Strange Highways (8 page)

He gently pressed a third finger to her palm, and it too came away slick with blood.

“A sign,” she said, not fully grasping what was happening.

“So you’ll believe me,” he said. “A sign to make you believe. Because if you don’t believe me, then I might not be able to help you. And if I can’t help you, I can’t help myself.”

“Your touch,” she whispered, taking his left hand in both of hers. “Your touch.” She met his eyes. “Joey … what’s going to happen to me … what
would
have happened if you hadn’t come along?”

“Raped,” he said with total conviction, although he didn’t understand how he knew. “Raped. Beaten. Tortured. Killed.”

“The man in the other car,” she said, gazing out at the dark highway, and the tremor in her voice became a shudder that shook her whole body.

“I think so,” Joey said. “I think … he’s done it before. The blonde wrapped in plastic.”

“I’m scared.”

“We have a chance.”

“You still haven’t explained. You haven’t told me. What about the
Chevy you thought you were driving … your being forty years old?”

She released his hand, leaving it covered with her blood.

He wiped the blood on his jeans. With his right hand he focused the flashlight on her palms. “The wounds are getting worse. Fate, your
destiny, whatever you want to call it—it’s reasserting itself.”
“He’s coming back?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Somehow … when we keep moving, you’re safer. The wounds close up and start to fade. As long as we’re moving, change can happen, there’s hope.”

He switched off the flashlight and gave it to her. He popped the hand brake and drove back onto Coal Valley Road.

“Maybe we shouldn’t go the way he went,” she said. “Maybe we should go back to the county route, to Asherville or somewhere else, anywhere else, away from him.”

“I think that would be the end of us. If we run … if we take the wrong highway like I did before … then there’s not going to be any mercy in Heaven.”

“Maybe we should get help.”

“Who’s going to believe this?”

“Maybe they’ll see … my hands. The blood on your fingers when you touch me.”

“I don’t think so. It’s you and me. Only you and me against everything.”

“Everything,” she said wonderingly.

“Against this man, against the fate you would have met if I hadn’t taken the turn onto Coal Valley Road—the fate you
did
meet on that other night when I took the county route instead. You and me against time and the future and the whole great weight of it all coming down like an avalanche.”

“What can we do?”

“I don’t know. Find him? Face him? We just have to play it as it lays … do what seems right, minute by minute, hour by hour.”

“How long do we have to … to do the right thing, whatever it is, to do the thing that’ll make the change permanent?”

“I don’t know. Maybe until dawn. The thing that happened on that night happened in darkness. Maybe the only thing I have to set right is what happened to you, and if we keep you alive, if we just make it through to sunrise, maybe then everything’s changed forever.”

The tires cut through puddles on the rural lane, and plumes of white water rose like angels’ wings on both sides of the car.

“What’s this ‘other night’ you keep talking about?” she asked.

She gripped the extinguished flashlight in both hands in her lap, as though afraid that something monstrous might fly at the Mustang from out of the darkness, a creature that could be repelled and banished by a withering beam of light.

As they drove through the deep mountain night toward the nearly abandoned town of Coal Valley, Joey Shannon said, “This morning when I got out of bed, I was forty years old, a drunk with a rotting liver and no future anyone would want. And this afternoon I stood at my father’s graveside, knowing I’d broken his heart, broken my mom’s heart too ….”

Celeste listened raptly, able to believe, because she had been given a sign that proved to her that the world had dimensions beyond those she could see and touch.

9

OUT OF THE RADIO CAME “ONE OF THESE NIGHTS” BY THE EAGLES, “Pick Up the Pieces” by the Average White Band, Ronstadt singing “When Will I Be Loved,” Springsteen pounding out “Rosalita,” “Black Water” by the Doobie Brothers—and all of them were new songs, the big hits of the day, although Joey had been listening to them on other radios in far places for twenty years.

By the time he had recounted his recent experiences to the point at which he had seen her disabled Valiant, they had reached the top of the long slope above Coal Valley. He coasted to a stop in gravel at the side of the road, beside a lush stand of mountain laurels, though he knew that they couldn’t linger for long without risking a reassertion of the pattern of fate that would result in her murder and in his return to living damnation.

