Strange Highways

or to a show to celebrate the passage of another workweek - while Joey found nothing to celebrate about having endured another seven days in the prison that was his life.
     Shortly before eleven o'clock the storm broke. Brilliant chains of molten-silver lightning flashed and rattled across the wedge of sky, providing him with flickering, unwanted reflections of himself in the window. Rolling thunder shook the first fat raindrops from the clouds; they snapped and spattered against the glass, and the ghostly image of Joey's face dissolved before him.
     At half past midnight he rose from the chair and went to the bed. The room was as black as a coal mine, but even after twenty years he could find his way around without light. In his mind's eye, he held a detailed image of the worn and cracked linoleum floor, the oval rag rug that his mother had made, the narrow bed with simple painted-iron headboard, the single nightstand with warped drawers. In one corner was the heavily scarred desk at which he had done his homework through twelve years of school and, when he was eight or nine, had written his first stories about magical kingdoms and monsters and trips to the moon.
     As a boy, he had loved books and had wanted to grow up to be a writer. That was one of the few things at which he hadn't failed in the past twenty years - though only because he had never tried. After that October weekend in 1975, he'd broken his long habit of writing stories and abandoned his dream.
     The bed was no longer covered by a chenille spread, as it had been in those days, and in fact it wasn't even fitted with sheets. Joey was too tired and fuzzy-headed to bother searching for linens.
     He stretched out on his back on the bare mattress, still wearing his shirt and jeans, not bothering to kick off his shoes. The soft twang of the weak springs was a familiar sound in the darkness.
     In spite of his weariness, Joey didn't want to sleep. Half a bottle of 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