Koontz,Dean - Strange Highways

Twilight Zone Magazine, December, 1986; reprinted by permission of Nkui, Inc.

Night Visions 4, published by Dark Harvest, Arlington Heights, Illinois;

reprinted by permission of Nkui, Inc.

in The Horror Show, Summer 1986, reprinted by permission of Nkui, Inc.

Infinity Four, edited by Robert Hoskins, published by Lancer Books; revised

Fall 1986; reprinted by permission of Nkui, Inc.

edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg , published by Dark Harvest,

Arlington, Illinois, reprinted by permission of Nkui, Inc.

Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April, 1971; revised version

Stage, edited by Edward L. Ferman and Barry N. Malzberg, published by

R. Koontz.

Visions 4, published by Dark Harvest, Arlington Heights, Illinois; reprinted

by permission of Nkui, Inc.

Reflector, Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania; revised

appeared in Continuum 1, edited by Roger Elwood, published by G. P. Putnam's

Koontz.

in Night Visions 4, published by Dark Harvest, Arlington Heights, Illinois;

reprinted by permission of Nkui, Inc.

published by Random House, New York, New York; revised version copyright (c)

1995 by Dean R. Koontz.

Warner Books, Inc., 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

A Time Warner Company

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing: May 1995

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Koontz, Dean R. (Dean Ray), 1945-

Strange highways / Dean Koontz.

p. cm.

"A Brandon Tartikoff book."

ISBN 0-446-51974-X

1. Horror tales, American. I. Title.

PS35G1.O55S69 1995 94-49024

813'.54-dc20 CIP

Book design by Giorgetta Bell McRee

This book is dedicated

with much affection to

Jerry and Mary Ann Crowe.

After all these years

of being your friends,

Gerda and I have learned

that we have infinite patience.

Thanks for the friendship,

for all the laughs

you've given us

(some of them intentional),

for buying the house

built over the gate to Hell,

and for pointing out to me

every error I make.

Every tiny error.

Every teeny-tiny error.

Every minute error that

no one else, not even God,

would notice.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.

CONTENTS

STRANGE HIGHWAYS

1

THE BLACK PUMPKIN

155

MISS ATTILA THE HUN

174

DOWN IN THE DARKNESS

201

OLLIE'S HANDS

226

SNATCHER

243

TRAPPED

259

BRUNO

309

WE THREE

336

HARDSHELL

344

KITTENS

371

THE NIGHT OF THE STORM

377

TWILIGHT OF THE DAWN

400

CHASE

430

NOTES TO THE READER

552

STRANGE HIGHWAYS

1

ON THAT AUTUMN AFTERNOON, WHEN HE DROVE THE RENTAL CAR INTO Asherville, Joey

Shannon broke out in an icy sweat. A sudden and intense hopelessness overcame

him.

He almost hung a hard U-turn in the middle of the street. He resisted the

urge to jam the accelerator to the floorboards, speed away, and never look

back.

The town was as bleak as any in Pennsylvania coal country, where the mines

had shut down and most good jobs had been lost decades ago. Nevertheless, it

wasn't such a desperate place that the very sight of it should chill his heart

and bring him instantly to the edge of despair. He was puzzled by his peculiar

reaction to this long-delayed homecoming.

Sustained by fewer than a thousand local residents and perhaps two thousand

more in several smaller outlying towns, the commercial district was just two

blocks long. The two- and three-story stone buildings - erected in the 1850s

and darkened by a century and a half of grime -were pretty much as he

remembered them from his youth.

Evidently the merchants' association or the town council was engaged in a

beautification project. All the doors, the window frames, the shutters, and

the eaves appeared to have been freshly painted. Within the past few years,

circular holes had been cut out of the sidewalks to allow the planting of

young maple trees, which were now eight feet tall and still lashed to support

poles.

The red and amber autumn foliage should have enlivened the town, but

Asherville was grim, huddled, and forbidding on the brink of twilight.

