Strange Highways (9 page)

Sitting in front of the Coal Valley house, with pieces of the mangled mailbox scattered across the lawn behind him, Joey realized that when he’d driven away from the crash scene on the interstate twenty years ago, he had forgotten about the jar and the eyes. Either the head injury had resulted in selective amnesia—or he’d
willed
himself to forget. He was overcome by the sick feeling that the explanation involved more of the latter than the former, that his moral courage—not his physiology—had failed him.

In that alternate reality, the jar lay hidden in a weedy field, but here it was in Celeste’s grip. She had dropped the flashlight and held fast to the jar with both hands, perhaps because she was afraid that the lid would come loose and the contents would spill into her lap. She shoved the container into the glove box and slammed the small door shut.

Gasping, half sobbing, she hugged herself and bent forward in her seat. “Oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit,” she chanted, using the word no more tightly now than before.

Gripping the steering wheel so tightly that he wouldn’t have been surprised if it had broken apart in his hands, Joey was filled with an inner turmoil more violent than the hard shatters of wind-driven rain that broke over the Mustang. He was on the brink of understanding the jar: where it had come from, whose eyes it contained, what it meant, why he had blocked it from memory all these years. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to step off that brink into the cold void of truth, perhaps because he knew that he didn’t yet possess the strength to face what he would discover at the bottom of the fall.

“I didn’t,” he said miserably.

Celeste was rocking in her seat, hugging herself, huddled over her crossed arms, making a low, tortured sound.

“I didn’t,” he repeated.

Slowly she raised her head.

Her eyes were as appealing as ever, suggesting unusual depths of character and knowledge beyond her years, but a new quality informed them as well, something disturbing. Perhaps it was an unsought and unwanted awareness of the human capacity for evil. She still looked like the girl he had picked up only eight or ten miles back along the road—but in a fundamental sense she was
not
that girl any more, and she could never return to the state of innocence in which she had entered the night. She was not a schoolgirl now, not the shy doe who had blushed when revealing the crush she had on him—and that was unspeakably sad.

He said, “I didn’t put the jar there. I didn’t put the eyes in the jar. It wasn’t me.”

“I know,” she said simply and with a firm conviction for which he loved her. She glanced at the glove box, then back at him. “You couldn’t have. Not you. Not you, Joey, not ever. You aren’t capable of anything like that.”

Again he teetered on a precipice of revelation, but a tide of anguish washed him back from it rather than over the edge. “They’ve got to be her eyes.”

“The blonde in the plastic tarp.”

“Yeah. And I think somehow … somehow I know who she is, know how she wound up dead with her eyes cut out. But I just can’t quite remember.”

“Earlier you said that she was more than a vision, more than drunk’s hallucination.”

“Yeah. For sure. She’s a memory. I saw her for real somewhere, sometime.” He put one hand to his forehead, gripping his skull so tightly that his hand shook with the effort and the muscles twitched the length of his arm, as if he could
pull
the forgotten knowledge out of himself.

“Who could have gotten in your car to leave the jar?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Where were you early in the evening, before you set out to go to college?”

“Home. Asherville. My folks’ house. I didn’t stop anywhere between there and your Valiant.”

“Was the Mustang in the garage?”

“We don’t have a garage. It’s not … that kind of house.”

“Was it locked?”

“No.”

“Then anybody could have gotten into your car.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

No one had come out of the house in front of them, because it was one of the first properties condemned in Coal Valley, abandoned for months. On the white aluminum siding, someone had spray-painted a big “4” and drawn a circle around it. As red as fresh blood in the Mustang’s headlights, the number was not graffiti but an official designation: It meant that the house would be the fourth structure to be torn down when the last citizens of Coal Valley moved out and the demolition crew came in with its bulldozers.

The state and federal bureaucracies had been so inefficient and slow in dealing with the mine fire that it had been allowed to spread relentlessly until its white-hot tributaries lay under the entire valley, whereupon it had grown too far-reaching to be extinguished by anything other than time and nature. With the destruction of the village, however, the authorities clearly intended to be as orderly and speedy as a clockwork military operation.