Coal Valley was more a village than it was a town. Even before the insatiable mine fire had eaten a maze of tunnels under the place, Coal Valley had been home to fewer than five hundred people. Simple frame houses with tar-shingle roofs. Yards full of peonies and lush huckleberry bushes in the summer, hidden under deep blankets of snow in the winter. Dogwood trees that blazed white and pink and purple in the spring. A small branch of County First National Bank. A one-truck volunteer fire station. Polanski’s Tavern, where mixed drinks were rarely requested and most orders were for beer or for beer with shooters of whiskey on the side, where huge jars of pickled eggs and hot sausages in spicy broth stood on the bar. A general store, one service station, a small elementary school.

The village wasn’t big enough to have streetlights, but before the government had finally begun condemning properties and offering compensation to the dispossessed, Coal Valley had produced a respectable warm glow in its snug berth among the surrounding night-clad hills. Now all the small businesses were shuttered and dark. The beacon of faith in the church belfry had been extinguished. Lights shone at only three houses, and those would be switched off forever when the final residents departed before Thanksgiving.

On the far side of town, an orange glow rose from a pit where the fire in one branch of the mine maze had burned close enough to the surface to precipitate a sudden subsidence. There the seething subterranean inferno was exposed, where otherwise it remained hidden under the untenanted houses and the heat-cracked streets.

“Is he down there?” Celeste asked, as though Joey might be able to sense clairvoyantly the presence of their faceless enemy.

The fitful precognitive flashes he had experienced thus far were beyond his control, however, and far too enigmatic to serve as a map to the lair of the killer. Besides, he suspected that the whole point of his being allowed to replay this night was to give him the chance to succeed or fail, to do right or do wrong, drawing only on the depth of his own wisdom, judgment, and courage. Coal Valley was his testing ground. No guardian angel was going to whisper instructions in his ear—or step between him and a razor-sharp knife flashing out of shadows.

“He could’ve driven straight through town without stopping,” Joey said. “Could’ve gone to Black Hollow Highway and maybe from there to the turnpike. That’s the route I usually took back to college. But … I think he’s down there, somewhere down there. Waiting.”

“For us?”

“He waited for me after he turned off the county route onto Coal Valley Road. Just stopped on the roadway and waited to see if I was going to follow him.”

“Why would he do that?”

Joey suspected that he knew the answer. He sensed suppressed, sharp-toothed knowledge swimming like a shark in the lightless sea of his subconscious, but he couldn’t entice it to surface. It would soar out of the murky depths and come for him when he was least expecting

“Sooner or later we’ll find out,” he said.

He knew in his bones that confrontation was inevitable. They were captured by the fierce gravity of a black hole, pulled toward an inescapable and crushing truth.

On the far side of Coal Valley, the glow at the open pit pulsed brighter than before. Streams of white and red sparks spewed out of the earth, like great swarms of fireflies, expelled with such force that they rose at least a hundred feet into the heavy rain before being quenched.

Fearful that a fluttering in his belly could quickly grow into a paralyzing weakness, Joey switched off the dome light, steered the Mustang back onto Coal Valley Road, and drove toward the desolate village below.

“We’ll go straight to my house,” Celeste said.

“I don’t know if we should.”

“Why not?”

“It might not be a good idea.”

“We’ll be safe there with my folks.”

“The idea isn’t just to get safe.”

“What
is
the idea?”

“To keep you alive.”

“Same thing.”

“And to stop him.”

“Stop him? The killer?”

“It makes sense. I mean, how can there be any redemption if I knowingly turn my back on evil and walk away from it? Saving you has to be only half of what I need to do. Stopping him is the other half.”

“This is getting too mystical again. When do we call in the exorcist, start spritzing holy water?”

“It is what it is. I can’t help that.”

“Listen, Joey, here’s what makes sense. My dad has a gun cabinet full of hunting rifles, a shotgun. That’s what we need.”

“But what if going to your house draws him there? Otherwise maybe your parents wouldn’t be in danger from him, wouldn’t ever encounter him.”

“Shit, this is deeply crazy,” she said. “And you better believe, I don’t use the word ‘shit’ often or lightly.”

“Principal’s daughter,” he said.

“Exactly.”

“By the way, a little while ago, what you said about yourself—it isn’t true.”

“Huh? What did I say?”

“You’re not nerdy.”

“Well.”

“You’re beautiful.”

“I’m a regular Olivia Newton-John,” she said self-mockingly.

“And you’ve got a good heart—too good to want to change your own fate and ensure your future at the cost of your parents’ lives.”

