Dean Koontz
Strange Highways
    
    
    
    
    CONTENTS
    
    Strange Highways
    The Black Pumpkin
    Miss Attila The Hun
    Down In The Darkness
    Ollie's Hands
    Snatcher
    Trapped
    Bruno
    We Three
    Hardshell
    Kittens
    The Night Of The Storm
    Twilight Of The Dawn
    Chase
    Notes To The Reader
    
    
    Strange highways
    
    1
    ON THAT AUTUMN AFTERNOON, WHEN HE DROVE THE RENTAL CAR INTO Asherville, Joey Shannon 
broke out in an icy sweat. A sudden and intense hopelessness overcame him.
    He almost hung a hard U-turn in the middle of the street. He resisted the urge to jam 
the accelerator to the floorboards, speed away, and never look back.
    The town was as bleak as any in Pennsylvania coal country, where the mines had shut 
down and most good jobs had been lost decades ago. Nevertheless, it wasn't such a 
desperate place that the very sight of it should chill his heart and bring him instantly 
to the edge of despair. He was puzzled by his peculiar reaction to this long-delayed 
homecoming.
    Sustained by fewer than a thousand local residents and perhaps two thousand more in 
several smaller outlying towns, the commercial district was just two blocks long. The 
two- and three-story stone buildings-erected in the 1850s and darkened by a century and a 
half of grime-were pretty much as he remembered them from his youth.
    Evidently the merchants' association or the town council was engaged in a 
beautification project. All the doors, the window frames, the shutters, and the eaves 
appeared to have been freshly painted. Within the past few years, circular holes had been 
cut out of the sidewalks to allow the planting of young maple trees, which were now eight 
feet tall and still lashed to support poles.
    The red and amber autumn foliage should have enlivened the town, but Asherville was 
grim, huddled, and forbidding on the brink of twilight. Balanced on the highest ridges of 
the western mountains, the sun seemed strangely shrunken, shedding light that didn't 
fully illuminate anything it touched. In the sour-yellow glow, the rapidly lengthening 
shadows of the new trees reached like grasping hands onto the cracked blacktop.
    Joey adjusted the car heater. The greater rush of hot air did not immediately warm 
him.
    Above the spire of Our Lady of Sorrows, as the retiring sun began to cast off purple 
cloaks of twilight, an enormous black bird wheeled in circles through the sky. The winged 
creature might have been a dark angel seeking shelter in a sacred bower.
    A few people were on the streets, others in cars, but he didn't recognize any of 
them. He'd been gone a long time. Over the years, of course, people changed, moved away. 
Died.
    When he turned onto the gravel driveway at the old house on the east edge of town, 
his fear deepened. The clapboard siding needed fresh paint, and the asphalt-shingle roof 
could have used repair, but the place wasn't ominous by any measure, not even as vaguely 
Gothic as the buildings in the heart of town. Modest. Dreary. Shabby. Nothing worse. He'd 
had a happy childhood here in spite of deprivation. As a kid, he hadn't even realized 
that his family was poor; that truth hadn't occurred to him until he went away to college 
and was able to look back on their life in Asherville from a distance. Yet for a few 
minutes, he waited in the driveway, overcome by inexplicable dread, unwilling to get out 
of the car and go inside.
    He switched off the engine and the headlights. Although the heater hadn't relieved 
his chill, he immediately grew even colder without the hot air from the vents.
    The house waited.
    Maybe he was afraid of facing up to his guilt and coming to terms with his grief. He 
hadn't been a good son. And now he would never have another opportunity to atone for all 
the pain that he had caused. Maybe he was frightened by the realization that he would 
have to live the rest of his life with the burden of what he'd done, with his remorse 
unexpressed and forgiveness forever beyond reach.
    No. That was a fearful weight, but it wasn't what scared him. Neither guilt nor grief 
made his mouth go dry and his heart pound as he stared at the old homestead. Something 
else.
    In its wake, the recessional twilight drew in a breeze from the northeast. A row of 
twenty-foot pines stood along the driveway, and their boughs began to stir with the onset 
of night.
    At first Joey's mood seemed extraordinary: a portentous sense that he was on the 
brink of a supernatural encounter. It was akin to what he had sometimes felt as an altar 
boy a long time ago, when he'd stood at the priest's side and tried to sense the instant 
at which the ordinary wine in the chalice became the sacred blood of Christ.
    After a while, however, he decided that he was being foolish. His anxiety was as 
irrational as any child's apprehension over an imaginary troll lurking in the darkness 
under his bed.
    He got out of the car and went around to the back to retrieve his suitcase. As he 
unlocked the trunk, he suddenly had the crazy notion that something monstrous was waiting 
in there for him, and as the lid rose, his heart knocked explosively against his ribs. He 
actually stepped back in alarm.
    The trunk contained only his scuffed and scarred suitcase, of course. After taking a 
deep breath to steady his nerves, he withdrew the single piece of luggage and slammed the 
trunk lid.
    He needed a drink to settle his nerves. He always needed a drink. Whiskey was the 
only solution that he cared to apply to most problems. Sometimes, it even worked.
    The front steps were swaybacked. The floorboards on the porch hadn't been painted in 
years, and they creaked and popped noisily under his feet. He wouldn't have been