Strange Highways

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