Dean Koontz - Strange Highways

But Celeste was in a panic about her folks, so she unlocked the door and plunged heedlessly into the short front hall, calling out to them as she entered. "Mom! Daddy! Where are you? Mom!"

No one answered.

Aware that any attempt to restrain the girl would prove futile, brandishing the crowbar at every shadow and imagined movement, Joey followed close behind her as she burst through doorways and flung open those doors that were closed, shouting for her mother and father with increasing terror. Four rooms downstairs and four up. One and a half bathrooms. The place wasn't a mansion by any definition, but it was better than any home that Joey had ever known, and everywhere there were books.

Celeste checked her own bedroom last, but her parents weren't there, either. "He's got them," she said frantically.

"No. I don't think so. Look around you — there aren't any signs of violence here no indications of a struggle. And I don't think they would have gone out with him anywhere willingly, not in this weather."

"Then where are they?"

"If they'd had to go somewhere unexpectedly, would they leave a note for you?"

Without answering, she spun around, dashed into the hall, and descended the stairs two at a time to the ground floor.

Joey caught up with her in the kitchen, where she was reading a message that was pinned to a corkboard beside the refrigerator.

Celeste,

Bev didn't come home from Mass this morning.

No one knows where she is. The sheriff is

looking for her. We've gone over to Asherville

to sit with Phil and Sylvie. They're half out

of their minds with worry. I'm sure it's all

going to turn out fine. Whatever happens,

we'll be home before midnight. Hope you had

a nice time at Linda's place. Keep the doors

locked. Don't worry. Bev will turn up. God

won't let anything happen to her. Love, Mom

Turning from the corkboard, Celeste glanced at the wall clock — only 9:02—and said, "Thank God, he can't get his hands on them."

"Hands." Joey suddenly remembered. "Let me see your hands."

She held them out to him.

The previously frightful stigmata in her palms had faded to vague bruises.

"We must be making right decisions," he said with a shiver of relief. "We're changing fate — your fate, at least. We've just got to keep on keeping on."

When he looked up from her hands to her face, he saw her eyes widen at the sight of something over his shoulder. Heart leaping, he swung toward the danger, raising the iron crowbar.

"No," she said, "just the telephone." She stepped to the wall phone. "We can call for help. The sheriff's office. Let them know where they can find Bev, get them looking for P.J."

The telephone was an old-fashioned rotary model. Joey hadn't seen one of those in a long time. Curiously, more than anything else, it convinced him that he was, indeed, twenty years in the past.

Celeste dialed the operator, then jiggled the cradle in which the handset had been hanging. "No dial tone."

"All this wind, ice — the lines might be down."

"No. It's him. He cut the lines."

Joey knew that she was right.

She slammed down the phone and headed out of the kitchen. "Come on. We can do better than the crowbar."

In the den, she went to the oak desk and took the gun-cabinet key from the center drawer.

Two walls were lined with books. Running one hand over their brightly colored spines, Joey said, "Just tonight, I finally realized… when P.J. conned me into letting him… letting him get away with murder, he stole my future."

Opening the glass door of the gun cabinet, she said, "What do you mean?"

"I wanted to be a writer. That's all I ever wanted to be. But what a novelist is always trying to do… if he's any good, he's trying to get at the truth of things. How could I hope to get at the truth of things, be a writer, when I couldn't even face up to the truth about my brother? He left me with nowhere to go, no future. And he became the writer."

She removed a shotgun from the rack in the cabinet and put it on the desk. "Remington. Twenty-gauge. Pump action. Nice gun. So tell me something — how could he be a writer if it's supposed to be all about dealing with truth? He's only about lies and deceit. Is he a good writer?"

"Everyone says he is."

She took another shotgun from the cabinet and put it on the desk beside the first weapon. "Remington too. My dad's partial to the brand. Twelve-gauge. Pretty walnut stock, isn't it? I didn't ask you what everyone else says. What do you think? Is he any good as a novelist — in this future of yours?"

"He's successful."

"So what. Doesn't necessarily mean he's good."

"He's won a lot of awards, and I've always pretended to think he's good. But… I've really never felt he was much good at all."

Crouching, pulling open a drawer in the bottom of the cabinet, quickly pawing through the contents, she said, "So tonight you take your future back — and you will be good."

In one corner stood a gray metal box the size of a briefcase. It was ticking.

"What's that thing in the corner?" Joey asked.

"It monitors carbon monoxide and other toxic gases seeping up from the mine fires. There's one in the basement. This room isn't over the basement, it's an add-on, so it has a monitor of its own."

"An alarm goes off?"

"Yeah, if there's too many fumes." In the drawer she found two boxes of ammunition. She put them on the desk. "Every house in Coal Valley was equipped with them years ago."

"It's like living on a bomb."

"Yeah. But with a long, slow fuse."

"Why haven't you moved out?"

"Bureaucrats. Paperwork. Processing delays. If you move out before the government has the papers ready to sign, then they declare the house abandoned, a public danger, and they aren't willing to pay as much for it. You have to live here, take the risk, let it happen at their pace if you want to get a halfway fair price."

Opening one of the boxes of shells as Celeste opened the other, Joey said, "You know how to use these guns?"

"I've been going skeet-shooting and hunting with my dad since I was thirteen."

"You don't seem like a hunter to me," he said as he loaded the 20-gauge.

"Never killed anything. Always aim to miss."

"Your dad never noticed that?"

"Funny thing is — whether it's shotguns or rifles, whether it's small game or deer, he always aims to miss too. Though he doesn't think I know it."

"Then what's the point?"

As she finished loading the 12-gauge, she smiled with affection at the thought of her father. "He likes just being in the woods, walking in the woods on a crisp morning, the clean smell of the pines — and having some private time with me. He's never said, but I've always sensed he would've liked a son. Mom had complications with me, couldn't carry another baby. So I've always tried to give Dad a little of the son stuff. He thinks I'm a real tomboy."

"You're amazing," he said.

Hastily dropping spare shells into the various pockets of her black raincoat, she said, "I'm only what I'm here to be."

The strangeness of that statement harked back to other enigmatic things that she had said earlier in the night. He met her eyes, and once again he saw those mysterious depths, which seemed too profound for her years, too deep to be plumbed. She was the most interesting girl that he had ever known, and he hoped that she saw something appealing in his eyes.

As Joey finished stuffing spare shells into the pockets of his sheepskin-lined denim jacket, Celeste said, "Do you think Beverly is the first?"

"The first?"