Balanced on the highest ridges of the western mountains, the sun seemed

strangely shrunken, shedding light that didn't fully illuminate anything it

touched. In the sour-yellow glow, the rapidly lengthening shadows of the new

trees reached like grasping hands onto the cracked blacktop.

Joey adjusted the car heater. The greater rush of hot air did not

immediately warm him.

Above the spire of Our Lady of Sorrows, as the retiring sun began to cast

off purple cloaks of twilight, an enormous black bird wheeled in circles

through the sky. The winged creature might have been a dark angel seeking

shelter in a sacred bower.

A few people were on the streets, others in cars, but he didn't recognize

any of them. He'd been gone a long time. Over the years, of course, people

changed, moved away. Died.

When he turned onto the gravel driveway at the old house on the east edge

of town, his fear deepened. The clapboard siding needed fresh paint, and the

asphalt-shingle roof could have used repair, but the place wasn't ominous by

any measure, not even as vaguely Gothic as the buildings in the heart of town.

Modest. Dreary. Shabby. Nothing worse. He'd had a happy childhood here in

spite of deprivation. As a kid, he hadn't even realized that his family was

poor; that truth hadn't occurred to him until he went away to college and was

able to look back on their life in Asherville from a distance. Yet for a few

minutes, he waited in the driveway, overcome by inexplicable dread, unwilling

to get out of the car and go inside.

He switched off the engine and the headlights. Although the heater hadn't

relieved his chill, he immediately grew even colder without the hot air from

the vents.

The house waited.

Maybe he was afraid of facing up to his guilt and coming to terms with his

grief. He hadn't been a good son. And now he would never have another

opportunity to atone for all the pain that he had caused. Maybe he was

frightened by the realization that he would have to live the rest of his life

with the burden of what he'd done, with his remorse unexpressed and

forgiveness forever beyond reach.

No. That was a fearful weight, but it wasn't what scared him. Neither guilt

nor grief made his mouth go dry and his heart pound as he stared at the old

homestead. Something else.

In its wake, the recessional twilight drew in a breeze from the northeast.

A row of twenty-foot pines stood along the driveway, and their boughs began to

stir with the onset of night.

At first Joey's mood seemed extraordinary: a portentous sense that he was

on the brink of a supernatural encounter. It was akin to what he had sometimes

felt as an altar boy a long time ago, when he'd stood at the priest's side and

tried to sense the instant at which the ordinary wine in the chalice became

the sacred blood of Christ.

After a while, however, he decided that he was being foolish. His anxiety

was as irrational as any child's apprehension over an imaginary troll lurking

in the darkness under his bed.

He got out of the car and went around to the back to retrieve his suitcase.

As he unlocked the trunk, he suddenly had the crazy notion that something

monstrous was waiting in there for him, and as the lid rose, his heart knocked

explosively against his ribs. He actually stepped back in alarm.

The trunk contained only his scuffed and scarred suitcase, of course. After

taking a deep breath to steady his nerves, he withdrew the single piece of

luggage and slammed the trunk lid.

He needed a drink to settle his nerves. He always needed a drink. Whiskey

was the only solution that he cared to apply to most problems. Sometimes, it

even worked.

The front steps were swaybacked. The floorboards on the porch hadn't been

painted in years, and they creaked and popped noisily under his feet. He

wouldn't have been surprised if he had crashed through the rotting wood.

The house had deteriorated in the two decades since he had last seen it,

which surprised him. For the past twelve years, on the first of each month,

his brother had sent a generous check to their father, enough to allow the old

man either to afford a better house or to renovate this place. What had Dad

been doing with the money?

The key was under the rubber-backed hemp mat, where he'd been told that he

would find it. Though Asherville might give him the heebie-jeebies, it was a

town where a spare key could be kept in an obvious place or a house could even

be left unlocked with virtually no risk of burglary.

The door opened directly into the living room. He put his bag at the foot

of the stairs to the second floor.

He switched on the lights.

The sofa and the armchair recliner were not the same as those that had been

there twenty years ago, but they were so similar as to be indistinguishable

from the previous furniture. Nothing else appeared to have been changed at all

- except the television, which was big enough to belong to God.

