Strange Highways

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 surprised if he had crashed through the rotting wood.

The house had deteriorated in the two decades since he had last seen it, which surprised him. For the past twelve years, on the first of each month, his brother had sent a generous check to their father, enough to allow the old man either to afford a better house or to renovate this place. What had Dad been doing with the money?

The key was under the rubber-backed hemp mat, where he'd been told that he would find it. Though Asherville might give him the heebie-jeebies, it was a town where a spare key could be kept in an obvious place or a house could even be left unlocked with virtually no risk of burglary.

The door opened directly into the living room. He put his bag at the foot of the stairs to the second floor.

He switched on the lights.

The sofa and the armchair recliner were not the same as those that had been there twenty years ago, but they were so similar as to be indistinguishable from the previous furniture. Nothing else appeared to have been changed at all — except the television, which was big enough to belong to God.

The rest of the first floor was occupied by the combined kitchen and dining area. The green Formica table with its wide chrome edge band was the one at which they had eaten meals throughout his childhood. The chairs were the same too, although the tie-on cushions had been changed.

He had the curious feeling that the house had been untenanted for an age, sealed tomb-tight, and that he was the first in centuries to invade its silent spaces. His mother had been dead sixteen years, his dad for only a day and a half, but both seemed to have been gone since time immemorial.

In one corner of the kitchen was the cellar door, on which hung a gift calendar from the First National Bank. The picture for October showed a pile of orange pumpkins in a drift of leaves. One had been carved into a jack-o'-lantern.

Joey went to the door but didn't open it right away.

He clearly remembered the cellar. It was divided into two rooms, each with its own outside entrance. One contained the furnace and the hot-water heater. The other had been his brother's room.

For a while he stood with his hand on the old cast-iron knob. It was icy under his palm, and his body heat didn't warm it.

The knob creaked softly when he finally turned it.

Two dim, dust-covered, bare bulbs came on when he flicked the switch: one halfway down the cellar stairs, the second in the furnace room below. But neither chased off all the darkness.

He didn't have to go into the cellar first thing, at night. The morning would be soon enough. In fact, he could think of no reason why he had to go down there at all.

The illuminated square of concrete floor at the foot of the steps was veined with cracks, just as he remembered it, and the surrounding shadows seemed to seep from those narrow fissures and rise along the walls.

"Hello?" he called.

He was surprised to hear himself speak, because he knew that he was alone in the house.

Nevertheless, he waited for a response. None came.

"Is someone there?" he asked.

Nothing.

At last he shut off the cellar lights and closed the door.

He carried his suitcase to the second floor. A short, narrow hallway with badly worn gray-and-yellow-flecked linoleum led from the head of the stairs to the bathroom at the back.

Beyond the single door on the right was his parents' room. Actually, for sixteen years, since his mother's death, his dad had slept there alone. And now it was nobody's room.

The single door on the left side of the hall led to his old bedroom, into which he had not set foot in twenty years.

The flesh prickled on the nape of his neck, and he turned to look down the stairs into the living room, half expecting to discover that someone was ascending after him. But who might have been there? Everyone was gone. Dead and gone. The stairs were deserted.

The house was so humble, small, narrow, plain — yet at the moment it felt vast, a place of unexpected dimensions and hidden rooms where unknown lives were lived, where secret dramas unfolded. The silence was not an ordinary quiet, and it cut through him as a woman's scream might have done.

He opened the door and went into his bedroom.

Home again.

He was scared. And he didn't know why. Or if he knew, the knowledge existed somewhere between instinct and recollection.

THAT NIGHT, AN AUTUMN STORM MOVED IN FROM THE NORTHwest, and all hope of stars was lost. Darkness congealed into clouds that pressed against the mountains and settled between the high slopes, until the heavens were devoid of light and as oppressive as a low vault of cold stone.

When he was a teenager, Joey Shannon had sometimes sat by the single window of his second-floor bedroom, gazing at the wedge of sky that the surrounding mountains permitted him. The stars and the brief transit of the moon across the gap between the ridges were a much needed reminder that beyond Asherville, Pennsylvania, other worlds existed where possibilities were infinite and where even a boy from a poor coal-country family might change his luck and become anything that he wished to be, especially if he were a boy with big dreams and the passion to pursue them.

This night, at the age of forty, Joey sat at the same window, with the lights off, but the sight of stars was denied him. Instead, he had a bottle of Jack Daniel's.

Twenty years ago, in another October when the world had been a far better place, he'd come home for one of his quick, infrequent visits from Shippensburg State College, where with the help of a partial scholarship, he had been paying his way by working evenings and weekends as a supermarket stock clerk. His mom had cooked his favorite dinner — meatloaf with tomato gravy, mashed potatoes, baked corn — and he had played some two-hand pinochle with his dad.

His older brother, P.J. (for Paul John), also had been home that weekend, so there had been a lot of laughter, affection, a comforting sense of family. Any time spent with P.J. was always memorable. He was successful at everything that he tried — the valedictorian of his high-school and college graduating classes, a football hero, a shrewd poker player who seldom lost, a guy at whom all the prettiest girls looked with doe-eyed interest — but the best thing about him was his singular way with people and the upbeat atmosphere that he created wherever he went. P.J. had a natural gift for friendship, a sincere liking for most people, and an uncanny empathy that made it possible for him to understand what made a person tick virtually upon first meeting. Routinely and without apparent effort, P.J. became the center of every social circle that he entered. Highly intelligent yet self-effacing, handsome yet free of vanity, acerbically witty but never mean, P.J. had been a terrific big brother when they had been growing up. More than that, he'd been — and after all these years, still was—the standard by which Joey Shannon measured himself, the one person into whom he would have remade himself if that had been possible.

In the decades since, he had fallen far short of that standard. Although P.J. moved from success to success, Joey had an unerring knack for failure.

Now he took a few ice cubes from the bowl on the floor beside his straight-backed chair and dropped them into his glass. He added two inches of Jack Daniel's.

One thing that Joey hadn't failed at was drinking. Although his bank account had seldom been above two thousand dollars in his entire adult life, he always managed to afford the best blended whiskey. No one could say that Joey Shannon was a cheap drunk.

On the most recent night that he'd spent at home — Saturday, October twenty-fifth, 1975—he had sat at this window with a bottle of RC Cola in his hand. He hadn't been a boozer back then. Diamond-bright stars had adorned the sky, and there had seemed to be an infinite number of possible lives waiting for him beyond the mountains.

Now he had the whiskey. He was grateful for it.

It was October twenty-first, 1995—another Saturday. Saturday was always the worst night of the week for him, although he didn't know why. Maybe he disliked Saturday because most people dressed up to go out to dinner or dancing 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 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 night.

He wondered if he was just unusually drunk or if he might be losing his mind.

To his surprise, he screwed the cap back on the bottle without taking a drink.

IN THE MORNING, THE RAIN STOPPED FALLING, BUT THE SKY REMAINED low and threatening.

Joey didn't have a hangover. He knew how to pace his drinking to minimize the painful results. And every day he took a megadose of vitamin-B complex to replace what had been destroyed by alcohol; extreme vitamin-B deficiency was the primary cause of hangovers. He knew all the tricks. His drinking was methodical and well organized; he approached it as though it were his profession.

He found the makings of breakfast in the kitchen: a piece of stale coffee cake, half a glass of orange juice.

After showering, he put on his only suit, a white shirt, and a dark red tie. He hadn't worn the suit in five years, and it hung loosely on him. The collar of the shirt was a size too large. He looked like a fifteen-year-old boy dressed in his father's clothes.

Perhaps because the endless intake of booze accelerated his metabolism, Joey burned off all that he ate and drank, and invariably he closed each December a pound lighter than he'd begun the previous January. In another hundred and sixty years, he would finally waste away into thin air.

At ten o'clock he went to the Devokowski Funeral Home on Main Street. It was closed, but he was admitted by Mr. Devokowski because he was expected.

Louis Devokowski had been Asherville's mortician for thirty-five years. He was not sallow and thin and stoop shouldered, as comic books and movies portrayed men of his trade, but stocky and ruddy faced, with dark hair untouched by gray — as though working with the dead was a prescription for long life and vitality.

"Joey."

"Mr. Devokowski."

"I'm so sorry."

"Me too."

"Half the town came to the viewing last night."

Joey said nothing.

"Everyone loved your father."

Joey didn't trust himself to speak.

Devokowski said, "I'll take you to him."

The front viewing room was a hushed space with burgundy carpet, burgundy drapes, beige walls, and subdued lighting. Arrangements of roses loomed in the shadows, and the air was sweet with their scent.

The casket was a handsome bronze model with polished-copper trim and handles. By phone, Joey had instructed Mr. Devokowski to provide the best. That was how P.J. would want it — and it would be his money paying for it.

Joey approached the bier with the hesitancy of a man in a dream who expects to peer into the coffin and see himself.

But it was Dan Shannon who rested in peace, in a dark-blue suit on a bed of cream-colored satin. The past twenty years had not been kind to him. He looked beaten by time, shrunken by care, and glad to be gone.

Mr. Devokowski had retreated from the room, leaving Joey alone with his dad.

"I'm sorry," he whispered to his father. "Sorry I never came back, never saw you or Mom again."

Hesitantly, he touched the old man's pale cheek. It was cold and dry.

He withdrew his hand, and now his whisper was shaky. "I just took the wrong road. A strange highway… and somehow… there was never any coming back. I can't say why, Dad. I don't understand it myself."

For a while he couldn't speak.

The scent of roses seemed to grow heavier.

Dan Shannon could have passed for a miner, though he had never worked the coal fields even as a boy. Broad, heavy features. Big shoulders. Strong, blunt-fingered hands cross-hatched with scars. He had been a car mechanic, a good one — although in a time and place that had never offered quite enough work.

"You deserved a loving son," Joey said at last. "Good thing you had two, huh?" He closed his eyes. "I'm sorry. Jesus, I'm so sorry."

His heart ached with remorse, as heavy as an iron anvil in his chest, but conversations with the dead couldn't provide absolution. Not even God could give him that now.

When Joey left the viewing room, Mr. Devokowski met him in the front hall of the mortuary. "Does P.J. know yet?"

Joey shook his head. "I haven't been able to track him down."

"How can you not be able to track him down? He's your brother," Devokowski said. For an instant before he regained the compassionate expression of a funeral director, his contempt was naked.

"He travels all over, Mr. Devokowski. You know about that. He's always traveling, on the move, researching. It's not my fault… being out of touch with him."

Reluctantly, Devokowski nodded. "I saw the piece about him in People a few months ago."

