Dean Koontz - Strange Highways

The plastic rustled.

"You amaze me," he said.

"Why?"

"Your strength."

"I'm here to help you, that's all."

"I thought I was here to help you."

"Maybe it's both ways."

The rustling stopped.

"Okay," Celeste assured him.

He lowered his head and saw what he first thought was blood on the floor of the altar platform. It had been revealed when they shifted the position of the corpse.

On second look, however, Joey realized that it was not blood but paint from a spray can. Someone had written the number 1 and drawn a circle around it.

"You see this?" he asked Celeste, as she rose to her feet on the other side of the dead woman.

"Yeah. Something to do with the demolition plans."

"I don't think so."

"Sure. Must be. Or maybe just kids vandalizing the place. They painted more of them back there," she said, gesturing in the general direction of the nave.

He got up, turned, and frowned at the dimly lighted church. "Where?"

"The first row of pews," she said.

Against the dark wood backs of the benches, the red paint was difficult to read from a distance.

After picking up the crowbar, Joey swung his legs over the presbytery balustrade, dropped into the three-sided choir enclosure, and went to the sanctuary railing.

He heard Celeste following him, but by way of the ambulatory.

On the front pew to the left of the center aisle, a series of sequential numbers, circled in red, had been painted side by side. They were spaced approximately as people would have been if any had been sitting there. Farthest to the left was the number 2, and the last number, nearest the center aisle, was 6.

Joey felt as though spiders were crawling on the back of his neck, but his hand found none there.

On the pew to the right of the center aisle, the red numbers continued in sequence—7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12—to the far side of the church.

"Twelve," he brooded.

Joining him at the sanctuary railing, Celeste said softly, "What's wrong?"

"The woman on the altar…"

"Beverly."

He stared intently at the red numbers on the pews, which now seemed as radiant as signs of the Apocalypse.

"Joey? What about her? What is it?"

Joey was still puzzling it out, standing in the shadow of truth but not quite able to see the whole icy structure of it. "He painted the number one and then put her on top of it."

"P.J. did?"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

A hard blast of wind battered the old church, and a draft swept through the nave. The faintly lingering scent of stale incense and the stronger smell of mildew were swept away, and the draft brought with it the stink of sulfur.

Joey said, "Do you have any brothers or sisters?"

Clearly puzzled by the question, she shook her head. "No."

"Does anyone else live with you and your folks, like maybe a grandparent, anyone?"

"No. Just the three of us."

"Beverly's one of twelve."

"Twelve what?"

He pointed at Celeste, and his hand shook. "Then your family — two, three, four. Who else still lives in Coal Valley?"

"The Dolans."

"How many of them?"

"Five in their family."

"Who else?"

"John and Beth Bimmer. John's mother, Hannah, lives with them."

"Three. Three Bimmers, five Dolans, plus you and your folks. Eleven. Plus her, there on the altar." With a sweep of his hand, he indicated the numbers on the pews. "Twelve."

"Oh, God."

"I don't need any psychic flash to see where he's going with this one. The number twelve must appeal to him for the obvious reason. Twelve apostles, all dead and lined up in a deconsecrated church. All of them paying silent homage not to God but to the thirteenth apostle. That's how P.J. sees himself, I think — as the thirteenth apostle, Judas. The Betrayer."

Still holding the crowbar, he pushed open the sacristy gate and returned to the nave.

He touched one of the numbers on the left-hand pew. In places, the paint was still tacky.

"Judas. Betraying his family," Joey said, "betraying the faith he was raised in, with reverence for nothing, loyal to nothing, to no one. Fearing nothing, not even God. Walking the most dangerous line of them all, taking the biggest imaginable risk to get the greatest of all thrills: risking his soul for a… for a dance along the edge of damnation."

Celeste moved close to Joey, pressed against his side, needing the comfort of contact. "He's setting up… some sort of a symbolic tableau?"

"With corpses," Joey said. "He intends to kill everyone who still lives in Coal Valley before the night is through and bring their bodies here."

She paled. "Did that come to pass?"

He didn't understand. "Come to pass?"

"In the future that you've already lived — were all the people in Coal Valley killed?"

With a shock, Joey realized that he didn't know the answer to her question.

"After that night, I pretty much stopped reading newspapers, news magazines. Avoided TV news. Changed stations on the radio every time a news report came on. Told myself that I was burnt out on news, that it was all just airplane crashes and floods and fires and earthquakes. But what it really must have been… I didn't want to read about or hear about any women being mutilated, murdered. Didn't want to risk some detail of a crime — eyes cut out, anything like that — making a subconscious connection for me and maybe blowing away my 'amnesia.'

"So for all you know — it happened. For all you know — they found twelve dead people in this church, lined up on the front pews, one of them on the altar platform."

"If it did come to pass — if that's what they found — no one ever nailed P.J. for it. Because in my future, he's still on the loose."

"Jesus. Mom and Dad." She pushed away from him and ran down the center aisle toward the back of the nave.

He rushed after her, through the narthex, through the open front doors, into the sleety night.

She slipped on the icy walkway, fell to one knee, scrambled up, and hurried on, rounding the car to the passenger side.

As he reached the driver's door of the Mustang, Joey heard a rumble that first seemed to be thunder — but then he realized that the sound was coming from beneath him, from under the street.

Celeste looked worriedly at him across the roof of the car. "Subsidence."

The rumble built, the street trembled as though a freight train were passing through a tunnel under them, and then both the shaking and the ominous sound faded away.

A section of a burning mine tunnel had collapsed.

Glancing around them, seeing no disturbance of the ground, Joey said, "Where?"

"Must be somewhere else in town. Come on, come on, hurry," she urged, getting into the car.

Behind the wheel, starting the engine, afraid that a sudden fissure in the street might swallow the Mustang and drop them into fire, Joey said, "Subsidence, huh?"

"I've never felt it that bad. Could be right under us but very deep, so far down that it didn't affect the surface."

"Yet."

EVEN THOUGH THE TIRES HAD WINTER TREAD, THEY SPUN USELESSLY A couple of times on the way to Celeste's place, but Joey concluded the short trip without sliding into anything. The Baker house was white with green trim and had two dormer windows on the second floor.

He and Celeste ran clumsily across the lawn to the front-porch steps, avoiding the walkway, which was far more treacherous than the frozen grass.

Lights glowed throughout the downstairs, glittering in laces of ice that filigreed some of the windows. The porch lamp was on as well.

They should have entered with caution, because P.J. might have gotten there ahead of them. They had no way of knowing which of the three families he intended to visit first.