Strange Highways

need you, Joey. I'm not out to use you for any reason. I just love you. Don't you think I love you? I do. You're my baby: brother. Aren't you my one and only little baby brother? Why shouldn't I want to have you at my side, share my good fortune with you?"
     Joey's mouth was dry, and not just from the sudden heat. For the first time since turning off the county route onto Coal Valley Road, he longed for a double shot of Jack Daniel's. "I think you just need me to take down the crucifix for you. Maybe hang it upside down instead of the way it is."
     P.J. didn't respond.
     "I think you're desperate to finish the little tableau that you started to set up here, but now you're afraid to come into the church since we've restored things."
     "You haven't restored anything," P.J. said scornfully.
     "I bet if I took down the crucifix, blew out the candles, tore up the altar, if I just made the place safe for you again - then you'd kill both of us, just like you planned all along."
     "Hey, kiddo, don't you see who you're talking to? This is your brother here. What's wrong with you? Am I your brother, the one who always fought all your fights with you, took good care of you? Am I ever going to hurt you? Hurt you? Does that make any sense at all?"
     Celeste rose from her knees to stand beside Joey, as though she sensed that any small show of courage on her part would help convince P.J. that she and Joey were confident about the protection provided by the symbols with which they had surrounded themselves. Their confidence might feed his apprehension.
     "If you're not afraid of the church, why won't you come farther in?" Joey asked.
     "Why's it so warm in here?" P.J. tried to sound as self-assured as always, but doubt tainted his voice. "What's there to be afraid of? Nothing."
     "Then come on in."
     "There's nothing sacred here."
     "Prove it. Put your fingers in the holy water."
     P.J. turned his attention to the marble font at his right side. "It was dry before. You put the water there yourself."
     "Did we?"
     "It hasn't been blessed," P.J. said. "You're not a damn priest. It's just ordinary water."
     "Then put your fingers in it."
     Joey had read of psychotics who, swept away by delusions that they possessed Satanic power, were capable of literally blistering when they put their fingers into holy water or touched a crucifix. The injuries they suffered were real, although induced entirely by their own powers of suggestion, by the depth of their belief in their own sick fantasies.
     When P.J. continued to regard the shallow pool of holy water with trepidation, Joey said, "Go on, touch it, go on - or are you afraid it'll eat into your hand, burn like an acid?"
     P.J. reached hesitantly toward the marble bowl. Like a dragonfly, his spread fingers hovered over the water. Then he pulled his hand back.
     "Jesus," Celeste said softly.
     They had found a way to use P.J.'s madness to protect themselves from him.
     The first time that he had lived through this night, Joey had been little more than a boy, just out of his teens, up against not merely an older brother but a psychopath of extreme cunning and high intelligence. Now, he had twenty years of experience on P.J., which gave him the psychological advantage this time.
     "You can't touch us," Joey said. "Not here in this sacred place. You can't do anything that you planned to do here, P.J. Not now, not since we've let God back inside these walls. All you can do now is run for it. Morning will roll around eventually, and we'll just wait here until someone comes looking for us or until someone finds the Bimmers."
     P.J. tried again to put his hand in the water, but he couldn't do it. Crying out wordlessly in fear and frustration, he kicked the font.
     The wide marble bowl crashed off the fluted pedestal, and P.J. took sufficient courage from that destruction to rush forward into the nave while the font was still toppling.
     Joey stooped and reached for the 20-gauge.
     Even as the contents of the bowl spilled onto the floor, P.J. stepped into the spreading puddle, and a cloud of sulfurous steam erupted around his feet as if the water had indeed been blessed and had reacted with fierce corrosive power upon encountering the shoe of a demon-ridden man.
     Joey realized that