Dean Koontz - Strange Highways

by Steven Leonard

  There was as yet no ragged breach in the west wall. The Mustang had not yet exploded into the church.

  Replay.

  Joey had been thrown back in time again. Not twenty years as before. Only a minute. Two minutes at most.

  A chance to save her.

  He's coming.

  "Celeste!"

  Running to the sanctuary gate, she shouted, "Come touch the floor, Joey, touch where the water spilled, see whether it's hot enough for steam, hurry!"

  Joey put a hand on the balustrade, ready to vault across it and go after her.

  No. Do it right this time. Last chance. Do it right.

  Celeste shoved through the sanctuary gate.

  Over the incessant drumming of the rain on the roof, another sound arose. An escalating roar. The Mustang.

  He's coming.

  With a terrifying conviction that he was wasting precious seconds and that this replay was running faster than the original event, Joey snatched the 20-gauge shotgun from the presbytery floor.

  Celeste hurried into the center aisle.

  He shouted frantically - "Get out of the way! The car!" - as he hurtled over the balustrade with the shotgun in one hand.

  She was halfway down the aisle, as she had been the first time. She turned, as before. Her face was slick with sweat. Like a ceramic glaze. Glistening with candlelight. The face of a saint. A martyr.

  The roar of the Mustang swelled.

  Puzzled, she half turned toward the windows, raising her hands.

  In her delicate palms were hideous wounds. Black holes thick with blood.

  "Run!" he shouted, but she froze where she was.

  This time he didn't even reach the sanctuary railing before the Mustang slammed through the west wall of the church. A tidal wave of glass and wood and plaster and broken pews crested before the running-horse hood ornament, washed back along both fenders, until the car was all but hidden in the debris.

  A length of board, spinning like a martial-arts weapon, whistled through the air, hit Celeste, and knocked her to the floor more than halfway down the center aisle - which was something that Joey hadn't been able to see from his previous vantage point, the first time that he had lived through the crash.

  With a double bang of blowing tires, the car came to a halt in steepled rubble, and even above the clatter of the last tumbling pews, Joey heard the curiously separate and distinct clank of the bronze crucifix falling off the back wall of the sanctuary.

  Instead of lying half trapped under the destruction in the nave, as before, he was still in the sanctuary, untouched by anything other than the cloud of pale dust that the incoming wind swept out of the ruins. And this time he was armed.

  Chambering a shell in the 20-gauge Remington, he kicked through the sanctuary gate.

  The wreckage was still settling, and debris was falling from the corner of the roof that had sagged inward when the supports had been knocked from under it. The amount of residual noise was greater than it had seemed to Joey when he had been lying under the ruins, but then he had been half dazed.

  As far as he was able to discern, the destruction had fallen into precisely the same patterns as before. The Mustang still could not be approached easily or directly. He could see only sections of it through gaps in the ruins.

  He had to do it right this time. No mistakes. Finish him off.

  Toting the gun, Joey climbed onto the precariously stacked pews. They creaked and groaned, wobbled and shuddered, treacherous beneath him. Wary of protruding nails and glass daggers, he nevertheless clambered quickly across upturned benches, splintered window frames, cracked two-by-fours, and slabs of wallboard, reaching the car much faster than when he'd had to snake his way to it from the bottom of the rubble.

  Even as he jumped down from a pew onto the Mustang's hood, he fired a round from the shotgun into the pitch-dark interior of the car. He wasn't well balanced, and the recoil nearly knocked him off his feet, but he stayed upright, pumped the Remington, fired again, and a third time, filled with savage judgmental glee, confident that P.J. could not have lived through that storm of buckshot.

  The three shots were thunderous, and in the fading echo of the third, he heard a movement behind him that didn't sound like merely another settling noise, that seemed to be more purposeful. It was impossible that P.J. could have gotten out of the car before Joey had arrived this time, impossible that he could have both gotten out and circled around behind. Joey started to turn, looking back and up - and beheld the impossible from the corner of his eye. P.J. was right there, coming down on him, descending the precarious woodpile with daunting agility, swinging a length of two-by-four.