P.J. Shannon was the quintessential writer of life on the road, the most famous literary Gypsy since Jack Kerouac.

"He should come home for a while," Devokowski said, "maybe write another book about Asherville. I still think that was his best. When he hears about your dad, poor P.J., he's going to be broken up real bad. P.J. really loved your dad."

So did I, Joey thought, but he didn't say it. Given his actions over the past twenty years, he wouldn't be believed. But he had loved Dan Shannon. God, yes. And he'd loved his mother, Kathleen — whose funeral he had avoided and to whose deathbed he had never gone.

"P.J. visited just in August. Stayed about a week. Your dad took him all over, showing him off. He was so proud, your dad."

Devokowski's assistant, an intense young man in a dark suit, entered the far end of the hallway. He spoke in a practiced hush: "Sir, it's time to transport the deceased to Our Lady."

Devokowski checked his watch. To Joey, he said, "You're going to the Mass?"

"Yes, of course."

The funeral director nodded and turned away, conveying by body language that this particular son of Dan Shannon had not earned the right to add "of course" to his answer.

Outside, the sky looked burnt out, all black char and thick gray ashes, but it was heavy with rain.

Joey hoped that the lull in the storm would last through the Mass and the graveside service.

On the street, as he was approaching his parked car from behind, heading for the driver's door, the trunk popped open by itself and the lid eased up a few inches. From the dark interior, a slender hand reached feebly toward him, as if in desperation, beseechingly. A woman's hand. The thumb was broken and hanging at a queer angle, and blood dripped from the torn fingernails.

Around him, Asherville seemed to fall under a dark enchantment. The wind died. The clouds, which had been moving ceaselessly out of the northwest, were suddenly as unchanging as the vaulted ceiling of Hell. All was lifeless. Silence reigned. Joey was frozen by shock and cold fear. Only the hand moved, only the hand was alive, and only the hand's pathetic groping for salvation had any meaning or importance in a world turned to stone.

Joey couldn't bear the sight of the dangling thumb, the torn nails, the slow drip-drip of blood — but he felt powerfully compelled to stare. He knew that it was the woman in the transparent gown, come out of his dream from the night before, into the waking world, though such a thing was not possible.

Reaching out from the shadow of the trunk lid, the hand slowly turned palm up. In the center was a spot of blood and a puncture wound that might have been made by a nail.

Strangely, when Joey closed his eyes against the horror before him, he could see the sanctuary of Our Lady of Sorrows as clearly as if he were standing upon the altar platform at that very moment. A silvery ringing of sacred bells broke the silence, but it was not a real sound in that October afternoon; they rang out of his memory, from morning Masses in the distant past. Through my fault, my fault, my most grievous fault. He saw the chalice gleaming with the reflections of candle flames. The wafer of the host was held high in the priest's hands. Joey strained hard to detect the moment of transubstantiation. The moment when hope was fulfilled, faith rewarded. The split instant of perfect mystery: wine into blood. Is there hope for the world, for lost men like me?

The images in his mind became as unbearable as the sight of the blood-smeared hand, and he opened his eyes. The hand was gone. The trunk lid was closed. The wind was blowing again, and the dark clouds rolled out of the northwest, and in the distance a dog barked.

The trunk had never actually popped open, and the hand had never reached toward him. Hallucination.

He raised his own hands and gazed at them as though they were the hands of a stranger. They were trembling badly.

Delirium tremens. The shakes. Visions of things crawling out of the walls. In this case, out of a car trunk. All drunks had them from time to time — especially when they tried to give up the bottle.

In the car, he withdrew a flask from an inside pocket of his suit jacket. He stared at it for a long time. Finally he unscrewed the cap, took a whiff of the whiskey, and brought it to his lips.

Either he had stood half mesmerized by the car trunk far longer than he'd realized or he had sat for an awfully long time with the flask, struggling against the urge to open it, because the funeral-home hearse pulled out of the driveway and turned right, heading across town toward Our Lady of Sorrows. Enough time had passed for his father's casket to be transferred from the viewing room.

Joey wanted to be sober for the funeral Mass. He wanted that more than he had wanted anything in a long time.

Without taking a drink, he screwed the cap back onto the flask and returned the flask to his pocket.

He started the car, caught up with the hearse, and followed it to the church.

More than once during the drive, he imagined that he heard something moving in the trunk of the car. A muffled thump. A tapping. A faint, cold, hollow cry.

OUR LADY OF SORROWS WAS AS HE REMEMBERED IT: DARK WOOD lovingly polished to a satiny sheen; stained-glass windows waiting only for the appearance of the sun to paint bright images of compassion and salvation across the pews in the nave; groin vaults receding into blue shadows above; the air woven through with a tapestry of odors — lemon-oil furniture polish, incense, hot candle wax.

Joey sat in the last pew, hoping that no one would recognize him. He had no friends in Asherville any more. And without a long drink from his flask of whiskey, he wasn't prepared to endure the looks of scorn and disdain that he was sure to receive and that, in fact, he deserved.

More than two hundred people attended the service, and to Joey the mood seemed even more somber than could be expected at a funeral. Dan Shannon had been well and widely liked, and he would be missed.

Many of the women blotted their eyes with handkerchiefs, but the men were all dry eyed. In Asherville, the men never wept publicly and rarely in private. Although none had worked the mines in more than twenty years, they came from generations of miners who had lived in constant expectation of tragedy, of friends and loved ones lost to cave-ins and explosions and early-onset black-lung disease. Theirs was a culture that not only valued stoicism but could never have existed without it.

Keep your feelings to yourself. Don't burden your friends and family with your own fear and anguish. Endure. That was the creed of Asherville, a guiding morality stronger even than that which was taught by the rector of Our Lady and the two-thousand-year-old faith that he served.

The Mass was the first that Joey had attended in twenty years. Evidently at the insistence of the parishioners, it was a classic Mass in Latin, with the grace and eloquence that had been lost when the Church had gone trendy back in the sixties.

The beauty of the Mass did not affect him, did not warm him. By his own actions and desire over the past twenty years, he had placed himself outside the art of faith, and now he could relate to it only in the manner of a man who studies a fine painting through the window of a gallery, his perception hampered by distorting reflections on the glass.

The Mass was beautiful, but it was a cold beauty. Like that of winter light on polished steel. An Arctic vista.

From the church, Joey drove to the cemetery. It was on a hill. The grass was still green, littered with crisp leaves that crunched under his shoes.

His father was to be buried beside his mother. No name had yet been cut into the blank half of the dual-plot headstone.

Being at his mother's graveside for the first time, seeing her name and the date of her passing carved in granite, Joey did not suddenly feel the reality of her death. The loss of her had been excruciatingly real to him for the past sixteen years.

In fact, he had lost her twenty years ago, when he had seen her for the last time.

The hearse was parked on the road near the grave site. Lou Devokowski and his assistant were organizing the pallbearers to unload the casket.

The open grave awaiting Dan Shannon was encircled by a three-foot-high black plastic curtain, not to provide a safety barrier but to shield the more sensitive mourners from the sight of the raw earth in the sheer walls of the pit, which might force them into too stark a confrontation with the grim realities of the service that they were attending. The undertaker had also been discreet enough to cover the mound of excavated earth with black plastic and to drape the plastic with bouquets of flowers and bunches of cut ferns.

In a mood to punish himself, Joey stepped to the yawning hole. He peered over the curtain to see exactly where his dad would be going.

At the bottom of the grave, only half buried in loose earth, lay a body wrapped in blood-smeared plastic. A naked woman. Face concealed. Ribbons of wet blond hair.

Joey stepped back, bumping into other mourners.

He was unable to breathe. His lungs seemed to be packed full of dirt from his father's grave.

As solemn as the sepulchral sky, the pallbearers arrived with the casket and carefully deposited it onto a motorized sling over the excavation.

Joey wanted to shout at them to move the casket and look, look below, look at the tarp-wrapped woman, look at the bottom of the pit.

He couldn't speak.

The priest had arrived, his black cassock and white surplice flapping in the wind. The interment service was about to begin.

When the casket was lowered into that seven-foot-deep abyss, atop the dead woman, when the grave was filled with earth, no one would ever know that she'd been there. To those in the world who loved her and sought her with such desperation, she would have vanished forever.

Again Joey tried to speak, but he was still unable to make a sound. He was shaking violently.

On one level, he knew that the body at the bottom of the grave was not really there. A phantom. Hallucination. Delirium tremens. Like the bugs that Ray Milland had seen crawling out of the walls in Lost Weekend.

Nevertheless, a scream swelled in him. He would have given voice to it if he could have broken the iron band of silence that tightened around him, would have shouted at them, would have demanded that they move the casket and look into the hole, even though he knew that they would find nothing and that everyone would think him deranged.

From the grave or from the mound beside it rose the fecund smell of damp earth and rotting vegetable matter, which called to mind all the small, teeming creatures that thrived below the sod — beetles, worms, and quick-moving things for which he had no names.

Joey turned away from the grave, pushed through the hundred or more mourners who had come from the church to the cemetery, and stumbled down the hill, through the ranks of tombstones. He took refuge in the rental car.

Suddenly he was able to breathe in great gasps, and he found his voice at last. "Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God."

He must be losing his mind. Twenty years of all-but-constant inebriation had screwed up his brain beyond repair. Too many cells of gray matter had died in the long bath of alcohol.

He was so far gone that only another taste of the same sin would give him surcease. He took the flask from his coat pocket.

Aware that a month's worth of gossip was in the making, the startled mourners at the grave site must have followed his stumbling flight with considerable interest. No doubt many, afraid of missing the next development, were still risking the disapproval of the priest by glancing downhill toward the rental car.

Joey didn't care what anyone thought. He didn't care about anything any more. Except whiskey.

But his dad still wasn't buried. He had promised himself that he would remain sober until the interment was complete. He had broken uncounted promises to himself over the years, but for reasons that he could not quite define, this one was more important than any of the others.

He didn't open the flask.

Uphill, under the half-bare limbs of the autumn-stripped trees, beneath a bruised sky, the casket slowly descended into the uncaring earth.

Soon the mourners began to leave, glancing toward Joey's car with unconcealed interest.

As the priest departed, several small whirlwinds full of dead leaves spun through the cemetery, exploding over headstones, as if angry spirits had awakened from an uneasy rest.

Thunder rolled across the heavens. It was the first peal in hours, and the remaining mourners hurried to their cars.

The undertaker and his assistant removed the motorized casket lift and the black plastic skirt from around the open grave.