For a moment she was silent in the roar of the sanctifying rain. Then she said, “No. God, no, I don’t want that. But it would take so little time to get into the house, open the gun cabinet in the den, and load up.”

“Everything we do tonight, every decision we make, has heavy consequences. The same thing would be true if this was an ordinary night, without all this weirdness. That’s something I once forgot—that there are always moral consequences—and I paid a heavy price for forgetting. Tonight it’s truer than ever.”

As they descended the last of the long slope and drew near the edge of town, Celeste said, “So what are we supposed to do—just cruise around, stay on the move, wait for that avalanche you talked about to hit us?”

“Play it as it lays.”

“But how does it lay?” she asked with considerable frustration.

“We’ll see. Show me your hands.”

She switched on the flashlight and revealed one palm, then the other.

“They’re only dark bruises now,” he told her. “No bleeding. We’re doing something right.”

The car hit a narrow band of subsidence in the pavement, not a deep pit with flames at the bottom, just a shallow swale about two yards wide, although it was rough enough to jolt them, make the car springs creak, scrape the muffler, and spring open the door on the glove box, which evidently had not been closed tightly.

The flapping door startled Celeste, and she swung the flashlight toward it. The beam flared off a curve of clear glass in that small compartment. A jar. Four or five inches tall, three to four inches in diameter. Once it might have contained pickles or peanut butter. The label had been removed. It was filled with a liquid now, which was made opaque by the glimmering reflections of the flashlight beam, and in the liquid floated something peculiar, not quite identifiable, but nevertheless alarming.

“What’s this?” she asked, reaching into the glove box without hesitation but with a palpable dread, compelled against her better judgment, just as Joey was, to have a closer look.

She withdrew the jar.

Held it up.

Floating in pink-tinted fluid was a pair of blue eyes.

10

GRAVEL RATTLED AGAINST THE UNDERCARRIAGE, THE MUSTANG THUMPED across a depression, and Joey tore his gaze from the jar in time to see a mailbox disintegrate on contact with the front bumper. The car churned across the lawn of the first house in Coal Valley and came to a stop just inches before plowing into the front porch.

Instantly he was cast into a memory from the first time that he had lived through this night, when he had failed to take the turnoff to Coal Valley:

… driving the Mustang recklessly fast on the interstate, in a night full of rain and sleet, in a frenzy to escape, as though a demon were in pursuit of him, torn up about something, alternately cursing God and praying to Him. His stomach is acidic, churning. There’s a roll of Tums in the glove box. Holding the wheel with one hand, he leans to the right, punches the latch release, and the door in the dashboard drops open. He reaches into that small compartment, feeling for the roll of antacid—and he finds the jar. Smooth and cool. He can’t figure what it is. He doesn’t keep a jar of anything in there. He takes it out, The headlights of an oncoming big rig, on the far side of the divided highway, throw enough light into the car for him to see the contents of the jar. Eyes. Either he jerks the wheel reflexively or the tires hydroplane on the slick pavement, because suddenly the Mustang is totally out of control, sliding, spinning. The signpost. A terrible crash. His head smacks against the window, safety glass shattering into a gummy mass but cutting him nonetheless. Rebounding from the steel signpost, slamming into the guardrail. Stopped. He forces open the damaged door and scrambles out into the storm. He has to get rid of the jar, dear Jesus, get rid of it before someone stops to help him. Not much traffic in this killing weather, but surely someone will be a good Samaritan when that is the last thing he needs. He’s lost the jar. No. He can’t have lost the jar. He feels around frantically in the car: the floor in front of the driver’s seat. Cool glass. Intact. The lid still screwed on tight. Thank God, thank God. He runs with it past the front of the car to the guardrail. Beyond is wild land, an open field full of tall weeds. With all the strength he can muster, he hurls the jar far into the darkness. And then time passes and he finds himself still standing on the verge of the highway, not sure what he’s doing there, confused. Sleet stings his exposed face and hands. He’s got a fierce headache. He touches his forehead, finds the cut. He needs medical attention. Maybe stitches. There’s an exit one mile ahead. He knows the town. He can find the hospital. No Samaritan has stopped. It’s that kind of world these days. When he gets back into the battered Mustang, he is relieved to discover that it’s still operable and that the damaged fender isn’t binding against the front tire. He’s going to be all right. He’s going to be all right.