Strange Highways Read Online Free PDF

for flicks so trashy that the advertising art had an unintentionally campy quality. They were thumbtacked to the walls, pus yellow with age, cracked, curling at the corners.
     In high school, P.J.'s dream was to get out of Asherville, out of poverty, and become a filmmaker. "But I need these," he had once said to Joey, indicating the posters, "to remind me that success at any price isn't worth it. In Hollywood you can become rich and famous and celebrated even for making stupid, dehumanizing crap. If I can't make it by doing worthwhile work, I hope I've got the courage to give up the dream altogether instead of selling out."
     Either fate had never given P.J. his shot at Hollywood or he had lost interest in filmmaking somewhere along the way. Ironically, he had achieved fame as a novelist, fulfilling Joey's dream after Joey had abandoned it.
     P.J. was a critically acclaimed writer. Using his ceaseless rambles back and forth across the United States as material, he produced highly polished prose that had mysterious depths under a deceptively simple surface.
     Joey envied his brother - but not with any malice. P.J. earned every line of the praise that he received and every dollar of his fortune, and Joey was proud of him.
     Theirs had been an intense and special relationship when they were young, and it was still intense, though it was now conducted largely at great distances by phone, when P.J. called from Montana or Maine or Key West or a small dusty town on the high plains of Texas. They saw each other no more than once every three or four years, always when P.J. dropped in unannounced in the course of his travels - but even then he didn't stay long, never more than two days, usually one.
     No one had ever meant more to Joey than P.J., and no one ever would. His feelings for his brother were rich and complex, and he would never be able to explain them adequately to anyone.
     The rain hammered the lawn just beyond the ground-level windows of the basement. In a place so far above that it seemed to be another world, more thunder crashed.
     He had come to the cellar for a jar. But the room was utterly empty except for the movie posters.
     On the concrete floor near his shoe, a fat black spider seemed to materialize from thin air. It scurried past him.
     He didn't step on it but watched it race for cover until it disappeared into a crack along the baseboard.
     He switched off the light and went back into the furnace room, leaving the warped door open.
     Climbing the stairs, almost to the kitchen, Joey said, "Jar? What jar?"
     Puzzled, he stopped and looked down the steps to the cellar.
     A jar of something? A jar for something?
     He couldn't remember why he had needed a jar or what kind of jar he had been seeking.
     Another sign of dementia.
     He'd been too long without a drink.
     Plagued by the persistent uneasiness and disorientation that he'd felt since first entering Asherville the previous day, he went upstairs. He turned off the cellar lights behind him.
     His suitcase was packed and standing in the living room. He carried the bag onto the front porch, locked the door, and put the key back under the hemp mat where he had found it less than twenty-four hours ago.
     Something growled behind him, and he turned to confront a many, rain-soaked black dog on the porch steps. Its eyes were as fiercely yellow as sulfurous coal fires, and it bared its teeth at him.
     "Go away," he said, not threateningly but softly.
     The dog growled again, lowered its head, and tensed as if it might spring at him.
     "You don't belong here any more than I do," Joey said, standing his ground.
     The hound looked uncertain, shivered, licked its chops, and at last retreated.
     With his suitcase, Joey went to the head of the porch steps and watched the dog as