Dean Koontz - Strange Highways

Joey shook his head in denial. "You were always a good athlete, even as a kid. And real smart. And everyone always liked you. You always had those things, P.J."

"The hell I did," P.J. said, raising his voice for the first time. "God gave me nothing when I came into this world, nothing, nothing but crosses to bear. He's a great advocate of suffering, God is. A real sadist. I had nothing until I made a deal for it."

Reason and logic would have no effect on him, especially not if his psychosis had taken root when he'd been a child. He was a long time gone into madness. The only hope of manipulating him into a disadvantageous position was to play into his fantasy, encourage him.

P.J. said, "Why don't you try it, Joey? You won't have to learn a lot of chants, conduct ceremonies in the woods, none of that. Just want it, open your heart to it, and you can have your own companion."

"Companion?"

"Like I have Judas. A rider on the soul. I invited him into me. I let him out of Hell for a while, and in return he takes good care of me. He has big plans for me, Joey. Wealth, fame. He wants me to satisfy every desire I have, because he experiences everything through me — feels the girls through me, tastes the champagne, shares the sense of power, the glorious power, when it's time to kill. He wants only the very best for me, Joey, and he makes sure that I get it. You could have a companion of your own, kiddo. I can make it happen, I really, can."

Joey was rendered speechless by the astonishing complexity of P.J.'s twisted fantasy of Faustian bargains, negotiated damnation, and possession. If he had not spent twenty years reading the most exotic cases of aberrant psychology ever published, he could not have begun to grasp the nature of the human monster with whom he was dealing He could not possibly have understood P.J. the first time that he'd lived through this night, because then he had lacked the special knowledge that allowed him to comprehend.

P.J. said, "You just have to want it, Joey. Then we kill this bitch here. One of the Dolan boys is sixteen. Big kid. We can make it look like he did it all, then killed himself. You and me — we walk away, and from now on we're together, tighter than brothers, together like we've never been before."

"What do you really need me for, P.J.?"

"Hey, I don't need you, Joey. I'm not out to use you for any reason. I just love you. Don't you think I love you? I do. You're my baby: brother. Aren't you my one and only little baby brother? Why shouldn't I want to have you at my side, share my good fortune with you?"

Joey's mouth was dry, and not just from the sudden heat. For the first time since turning off the county route onto Coal Valley Road, he longed for a double shot of Jack Daniel's. "I think you just need me to take down the crucifix for you. Maybe hang it upside down instead of the way it is."

P.J. didn't respond.

"I think you're desperate to finish the little tableau that you started to set up here, but now you're afraid to come into the church since we've restored things."

"You haven't restored anything," P.J. said scornfully.

"I bet if I took down the crucifix, blew out the candles, tore up the altar, if I just made the place safe for you again — then you'd kill both of us, just like you planned all along."

"Hey, kiddo, don't you see who you're talking to? This is your brother here. What's wrong with you? Am I your brother, the one who always fought all your fights with you, took good care of you? Am I ever going to hurt you? Hurt you? Does that make any sense at all?"

Celeste rose from her knees to stand beside Joey, as though she sensed that any small show of courage on her part would help convince P.J. that she and Joey were confident about the protection provided by the symbols with which they had surrounded themselves. Their confidence might feed his apprehension.

"If you're not afraid of the church, why won't you come farther in?" Joey asked.

"Why's it so warm in here?" P.J. tried to sound as self-assured as always, but doubt tainted his voice. "What's there to be afraid of? Nothing."

"Then come on in."

"There's nothing sacred here."

"Prove it. Put your fingers in the holy water."

P.J. turned his attention to the marble font at his right side. "It was dry before. You put the water there yourself."

"Did we?"

"It hasn't been blessed," P.J. said. "You're not a damn priest. It's just ordinary water."

"Then put your fingers in it."

Joey had read of psychotics who, swept away by delusions that they possessed Satanic power, were capable of literally blistering when they put their fingers into holy water or touched a crucifix. The injuries they suffered were real, although induced entirely by their own powers of suggestion, by the depth of their belief in their own sick fantasies.

When P.J. continued to regard the shallow pool of holy water with trepidation, Joey said, "Go on, touch it, go on — or are you afraid it'll eat into your hand, burn like an acid?"

P.J. reached hesitantly toward the marble bowl. Like a dragonfly, his spread fingers hovered over the water. Then he pulled his hand back.

"Jesus," Celeste said softly.

They had found a way to use P.J.'s madness to protect themselves from him.

The first time that he had lived through this night, Joey had been little more than a boy, just out of his teens, up against not merely an older brother but a psychopath of extreme cunning and high intelligence. Now, he had twenty years of experience on P.J., which gave him the psychological advantage this time.

"You can't touch us," Joey said. "Not here in this sacred place. You can't do anything that you planned to do here, P.J. Not now, not since we've let God back inside these walls. All you can do now is run for it. Morning will roll around eventually, and we'll just wait here until someone comes looking for us or until someone finds the Bimmers."

P.J. tried again to put his hand in the water, but he couldn't do it. Crying out wordlessly in fear and frustration, he kicked the font.

The wide marble bowl crashed off the fluted pedestal, and P.J. took sufficient courage from that destruction to rush forward into the nave while the font was still toppling.

Joey stooped and reached for the 20-gauge.

Even as the contents of the bowl spilled onto the floor, P.J. stepped into the spreading puddle, and a cloud of sulfurous steam erupted around his feet as if the water had indeed been blessed and had reacted with fierce corrosive power upon encountering the shoe of a demon-ridden man.

Joey realized that the floor must have been much hotter at the back of the nave than in the sanctuary, fearfully hot.

Having noticed the extreme and increasing heat in the church, P.J. should have realized as much himself; however, in his dementia, he reacted not with reason but with superstitious panic. The gush of steam from the "holy" water reinforced his bizarre delusion, and he screamed as if he'd actually been burned. In fact, he surely was suffering, because to anyone afflicted with psychosomatic pain, it seemed as genuine as the real thing. P.J. let out a shriek of abject misery, slipped and fell in the water, into more steam, landing hard on his hands and

knees, wailing, squealing. He raised his hands, fingers smoking, and then put them to his face but tore them away at once, as though the beads of water on them were indeed the tears of Christ and were searing his lips, his cheeks, half blinding him. He thrashed to his feet, stumbled out of the nave into the narthex, to the front doors, into the night, alternately shouting in rage and bleating in purest anguish, like neither a man nor a man possessed but like a wild beast in excruciating torment.