Strange Highways
car that night before sending me back to school."
"Thirty dollars - thirty pieces of silver."
Returning to the altar platform and putting aside the hammer, he grouped the six Christmas candles at one end of the white sheet. "Thirty dollars. Just a little symbolic gesture to amuse himself. Payment for my cooperation in letting him get away with her murder, making a little Judas out of me."
Frowning as she picked up the pack of matches and began to light the candles, Celeste said, "So he sees Judas Iscariot as - what? - like his patron saint on the dark side?"
"Something like that, I think."
"Did Judas go to Hell for betraying Christ?" she wondered.
"If you believe there's a Hell, then I guess he has one of the deepest rooms there," Joey said.
"You, of course, don't believe in Hell."
"Look, it doesn't really matter what I believe in, only what P.J. believes in."
"You're wrong about that."
Ignoring her comment, he said, "I don't pretend to know all the twists and turns of his delusions - just maybe the overall design of it. I think even a first-rate psychiatrist would have trouble mapping the weird landscape in my big brother's head."
As she finished lighting the six bayberry candles, Celeste said, "So P.J. comes home from New York, takes a ride around the county, and he sees how weird things have gotten here in Coal Valley. All the abandoned houses. The subsidence everywhere. More vent pipes than ever. The open pit of fire out on the edge of town. The church deconsecrated, condemned. It's as if the whole town's sliding into Hell. Sliding pretty fast, in fact, and right before his eyes. And it excites him. Is that what you think?"
"Yeah. A lot of psychotics are very susceptible to symbolism. They live in a different reality from ours. In their world, everyone and everything has secret meanings. There are no coincidences."
"You sound like you've crammed the subject for a test."
"Over the years I read lots of books about aberrant psychology. At first I told myself it was all research for novels I'd write. Then, when I admitted I'd never be a writer, I kept reading - as a hobby."
"But subconsciously, you were trying to understand P.J."
"A homicidal sociopath with religious delusions, of the sort that P.J. seems to have, might see demons and angels masquerading as ordinary people. He believes cosmic forces are at work in the simplest events. His world is a place of constant high drama and immense conspiracies."
Celeste nodded. She was the principal's daughter, after all, raised in a house full of books. "He's a citizen of Paranoialand. Yeah, okay, so maybe he's been killing for years, since he went away to college if not before, one girl here, one there, little offerings from time to time. But the situation in Coal Valley really gets his juices up, makes him want to do something special, something big."
Joey placed the ceramic statuette of the Holy Mother at the far end of the white sheets from the candles and plugged the cord into a socket on the side of the altar platform. "So now we'll screw up his plans by opening the door to God and inviting Him back into the church. We'll step straight into P.J.'s fantasy and fight symbolism with symbolism, counter superstition with superstition."
"And how will that stop him?" she asked, moving to Joey's end of the altar to light the three votive candles in the ruby glasses, which he had carefully arranged in front of the statuette of the Virgin.
"It'll rattle him, I think. That's the first thing we have to do - rattle him, shake his confidence and get him to come in out of the darkness, where we have a chance at him."
"He's like a wolf out there," she agreed, "just circling beyond the campfire light."
"He's promised this offering - twelve sacrifices, twelve innocent people - and now he feels he's got to deliver. But he's committed to setting up his tableau of corpses in a church from which God's been driven out."
"You seem so sure ... as if you're in tune with him."
"He's my brother."
"It's a little scary," she said.
"For me too. But I sense that he needs St. Thomas's. He has no chance of finding another place like it, not tonight. And now that he's started all this, he feels compelled to finish it. Tonight. If he's watching us right now,
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