The rest of the first floor was occupied by the combined kitchen and dining

area. The green Formica table with its wide chrome edge band was the one at

which they had eaten meals throughout his childhood. The chairs were the same

too, although the tie-on cushions had been changed.

He had the curious feeling that the house had been untenanted for an age,

sealed tomb-tight, and that he was the first in centuries to invade its silent

spaces. His mother had been dead sixteen years, his dad for only a day and a

half, but both seemed to have been gone since time immemorial.

In one corner of the kitchen was the cellar door, on which hung a gift

calendar from the First National Bank. The picture for October showed a pile

of orange pumpkins in a drift of leaves. One had been carved into a jack-o'-

lantern.

Joey went to the door but didn't open it right away.

He clearly remembered the cellar. It was divided into two rooms, each with

its own outside entrance. One contained the furnace and the hot-water heater.

The other had been his brother's room.

For a while he stood with his hand on the old cast-iron knob. It was icy

under his palm, and his body heat didn't warm it.

The knob creaked softly when he finally turned it.

Two dim, dust-covered, bare bulbs came on when he flicked the switch: one

halfway down the cellar stairs, the second in the furnace room below. But

neither chased off all the darkness.

He didn't have to go into the cellar first thing, at night. The morning

would be soon enough. In fact, he could think of no reason why he had to go

down there at all.

The illuminated square of concrete floor at the foot of the steps was

veined with cracks, just as he remembered it, and the surrounding shadows

seemed to seep from those narrow fissures and rise along the walls.

"Hello?" he called.

He was surprised to hear himself speak, because he knew that he was alone

in the house.

Nevertheless, he waited for a response. None came.

"Is someone there?" he asked.

Nothing.

At last he shut off the cellar lights and closed the door.

He carried his suitcase to the second floor. A short, narrow hallway with

badly worn gray-and-yellow-flecked linoleum led from the head of the stairs to

the bathroom at the back.

Beyond the single door on the right was his parents' room. Actually, for

sixteen years, since his mother's death, his dad had slept there alone. And

now it was nobody's room.

The single door on the left side of the hall led to his old bedroom, into

which he had not set foot in twenty years.

The flesh prickled on the nape of his neck, and he turned to look down the

stairs into the living room, half expecting to discover that someone was

ascending after him. But who might have been there? Everyone was gone. Dead

and gone. The stairs were deserted.

The house was so humble, small, narrow, plain - yet at the moment it felt

vast, a place of unexpected dimensions and hidden rooms where unknown lives

were lived, where secret dramas unfolded. The silence was not an ordinary

quiet, and it cut through him as a woman's scream might have done.

He opened the door and went into his bedroom.

Home again.

He was scared. And he didn't know why. Or if he knew, the knowledge existed

somewhere between instinct and recollection.

2

THAT NIGHT, AN AUTUMN STORM MOVED IN FROM THE NORTHwest, and all hope of stars

was lost. Darkness congealed into clouds that pressed against the mountains

and settled between the high slopes, until the heavens were devoid of light

and as oppressive as a low vault of cold stone.

When he was a teenager, Joey Shannon had sometimes sat by the single window

of his second-floor bedroom, gazing at the wedge of sky that the surrounding

mountains permitted him. The stars and the brief transit of the moon across

the gap between the ridges were a much needed reminder that beyond Asherville,

Pennsylvania, other worlds existed where possibilities were infinite and where

even a boy from a poor coal-country family might change his luck and become

anything that he wished to be, especially if he were a boy with big dreams and

the passion to pursue them.

This night, at the age of forty, Joey sat at the same window, with the

lights off, but the sight of stars was denied him. Instead, he had a bottle of

Jack Daniel's.

Twenty years ago, in another October when the world had been a far better

place, he'd come home for one of his quick, infrequent visits from

Shippensburg State College, where with the help of a partial scholarship, he

had been paying his way by working evenings and weekends as a supermarket

stock clerk. His mom had cooked his favorite dinner - meatloaf with tomato

gravy, mashed potatoes, baked corn - and he had played some two-hand pinochle

with his dad.