As the storm resumed, a cemetery worker in a yellow rain slicker stripped the tarp and flowers from the mound of excavated dirt.

Another worker appeared behind the wheel of a compact little earthmoving machine called a Bobcat. It was painted the same shade of yellow as his raincoat.

Before the open grave could be flooded by the storm, it was filled — and then tamped down by the tread of the Bobcat.

"Goodbye," Joey said.

He should have had a sense of completion, of having reached the end of an important phase of his life. But he only felt empty and incomplete. He had not put an end to anything — if that was what he had been hoping to do.

BACK AT HIS FATHER'S HOUSE, HE WENT DOWN THE NARROW STEPS FROM the kitchen to the basement. Past the furnace. Past the small water heater.

The door to P.J.'s old room was warped by humidity and age. It squealed against the jamb and scraped across the sill as Joey forced it open.

Rain beat on the two narrow, horizontal casement windows that were set high in one basement wall, and the deep shadows were not dispersed by the meager storm light. He flicked the switch by the door, and a bare overhead bulb came on.

The small room was empty. Many years ago, the single bed and the other furniture must have been sold to raise a few dollars. For the past two decades, when P.J. came home, he had slept in Joey's room on the second floor, because there had been no chance that Joey would pay a visit and need it himself.

Dust. Cobwebs. Low on the.walls: a few dark patches of mildew like Rorschach blots.

The only items of proof that remained of P.J.'s long-ago residence were a couple of movie posters 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 it hunched away into the slanting sheets of gray rain, gradually fading as though it had been a mirage. When it moved around the corner and out of sight at the end of the block, he could easily have been convinced that it had been another hallucination.

THE LAWYER CONDUCTED BUSINESS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR OF A BRICK building on Main Street, above the Old Town Tavern. The barroom was closed on Sunday afternoons, but small neon signs for Rolling Rock and Pabst Blue Ribbon still glowed in its windows brightly enough to tint the rain green and blue as it fell past the glass.

The law offices of Henry Kadinska occupied two rooms off a dimly lighted hallway that also served a real-estate office and a dentist. The door stood open to the reception room.

Joey stepped inside and said, "Hello?"

The inner door was ajar, and from beyond it a man responded. "Please come in, Joey."

The second room was larger than the first, although still of modest proportions. Law books lined two walls; on another, a pair of diplomas hung crookedly. The windows were covered with wood-slat venetian blinds of a type that probably had not been manufactured in fifty years, revealing horizontal slices of the rainy day.

Identical mahogany desks stood at opposite ends of the room. At one time Henry Kadinska had shared the space with his father, Lev, who had been the town's only lawyer before him. Lev had died when Joey was a senior in high school. Unused but well polished, the desk remained as a monument.

Putting his pipe in a large cut-glass ashtray, Henry rose from his chair, reached across the desk, and shook Joey's hand. "I saw you at Mass, but I didn't want to intrude."

"I didn't notice… anyone," Joey said.

"How're you doing?"

"Okay. I'm okay."

They stood awkwardly for a moment, not sure what to say. Then Joey sat in one of the two commodious armchairs that faced the desk.

Kadinska settled back into his own chair and picked up his pipe. He was in his midfifties, slightly built, with a prominent Adam's apple. His head seemed somewhat too large for his body, and this disproportionateness was emphasized by a hairline that had receded four or five inches from his brow. Behind his thick glasses, his hazel eyes seemed to have a kindly aspect.

"You found the house key where I told you?"

Joey nodded.

"The place hasn't changed all that much, has it?" Henry Kadinska asked.

"Less than I expected. Not at all, really."

"Most of his life, your dad didn't have any money to spend — and when he finally got some, he didn't know how to spend it." He touched a match to his pipe and drew on the mouthpiece. "Drove P.J. crazy that Dan wouldn't use much of what he gave him."

Joey shifted uneasily in his chair. "Mr. Kadinska… I don't understand why I'm here. Why did you need to see me?"

"P.J. still doesn't know about your dad?"

"I've left messages on the answering machine in his New York apartment. But he doesn't really live there. Only for a month or so each year."

The pipe was fired up again. The air was redolent of cherry-scented tobacco.

In spite of the diplomas and books, the room wasn't much like an average law office. It was a cozy place — shabby-genteel but cozy. Slumped in his chair, Henry Kadinska seemed to be as comfortable in his profession as he might have been in a pair of pajamas.

"Sometimes," Joey said, "he doesn't call that number for days, even a week or two."

"Funny way to live — nearly always on the road. But I guess it's right for him."

"He seems to thrive on it."

"And it results in those wonderful books," said Kadinska.

"Yes."

"I dearly love P.J.'s books."

"Virtually everyone does."

"There's a marvelous sense of freedom in them, such a… such a spirit."

"Mr. Kadinska, the weather being as bad as it is, I'd like to get started back to Scranton as soon as possible. I have to catch a commuter flight out of there early in the morning."

"Of course, yes," said Kadinska, with an unmistakable note of disappointment.

Now, he seemed to be a lonely little man who had hoped only for some friendly conversation.

While the lawyer opened a file drawer on his desk and searched for something, Joey noticed that one of the crookedly hung diplomas was from Harvard Law. That was a wildly unlikely alma mater for a small-town, coal-country lawyer.

Not all the shelves were filled with law books, either. Many were volumes of philosophy. Plato. Socrates. Aristotle. Kant. Augustine. Kierkegaarde. Bentham. Santayana. Schopenhauer. Empedocles, Heidegger, Hobbes, and Francis Bacon.

Perhaps Henry Kadinska wasn't comfortable being a small-town lawyer but was simply long resigned to it, trapped first in the orbit of his father and then by the gravity of habit.

Sometimes, especially in a whiskey haze, it was easy for Joey to forget that he himself wasn't the only person in the world whose dearest dreams had come to nothing.

"Your father's last will and testament," said Kadinska as he opened a file folder on his desk.

"A reading of the will?" Joey asked. "I think P.J. should be here for that, not me."

"On the contrary. The will has nothing to do with P.J. Your father left everything to you."

A sickening pang of guilt quivered through Joey. "Why would he do that?"

"You're his son. Why wouldn't he?"

Joey made a point of meeting the attorney's eyes. On this one day, even if never again, he wanted to be honest about these matters, to conduct himself with a dignity of which his father would have approved.

"We both know the hard answer to that, Mr. Kadinska. I broke his heart. Broke my mother's heart too. More than two years she withered from the cancer, but I never came. Never held her hand, never consoled my dad. Never saw him once in the last twenty years of his life. I called maybe six or eight times, no more than that. Half the time he didn't know how to reach me, because I didn't always give him my address or phone number. And when he did have my number, I always kept an answering machine switched on so I wouldn't have to pick up. I was a rotten son, Mr. Kadinska. I'm a drunk, a selfish shit, and a loser, and I don't deserve any inheritance, no matter how little it is."

Henry Kadinska appeared to be pained to hear any man criticize himself so mercilessly. "You're not drunk now, Joey. And the man I see before me isn't bad in his heart."

"I'll be drunk by tonight, sir, I assure you," Joey said quietly. "And if you can't see me the way I described myself, then you're a lousy judge of character. You don't know me at all — and you should count that as a blessing."

Kadinska put his pipe in the glass ashtray again. "Well, your father was a forgiving man. He wanted everything to go to you."

Getting to his feet, Joey said, "No. I can't take it. I don't want it." He started toward the door to the outer room.

"Wait, please," said the lawyer.

Joey stopped and turned to him. "The weather's miserable, and I've got a long drive out of these mountains to Scranton."

Still slumped in his chair, picking up his pipe again, Henry Kadinska said, "Where do you live, Joey?"

"You know. Las Vegas. That's where you got hold of me."

"I mean, where do you live in Las Vegas?"

"Why?"

"I'm a lawyer. I've spent my life asking questions, and it's hard to change this late in the game. Indulge me."

"I live in a trailer park."

"One of those upscale parks with a community swimming pool and tennis courts?"

"Old trailers," Joey said bluntly. "Mostly real old."

"No pool? No tennis?"

"Hell, not even any grass."

"What do you do for a living?"

"I'm a blackjack dealer. Run roulette wheels sometimes."

"You work regularly?"

"When I need to."

"When the drinking doesn't get in the way?"

"When I can," Joey amended, remembering his promise to himself to deal with all of this truthfully. "Pays well, with the tips from the players. I can save up for when… when I have to take some time off. I do okay."

"But with your work record, always moving on, you don't find jobs in the new, flashy casinos very often any more."

"Not often," Joey agreed.

"Each job is in a seedier place than the one before."

"For a man who sounded so compassionate a minute ago, you sure are showing a cruel streak all of a sudden."

Kadinska's face reddened with embarrassment. "I'm sorry, Joey, but I'm just trying to make the point that you're not exactly in a position to walk away from an inheritance."

Joey was quietly adamant. "I don't deserve it, don't want it, won't take it. That's flat final. Anyway, nobody would buy that old house, and I sure as hell won't move back here to live in it."

Tapping the documents in the open file folder, Kadinska said, "The house has little value. You're right. But the house and its contents aren't the meat of this inheritance, Joey. There's more than a quarter of a million dollars in liquid assets — certificates of deposit and money-market accounts."

Joey's mouth went punk dry. His heart began to pound fiercely. The lawyer's office harbored a terrible darkness of which he had been dangerously unaware, and now it was rising up around him.

"That's crazy. Dad was a poor man."

"But your brother has been a success for a long time now. For about fourteen years, he's been sending your father a check every month, just like clockwork. A thousand dollars. I told you how it drove P.J. crazy that your dad wouldn't spend more than a little of it. Dan pretty much just banked check after check, and through what bankers like to call the miracle of compound interest, the principal has grown."

Joey's voice was shaky: "That's not my money. That belongs to P.J. It came from him, it should go back to him."

"But your father left it to you. All to you. And his will is a legal document."

"Give it to P.J. when he shows up," Joey insisted, and he headed for the office door.

"I suspect P.J. will want whatever your dad wanted. He'll say you should keep it all."

"I won't, I won't," Joey said, raising his voice.

Kadinska caught up with him in the reception lounge, took him by the arm, and halted him. "Joey, it's not that easy."

"Sure it is."

"If you really don't want it, then you have to renounce the inheritance.'

"I renounce it. I already did. Don't want it."

"A document has to be drawn, signed, notarized."

Although the day was cold and the office was on the chilly side, Joey had broken into a sweat. "How long will it take to put these papers together?"