“We’re sitting ducks here,” he said.

Without checking Celeste’s hands, certain that this immobility had already resulted in a resurgence of the stigmata, he shifted the Mustang into reverse and backed across the lawn to the street. So much rain had fallen that he was worried about getting bogged down in the soft sod, but they reached the blacktop without trouble.

“Where now?” she asked.

“We’ll look around town.”

“For what?”

“Anything out of the ordinary.”

“It’s
all
out of the ordinary.”

“We’ll know it when we see it.”

He cruised slowly along Coal Valley Road, which was the main thoroughfare through town.

At the first intersection, Celeste pointed to a narrow street on the left. “Our house is over there.”

A block away, through beaded curtains of rain and past a few screening pines, several windows were filled with a welcoming amber light. No other house in that direction appeared to be occupied.

“All the neighbors are gone, moved out,” Celeste confirmed. “Mom and Dad are alone over there.”

“And they may be safer alone,” he reminded her, crossing the intersection, driving slowly past her street, studying both sides of the main drag.

Even though Coal Valley Road led to destinations beyond the town of Coal Valley itself, they had encountered no pass-through traffic, and Joey figured that they weren’t likely to encounter any. Numerous experts and officials had assured the public that the highway was fundamentally safe and that there was no danger of sudden subsidence swallowing unwary motorists. Following the demolition of the village, however, the road was scheduled for condemnation and removal, and the residents of those mountain towns had long ago become skeptical about
anything
the experts had to say about the mine fire. Alternate routes had become popular.

Ahead of them, on the left, was St. Thomas’s Catholic Church, where services had once been conducted every Saturday and Sunday by the rector and the curate of Our Lady of Sorrows in Asherville, who were circuit priests covering two other small churches in that part of the county. It was not a grand house of worship, but a wooden structure with plain rather than stained-glass windows.

Joey’s attention was drawn to St. Thomas’s by flickering light at the windows. A flashlight. Inside, each time the beam moved, shadows spun and leaped like tormented spirits.

He angled across the street and coasted to a stop in front of the church. He switched off the headlights and the engine.

At the top of the concrete steps, the double doors stood open.

“It’s an invitation,” Joey said.

“You think he’s in there?”

“It’s a pretty good bet.”

Inside the church, the light blinked off.

“Stay here,” Joey said, opening his door.

“Like hell.”

“I wish you would.”

“No,” she said adamantly.

“Anything could happen in there.”

“Anything could happen out here too.”

He couldn’t argue with the truth of that.

When he got out and went around to the back of the car, Celeste followed him, pulling up the hood of her raincoat.

The rain was now mixed with sleet, as when he’d lived through this night the first time and crashed on the interstate. It ticked against the Mustang with a sound like scrabbling claws.

When he opened the trunk, he more than half expected to find the dead blonde.

She wasn’t there.

He removed the combination crowbar and lug wrench from the side well that contained the jack. It was made of cast iron, comfortingly heavy in his hand.

In the faint glow of the trunk light, Celeste saw the toolbox and opened it even as Joey was hefting the crowbar. She extracted a large screwdriver.

“It’s not a knife,” she said, “but it’s something.”

Joey wished that she would stay behind in the car with the doors locked. If anyone showed up, she could blow the horn, and he would be at her side in seconds.

Although he had met her hardly an hour ago, he already knew her well enough to recognize the futility of trying to dissuade her from accompanying him. In spite of her delicate beauty, she was uncommonly tough and resilient. Any lingering uncertainties of youth, which might have inhibited her, had been burned away forever with the realization that she’d been marked for rape and murder—and with the discovery of the eyes in the jar. The world as she knew it had abruptly become a far darker and more disturbing place than it had been when the day began, but she had absorbed that change and adapted to it with surprising and admirable courage.