His older brother, P.J. (for Paul John), also had been home that weekend,

so there had been a lot of laughter, affection, a comforting sense of family.

Any time spent with P.J. was always memorable. He was successful at everything

that he tried - the valedictorian of his high-school and college graduating

classes, a football hero, a shrewd poker player who seldom lost, a guy at whom

all the prettiest girls looked with doe-eyed interest - but the best thing

about him was his singular way with people and the upbeat atmosphere that he

created wherever he went. P.J. had a natural gift for friendship, a sincere

liking for most people, and an uncanny empathy that made it possible for him

to understand what made a person tick virtually upon first meeting. Routinely

and without apparent effort, P.J. became the center of every social circle

that he entered. Highly intelligent yet self-effacing, handsome yet free of

vanity, acerbically witty but never mean, P.J. had been a terrific big brother

when they had been growing up. More than that, he'd been - and after all these

years, still was - the standard by which Joey Shannon measured himself, the

one person into whom he would have remade himself if that had been possible.

In the decades since, he had fallen far short of that standard. Although

P.J. moved from success to success, Joey had an unerring knack for failure.

Now he took a few ice cubes from the bowl on the floor beside his straight-

backed chair and dropped them into his glass. He added two inches of Jack

Daniel's.

One thing that Joey hadn't failed at was drinking. Although his bank

account had seldom been above two thousand dollars in his entire adult life,

he always managed to afford the best blended whiskey. No one could say that

Joey Shannon was a cheap drunk.

On the most recent night that he'd spent at home - Saturday, October

twenty-fifth, 1975 - he had sat at this window with a bottle of RC Cola in his

hand. He hadn't been a boozer back then. Diamond-bright stars had adorned the

sky, and there had seemed to be an infinite number of possible lives waiting

for him beyond the mountains.

Now he had the whiskey. He was grateful for it.

It was October twenty-first, 1995 - another Saturday. Saturday was always

the worst night of the week for him, although he didn't know why. Maybe he

disliked Saturday because most people dressed up to go out to dinner or

dancing or to a show to celebrate the passage of another workweek - while Joey

found nothing to celebrate about having endured another seven days in the

prison that was his life.

Shortly before eleven o'clock the storm broke. Brilliant chains of molten-

silver lightning flashed and rattled across the wedge of sky, providing him

with flickering, unwanted reflections of himself in the window. Rolling

thunder shook the first fat raindrops from the clouds; they snapped and

spattered against the glass, and the ghostly image of Joey's face dissolved

before him.

At half past midnight he rose from the chair and went to the bed. The room

was as black as a coal mine, but even after twenty years he could find his way

around without light. In his mind's eye, he held a detailed image of the worn

and cracked linoleum floor, the oval rag rug that his mother had made, the

narrow bed with simple painted-iron headboard, the single nightstand with

warped drawers. In one corner was the heavily scarred desk at which he had

done his homework through twelve years of school and, when he was eight or

nine, had written his first stories about magical kingdoms and monsters and

trips to the moon.

As a boy, he had loved books and had wanted to grow up to be a writer. That

was one of the few things at which he hadn't failed in the past twenty years -

though only because he had never tried. After that October weekend in 1975,

he'd broken his long habit of writing stories and abandoned his dream.

The bed was no longer covered by a chenille spread, as it had been in those

days, and in fact it wasn't even fitted with sheets. Joey was too tired and

fuzzy-headed to bother searching for linens.

He stretched out on his back on the bare mattress, still wearing his shirt

and jeans, not bothering to kick off his shoes. The soft twang of the weak

springs was a familiar sound in the darkness.

In spite of his weariness, Joey didn't want to sleep. Half a bottle of Jack

Daniel's had failed to quiet his nerves or to diminish his apprehension. He

felt vulnerable. Asleep, he'd be defenseless.

Nevertheless, he had to try to get some rest. In little more than twelve

hours, he would bury his dad, and he needed to build up strength for the

funeral, which wasn't going to be easy on him.