"If you'll come back tomorrow afternoon—"

"No." Joey's heart was jackhammering almost hard enough to shatter the ribs and breastbone that caged it. "No, sir, I'm not staying here another night. I'm going to Scranton. A flight to Pittsburgh in the morning. Vegas from there. All the way out to Vegas. Mail me the papers.'

"That's probably better anyway," Kadinska said. "It'll give you more time to think, to reconsider."

At first the lawyer had seemed to be a gentle, bookish man. Not now.

Joey no longer saw kindness in the man's eyes. Instead he perceived the slyness of a bargainer for souls, something with scales under the disguise of skin, with eyes that in a different light would be like the sulfur-yellow eyes of the dog that had confronted him on the front porch a while ago.

He wrenched loose of the attorney's hand, shoved him aside, and made for the outer door in a state close to panic.

Kadinska called after him: "Joey, what's wrong?"

The hallway. Past the real-estate office. The dentist. Toward the stairs. He wanted desperately to be out in the fresh air, to be washed clean by the rain.

"Joey, what's the matter with you?"

"Stay away from me!" he shouted.

When he reached the head of the stairs, he halted so abruptly that he almost pitched to the bottom. He grabbed the newel post to keep

his balance.

At the foot of the steep stairs lay the dead blonde, bundled in a transparent tarp partly opaque with blood. The plastic was drawn tightly across her bare breasts, compressing them. Her nipples were visible but not her face.

One pale arm had slipped out of her shroud. Although she was dead, she reached out beseechingly.

He could not bear the sight of her mangled hand, the blood, the nail hole in her delicate palm. Most of all he was terrified that she would speak to him from behind her plastic veil and that he would be told things that he shouldn't know, mustn't know.

With a whimper like that of a cornered animal, he turned from her and started back the way he had come.

"Joey?"

Henry Kadinska stood in the dimly lighted hall ahead of him. Shadows seemed to be drawn to the attorney — except for his thick eyeglasses, which blazed with reflections of the yellow light overhead. He was blocking the way. Approaching. Eager to have another chance to offer his bargain.

Now frantic for fresh air and cleansing rain, Joey spun away from Kadinska and returned to the stairs.

The blonde still sprawled below, her arm extended, her hand open, silently pleading for something, perhaps for mercy.

"Joey?"

Kadinska's voice. Close behind him.

Joey descended the precipitous flight of stairs hesitantly at first, then faster, figuring that he would step over her if she was really there, kick at her if she tried to seize him, down two stairs at a time, not even holding on to the handrail, barely keeping his balance, a third of the way, halfway, and still she was there, now eight steps below, six, four, and she was reaching out to him, the red stigmata glistening in the center of her palm. He screamed as he reached the last step, and the dead woman vanished when he cried out. He plunged through the space that she had occupied, crashed through the door, and staggered onto the sidewalk in front of the Old Town Tavern.

He turned his face up into the Pabst-blue and Rolling Rock-green rain, which was so cold that it might soon turn to sleet. In seconds he was soaked — but he didn't feel entirely clean.

In the rental car again, he fumbled the flask out from under the driver's seat where he'd tucked it earlier.

The rain had not cleansed him inside. He had breathed in corruption, swallowed it. Blended whiskey offered considerable antiseptic power.

He unscrewed the cap from the flask and took a long swallow. Then another.

Choking on the spirits, gasping for breath, he replaced the cap, afraid that he would drop the flask and waste the precious ounces that it still contained.

Kadinska hadn't followed him out into the storm, but Joey didn't want to delay another moment. He started the car, pulled away from the curb, splashed through a flooded intersection, and drove along Main Street toward the end of town.

He didn't believe that he would be allowed to leave. Something would stop him. The car would sputter, stall, and refuse to start. Cross traffic would crash into him at an intersection, even though the streets seemed deserted. Lightning would strike a telephone pole and drop it across the road. Something would prevent him from getting out of town. He was in the grip of a superstition that he could not shake or explain.

In spite of his dire expectations, he reached the town line and crossed it. Main Street became the county road. Forests and fields replaced the huddled and depressing buildings of Asherville.

Still shuddering as much from fear as from having been soaked by the rain, he drove at least a mile before he began to realize how strangely he had reacted to the prospect of receiving a quarter of a million dollars. He had no idea why a sudden windfall should have terrified him, why a stroke of good fortune should instantly convince him that his soul was in peril.

After all, considering how he had lived his life thus far, he was doomed to Hell anyway, if it existed.

Three miles outside Asherville, Joey came to a three-way stop. Directly ahead of him, beyond the rural intersection, the county route continued: a glistening black ribbon dwindling down a long, gradual slope into the early twilight. To the left was Coal Valley Road, leading to the town of Coal Valley.

On that Sunday night twenty years ago, when he had been on his way back to college, he had planned to take Coal Valley Road twelve miles through the mountains, until it connected with the old state three-lane that the locals called Black Hollow Highway, then go west nine miles to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He always went that way, because it was the shortest route.

But on that night, for reasons he had never since been able to recall, he had driven past Coal Valley Road. He'd followed the county route another nineteen miles to the interstate and had taken the interstate in a roundabout loop toward Black Hollow Highway and the turnpike. On the interstate he'd had the accident, and thereafter nothing had ever gone right for him again.

He had been driving his ten-year-old '65 Ford Mustang, which he had salvaged and restored — with his dad's help — from an auto junkyard after the original owner had rolled it. God, how he had loved that car. It had been the only thing of beauty he'd ever owned, and most important, his own hands had brought it back from ruin to glory.

Recalling the Mustang, he hesitantly touched the left side of his forehead just below the hairline. The scar was an inch long, barely visible but easily felt. He remembered the sickening slide, his car spinning on the rain-slick interstate, the collision with the signpost, the shattering window.

He remembered all the blood.

Now he sat at the three-way stop, staring down Coal Valley Road to his left, and he knew that if he took this route, as he should have taken it on that eventful night long ago, he would at last have a chance to put everything right. He would get his life back on track.

That was a crazy notion, perhaps as superstitious as his earlier certainty that fate would not allow him to drive out of Asherville but this time he was right. It was true. He had no doubt that he was being given another chance. He knew that some superhuman power was at work in the fading October twilight, knew that the meaning of his troubled life lay along that two-lane mountain route — because Coal Valley Road had been condemned and torn up more than nineteen years ago, yet now it waited to his left, exactly as it had been on that special night. It was magically restored.

JOEY EASED THE RENTAL CHEVY PAST THE STOP SIGN AND PARKED ON the narrow shoulder, on the dead-end side of the three-way intersection, directly across from the entrance to Coal Valley Road. He switched off the headlights but left the engine running.

Overhung by autumnal trees, those two lanes of wet blacktop led out of the deepening twilight and vanished into shadows as black as the oncoming night. The pavement was littered with colorful leaves that glowed strangely in the gloom, as though irradiated.

His heart pounded, pounded.

He closed his eyes and listened to the rain.

When at last he opened his eyes, he half expected that Coal Valley Road wouldn't be there any more, that it had been just one more hallucination. But it hadn't vanished. The two lanes of blacktop glistened with silver rain. Scarlet and amber leaves glimmered like a scattering of jewels meant to lure him into the tunnel of trees and into the deeper darkness beyond.

Impossible.

But there it was.

Twenty-one years ago in Coal Valley, a six-year-old boy named Rudy DeMarco had tumbled into a sinkhole that abruptly opened under him while he was playing in his backyard. Rushing out of the house in response to her son's screams, Mrs. DeMarco had found him in an eight-foot-deep pit, with sulfurous smoke billowing from fissures in the bottom. She scrambled into the hole after him, into heat so intense that she seemed to have descended through the gates of Hell. The floor of the pit resembled a furnace grate; little Rudy's legs were trapped between thick bars of stone, dangling into whatever inferno was obscured by the rising smoke. Choking, dizzy, instantly disoriented, Mrs. DeMarco nevertheless wrenched her child from the gap in which he was wedged. As the unstable floor of the pit quaked and cracked and crumbled under her, she dragged Rudy to the sloped wall, clawed at the hot earth, and frantically struggled upward. The bottom dropped out altogether, the sinkhole rapidly widened, the treacherous slope slid away beneath her, but still she pulled her boy out of the seething smoke and onto the lawn. His clothes were ablaze. She covered him with her body, trying to smother the flames, and her clothes caught on fire. Clutching Rudy against her, she rolled with him in the grass, crying for help, and her screams seemed especially loud because her boy had fallen silent. More than his clothes had burned: Most of his hair was singed away, one side of his face was blistered, and his small body was charred. Three days later, in the Pittsburgh hospital to which he had been taken by air ambulance, Rudy DeMarco died of catastrophic burns.

For sixteen years prior to the boy's death, the people of Coal Valley had lived above a subterranean fire that churned relentlessly through a network of abandoned mines, eating away at untapped veins of anthracite, gradually widening those underground corridors and shafts. While state and federal officials debated whether the hidden conflagration would eventually burn itself out, while they argued about various strategies for extinguishing it, while they squandered fortunes on consultants and interminable hearings, while they strove indefatigably to shift the financial responsibility for the clean-up from one jurisdiction to another, Coal Valley's residents lived with carbon-monoxide monitors to avoid being gassed in the night by mine-fire fumes that seeped, up through the foundations of their homes. Scattered across the town were vent pipes, tapping the tunnels below to release smoke from the fire and perhaps minimize the build-up of toxic gases in nearby houses; one even thrust up from the elementary-school playground.

With the tragic death of little Rudy DeMarco, the politicians and bureaucrats were at last compelled to take action. The federal government purchased the threatened properties, beginning with those houses directly over the most hotly burning tunnels, then those over secondary fires, then those that were still only adjacent to the deep, combustible rivers of coal. During the course of the following year, as homes were condemned and the residents moved away, the reasonably pleasant village of Coal Valley gradually became a ghost town.

By that rainy night in a long-ago October, when Joey had taken the wrong road back to college, only three families remained in Coal Valley. They had been scheduled to move out before Thanksgiving.

In the year that followed the departure of those last residents, bulldozers were to knock down every building in the village. Every scrap of the demolished structures was to be hauled away. The streets, cracked and hoved from the pressures of the hidden fires below, would be torn up. The hills and fields would be seeded with grass, restoring the land to something resembling a natural state, and the mine fires would be left to burn — some said for a hundred or two hundred years — until the veins of coal were at last exhausted.

Geologists, mining engineers, and officials from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources believed that the fire would eventually undermine four thousand acres — an area far greater than that encompassed by the abandoned village. Consequently, Coal Valley Road was likely to suffer sudden subsidence at numerous points along much of its length — a deadly danger to motorists. More than nineteen years ago, therefore, after the ghost town had been demolished and hauled away, Coal Valley Road had been torn up as well.

