Strange Highways

squealed.
     Celeste hesitated, then preceded him into the sanctuary. She was riveted by the pale mound on the altar platform, but she didn't direct tie flashlight at it, evidently preferring, as he did, to delay the inevitable revelation.
     As the low gate creaked shut behind him, Joey glanced back into the nave. No one had entered behind them.
     Directly ahead was the choir enclosure. The chairs, the music stands, and the organ had all been hauled away.
     They followed the ambulatory to the left, around the choir. Though they tried to tread lightly, their footfalls on the oak floor echoed hollowly through the empty church.
     On the wall beside the door to the sacristy were more switches. Joey flicked them, and the sanctuary filled with sour light no brighter than that in the nave.
     He motioned for Celeste to slip past the closed door, and when she was out of the way, he kicked it open as he had seen cops do in countless movies, rushed across the threshold, and swung the crowbar with all his might, right to left and back again, on the assumption that someone was waiting for him there. He hoped to surprise and cripple the bastard with a preemptive blow, but the length of iron cut the empty air with a whoosh.
     Enough light spilled past him from the sanctuary to confirm that the sacristy was deserted. The outer door was standing open when he entered, but a gust of cold wind threw it shut.
     "He's already gone," Joey told Celeste, who stood rigid with fear in the inner doorway.
     They returned to the sanctuary, followed the ambulatory to the presbytery, and stopped at the foot of the three altar steps.
     Joey's heart slammed in his breast.
     Beside him, Celeste made a soft, plaintive sound - not a gasp of horror but a murmur of compassion, regret, despair. "Ah, no."
     The high altar, with its hand-carved antependium, was gone.
     Only the altar platform remained.
     The mound that they had seen from the nave was neither as pale nor as shapeless as it had appeared to be when the sanctuary lights had been off. Portions of the fetally curled corpse were visible through the heavy-gauge, rumpled plastic. Her face was concealed, but a limp flag of blond hair trailed out of a gap in the folds of the tarp.
     This was no precognitive vision.
     Not an hallucination either.
     Not merely a memory.
     This time the body was real.
     Nevertheless, the events of the past twenty-four hours had left Joey in doubt about what was real and what was not. He distrusted his own senses enough to seek confirmation from Celeste: "You see it too, don't you?"
     "Yes."
     "The body?"
     "Yes."
     He touched the thick plastic. It crackled under his fingers.
     One slender, alabaster arm was exposed. The hand was cupped, and a nail hole marked the center. The fingernails were torn and caked with blood.
     Although he knew that the blonde was dead, in his heart Joey harbored a fragile and irrational hope that the eyes in the jar were not hers, that a thread of life still sewed her to this world, and that she might yet be resuscitated. He dropped to his knees on the top altar step and put his fingertips against her wrist, seeking at least a feeble pulse.
     He found no pulse, but the contact with her cold flesh jolted him as if he'd grasped a live electrical wire, and he was shocked into another memory that had been long suppressed:
      ... only wanting to help, carrying the two suitcases through the icy rain to the back of the car, putting them down on the gravel driveway to unlock the trunk. He raises the lid, and the small bulb inside the trunk is as dim as a half-melted votive candle in a ruby-dark glass. The light is tinted red, in fact, because the bulb is smeared with blood. The hot-copper stench of fresh blood virtually steams from that cramped space, making him gag. She is there. She is there. She is completely and totally there - so utterly unexpected that she might have been mistaken for an hallucination, but instead she is more solid than granite, more real than a punch in the face. Naked but swaddled in a semitransparent tarp. Face hidden by her long blond hair and by smears of blood on the inner surface of the plastic. One bare arm is free of the shroud, and the delicate hand is turned with the palm up, revealing a cruel wound. She