He carried the straight-backed chair to the hall door, tilted and wedged it

under the knob: a simple but effective barricade.

His room was on the second floor. No intruder could easily reach the window

from outside. Besides, it was locked.

Now, even if he was sound asleep, no one could get into the room without

making enough noise to alert him. No one. Nothing.

In bed again, he listened for a while to the relentless roar of the rain on

the roof. If someone was prowling the house at that very moment, Joey couldn't

have heard him, for the gray noise of the storm provided perfect cover.

"Shannon," he mumbled, "you're getting weird in middle age."

Like the solemn drums of a funeral cortege, the rain marked Joey's

procession into deeper darkness.

In his dream, he shared his bed with a dead woman who wore a strange

transparent garment smeared with blood. Though lifeless, she suddenly became

animated by demonic energy, and she pressed one pale hand to his face. Do you

want to make love to me? she asked. No one will ever know. Even I couldn't be

a witness against you. I'm not just dead but blind. Then she turned her face

toward him, and he saw that her eyes were gone. In her empty sockets was the

deepest darkness he had ever known. I'm yours, Joey. I'm all yours.

He woke not with a scream but with a cry of sheer misery. He sat on the

edge of the bed, his face in his hands, sobbing softly.

Even dizzy and half nauseated from too much booze, he knew that his

reaction to the nightmare was peculiar. Although his heart raced with fear,

his grief was greater than his terror. Yet the dead woman was no one he had

ever known, merely a hobgoblin born of too little sleep and too much Jack

Daniel's. The previous night, still shaken by the news of his dad's death and

dreading the trip to Asherville, he had dozed only fitfully. Now, because of

weariness and whiskey, his dreams were bound to be populated with monsters.

She was nothing more than the grotesque denizen of a nightmare. Nevertheless,

the memory of that eyeless woman left him half crushed by an inexplicable

sense of loss as heavy as the world itself.

According to the radiant dial of his watch, it was three-thirty in the

morning. He had been asleep less than three hours.

Darkness still pressed against the window, and endless skeins of rain

unraveled through the night.

He got up from the bed and went to the corner desk where he had left the

half-finished bottle of Jack Daniel's. One more nip wouldn't hurt. He needed

something to make it through to the dawn.

As Joey uncapped the whiskey, he was gripped by a peculiar urge to go to

the window. He felt drawn as if by a magnetic force, but he resisted. Crazily,

he was afraid that he might see the dead woman on the far side of the rain-

washed glass, levitating one story above the ground: blond hair tangled and

wet, empty eye sockets darker than the night, in a transparent gown, arms

extended, wordlessly imploring him to fling up the window and plunge into the

storm with her.

He became convinced that she was floating out there like a ghost. He dared

not even glance toward the window or risk catching sight of it from the corner

of his eye. If he saw her peripherally, even that minimal eye contact would be

an invitation for her to come into his room. Like a vampire, she could tap at

the window and plead to be let in, but she could not cross his threshold

unless invited.

Edging back to the bed with the bottle in his hand, he kept his face

averted from that framed rectangle of night.

He wondered if he was just unusually drunk or if he might be losing his

mind.

To his surprise, he screwed the cap back on the bottle without taking a

drink.

3

IN THE MORNING, THE RAIN STOPPED FALLING, BUT THE SKY REMAINED low and

threatening.

Joey didn't have a hangover. He knew how to pace his drinking to minimize

the painful results. And every day he took a megadose of vitamin-B complex to

replace what had been destroyed by alcohol; extreme vitamin-B deficiency was

the primary cause of hangovers. He knew all the tricks. His drinking was

methodical and well organized; he approached it as though it were his

profession.

He found the makings of breakfast in the kitchen: a piece of stale coffee

cake, half a glass of orange juice.

After showering, he put on his only suit, a white shirt, and a dark red

tie. He hadn't worn the suit in five years, and it hung loosely on him. The

collar of the shirt was a size too large. He looked like a fifteen-year-old

boy dressed in his father's clothes.

