Dean Koontz - Strange Highways

Joey had only half raised the Remington. P.J. had never come close enough to warrant the use of the gun.

"My God," Celeste said shakily.

"That was amazing luck," Joey agreed.

But they were talking about different things.

She said, "What luck?"

"The hot floor."

"It's not that hot," she said.

He frowned. "Well, it must be a lot hotter back there than at this end of the building. In fact, I'm wondering how long we'll even be safe here."

"It wasn't the floor."

"You saw—"

"It was him."

"Him?"

She was as deathly pale as one of the distorted, ghostly faces of condensation on the church windows. Staring at the shallow puddle that was still lightly steaming at the far end of the center aisle, she said, "He couldn't touch it. Wasn't worthy."

"No. Nonsense. It was just the hot floor meeting the cool water, steam—"

She shook her head vigorously. "Corrupt. Couldn't touch something holy."

"Celeste—"

"Corrupt, foul, tainted."

Worried that she was on the brink of hysteria, he said, "Have you forgotten?"

Celeste met his eyes, and he saw such an acute awareness in her that he dismissed all concerns about panic attacks and hysteria. In fact, there was a curiously humbling quality about her piercing stare. She'd forgotten nothing. Nothing. And he sensed that her perception was, in fact, clearer than his.

Nevertheless, he said, "We put the water in the font."

"So?"

"Not a priest."

"So?"

"We put it there, and it's just ordinary water."

"I saw what it did to him."

"Just steam—"

"No, Joey. No, no." She spoke rapidly, running sentences together, frantic to convince him: "I got a glimpse of his hands, part of his face, his skin was blistered, red and peeling, the steam can't have been that hot, not off a wooden floor."

"Psychosomatic injury," he assured her.

"No."

"The power of the mind, autohypnosis."

"There's not much time," she said urgently, looking around at the crucifix and then at the candles, as if to make sure that their stage setting was still in order.

"I don't think he'll be back," Joey said.

"He will."

"But when we played straight into his fantasy, we scared the bejesus —

"No. He can't be frightened. Nothing can scare him."

Even in her urgency, she seemed mildly dazed, in shock. But Joey was overcome by the odd certainty that she was not distracted, as she seemed, but was functioning at a level of awareness and with a degree of insight that he had never known. Heightened perceptions.

She crossed herself. " … in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti… " She was spooking Joey worse than P.J. had done.

"A homicidal psychotic," Joey said nervously, "is full of rage, sure, but he can be as susceptible to fear as any sane person. Many of them—"

"No. He's the father of fear—"

"— many of them live in constant terror—"

"— the father of lies, such inhuman fury—"

"— even when they're on power fantasies like he is, they live in fear of—"

"— fury driving him for eternity." Her expressive eyes were glazed, haunted. "He never gives up, never will, nothing to lose, in a perpetual state of hatred and rage ever since the Fall…. "

Joey glanced toward the spilled water in which P.J. had slipped. The church was hotter than ever, sweltering, but steam had stopped rising from the puddle. Anyway, that wasn't the fall she meant.

After a hesitation, he said, "Who're we talking about, Celeste?"

She appeared to be listening to voices that only she could hear. "He's coming," she whispered tremulously.

"You're not talking about P.J., are you?"

"He's coming."

"What? Who?"

"The companion."

"Judas? There's no Judas. That's fantasy."

"Beyond Judas."

"Celeste, be serious, the devil himself isn't really in P.J."

As alarmed by his insistence on reason as he was alarmed by her sudden descent into full-blown mysticism, she gripped him by the lapels of his denim jacket. "You're running out of time, Joey. Not much time left to believe."

"I believe—"

"Not in what matters."

She let go of him, vaulted over the presbytery balustrade into the choir enclosure, landing solidly on both feet.

"Celeste!"

Rushing to the sanctuary gate, she shouted, "Come touch the floor, Joey, touch where the water spilled, see whether it's hot enough for steam, hurry!"

Frightened for her, frightened by her, Joey also vaulted the balustrade. "Wait!"

She shoved through the sanctuary gate.

Over the incessant drumming of the rain on the roof, another sound arose. An escalating roar. Not from under them. Outside.

She hurried into the center aisle.

He looked toward the windows on the left. Toward the windows on the right. Darkness on both sides.

"Celeste!" he shouted as he pushed through the sanctuary gate. "Show me your hands!"

She was halfway down the aisle. She turned toward him. Her face was slick with sweat. Like a ceramic glaze. Glistening with candlelight. The face of a saint. A martyr.

The roar swelled. An engine. Accelerating.

"Your hands!" Joey shouted desperately.

She raised her hands.

In her delicate palms were hideous wounds. Black holes thick with blood.

From out of the west, shattering windows, smashing through clapboard and wall studs and old wood paneling and stations of the cross, the Mustang exploded into the church, headlights unlit but engine screaming, horn suddenly blaring, tires popping like balloons as the floor splintered under them, driving forward with tremendous power, plowing into the pews, unstoppable. Those benches cracked free of their moorings, tilted up, slammed into one another — pews and kneelers erupting and crashing together and piling one atop the next in a cresting wave of wood, in a geometry of penitence — and still the Mustang surged forward, engine racing, gears grinding, trumpeting as it came.

Joey fell to the floor in the center aisle and shielded his head with his folded arms, certain that he was going to die in the tsunami of pews. He was even more certain that Celeste would die, whether crushed to death now or, later, after being nailed to the floor or to the wall by P.J. Joey had utterly failed her, failed himself. Following the storm of broken glass, the,hail of plaster, the avalanche of wood, there would be a rain of blood. Over the roar of the Mustang, over the banshee horn, over the crack-split-shatter of wood, over the ringing of falling glass, over the ominous creak of sagging ceiling beams, he heard one special sound separate and eerily distinct from all others, and instantly he knew what it was: the bronze clatter and thud of the crucifix dropping off the back wall of the sanctuary.

THE COLD WIND WAS IN THE CHURCH NOW, SNIFFING AND PANTING, LIKE a pack of dogs through the ruins.

Joey lay facedown under a stack of tumbled pews and shattered wall beams, and although he felt no pain, he was afraid that his legs were crushed. When he dared to move, however, he discovered that he was neither injured nor pinned in place.

The rubble was a multitiered, three-dimensional maze. Joey was forced to crawl, writhe, and squirm through it as though he were a rat-seeking ferret exploring the depths of an ancient timberfall.

Shingles, laths, and chunks of other debris still dropped out of the demolished wall and from the damaged ceiling, clattering into the wreckage. The wind played the narrow twisting passages in the destruction as though they were flutes, piping an eerie, tuneless music. But the car engine had died.

After wriggling through an especially cramped space between slabs of prayer-polished oak, Joey came to the front wheel of the Mustang. The tire was flat, and the fender had crumpled around it like paper.