It had not been there when he had driven into Asherville the previous day. Now it waited. Leading out of the rain-slashed twilight into an unknown night. The road not taken.

Joey was holding the flask again. Although he had opened it, he had no memory of unscrewing the cap.

If he drank what remained of the Jack Daniel's, the road that led into the dark tunnel of trees might blur, fade, and finally vanish. Perhaps it was wise not to pin any hopes on miraculous second chances and supernatural redemption. For all he knew, if he put the Chevy in gear and followed that strange highway, he would be changing his life not for better but for worse.

He brought the flask to his lips.

Thunder rolled through a cold Heaven. The rataplan of rain swelled until he could not even hear the idling car engine.

The whiskey fumes smelled as sweet as salvation.

Rain, rain, torrential rain. It washed the last light out of the bleak day.

Although he was beyond the touch of the rain, the heavy,pall of descending darkness was inescapable. Night entered the car: a familiar companion with whom he had passed uncountable lonely hours in troubled contemplation of a life gone wrong.

He and the night had finished many bottles of whiskey together, and eventually he had always been granted the surcease of sleep, if nothing else. All he had to do was put the flask against his lips, tip it, and drain the few ounces that it still contained, whereupon this dangerous temptation to embrace hope would surely pass. The mysterious highway would vanish, and then he could get on with a life that, although lacking hope, could be passed in a safe, blessed anesthetic haze.

He sat for a long time. Wanting a drink. Not drinking.

Joey wasn't aware of the car approaching along the county road behind him until its headlights suddenly shot through the back window of the Chevy. A virtual explosion of light shattered over him, as though from an onrushing locomotive with one giant, blazing Cyclopean eye. He glanced at the rearview mirror but winced and looked away as the bright reflection stung his eyes.

The car roared past him and hung a hard left onto Coal Valley Road. It cast up such a heavy plume of dirty water from the puddled pavement that it was impossible for Joey to see any details of it or get a glimpse of its driver.

As the spray washed down the side window of the Chevy and the glass cleared again, the other vehicle slowed. Its taillights dwindled until it had gone perhaps a hundred yards along the colonnade of trees, where it came to a full stop on the roadway.

"No," Joey said.

Out there on Coal Valley Road, the red brake lights were like the radiant eyes of a demon in a dream, frightening but compelling, alarming but mesmerizing.

"No."

He turned his head and stared at the night-cloaked county road in front of him, the route that he'd taken twenty years ago. It had been the wrong highway then, but it was the right one now. After all, he wasn't headed back to college as he had been that night; now he was forty years old and bound for Scranton, where he had to catch a commuter flight to Pittsburgh in the morning.

On Coal Valley Road, the taillights glowed. The strange car waited.

Scranton. Pittsburgh. Vegas. The trailer park. A shabby but safe little life. No hope… but no nasty surprises, either.

Red brake lights. Beacons. Shimmering in the delude.

Joey capped the flask without drinking from it.

He switched on the headlights and put the Chevy in gear.

"Jesus, help me," he said.

He drove across the intersection and onto Coal Valley Road.

Ahead of him, the other car began to move again. It quickly picked up speed.

Joey Shannon followed the phantom driver through a veil between reality and some other place, toward a town that no longer existed, toward a fate beyond understanding.

THE WIND AND THE RAIN SHOOK LEAVES FROM THE OVERHANGING TREES and hurled them onto the pavement. They smacked the windshield and clung briefly, batlike shapes that furled their wings and fell away when the wipers swept over them.

Joey remained about a hundred yards behind the other car, not quite close enough to discern what make and model it was. He told himself that he still had time to turn around, drive to the county road, and go to Scranton as he had planned. But he might not have the option of turning back if he got a good look at the car ahead of him. Intuitively he understood that the more he learned about what was happening, the more thoroughly his fate would be sealed. Mile by mile he was driving farther away from the real world, into this otherworldly land of second chances, and eventually the intersection of the county route and Coal Valley Road would cease to exist in the night behind him.

When they had gone only three miles, they came upon a white, two-door Plymouth Valiant — a car that Joey had admired as a kid but hadn't seen in ages. It was stopped at the side of the road, broken down. Three sputtering red flares had been set out along the shoulder of the highway, and in their intense light, as if by a dark miracle of transubstantiation, the falling rain appeared to be a downpour of blood.

The vehicle that he was following slowed, almost halted beside the Valiant, then accelerated again.

Someone in a black, hooded raincoat stood beside the disabled Plymouth, holding a flashlight. The stranded motorist waved at him, imploring him to stop.

Joey glanced at the dwindling taillights of the car that he had been pursuing. It would soon pass around a bend, over a rise, out of sight.

Coasting past the Plymouth, he saw that the person in the raincoat was a woman. A girl, really. Arrestingly pretty. She appeared to be no older than sixteen or seventeen'

Under the hood of the coat, her flare-tinted face reminded him, curiously, of the haunting countenance on the statue of the Virgin Mother at Our Lady of Sorrows, back in Asherville. Sometimes the Virgin's serene ceramic face had just such a forlorn and spectral aspect in the crimson glow of the flickering votive candles arrayed in red glasses beneath it.

As Joey rolled slowly past this girl, she stared entreatingly, and in her porcelain features he saw something that alarmed him: a disturbing premonition, a vision of her lovely face without eyes, battered and bloody. Somehow he knew that if he didn't stop to help her, she would not live to see the dawn but would die violently in some black moment of the storm.

He parked on the shoulder ahead of the Valiant and got out of the rental car. He was still soaked from having stood in the cleansing downpour outside Henry Kadinska's office little more than twenty minutes ago, so the pounding rain didn't bother him, and the cold night air wasn't half as chilling as the fear that had filled him since he had learned of his inheritance.

He hurried along the pavement, and the girl came forward to meet him at the front of her disabled Valiant.

"Thank God, you stopped," she said. Rain streamed off her hood, a glistening veil in front of her face.

He said, "What happened?"

"It just failed."

"While you were rolling?"

"Yeah. Not the battery."

"How do you know?"

"I've still got power."

Her eyes were dark and huge. Her face glowed in the flare light, and on her cheeks, raindrops glistened like tears.

"Maybe the generator," he said.

"You know cars?"

"Yeah."

"I don't," she said. "I feel so helpless."

"We all do," Joey said.

She gave him a peculiar look.

She was just a girl, and at her age she was surely naive and not yet fully aware of the world's cruelty. Yet Joey Shannon saw more in her eyes than he could comprehend.

"I feel lost," she said, evidently still referring to her lack of knowledge about cars.

He unlatched and raised the hood. "Let me have your light."

At first she seemed not to know what he meant, but then she handed the flashlight to him. "I think it's hopeless."

While rain pounded against his back, he checked the distributor cap to be sure that it was seated securely, examined the spark-plug leads, scrutinized the battery cables.

"If you could just give me a ride home," she said, "my dad and I can come back here tomorrow."

"Let me try it first," he said, closing the hood.

"You don't even have a raincoat," she worried.

"Doesn't matter."

"You'll catch your death."

"It's only water — they baptize babies in it."

Overhead, the branches of the mountain laurels clattered in a bitter gust of wind, shaking loose a flock of dead leaves that whirled briefly but then settled to the ground as spiritlessly as lost hopes sifting down through the darkness of a troubled heart.

He opened the driver's door, got behind the steering wheel, and put the flashlight on the seat beside him. The keys were in the ignition. When he attempted to start the engine, there was no response whatsoever. He tried the headlights, and they came on at full power.

In front of the car, the girl was caught in the bright beams. She was no longer tinted red. Her black raincoat hung like a cowled robe, and in its folds, her face and hands were white and gloriously radiant.

He stared at her for a moment, wondering why he had been brought to her and where they would find themselves by the time this strange night had ended. Then he switched off the headlights.

The girl stood once more in the lambent light of the flares, lashed by crimson rain.

After leaning across the seat to lock the passenger door, Joey got out of the Valiant, taking the flashlight and the keys with him. "Whatever's wrong, I don't have what's needed to fix it." He slammed the driver's door and locked it as well. "You're right — the best I can do is give you a lift. Where do you live?"

"Coal Valley. I was on my way home when the trouble started."

"Hardly anyone lives there any more."

"Yeah. We're one of the last three families. It's almost like a ghost town."

Thoroughly soaked and cold to the bone, he was eager to get back to the rental car and switch the heater to its highest setting. But when he met her dark eyes again, he felt more strongly than ever that she was the reason that he had been given another chance to take the road to Coal Valley, as he should have done twenty years ago. Rather than run with her to the shelter of the Chevy, he hesitated, afraid that whatever he did — even taking her home — might be the wrong thing to do, and that in choosing a course of action, he would be throwing away this last, miraculous chance at redemption.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

Joey had been staring at her, half mesmerized, contemplating the possible consequences of his actions. His empty gaze must have disconcerted her every bit as much as the concept of consequences disconcerted him.

Speaking without thinking, surprised to hear these particular words issuing from himself, he said, "Show me your hands."

"My hands?"

"Show me your hands."

The wind sang epithalamion in the trees above, and the night was a chapel in which they stood alone.

With a look of puzzlement, she held out her delicate hands for his inspection.

"Palms up," he said.

She did as he asked, and her posture made her resemble more than ever the Mother of Heaven entreating all to come unto her, into the bosom of everlasting peace.

The girl's hands cupped the darkness, and he couldn't read her palms.

Trembling, he raised the flashlight.

At first her hands were unblemished. Then a faint bruise slowly appeared in the center of each rain-pooled palm.

He closed his eyes and held his breath. When he looked again, the bruises had darkened.

"You're scaring me," she said.

"We should be scared."

"You never seemed strange."

"Look at your hands," he said.

She lowered her eyes.

"What do you see?" he asked.

"See? Just my hands."

The storm wind crying in the trees was the voice of a million victims, and the night was filled with their pathetic pleas for mercy.

He would have been shaking uncontrollably if he had not been paralyzed by fear. "You don't see the bruises?"

"What bruises?"

Her gaze rose from her hands, and her eyes met his again.

"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.

"Celeste. Celeste Baker."

"How did you know my name?"

The question made her self-conscious, and she was able to meet his eyes only briefly. Even in the dim backwash of light from the instrument panel, he could see that she was blushing.

"You never noticed me, I know."

He frowned. "Noticed you?"

"You were two years ahead of me at County High."

Joey shifted his attention from the dangerously slick roadway longer than he should have, mystified by what she'd said. "What're you talking about?"