Perhaps because the endless intake of booze accelerated his metabolism,

Joey burned off all that he ate and drank, and invariably he closed each

December a pound lighter than he'd begun the previous January. In another

hundred and sixty years, he would finally waste away into thin air.

At ten o'clock he went to the Devokowski Funeral Home on Main Street. It

was closed, but he was admitted by Mr. Devokowski because he was expected.

Louis Devokowski had been Asherville's mortician for thirty-five years. He

was not sallow and thin and stoop shouldered, as comic books and movies

portrayed men of his trade, but stocky and ruddy faced, with dark hair

untouched by gray - as though working with the dead was a prescription for

long life and vitality.

"Joey."

"Mr. Devokowski."

"I'm so sorry."

"Me too."

"Half the town came to the viewing last night."

Joey said nothing.

"Everyone loved your father."

Joey didn't trust himself to speak.

Devokowski said, "I'll take you to him."

The front viewing room was a hushed space with burgundy carpet, burgundy

drapes, beige walls, and subdued lighting. Arrangements of roses loomed in the

shadows, and the air was sweet with their scent.

The casket was a handsome bronze model with polished-copper trim and

handles. By phone, Joey had instructed Mr. Devokowski to provide the best.

That was how P.J. would want it - and it would be his money paying for it.

Joey approached the bier with the hesitancy of a man in a dream who expects

to peer into the coffin and see himself.

But it was Dan Shannon who rested in peace, in a dark-blue suit on a bed of

cream-colored satin. The past twenty years had not been kind to him. He looked

beaten by time, shrunken by care, and glad to be gone.

Mr. Devokowski had retreated from the room, leaving Joey alone with his

dad.

"I'm sorry," he whispered to his father. "Sorry I never came back, never

saw you or Mom again."

Hesitantly, he touched the old man's pale cheek. It was cold and dry.

He withdrew his hand, and now his whisper was shaky. "I just took the wrong

road. A strange highway ... and somehow ... there was never any coming back. I

can't say why, Dad. I don't understand it myself."

For a while he couldn't speak.

The scent of roses seemed to grow heavier.

Dan Shannon could have passed for a miner, though he had never worked the

coal fields even as a boy. Broad, heavy features. Big shoulders. Strong,

blunt-fingered hands cross-hatched with scars. He had been a car mechanic, a

good one - although in a time and place that had never offered quite enough

work.

"You deserved a loving son," Joey said at last. "Good thing you had two,

huh?" He closed his eyes. "I'm sorry. Jesus, I'm so sorry."

His heart ached with remorse, as heavy as an iron anvil in his chest, but

conversations with the dead couldn't provide absolution. Not even God could

give him that now.

When Joey left the viewing room, Mr. Devokowski met him in the front hall

of the mortuary. "Does P.J. know yet?"

Joey shook his head. "I haven't been able to track him down."

"How can you not be able to track him down? He's your brother," Devokowski

said. For an instant before he regained the compassionate expression of a

funeral director, his contempt was naked.

"He travels all over, Mr. Devokowski. You know about that. He's always

traveling, on the move, researching. It's not my fault ... being out of touch

with him."

Reluctantly, Devokowski nodded. "I saw the piece about him in People a few

months ago."

P.J. Shannon was the quintessential writer of life on the road, the most

famous literary Gypsy since Jack Kerouac.

"He should come home for a while," Devokowski said, "maybe write another

book about Asherville. I still think that was his best. When he hears about

your dad, poor P.J., he's going to be broken up real bad. P.J. really loved

your dad."

So did I, Joey thought, but he didn't say it. Given his actions over the

past twenty years, he wouldn't be believed. But he had loved Dan Shannon. God,

yes. And he'd loved his mother, Kathleen - whose funeral he had avoided and to

whose deathbed he had never gone.

"P.J. visited just in August. Stayed about a week. Your dad took him all

over, showing him off. He was so proud, your dad."

Devokowski's assistant, an intense young man in a dark suit, entered the

far end of the hallway. He spoke in a practiced hush: "Sir, it's time to

Koontz, Dean - Strange Highways

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: