never since. Deep in the thrall of the Mustang. A boy and his car. Lost to the romance of the road.

  Then he remembered something that she had said when he had first seen the Mustang and had halted before it in shock. Joey? She had called him by his name. Joey
? What's wrong? Yet he was certain that he had never introduced himself.

  "Some music?" she asked with a nervous tremor in her voice, as though his silent, rapturous involvement with the unrolling road was more disturbing to her than anything he'd previously said or done.

  He glanced at her as she leaned forward to switch on the radio. She had pushed back the hood of her raincoat. Her hair was thick and silky and darker than the night.

  Something else she'd said, which had struck him as peculiar, now came back to him: You sure aren't anything like I thought you'd be. And before that: You never seemed strange.

  The girl twisted the tuning knob on the radio until she found a station playing Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road."

  "What's your name?" he asked.

  "Celeste. Celeste Baker."

  "How did you know my name?"

  The question made her self-conscious, and she was able to meet his eyes only briefly. Even in the dim backwash of light from the instrument panel, he could see that she was blushing.

  "You never noticed me, I know."

  He frowned. "Noticed you?"

  "You were two years ahead of me at County High."

  Joey shifted his attention from the dangerously slick roadway longer than he should have, mystified by what she'd said. "What're you talking about?"

  Staring at the lighted face of the radio, she said, "I was a sophomore when you were a senior. I had a terrible crush on you. I was in despair when you graduated and went off to college."

  He was barely able to look away from her.

  Sweeping around a curve, the road passed an abandoned mine head and a broken-down tipple that loomed out of the darkness like the half-shattered skeleton of a prehistoric beast. Generations had toiled in its shadow to bring forth coal, but they were now gone to bones or to city work. As he followed the curve, Joey braked gently, slowing from fifty to forty, so badly rattled by what the girl had said that he no longer trusted himself to drive safely at the higher speed.

  "We never spoke," she said. "I never could get up the nerve. I just ... you know ... admired you from afar. God. Sounds so stupid." She glanced at him from under her brow to see if, in fact, he was amused at her expense.

  "You're not making any sense," he said.