Staring at the lighted face of the radio, she said, "I was a sophomore when you were a senior. I had a terrible crush on you. I was in despair when you graduated and went off to college."

He was barely able to look away from her.

Sweeping around a curve, the road passed an abandoned mine head and a broken-down tipple that loomed out of the darkness like the half-shattered skeleton of a prehistoric beast. Generations had toiled in its shadow to bring forth coal, but they were now gone to bones or to city work. As he followed the curve, Joey braked gently, slowing from fifty to forty, so badly rattled by what the girl had said that he no longer trusted himself to drive safely at the higher speed.

"We never spoke," she said. "I never could get up the nerve. I just… you know… admired you from afar. God. Sounds so stupid." She glanced at him from under her brow to see if, in fact, he was amused at her expense.

"You're not making any sense," he said.

"Me?"

"How old are you? Sixteen?"

"Seventeen, almost eighteen. My dad's Carl Baker, and being the principal's daughter makes everything worse. I'm a social outcast to begin with, so I have a hard time striking up a conversation with a boy who's even… well, who's even half as good-looking as you."

He felt as if he were in a chamber of fun-house mirrors where everything, including conversation, was distorted until nothing quite made sense. "What's the joke here?"

"Joke?"

He slowed to thirty miles an hour, then slowed further still, until he was not quite keeping pace with the racing water that nearly overflowed the wide drainage ditch along the right shoulder of the highway. The surging torrents cast back leaping silvery reflections of the headlights.

"Celeste, damn it, I'm forty years old. How could I be just two years ahead of you in high school"

Her expression was somewhere between astonishment and alarm, but then it swiftly gave way to anger. "Why're you being like this? Are you trying to spook me?"

"No, no. I just—"

"Trying to give the principal's kid a real scare, make a fool of her?"

"No, listen—"

"You've been away to college all this time, and you're still that immature? Maybe I should be glad I never had the guts to talk to you before."

Tears shimmered in her eyes.

Nonplussed, he returned his attention to the highway ahead — just as the Springsteen song ended.

The deejay said, "That's 'Thunder Road,' from Born to Run, the new album by Bruce Springsteen."

"New album?" Joey said.

The deejay said, "Is that hot or not? Man, that guy is gonna be huge."

"It's not a new album," Joey said.

Celeste was blotting her eyes with a Kleenex.

"Let's spin one more by the Boss," said the deejay. "Here's 'She's the One,' off the same album."

Pure, passionate, exhilarating rock-'n'-roll exploded from the radio. "She's the One" was as fresh, as powerful, as joyful as it had been when Joey had first heard it twenty years ago.

He said, "What's this guy talking about? It's not new. Born to Run is twenty years old."

"Stop it," she said in a voice colored half by anger and half by hurt. "Just stop it, okay?"

"It was all over the radio back then. He knocked the whole world on its ass. The real stuff. Born to Run."

"Give it up," she said fiercely. "You're not scaring me any more. You're not going to make the principal's nerdy kid cry."

She had fought back her tears. Her jaw was clenched, and her lips were tightly compressed.

"Born to Run," he insisted, "is twenty years old."

"Creep."

"Twenty years old."

Celeste huddled against the passenger door, pulling as far away from him as she could.

Springsteen rocked.

Joey's mind spun.

Answers occurred to him. He dared not consider them, for fear that they would be wrong and that his sudden rush of hope would prove unfounded.

They were traveling through a narrow passage carved from the mountain. Walls of rock crowded the blacktop and rose forty feet into the night, reducing their options to the road ahead and the road behind.

Barrages of cold rain snapped with bullet-hard ferocity against the Mustang.

The windshield wipers throbbed—lubdub, lubdub—as though the car were a great heart pumping time and fate instead of blood.

At last he dared to look at the rearview mirror.

In the dim light from the instrument panel, he could see little, but what little he could see was enough to fill him with wonder, with awe, with wild exhilaration, with fear and with delight simultaneously, with respect for just how very strange the night and the highway had become. In the mirror, his eyes were clear, and the whites of them were luminescent white: They were no longer bleary and bloodshot from twenty years of heavy drinking. Above his eyes, his brow was smooth and unlined, untouched by two decades of worry and bitterness and self-loathing.

He jammed his foot on the brake pedal, the tires shrieked, and the Mustang fishtailed.

Celeste squealed and put out her hands to brace herself against the dashboard. If they had been going fast, she wound have been thrown out of her seat.

The car skidded across the double yellow line into the other lane, coward the far rock wall, but then slid into a hundred-eighty-degree turn, back into the lane where they'd begun, and came to a stop on the roadway, facing the wrong direction.

Joey grabbed the rearview mirror, tilted it up to reveal a hairline that had not receded, tilted it down past his eyes, left, right.

"What are you doing?" she demanded.

Though his hand was shaking uncontrollably, he found the switch for the dome light.

"Joey, we could be hit head-on!" she said frantically, though there were no headlights approaching.

He leaned closer to the small mirror, turned it this way and that, craned his neck, trying to capture every possible aspect of his face in that narrow rectangle.

"Joey, damn it, we can't just sit here!"

"Oh, my God, my God."

"Are you crazy?"

"Am I crazy?" he asked his youthful reflection.

"Get us off the road!"

"What year is it?"

"Drop the stupid act, you moron."

"What year is it?"

"It isn't funny."

"What year is it?" he demanded.

She started to open her door.

"No," Joey said, "wait, wait, all right, you're right, got to get off the road, just wait."

He swung the Mustang around, back in the direction they had been heading before he'd slammed on the brakes, and he pulled to a stop on the side of the road.

Turning to her, pleading with her, he said, "Celeste, don't be angry with me, don't be afraid, be patient, just tell me what year it is. Please. Please. I need to hear you say it, then I'll know it's real. Tell me what year it is, and then I'll explain everything — as much as I can explain it."

Celeste's schoolgirl crush on him was still strong enough to overcome her fear and anger. Her expression softened.

"What year?" he repeated.

"It's 1975," she said.

On the radio, "She's the One" rocked to its glorious end.

Springsteen was followed by a commercial for the current big hit in the movie theaters: Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon.

The past summer it had been Jaws. Steven Spielberg was just starting to become a household name.

The previous spring, Vietnam had fallen.

Nixon had left office the year before.

Amiable Gerald Ford was in the White House, caretaker president of a troubled country. Twice in September, attempts had been made on his life. Lynnette Fromme had taken a shot at him in Sacramento. Sara Jane Moore had gone after him in San Francisco.

Elizabeth Seton had become the first American to be canonized by the Roman Catholic Church.

The Cincinnati Reds had won the World Series in seven games.

Jimmy Hoffa had disappeared.

Muhammad Ali was world heavyweight champion.

Doctorow's novel Ragtime. Judith Rossner's Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

Disco. Donna Summers. The Bee Gees.

Now, although still soaked, he realized that he wasn't wearing the suit in which he had attended the funeral and which he had been wearing when he'd fled Henry Kadinska's law office. He was in boots and blue jeans. Hunter's-plaid flannel shirt. Blue-denim jacket with sheepskin lining.

"I'm twenty years old," Joey whispered as reverentially as he once would have spoken to God in the hush of a church.

Celeste reached out and touched his face. Her hand was warm against his cold cheek, and it trembled not with fear but with the pleasure of touching him, a difference that he was able to sense only because he was young again and acutely sensitive to the currents of a young girl's heart.

"Definitely not forty," she said.

On the car radio, Linda Ronstadt launched into the title song from her current hit album: "Heart Like a Wheel."

"Twenty years old," he repeated, and his vision blurred with gratitude to whatever power had brought him to this place, this time, this miraculous passage.

He wasn't merely being given a second chance. This was a shot at

whole new beginning.

"All I've got to do is the right thing," he said. "But how will I know what it is?"

Rain beat, beat, beat on the car with all the fury of judgment drums.

Moving her hand from his cheek, smoothing his rain-soaked hair back from his forehead, Celeste said, "Your turn."

"What?"

"I told you what year it is. Now you're supposed to explain everything."

"Where do I start? How do I… make you believe?"

"I'll believe," she softly assured him.

"One thing I know for sure: Whatever I've been brought back here to do, whatever I'm supposed to change, you're at the center of it. You're the heart of it. You're the reason that I have hope for a new life, and any better future I might have hinges on you."

As he'd spoken, her comforting hand had withdrawn from him. Now she held it over her heart.

For a moment the girl seemed unable to breathe, but then she sighed and said, "You get stranger by the minute… but I'm starting to like it."

"Let me see your hand."

She took her right hand from her heart and turned it palm up.

The dome light was still on, but even that didn't provide enough light for him to read the meaning of the stigmata.

"Give me the flashlight," he said.

Celeste handed it to him.

He switched on the beam and studied both her palms. The wounds had been fading when last he'd looked. Now they were deep again and oozing blood.

Reading the reawakened fear in his face, she said, "What do you see, Joey?"

"Nail holes."

"There's nothing."

"Bleeding."

"There's nothing in my hands."

"You can't see, but you've got to believe."

Hesitantly, he touched her palm. When he raised his finger, the tip of it glistened with her blood.

"I can see it. I can feel it," he said. "It's so frighteningly real to me."

When he looked at her, she was staring wide-eyed at his crimson fingertip. Her mouth was an oval of surprise. "You… you must've cut yourself."

"You can see it?"

"On your finger," she confirmed, a tremor in her voice.

"In your hand?"

She shook her head. "There's nothing on my hands."

He touched another finger to her palm. It came away wet with her blood.

"I see it," she said tremulously. "Two fingers."

Transubstantiation. The precognitive vision of blood in her hand had been transformed by his touch — and by some miracle — into the real blood of her body.

She touched the fingers of her left hand to the palm of her right, but they found no blood.

On the radio, Jim Croce — not yet dead in a plane crash — was singing "Time in a Bottle."

"Maybe you can't see your own fate by looking at yourself," Joey said. "Who of us can? But somehow… through me… through my touch, you're being… I don't know… being given a sign."

He gently pressed a third finger to her palm, and it too came away slick with blood.

"A sign," she said, not fully grasping what was happening.

"So you'll believe me," he said. "A sign to make you believe. Because if you don't believe me, then I might not be able to help you. And if I can't help you, I can't help myself."

"Your touch," she whispered, taking his left hand in both of hers. "Your touch." She met his eyes. "Joey… what's going to happen to me… what would have happened if you hadn't come along?"

"Raped," he said with total conviction, although he didn't understand how he knew. "Raped. Beaten. Tortured. Killed."

