Strange Highways

lights. Beacons. Shimmering in the delude.
     Joey capped the flask without drinking from it.
     He switched on the headlights and put the Chevy in gear.
     "Jesus, help me," he said.
     He drove across the intersection and onto Coal Valley Road.
     Ahead of him, the other car began to move again. It quickly picked up speed.
     Joey Shannon followed the phantom driver through a veil between reality and some other place, toward a town that no longer existed, toward a fate beyond understanding.

    8

THE WIND AND THE RAIN SHOOK LEAVES FROM THE OVERHANGING TREES and hurled them onto the pavement. They smacked the windshield and clung briefly, batlike shapes that furled their wings and fell away when the wipers swept over them.
     Joey remained about a hundred yards behind the other car, not quite close enough to discern what make and model it was. He told himself that he still had time to turn around, drive to the county road, and go to Scranton as he had planned. But he might not have the option of turning back if he got a good look at the car ahead of him. Intuitively he understood that the more he learned about what was happening, the more thoroughly his fate would be sealed. Mile by mile he was driving farther away from the real world, into this otherworldly land of second chances, and eventually the intersection of the county route and Coal Valley Road would cease to exist in the night behind him.
     When they had gone only three miles, they came upon a white, two-door Plymouth Valiant - a car that Joey had admired as a kid but hadn't seen in ages. It was stopped at the side of the road, broken down. Three sputtering red flares had been set out along the shoulder of the highway, and in their intense light, as if by a dark miracle of transubstantiation, the falling rain appeared to be a downpour of blood.
     The vehicle that he was following slowed, almost halted beside the Valiant, then accelerated again.
     Someone in a black, hooded raincoat stood beside the disabled Plymouth, holding a flashlight. The stranded motorist waved at him, imploring him to stop.
     Joey glanced at the dwindling taillights of the car that he had been pursuing. It would soon pass around a bend, over a rise, out of sight.
     Coasting past the Plymouth, he saw that the person in the raincoat was a woman. A girl, really. Arrestingly pretty. She appeared to be no older than sixteen or seventeen'
     Under the hood of the coat, her flare-tinted face reminded him, curiously, of the haunting countenance on the statue of the Virgin Mother at Our Lady of Sorrows, back in Asherville. Sometimes the Virgin's serene ceramic face had just such a forlorn and spectral aspect in the crimson glow of the flickering votive candles arrayed in red glasses beneath it.
     As Joey rolled slowly past this girl, she stared entreatingly, and in her porcelain features he saw something that alarmed him: a disturbing premonition, a vision of her lovely face without eyes, battered and bloody. Somehow he knew that if he didn't stop to help her, she would not live to see the dawn but would die violently in some black moment of the storm.
     He parked on the shoulder ahead of the Valiant and got out of the rental car. He was still soaked from having stood in the cleansing downpour outside Henry Kadinska's office little more than twenty minutes ago, so the pounding rain didn't bother him, and the cold night air wasn't half as chilling as the fear that had filled him since he had learned of his inheritance.
     He hurried along the pavement, and the girl came forward to meet him at the front of her disabled Valiant.
     "Thank God, you stopped," she said. Rain streamed off her hood, a glistening veil in front of her face.
     He said, "What happened?"
     "It just failed."
     "While you were rolling?"
     "Yeah. Not the battery."
     "How do you know?"
     "I've still got power."
     Her eyes were dark and huge. Her face glowed in the flare light, and on her cheeks, raindrops glistened like tears.
     "Maybe the generator," he said.
     "You know cars?"
     "Yeah."
     "I don't," she said. "I feel so helpless."
     "We all do," Joey said.
     She gave him a peculiar look.
     She was just a girl, and at her age she was surely naive and not yet fully aware of the world's