  The flat of the heavy club struck Joey hard along the right temple. He fell onto the car hood, losing his grip on the shotgun, instinctively rolling away from his assailant, drawing his knees up and tucking his head down in the fetal position. The second blow smashed the ribs along his left side and drove all the breath out of him. Wheezing for air, getting none, he rolled again. The third blow landed on his back, and a scintillant pain coruscated along his spine. He rolled through the shot-out windshield, over the dashboard, into the front seat of the dark Mustang, and from there dropped into a far deeper, more profound

  blackness.

  When he came around, rising out of a cloistered inner space of softly scurrying midnight spiders, he was certain that he'd been unconscious for only a few seconds, surely less than a minute. He was still struggling mightily to breathe. Sharp pain in his ribs. The taste of his own blood.

  Celeste.

  Sliding through gummy safety glass and buckshot, Joey pulled himself behind the steering wheel. He pushed the door open as far as the embracing rubble would allow, but that was far enough to get out into the October wind and the flickering light.

  Toward the narthex and the overturned holy-water font, sparks cascaded from a ceiling fixture.

  In the other direction, orange reflections of fire and shadows of flames slithered up the back wall of the sacristy, but he couldn't see the blaze itself through the encircling ruins.

  Having taken the first blow from the two-by-four on the right side of his head, he had little vision in that eye. Blurred shapes throbbed and swarmed among twinkling phantom lights.

  He smelled gasoline.

  He dragged-levered-kicked himself onto the roof of the Mustang. He was too dizzy to get all the way to his feet. On his knees, he surveyed the church.

  With his left eye, he could see P.J. ascending the altar steps with Celeste unconscious in his arms.

  The candles had toppled. The altar cloth was afire.

  Joey heard someone cursing, then realized that he was listening to his own voice. He was cursing himself.

  Cruelly dropping Celeste onto the seething altar platform, P.J. Snatched up the hammer.

  Joey heard sobbing where there had been cursing, and devastating pain detonated along his left side, through his broken ribs.

  The hammer. Raised high.

  Stung to wakefulness by the fire, Celeste screamed.

  From the altar platform, P.J. peered across the church, toward the Mustang, toward Joey, and his eyes were filled with jack-o'-lantern light.

  The hammer crashed down.

  A flutter. Behind Joey's eyes. Like a darting shadow of wings on rippled, sun-spangled water. Like the flight of angels half seen at the periphery of vision.

  Everything had changed.

  His ribs were no longer broken.

  His vision was clear.

  He had not yet been beaten by his brother.

  Rewind. Replay.

  Oh, Jesus.

  Another replay.

  One more chance.

  Surely it would be the last.

  And he hadn't been cast backward in time as far as he had been before. His window of opportunity was narrower than ever, giving him less time to think; his chances of altering their fate were poor, because now he didn't have leeway for even a small error in judgment. The Mustang had alrea
dy rammed into the church, the high altar was burning, and Joey was already scrambling across the steepled rubble, jumping down onto the hood of the car, squeezing the trigger on the Remington.

  He checked himself just in time to avoid his previous mistake, whirled, and instead fired up at the jumbled pews behind him, from which P.J. had attacked him with the two-by-four. The buckshot shredded empty air. P.J. wasn't there.

  Confused, Joey turned to the car and blasted out the windshield, as he had done before, but no scream came from inside, so he whipped around to cover his back again. P.J. still wasn't coming at him with the two-by-four.

  Jesus! Screwing up again, screwing up, doing the wrong thing again. Think. Think!

  Celeste. She was all that mattered.

  Forget about taking P.J. Just get to Celeste before he does.

  Carrying the shotgun with him even though it inhibited movement, Joey scrambled up the tilted pews and kneelers, across the rubble, toward the rear of the nave, down again into the center aisle where he'd seen Celeste knocked unconscious by the spinning chunk of wood. She wasn't there.

