Strange Highways

slammed the trunk lid.
     He needed a drink to settle his nerves. He always needed a drink. Whiskey was the only solution that he cared to apply to most problems. Sometimes, it even worked.
     The front steps were swaybacked. The floorboards on the porch hadn't been painted in years, and they creaked and popped noisily under his feet. He wouldn't have been surprised if he had crashed through the rotting wood.
     The house had deteriorated in the two decades since he had last seen it, which surprised him. For the past twelve years, on the first of each month, his brother had sent a generous check to their father, enough to allow the old man either to afford a better house or to renovate this place. What had Dad been doing with the money?
     The key was under the rubber-backed hemp mat, where he'd been told that he would find it. Though Asherville might give him the heebie-jeebies, it was a town where a spare key could be kept in an obvious place or a house could even be left unlocked with virtually no risk of burglary.
     The door opened directly into the living room. He put his bag at the foot of the stairs to the second floor.
     He switched on the lights.
     The sofa and the armchair recliner were not the same as those that had been there twenty years ago, but they were so similar as to be indistinguishable from the previous furniture. Nothing else appeared to have been changed at all - except the television, which was big enough to belong to God.
     The rest of the first floor was occupied by the combined kitchen and dining area. The green Formica table with its wide chrome edge band was the one at which they had eaten meals throughout his childhood. The chairs were the same too, although the tie-on cushions had been changed.
     He had the curious feeling that the house had been untenanted for an age, sealed tomb-tight, and that he was the first in centuries to invade its silent spaces. His mother had been dead sixteen years, his dad for only a day and a half, but both seemed to have been gone since time immemorial.
     In one corner of the kitchen was the cellar door, on which hung a gift calendar from the First National Bank. The picture for October showed a pile of orange pumpkins in a drift of leaves. One had been carved into a jack-o'-lantern.
     Joey went to the door but didn't open it right away.
     He clearly remembered the cellar. It was divided into two rooms, each with its own outside entrance. One contained the furnace and the hot-water heater. The other had been his brother's room.
     For a while he stood with his hand on the old cast-iron knob. It was icy under his palm, and his body heat didn't warm it.
     The knob creaked softly when he finally turned it.
     Two dim, dust-covered, bare bulbs came on when he flicked the switch: one halfway down the cellar stairs, the second in the furnace room below. But neither chased off all the darkness.
     He didn't have to go into the cellar first thing, at night. The morning would be soon enough. In fact, he could think of no reason why he had to go down there at all.
     The illuminated square of concrete floor at the foot of the steps was veined with cracks, just as he remembered it, and the surrounding shadows seemed to seep from those narrow fissures and rise along the walls.
     "Hello?" he called.
     He was surprised to hear himself speak, because he knew that he was alone in the house.
     Nevertheless, he waited for a response. None came.
     "Is someone there?" he asked.
     Nothing.
     At last he shut off the cellar lights and closed the door.
     He carried his suitcase to the second floor. A short, narrow hallway with badly worn gray-and-yellow-flecked linoleum led from the head of the stairs to the bathroom at the back.
     Beyond the single door on the right was his parents' room. Actually, for sixteen years, since his mother's death, his dad had slept there alone. And now it was nobody's room.
     The single door on the left side of the hall led to his old bedroom, into which he had not set foot in twenty years.
     The flesh prickled on the nape of his neck, and he turned to look down the stairs into the living room, half expecting to discover that someone was ascending after him. But who might have been there? Everyone was gone. Dead and gone. The stairs were