"The man in the other car," she said, gazing out at the dark highway, and the tremor in her voice became a shudder that shook her whole body.

"I think so," Joey said. "I think… he's done it before. The blonde wrapped in plastic."

"I'm scared."

"We have a chance."

"You still haven't explained. You haven't told me. What about the

Chevy you thought you were driving… your being forty years old?"

She released his hand, leaving it covered with her blood.

He wiped the blood on his jeans. With his right hand he focused the flashlight on her palms. "The wounds are getting worse. Fate, your

destiny, whatever you want to call it — it's reasserting itself."

"He's coming back?"

"I don't know. Maybe. Somehow… when we keep moving, you're safer. The wounds close up and start to fade. As long as we're moving, change can happen, there's hope."

He switched off the flashlight and gave it to her. He popped the hand brake and drove back onto Coal Valley Road.

"Maybe we shouldn't go the way he went," she said. "Maybe we should go back to the county route, to Asherville or somewhere else, anywhere else, away from him."

"I think that would be the end of us. If we run… if we take the wrong highway like I did before… then there's not going to be any mercy in Heaven."

"Maybe we should get help."

"Who's going to believe this?"

"Maybe they'll see… my hands. The blood on your fingers when you touch me."

"I don't think so. It's you and me. Only you and me against everything."

"Everything," she said wonderingly.

"Against this man, against the fate you would have met if I hadn't taken the turn onto Coal Valley Road — the fate you did meet on that other night when I took the county route instead. You and me against time and the future and the whole great weight of it all coming down like an avalanche."

"What can we do?"

"I don't know. Find him? Face him? We just have to play it as it lays… do what seems right, minute by minute, hour by hour."

"How long do we have to… to do the right thing, whatever it is, to do the thing that'll make the change permanent?"

"I don't know. Maybe until dawn. The thing that happened on that night happened in darkness. Maybe the only thing I have to set right is what happened to you, and if we keep you alive, if we just make it through to sunrise, maybe then everything's changed forever."

The tires cut through puddles on the rural lane, and plumes of white water rose like angels' wings on both sides of the car.

"What's this 'other night' you keep talking about?" she asked.

She gripped the extinguished flashlight in both hands in her lap, as though afraid that something monstrous might fly at the Mustang from out of the darkness, a creature that could be repelled and banished by a withering beam of light.

As they drove through the deep mountain night toward the nearly abandoned town of Coal Valley, Joey Shannon said, "This morning when I got out of bed, I was forty years old, a drunk with a rotting liver and no future anyone would want. And this afternoon I stood at my father's graveside, knowing I'd broken his heart, broken my mom's heart too…."

Celeste listened raptly, able to believe, because she had been given a sign that proved to her that the world had dimensions beyond those she could see and touch.

OUT OF THE RADIO CAME "ONE OF THESE NIGHTS" BY THE EAGLES, "Pick Up the Pieces" by the Average White Band, Ronstadt singing "When Will I Be Loved," Springsteen pounding out "Rosalita," "Black Water" by the Doobie Brothers — and all of them were new songs, the big hits of the day, although Joey had been listening to them on other radios in far places for twenty years.

By the time he had recounted his recent experiences to the point at which he had seen her disabled Valiant, they had reached the top of the long slope above Coal Valley. He coasted to a stop in gravel at the side of the road, beside a lush stand of mountain laurels, though he knew that they couldn't linger for long without risking a reassertion of the pattern of fate that would result in her murder and in his return to living damnation.

Coal Valley was more a village than it was a town. Even before the insatiable mine fire had eaten a maze of tunnels under the place, Coal Valley had been home to fewer than five hundred people. Simple frame houses with tar-shingle roofs. Yards full of peonies and lush huckleberry bushes in the summer, hidden under deep blankets of snow in the winter. Dogwood trees that blazed white and pink and purple in the spring. A small branch of County First National Bank. A one-truck volunteer fire station. Polanski's Tavern, where mixed drinks were rarely requested and most orders were for beer or for beer with shooters of whiskey on the side, where huge jars of pickled eggs and hot sausages in spicy broth stood on the bar. A general store, one service station, a small elementary school.

The village wasn't big enough to have streetlights, but before the government had finally begun condemning properties and offering compensation to the dispossessed, Coal Valley had produced a respectable warm glow in its snug berth among the surrounding night-clad hills. Now all the small businesses were shuttered and dark. The beacon of faith in the church belfry had been extinguished. Lights shone at only three houses, and those would be switched off forever when the final residents departed before Thanksgiving.

On the far side of town, an orange glow rose from a pit where the fire in one branch of the mine maze had burned close enough to the surface to precipitate a sudden subsidence. There the seething subterranean inferno was exposed, where otherwise it remained hidden under the untenanted houses and the heat-cracked streets.

"Is he down there?" Celeste asked, as though Joey might be able to sense clairvoyantly the presence of their faceless enemy.

The fitful precognitive flashes he had experienced thus far were beyond his control, however, and far too enigmatic to serve as a map to the lair of the killer. Besides, he suspected that the whole point of his being allowed to replay this night was to give him the chance to succeed or fail, to do right or do wrong, drawing only on the depth of his own wisdom, judgment, and courage. Coal Valley was his testing ground. No guardian angel was going to whisper instructions in his ear — or step between him and a razor-sharp knife flashing out of shadows.

"He could've driven straight through town without stopping," Joey said. "Could've gone to Black Hollow Highway and maybe from there to the turnpike. That's the route I usually took back to college. But… I think he's down there, somewhere down there. Waiting."

"For us?"

"He waited for me after he turned off the county route onto Coal Valley Road. Just stopped on the roadway and waited to see if I was going to follow him."

"Why would he do that?"

Joey suspected that he knew the answer. He sensed suppressed, sharp-toothed knowledge swimming like a shark in the lightless sea of his subconscious, but he couldn't entice it to surface. It would soar out of the murky depths and come for him when he was least expecting

"Sooner or later we'll find out," he said.

He knew in his bones that confrontation was inevitable. They were captured by the fierce gravity of a black hole, pulled toward an inescapable and crushing truth.

On the far side of Coal Valley, the glow at the open pit pulsed brighter than before. Streams of white and red sparks spewed out of the earth, like great swarms of fireflies, expelled with such force that they rose at least a hundred feet into the heavy rain before being quenched.

Fearful that a fluttering in his belly could quickly grow into a paralyzing weakness, Joey switched off the dome light, steered the Mustang back onto Coal Valley Road, and drove toward the desolate village below.

"We'll go straight to my house," Celeste said.

"I don't know if we should."

"Why not?"

"It might not be a good idea."

"We'll be safe there with my folks."

"The idea isn't just to get safe."

"What is the idea?"

"To keep you alive."

"Same thing."

"And to stop him."

"Stop him? The killer?"

"It makes sense. I mean, how can there be any redemption if I knowingly turn my back on evil and walk away from it? Saving you has to be only half of what I need to do. Stopping him is the other half."

"This is getting too mystical again. When do we call in the exorcist, start spritzing holy water?"

"It is what it is. I can't help that."

"Listen, Joey, here's what makes sense. My dad has a gun cabinet full of hunting rifles, a shotgun. That's what we need."

"But what if going to your house draws him there? Otherwise maybe your parents wouldn't be in danger from him, wouldn't ever encounter him."

"Shit, this is deeply crazy," she said. "And you better believe, I don't use the word 'shit' often or lightly."

"Principal's daughter," he said.

"Exactly."

"By the way, a little while ago, what you said about yourself — it isn't true."

"Huh? What did I say?"

"You're not nerdy."

"Well."

"You're beautiful."

"I'm a regular Olivia Newton-John," she said self-mockingly.

"And you've got a good heart — too good to want to change your own fate and ensure your future at the cost of your parents' lives."

For a moment she was silent in the roar of the sanctifying rain. Then she said, "No. God, no, I don't want that. But it would take so little time to get into the house, open the gun cabinet in the den, and load up."

"Everything we do tonight, every decision we make, has heavy consequences. The same thing would be true if this was an ordinary night, without all this weirdness. That's something I once forgot — that there are always moral consequences — and I paid a heavy price for forgetting. Tonight it's truer than ever."

As they descended the last of the long slope and drew near the edge of town, Celeste said, "So what are we supposed to do — just cruise around, stay on the move, wait for that avalanche you talked about to hit us?"

"Play it as it lays."

"But how does it lay?" she asked with considerable frustration.

"We'll see. Show me your hands."

She switched on the flashlight and revealed one palm, then the other.

"They're only dark bruises now," he told her. "No bleeding. We're doing something right."

The car hit a narrow band of subsidence in the pavement, not a deep pit with flames at the bottom, just a shallow swale about two yards wide, although it was rough enough to jolt them, make the car springs creak, scrape the muffler, and spring open the door on the glove box, which evidently had not been closed tightly.

The flapping door startled Celeste, and she swung the flashlight toward it. The beam flared off a curve of clear glass in that small compartment. A jar. Four or five inches tall, three to four inches in diameter. Once it might have contained pickles or peanut butter. The label had been removed. It was filled with a liquid now, which was made opaque by the glimmering reflections of the flashlight beam, and in the liquid floated something peculiar, not quite identifiable, but nevertheless alarming.

"What's this?" she asked, reaching into the glove box without hesitation but with a palpable dread, compelled against her better judgment, just as Joey was, to have a closer look.

She withdrew the jar.

Held it up.

Floating in pink-tinted fluid was a pair of blue eyes.

GRAVEL RATTLED AGAINST THE UNDERCARRIAGE, THE MUSTANG THUMPED across a depression, and Joey tore his gaze from the jar in time to see a mailbox disintegrate on contact with the front bumper. The car churned across the lawn of the first house in Coal Valley and came to a stop just inches before plowing into the front porch.