  "Celeste!"

  In the sanctuary at the front of the church, a slouching figure hunched along the ambulatory, through the dervish reflections of the altar fire above. It was P.J. He was carrying Celeste.

  The center aisle was blocked. Joey ran between two rows of pews to the side aisle along the east wall of the church, and then raced forward along the unbroken panes of rain-beaten glass toward the sanctuary

  railing.

  Rather than proceed to the altar as before, P.J. disappeared with Celeste through the door to the sacristy.

  Joey leaped over the sanctuary railing, as though too eager to accept a proffered sacrament, and edged swiftly but warily along the wall to the sacristy. He hesitated at the doorway, fearful of stepping face-first into a hard-swung two-by-four or a gun blast, but then he did what must be done - the right thing - and stepped up to the threshold.

  The sacristy door was closed, locked.

  He stepped back, aimed the shotgun. One round trashed the lock and blew the door open.

  The sacristy was deserted - except for Beverly Korshak's body, which lay in a corner, a pale mound in a plastic shroud.

  Joey went to the exterior door. It was secured with a deadbolt from the inside, as he had left it.

  The cellar door. He opened it.

  In the moon-yellow light below, a serpentine shadow slithered into a coil and rolled out of sight around a corner.

  The stairs were unpainted wood, and in spite of every effort he made at stealth, his boots met every tread with a hollow knock like the deliberative countdown of a doomsday clock.

  Heat rose in parching currents, in torrid waves, in scorching tides, and by the time he reached the basement floor, he felt as if he had descended into a primal furnace. The air was redolent of superheated wood ceiling beams on the brink of charting, hot stone from the masonry walls, hot lime from the concrete floor - and a trace of sulfur from the mine fires below.

  When he stepped off the final wooden tread, Joey would not have been surprised if the rubber heels of his boots had melted on contact with the cellar floor. Sweat streamed from him, and his hair fell across his face in lank, dripping strands.

  The cellar appeared to be divided into several chambers that were separated by deep, offset archways, so it was impossible to see into one room from another. The first was illuminated only by a single, bare, dust-caked bulb seated in a coffer between two beams that severely limited the spread of the light.

  A fat black spider, as if driven mad by the heat and sulfurous fumes, circled frenziedly around and around and around the crystal-glittering strands of its enormous web, in the same coffer as the lightbulb. Its exaggerated shadow jittered and stilted across the floor in a spiral that made Joey nauseous and dizzied him when he trod upon it as he headed toward the archway to the next room.

  Aboveground, the structure had been a plain coal-country church, but its masonry underpinnings were more formidable, seemed older than the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania itself, and had a Gothic weight that imprisoned his heart. Joey felt as though he had descended not only into St. Thomas's basement but into haunted catacombs beneath Rome itself - one sea, one continent, one millennium away from Coal Valley.

  He paused long enough to reload the Remington with shells from his jacket pockets.

  As Joey entered the second room, the serpentine shadow shimmered away from him across the floor again, as though it were a stream of black mercury. It darkled out of the bile-yellow light and around the corner of another archway into the next crypt.

  Because the slippery shade was P.J.'s shadow and bore with it the precious shadow of Celeste, Joey swallowed his fear and followed into a third vault, a fourth. Although none of those low-ceilinged spaces was immense, the subterranean portion of the church began to seem vast, immeasurably larger than the humble realm above. Even if the basement architecture proved to be supernaturally extensive, however, he would arrive eventually at a final chamber where brother could come face to face with brother and the right thing at last could be done.

  The cellar had no windows.

  No outside doors.

  Confrontation was inevitable.

  Sooner rather than later, holding the shotgun at the ready, Joey edged cautiously through a final archway with carved-scroll keystone, into a bleak hold that measured approximately forty feet from left to right and eighteen from the archway to the back wall. He figured that it lay under the narthex. Here, the floor wasn't concrete but stone, like the walls, either black by its nature or grime-coated by time.

