Strange Highways Read Free Page A

Jack Daniel's had failed to quiet his nerves or to diminish his apprehension. He felt vulnerable. Asleep, he'd be defenseless.
     Nevertheless, he had to try to get some rest. In little more than twelve hours, he would bury his dad, and he needed to build up strength for the funeral, which wasn't going to be easy on him.
     He carried the straight-backed chair to the hall door, tilted and wedged it under the knob: a simple but effective barricade.
     His room was on the second floor. No intruder could easily reach the window from outside. Besides, it was locked.
     Now, even if he was sound asleep, no one could get into the room without making enough noise to alert him. No one. Nothing.
     In bed again, he listened for a while to the relentless roar of the rain on the roof. If someone was prowling the house at that very moment, Joey couldn't have heard him, for the gray noise of the storm provided perfect cover.
     "Shannon," he mumbled, "you're getting weird in middle age."
     Like the solemn drums of a funeral cortege, the rain marked Joey's procession into deeper darkness.
     In his dream, he shared his bed with a dead woman who wore a strange transparent garment smeared with blood. Though lifeless, she suddenly became animated by demonic energy, and she pressed one pale hand to his face. Do you want to make love to me? she asked. No one will ever know. Even I couldn't be a witness against you. I'm not just dead but blind. Then she turned her face toward him, and he saw that her eyes were gone. In her empty sockets was the deepest darkness he had ever known. I'm yours, Joey. I'm all yours.
     He woke not with a scream but with a cry of sheer misery. He sat on the edge of the bed, his face in his hands, sobbing softly.
     Even dizzy and half nauseated from too much booze, he knew that his reaction to the nightmare was peculiar. Although his heart raced with fear, his grief was greater than his terror. Yet the dead woman was no one he had ever known, merely a hobgoblin born of too little sleep and too much Jack Daniel's. The previous night, still shaken by the news of his dad's death and dreading the trip to Asherville, he had dozed only fitfully. Now, because of weariness and whiskey, his dreams were bound to be populated with monsters. She was nothing more than the grotesque denizen of a nightmare. Nevertheless, the memory of that eyeless woman left him half crushed by an inexplicable sense of loss as heavy as the world itself.
     According to the radiant dial of his watch, it was three-thirty in the morning. He had been asleep less than three hours.
     Darkness still pressed against the window, and endless skeins of rain unraveled through the night.
     He got up from the bed and went to the corner desk where he had left the half-finished bottle of Jack Daniel's. One more nip wouldn't hurt. He needed something to make it through to the dawn.
     As Joey uncapped the whiskey, he was gripped by a peculiar urge to go to the window. He felt drawn as if by a magnetic force, but he resisted. Crazily, he was afraid that he might see the dead woman on the far side of the rain-washed glass, levitating one story above the ground: blond hair tangled and wet, empty eye sockets darker than the night, in a transparent gown, arms extended, wordlessly imploring him to fling up the window and plunge into the storm with her.
     He became convinced that she was floating out there like a ghost. He dared not even glance toward the window or risk catching sight of it from the corner of his eye. If he saw her peripherally, even that minimal eye contact would be an invitation for her to come into his room. Like a vampire, she could tap at the window and plead to be let in, but she could not cross his threshold unless invited.
     Edging back to the bed with the bottle in his hand, he kept his face averted from that framed rectangle of