"You don't see?" he asked.
"No."
"You don't feel?"
In fact, the bruises were not merely bruises any more but had ripened into wounds from which blood began to ooze.
"I'm not seeing what is," Joey told her, overcome by dread. "I'm seeing what will be."
"You're scaring me," she said again.
She wasn't the dead blonde in the bloodstained plastic shroud. Under her hood, her face was framed by raven-black hair.
"But you might end up like her," he said more to himself than to the girl.
"Like who?"
"I don't know her name. But she wasn't just an hallucination. I see that now. Not a drunk's delirium. More than that. She was something… else. I don't know."
The grievous stigmata in the girl's hands became more terrible by the second, though she continued to be unaware of them and seemed to feel no pain.
Suddenly Joey understood that the increasing grisliness of his paranormal vision meant that this girl was in growing danger. The fate for which she had been destined — the fate that he had postponed by taking Coal Valley Road and stopping to assist her — was grimly reasserting itself. Delaying by the side of the road was apparently the wrong thing to do.
"Maybe he's coming back," Joey said.
She closed her hands, as if shamed by the intensity with which he stared at them. "Who?"
"I don't know," he said, and he looked into the distance along Coal Valley Road, into the impenetrable gloom that swallowed the two rain-swept lanes of blacktop.
"You mean that other car?" she asked.
"Yeah. Did you get a glimpse of whoever was in it?"
"No. A man. But I didn't see him clearly. A shadow, a shape. Why does it matter?"
"I'm not sure." He took her by the arm. "Come on. Let's get out of here."
As they hurried toward the Chevy, she said, "You sure aren't anything like I thought you'd be."
That struck him as a peculiar statement. Before he could ask her what she meant, however, they reached the Chevy — and he stumbled to a halt, stunned by what stood before him, her words forgotten.
"Joey?" she said.
The Chevy was gone. In its place was a Ford. A 1965 Mustang. His 1965 Mustang. The wreck that, as a teenager, he had lovingly restored with his dad's help. Midnight blue with white-wall tires.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
He had been driving the Mustang that night twenty years ago. It had sustained major body damage when he had spun out on the interstate and collided with a signpost.
There was no body damage now. The side window, which had shattered when his head hit it, was intact. The Mustang was as cherry as it had ever been.
The wind picked up, shrieking, so the night itself seemed mad. Silvery whips of rain lashed around them and snapped against the pavement.
"Where's the Chevy?" he asked shakily.
"What?"
"The Chevy," he repeated, raising his voice above the storm.
"What Chevy?"
"The rental car. The one I was driving."
"But… you were driving this," she said.
He looked at her in disbelief.
As before, he was aware of mysteries in her eyes, but he had no sense that she was trying to deceive him.
He let go of her arm and walked to the front of the Mustang, trailing one hand along the rear fender, the driver's door, the front fender. The metal was cold, smooth, slick with rain, as solid as the road on which he stood, as real as the heart that knocked in his chest.
Twenty years ago, after he'd hit the signpost, the Mustang had been badly scraped and dented, but it had been drivable. He had returned to college in it. He remembered how it had rattled and ticked all the way to Shippensburg — the sound of his young life falling apart.
He remembered all the blood.
Now, when he hesitantly opened the driver's door, the light came on inside. It was bright enough to reveal that the upholstery was free of bloodstains. The cut that he'd suffered in his forehead had bled heavily until he'd driven to a hospital and had it stitched, and by that time the bucket seat had been well spattered. But this upholstery was pristine.
The girl had gone around to the other side of the car. She slipped into the passenger seat and slammed the door.
With her inside, the night seemed as utterly empty of life as a pharaoh's crypt undiscovered beneath the sands of Egypt. All the world might have been dead, with only Joey Shannon left to hear the sound and know the fury of the storm.
He was reluctant to get behind the steering wheel. It was all too strange. He felt as though he had surrendered entirely to a drunkard's delirium — although he knew that he was stone sober.
Then he remembered the wounds that he'd foreseen in her delicate hands, the premonition that the danger to her was increasing with every second they remained at the roadside. He got in behind the wheel, closed the door, and gave her the flashlight.
"Heat," she said. "I'm freezing."
He was barely aware of being sodden and cold himself. For the moment, numb with wonder, he was sensitive only to the deepening mystery, to the shapes and textures and sounds and smells of the mystical Mustang.
The keys were in the ignition.
He started the engine. It had a singular pitch, as familiar to him as his own voice. The sweet, strong sound had such nostalgic power that it lifted his spirits at once. In spite of the flat-out weirdness of what was happening to him, in spite of the fear that had dogged him ever since he'd driven into Asherville the previous day, he was filled with a wild elation.
The years seemed to have fallen away from him. All the bad choices that he'd made were sloughed off. For the moment, at least, the future was as filled with promise as it had been when he was seventeen.
The girl fiddled with the heater controls, and hot air blasted from the vents.
He released the emergency brake and put the car in gear, but before he pulled onto the highway, he turned to her and said, "Show me your hands."
Clearly uneasy, regarding him with understandable wariness, she responded to his request.
The nail wounds remained in her palms, visible only to him, but he thought that they had closed somewhat. The flow of blood had diminished.
"We're doing the right thing now, getting out of here," he said, although he knew that he was making little — if any — sense to her.
He switched on the windshield wipers and drove onto the two-lane blacktop, heading toward the town of Coal Valley. The car handled like the fine-tuned masterpiece that he remembered, and his exhilaration intensified.
For a minute or two he was entirely possessed by the thrill of driving — just driving—that he had known as a teenager but never since. Deep in the thrall of the Mustang. A boy and his car. Lost to the romance of the road.
Then he remembered something that she had said when he had first seen the Mustang and had halted before it in shock. Joey? She had called him by his name. Joey? What's wrong? Yet he was certain that he had never introduced himself.
"Some music?" she asked with a nervous tremor in her voice, as though his silent, rapturous involvement with the unrolling road was more disturbing to her than anything he'd previously said or done.
He glanced at her as she leaned forward to switch on the radio. She had pushed back the hood of her raincoat. Her hair was thick and silky and darker than the night.
Something else she'd said, which had struck him as peculiar, now came back to him: You sure aren't anything like I thought you'd be. And before that: You never seemed strange.
The girl twisted the tuning knob on the radio until she found a station playing Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road."
"What's your name?" he asked.