  Celeste lay in the middle of the room, in a drizzle of yolk-yellow light from the lone overhead bulb. Wispy beards of dust and tattered spider silk hung from the fixture, casting a faint faux lace over her pale face. Her raincoat was spread like a cape around her, and her silken hair spilled black-on-black across the floor. She was unconscious but, judging by appearances, otherwise unharmed.

  P.J. had vanished.

  In a socket between two massive beams, the single light didn't reach to every end of the chamber, but even in the farthest corners the gloom was not deep enough to conceal a door. Except for the entrance archway, the stone walls were featureless.

  The heat was so intense that Joey felt as though his clothes - if not his body - might spontaneously combust, and he worried that his fevered brain was boiling up hallucinations. No one, not even the soul-mortgaged companion of Judas, could have walked through those walls.

  He wondered if the walls were, in fact, as solid as they seemed and if exploration might reveal a panel of masonry cleverly hinged to swing open into an extension of the cellar. But even half roasted in that stone oven, confused and beginning to be disoriented, he couldn't bring himself to believe that there were secret passages, keeps, and dungeons under ramshackle old St. Thomas's. Who would have built them - legions of demented monks in some clandestine and evil brotherhood?

  Nonsense.

  Yet P.J. was gone.

  Heart pounding like a blacksmith's hammer, the anvil ring of it filling his ears, Joey eased across the room to Celeste. She seemed to be sleeping peacefully.

  He spun in a crouch and swept the room with the shotgun, finger taut on the trigger, certain that P.J. was looming behind him, having materialized out of thin air.

  Nothing.

  He needed to wake Celeste, if possible, and quickly lead her out of there - or carry her out as she had been carried in. If she had to be carried, however, he would need to set aside the shotgun, which he was loath to do.

  Gazing down at her, at the fine filigree of dust-web shadows that trembled like a veil on her face, Joey recalled the frenzied spider pointlessly circling its web in the first room at the foot of the basement stairs.

  Shocked by a sudden dreadful thought, he sucked hot breath between clenched teeth, producing a brief, thin whistle of alarm.

  He stepped back from under the coffer that contained the lig
ht fixture. He squinted up into the unlighted three-foot-wide, foot-deep recess between the next pair of beams.

  P.J. was there, a cunning shadow among shadows, not simply wedged in place and waiting to drop upon his prey, but scuttling straight at Joey from the right side of the chamber with all the horrid grace of a spider, diabolically nimble and impossibly silent, upside down, clinging to the ceiling by means unknowable, softly ricocheting back and forth between the timbers, defying gravity, defying reason, his eyes gleaming like polished coal, teeth bared - and there could no longer be any doubt that he was something other than merely a man.

  Joey started to raise the 20-gauge, which felt like a ton weight in his arms. Too late and far too slow, he knew the despair of defeat even as he reacted, felt himself in the cold and paralyzing grip of nightmare though he was awake.

  Like a bat erupting from its roost, P.J. sprang out of the well between the rough-hewn beams, swooped down, and knocked Joey off his feet. The shotgun spun away across the concrete, out of reach.

  As boys, they had occasionally wrestled and roughhoused, but they had never actually fought each other with serious intention. They had always been too tight for that - the Shannon brothers against the world. But now twenty years of pent-up rage flashed through Joey with atomic heat, instantly purging him of all lingering affection and compassion for P.J., leaving only an energizing remorse-regret-resentment. He was determined not to be a victim any more. He had a passion for justice. He punched and clawed and kicked, fighting for his life and for Celeste's, tapping a wrath that was Biblical in its power, a righteous and frightening fury that freed a savage avenger within him.

  But even driven by rage and desperation, Joey was no match for whomever and whatever his brother had become. P.J.'s stone-hard fists landed an avalanche of punches, and no blocking arm or turned head seemed able to deflect the power of a single blow. His fury was inhuman, his strength superhuman. As Joey's resistance collapsed, P.J. grabbed him, lifted him half off the floor, slammed him down, slammed him down, slammed him down again, bouncing the back of his skull off the stone.