Strange Highways

silent.
     Like the frantic wings of trapped birds struggling to break free, rain and wind beat against the church.
     After a while he said, "I feel warm."
     "It's been heating up in here for some time," Celeste confirmed.
     "How can that be? We didn't turn on any furnace."
     "It's coming up through the floor. Don't you feel it? Through every chink, every crack in the boards."
     He put his hand on the presbytery floor and discovered that the wood was actually warm to the touch.
     Celeste said, "Rising from the ground under the church, from the fires far below."
     "Maybe not so far any more." Remembering the ticking metal box in the corner of the study at her house, Joey said, "Should we be worried about toxic gases?"
     "No."
     "Why not?"
     "There's worse tonight."
     Within only a minute or two, a fine dew of perspiration formed on his brow.
     Searching his jacket pockets for a handkerchief, Joey found a wad of money instead. Two ten-dollar bills. Two fives. Thirty bucks.
     He kept forgetting that what had happened twenty years in the past had also, in another sense, happened only hours ago.
     Staring in horror at the folded currency, Joey recalled the persistence with which P.J. had forced it upon him back there in the humid closeness of the parked car. The body hidden in the trunk. The smell of rain heavy in the night. The odor of blood heavier in his memory.
     He shuddered violently and dropped the money.
     As they fell out of his hand, the rumpled bills became coins and rang against the wooden floor, making a music like altar bells. Glittering, spinning, clinking, wobbling, rattling, they quickly settled into a silent heap beside him.
     "What's that?" Celeste asked.
     He glanced at her. She hadn't seen. He was between her and the coins.
     "Silver," he said.
     But when he looked again, the coins were gone. Only a wad of paper currency lay on the floor.
     The church was hot. The window glass, streaming with rain, appeared to be melting.
     His heart was suddenly racing. Pounding like a penitent fist upon the wrong side of his breast.
     "He's coming," Joey said.
     "Where?"
     Rising slightly, Joey pointed across the balustrade and along the center aisle to the archway at the back of the nave, to the dimly lighted narthex beyond the arch, to the front doors of the church, which were barely visible in the shadows. "He's coming."

    16

WITH A FORTHRIGHT SHRIEK OF UNCOILED HINGES, THE CHURCH DOORS opened out of darkness into shadow, out of the cold night into the strange heat, out of the blustering storm into a quiet one, and a man entered the narthex. He didn't proceed stealthily or even with any noticeable caution, but walked directly to the nave arch, and with him came the rotten-egg fumes from the vent pipe outside.
     It was P.J. He was wearing the same black boots, beige cords, and red cable-knit sweater that he had been wearing earlier in the evening, back at the house, at dinner, and later in the car when he had argued the merits of forgetfulness and brotherly bonds. Since then he had put on a black ski jacket.
     This was not the P.J. Shannon whose novels always found a home on the best-seller lists, not the New-Age Kerouac who had crossed the country uncounted times in various vans, motor homes, and cars. This P.J. was still shy of his twenty-fourth birthday, a recent graduate of Notre Dame, home from his new job in New York publishing.
     He wasn't carrying the rifle with which he'd shot the Bimmers, and he didn't seem to think he needed it. He stood in the archway, feet planted wide, hands empty at his sides, smiling.
     Until now, Joey had forgotten the extreme confidence of P.J. at that age, the tremendous power that he radiated, the sheer intensity of his presence. The word "charismatic" had been overused even in 1975; by 1995, it was employed by journalists and critics to describe every new politician who had not yet been caught stealing, every new rap singer who thought "hate" rhymed with "rape," every young actor with more smoldering in his eyes than in his brain. But whether in 1995 or 1975, the word seemed to have been invented for P.J. Shannon. He had all the charisma of an Old Testament prophet without the beard and robes, commanding attention sheerly by his presence, so