Joey didn’t bother to close the trunk quietly. The open doors of the church made it clear that the man who had led him onto Coal Valley Road was expecting him to follow here as well.

“Stay close,” he said.

She nodded grimly. “Guaranteed.”

In the front yard of St. Thomas’s, a one-foot-diameter vent pipe rose six feet above the ground. It was surrounded by an hourglass construction of chain-link, which served as a safety barrier. Plumes of mine-fire smoke rose from deep underground and wafted from the top of the pipe, lessening the likelihood that toxic fumes would build to dangerous levels in the church and in nearby homes. During the past twenty years, as all efforts to extinguish—or even to contain—the subterranean inferno had proved inadequate, almost two thousand such vents had been installed.

In spite of the continuous scrubbing by the rain, the air around the entrance to St. Thomas’s had a sulfurous stench, as if some rough beast, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born, had taken a detour to Coal Valley.

Painted in red on the front of the church was a large “13” with a red circle around it.

Curiously, Joey thought of Judas. The thirteenth apostle. The betrayer of Jesus.

The number on the wall merely indicated that the building had been the thirteenth property in Coal Valley to be condemned and added to the master demolition list, but he couldn’t shake the notion that it was significant for other reasons. In his heart he knew that it was a warning to guard against betrayal. But betrayal from what source?

He hadn’t gone to Mass in two decades, until the funeral this morning. He had called himself an agnostic—and sometimes an atheist—for many years, yet suddenly everything he saw and everything that happened seemed to have a religious association for him. Of course, in one sense, he wasn’t a cynical and faithless man of forty any more but a young man of twenty who had still been an altar boy less than two years ago. Perhaps this strange fall backward in time had brought him closer to the faith of his youth.

Thirteen.

Judas.

Betrayal.

Rather than dismiss that train of thought as superstition, he took it seriously and decided to be more cautious than ever.

Sleet had not yet mantled the sidewalk in ice, and the scattered pellets crunched under their feet.

At the top of the steps, at the open doors, Celeste clicked on the small flashlight that she had brought from the car, dispelling some of the darkness inside.

They crossed the threshold side by side. She slashed left and right with the beam, quickly revealing that no one was waiting for them in the narthex.

A white marble holy-water font stood at the entrance to the nave. Joey discovered that it was empty, slid his fingers along the dry bottom of the bowl, and crossed himself anyway.

He advanced into the church with the crowbar raised and ready, holding it firmly in both hands. He wasn’t willing to trust to the grace of God.

Celeste handled the flashlight expertly, probing quickly to all sides, as though accustomed to conducting searches for homicidal maniacs.

Although no Masses had been said in St. Thomas’s for the past five or six months, Joey suspected that the electrical service had not been disconnected. For safety reasons, the power might have been left on, because all the dangers inherent in an abandoned building were greater in darkness. Now that official indifference and incompetence had resulted in the loss of the entire town to the hidden, hungry fire below, the authorities were uniformly enthusiastic proponents of safety measures.

A faint scent of incense lingered from past Masses, but it was largely masked by the smell of damp wood and mildew. A trace of sulfurous fumes laced the air as well, and that stink gradually grew stronger till it drowned the spicy aroma from all the old ceremonies of innocence.

Although volleys of sleet rattled against the roof and the windows, the nave was filled with the familiar hush of all churches and with a sense of quiet expectation. Usually it was an expectation of the subtle visitation of a divine presence, but now it was the apprehension of a hateful intrusion into that once-consecrated space.

Holding the crowbar in one fist, he slid his other hand along the wall to the left of the narthex arch. He couldn’t locate any switches.

Encouraging Celeste to move to the right of the arch, he felt along that wall until he found a panel of four switches. He snapped them all up with one sweep of his hand.

From overhead, cone-shaped fixtures cast dim, chrome-yellow light on the ranks of pews. Along the walls, hooded sconces directed soft light down across the fourteen stations of the cross an onto the dusty wood floor.