Strange Highways

the floor must have been much hotter at the back of the nave than in the sanctuary, fearfully hot.
     Having noticed the extreme and increasing heat in the church, P.J. should have realized as much himself; however, in his dementia, he reacted not with reason but with superstitious panic. The gush of steam from the "holy" water reinforced his bizarre delusion, and he screamed as if he'd actually been burned. In fact, he surely was suffering, because to anyone afflicted with psychosomatic pain, it seemed as genuine as the real thing. P.J. let out a shriek of abject misery, slipped and fell in the water, into more steam, landing hard on his hands and
knees, wailing, squealing. He raised his hands, fingers smoking, and then put them to his face but tore them away at once, as though the beads of water on them were indeed the tears of Christ and were searing his lips, his cheeks, half blinding him. He thrashed to his feet, stumbled out of the nave into the narthex, to the front doors, into the night, alternately shouting in rage and bleating in purest anguish, like neither a man nor a man possessed but like a wild beast in excruciating torment.
     Joey had only half raised the Remington. P.J. had never come close enough to warrant the use of the gun.
     "My God," Celeste said shakily.
     "That was amazing luck," Joey agreed.
     But they were talking about different things.
     She said, "What luck?"
     "The hot floor."
     "It's not that hot," she said.
     He frowned. "Well, it must be a lot hotter back there than at this end of the building. In fact, I'm wondering how long we'll even be safe here."
     "It wasn't the floor."
     "You saw-"
     "It was him."
     "Him?"
     She was as deathly pale as one of the distorted, ghostly faces of condensation on the church windows. Staring at the shallow puddle that was still lightly steaming at the far end of the center aisle, she said, "He couldn't touch it. Wasn't worthy."
     "No. Nonsense. It was just the hot floor meeting the cool water, steam-"
     She shook her head vigorously. "Corrupt. Couldn't touch something holy."
     "Celeste-"
     "Corrupt, foul, tainted."
     Worried that she was on the brink of hysteria, he said, "Have you forgotten?"
     Celeste met his eyes, and he saw such an acute awareness in her that he dismissed all concerns about panic attacks and hysteria. In fact, there was a curiously humbling quality about her piercing stare. She'd forgotten nothing. Nothing. And he sensed that her perception was, in fact, clearer than his.
     Nevertheless, he said, "We put the water in the font."
     "So?"
     "Not a priest."
     "So?"
      "We put it there, and it's just ordinary water."
     "I saw what it did to him."
     "Just steam-"
     "No, Joey. No, no." She spoke rapidly, running sentences together, frantic to convince him: "I got a glimpse of his hands, part of his face, his skin was blistered, red and peeling, the steam can't have been that hot, not off a wooden floor."
     "Psychosomatic injury," he assured her.
     "No."
     "The power of the mind, autohypnosis."
     "There's not much time," she said urgently, looking around at the crucifix and then at the candles, as if to make sure that their stage setting was still in order.
     "I don't think he'll be back," Joey said.
     "He will."
     "But when we played straight into his fantasy, we scared the bejesus -
     "No. He can't be frightened. Nothing can scare him."
     Even in her urgency, she seemed mildly dazed, in shock. But Joey was overcome by the odd certainty that she was not distracted, as she seemed, but was functioning at a level of awareness and with a degree of insight that he had never known. Heightened perceptions.
     She crossed herself. " ... in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti ... " She was spooking Joey worse than P.J. had done.
     "A homicidal psychotic," Joey said nervously, "is full of rage, sure, but he can be as susceptible to fear as any sane person. Many of them-"
     "No. He's the father of fear-"
     "-many of them live in constant terror-"
     "-the father of lies, such inhuman fury-"
     "-even when they're on power fantasies like he is, they live in fear of-"
     "-fury driving him for