Instantly he was cast into a memory from the first time that he had lived through this night, when he had failed to take the turnoff to Coal Valley:

… driving the Mustang recklessly fast on the interstate, in a night full of rain and sleet, in a frenzy to escape, as though a demon were in pursuit of him, torn up about something, alternately cursing God and praying to Him. His stomach is acidic, churning. There's a roll of Tums in the glove box. Holding the wheel with one hand, he leans to the right, punches the latch release, and the door in the dashboard drops open. He reaches into that small compartment, feeling for the roll of antacid — and he finds the jar. Smooth and cool. He can't figure what it is. He doesn't keep a jar of anything in there. He takes it out, The headlights of an oncoming big rig, on the far side of the divided highway, throw enough light into the car for him to see the contents of the jar. Eyes. Either he jerks the wheel reflexively or the tires hydroplane on the slick pavement, because suddenly the Mustang is totally out of control, sliding, spinning. The signpost. A terrible crash. His head smacks against the window, safety glass shattering into a gummy mass but cutting him nonetheless. Rebounding from the steel signpost, slamming into the guardrail. Stopped. He forces open the damaged door and scrambles out into the storm. He has to get rid of the jar, dear Jesus, get rid of it before someone stops to help him. Not much traffic in this killing weather, but surely someone will be a good Samaritan when that is the last thing he needs. He's lost the jar. No. He can't have lost the jar. He feels around frantically in the car: the floor in front of the driver's seat. Cool glass. Intact. The lid still screwed on tight. Thank God, thank God. He runs with it past the front of the car to the guardrail. Beyond is wild land, an open field full of tall weeds. With all the strength he can muster, he hurls the jar far into the darkness. And then time passes and he finds himself still standing on the verge of the highway, not sure what he's doing there, confused. Sleet stings his exposed face and hands. He's got a fierce headache. He touches his forehead, finds the cut. He needs medical attention. Maybe stitches. There's an exit one mile ahead. He knows the town. He can find the hospital. No Samaritan has stopped. It's that kind of world these days. When he gets back into the battered Mustang, he is relieved to discover that it's still operable and that the damaged fender isn't binding against the front tire. He's going to be all right. He's going to be all right.

Sitting in front of the Coal Valley house, with pieces of the mangled mailbox scattered across the lawn behind him, Joey realized that when he'd driven away from the crash scene on the interstate twenty years ago, he had forgotten about the jar and the eyes. Either the head injury had resulted in selective amnesia — or he'd willed himself to forget. He was overcome by the sick feeling that the explanation involved more of the latter than the former, that his moral courage — not his physiology — had failed him.

In that alternate reality, the jar lay hidden in a weedy field, but here it was in Celeste's grip. She had dropped the flashlight and held fast to the jar with both hands, perhaps because she was afraid that the lid would come loose and the contents would spill into her lap. She shoved the container into the glove box and slammed the small door shut.

Gasping, half sobbing, she hugged herself and bent forward in her seat. "Oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit," she chanted, using the word no more tightly now than before.

Gripping the steering wheel so tightly that he wouldn't have been surprised if it had broken apart in his hands, Joey was filled with an inner turmoil more violent than the hard shatters of wind-driven rain that broke over the Mustang. He was on the brink of understanding the jar: where it had come from, whose eyes it contained, what it meant, why he had blocked it from memory all these years. But he couldn't quite bring himself to step off that brink into the cold void of truth, perhaps because he knew that he didn't yet possess the strength to face what he would discover at the bottom of the fall.

"I didn't," he said miserably.

Celeste was rocking in her seat, hugging herself, huddled over her crossed arms, making a low, tortured sound.

"I didn't," he repeated.

Slowly she raised her head.

Her eyes were as appealing as ever, suggesting unusual depths of character and knowledge beyond her years, but a new quality informed them as well, something disturbing. Perhaps it was an unsought and unwanted awareness of the human capacity for evil. She still looked like the girl he had picked up only eight or ten miles back along the road — but in a fundamental sense she was not that girl any more, and she could never return to the state of innocence in which she had entered the night. She was not a schoolgirl now, not the shy doe who had blushed when revealing the crush she had on him — and that was unspeakably sad.

He said, "I didn't put the jar there. I didn't put the eyes in the jar. It wasn't me."

"I know," she said simply and with a firm conviction for which he loved her. She glanced at the glove box, then back at him. "You couldn't have. Not you. Not you, Joey, not ever. You aren't capable of anything like that."

Again he teetered on a precipice of revelation, but a tide of anguish washed him back from it rather than over the edge. "They've got to be her eyes."

"The blonde in the plastic tarp."

"Yeah. And I think somehow… somehow I know who she is, know how she wound up dead with her eyes cut out. But I just can't quite remember."

"Earlier you said that she was more than a vision, more than drunk's hallucination."

"Yeah. For sure. She's a memory. I saw her for real somewhere, sometime." He put one hand to his forehead, gripping his skull so tightly that his hand shook with the effort and the muscles twitched the length of his arm, as if he could pull the forgotten knowledge out of himself.

"Who could have gotten in your car to leave the jar?" she asked.

"I don't know."

"Where were you early in the evening, before you set out to go to college?"

"Home. Asherville. My folks' house. I didn't stop anywhere between there and your Valiant."

"Was the Mustang in the garage?"

"We don't have a garage. It's not… that kind of house."

"Was it locked?"

"No."

"Then anybody could have gotten into your car."

"Yeah. Maybe."

No one had come out of the house in front of them, because it was one of the first properties condemned in Coal Valley, abandoned for months. On the white aluminum siding, someone had spray-painted a big "4" and drawn a circle around it. As red as fresh blood in the Mustang's headlights, the number was not graffiti but an official designation: It meant that the house would be the fourth structure to be torn down when the last citizens of Coal Valley moved out and the demolition crew came in with its bulldozers.

The state and federal bureaucracies had been so inefficient and slow in dealing with the mine fire that it had been allowed to spread relentlessly until its white-hot tributaries lay under the entire valley, whereupon it had grown too far-reaching to be extinguished by anything other than time and nature. With the destruction of the village, however, the authorities clearly intended to be as orderly and speedy as a clockwork military operation.

"We're sitting ducks here," he said.

Without checking Celeste's hands, certain that this immobility had already resulted in a resurgence of the stigmata, he shifted the Mustang into reverse and backed across the lawn to the street. So much rain had fallen that he was worried about getting bogged down in the soft sod, but they reached the blacktop without trouble.

"Where now?" she asked.

"We'll look around town."

"For what?"

"Anything out of the ordinary."

"It's all out of the ordinary."

"We'll know it when we see it."

He cruised slowly along Coal Valley Road, which was the main thoroughfare through town.

At the first intersection, Celeste pointed to a narrow street on the left. "Our house is over there."

A block away, through beaded curtains of rain and past a few screening pines, several windows were filled with a welcoming amber light. No other house in that direction appeared to be occupied.

"All the neighbors are gone, moved out," Celeste confirmed. "Mom and Dad are alone over there."

"And they may be safer alone," he reminded her, crossing the intersection, driving slowly past her street, studying both sides of the main drag.

Even though Coal Valley Road led to destinations beyond the town of Coal Valley itself, they had encountered no pass-through traffic, and Joey figured that they weren't likely to encounter any. Numerous experts and officials had assured the public that the highway was fundamentally safe and that there was no danger of sudden subsidence swallowing unwary motorists. Following the demolition of the village, however, the road was scheduled for condemnation and removal, and the residents of those mountain towns had long ago become skeptical about anything the experts had to say about the mine fire. Alternate routes had become popular.

Ahead of them, on the left, was St. Thomas's Catholic Church, where services had once been conducted every Saturday and Sunday by the rector and the curate of Our Lady of Sorrows in Asherville, who were circuit priests covering two other small churches in that part of the county. It was not a grand house of worship, but a wooden structure with plain rather than stained-glass windows.

Joey's attention was drawn to St. Thomas's by flickering light at the windows. A flashlight. Inside, each time the beam moved, shadows spun and leaped like tormented spirits.

He angled across the street and coasted to a stop in front of the church. He switched off the headlights and the engine.

At the top of the concrete steps, the double doors stood open.

"It's an invitation," Joey said.

"You think he's in there?"

"It's a pretty good bet."

Inside the church, the light blinked off.

"Stay here," Joey said, opening his door.

"Like hell."

"I wish you would."

"No," she said adamantly.

"Anything could happen in there."

"Anything could happen out here too."

He couldn't argue with the truth of that.

When he got out and went around to the back of the car, Celeste followed him, pulling up the hood of her raincoat.

The rain was now mixed with sleet, as when he'd lived through this night the first time and crashed on the interstate. It ticked against the Mustang with a sound like scrabbling claws.

When he opened the trunk, he more than half expected to find the dead blonde.

She wasn't there.

He removed the combination crowbar and lug wrench from the side well that contained the jack. It was made of cast iron, comfortingly heavy in his hand.

In the faint glow of the trunk light, Celeste saw the toolbox and opened it even as Joey was hefting the crowbar. She extracted a large screwdriver.

"It's not a knife," she said, "but it's something."

Joey wished that she would stay behind in the car with the doors locked. If anyone showed up, she could blow the horn, and he would be at her side in seconds.

Although he had met her hardly an hour ago, he already knew her well enough to recognize the futility of trying to dissuade her from accompanying him. In spite of her delicate beauty, she was uncommonly tough and resilient. Any lingering uncertainties of youth, which might have inhibited her, had been burned away forever with the realization that she'd been marked for rape and murder — and with the discovery of the eyes in the jar. The world as she knew it had abruptly become a far darker and more disturbing place than it had been when the day began, but she had absorbed that change and adapted to it with surprising and admirable courage.

Joey didn't bother to close the trunk quietly. The open doors of the church made it clear that the man who had led him onto Coal Valley Road was expecting him to follow here as well.

"Stay close," he said.

She nodded grimly. "Guaranteed."

In the front yard of St. Thomas's, a one-foot-diameter vent pipe rose six feet above the ground. It was surrounded by an hourglass construction of chain-link, which served as a safety barrier. Plumes of mine-fire smoke rose from deep underground and wafted from the top of the pipe, lessening the likelihood that toxic fumes would build to dangerous levels in the church and in nearby homes. During the past twenty years, as all efforts to extinguish — or even to contain — the subterranean inferno had proved inadequate, almost two thousand such vents had been installed.

In spite of the continuous scrubbing by the rain, the air around the entrance to St. Thomas's had a sulfurous stench, as if some rough beast, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born, had taken a detour to Coal Valley.

Painted in red on the front of the church was a large "13" with a red circle around it.

Curiously, Joey thought of Judas. The thirteenth apostle. The betrayer of Jesus.

The number on the wall merely indicated that the building had been the thirteenth property in Coal Valley to be condemned and added to the master demolition list, but he couldn't shake the notion that it was significant for other reasons. In his heart he knew that it was a warning to guard against betrayal. But betrayal from what source?

He hadn't gone to Mass in two decades, until the funeral this morning. He had called himself an agnostic — and sometimes an atheist — for many years, yet suddenly everything he saw and everything that happened seemed to have a religious association for him. Of course, in one sense, he wasn't a cynical and faithless man of forty any more but a young man of twenty who had still been an altar boy less than two years ago. Perhaps this strange fall backward in time had brought him closer to the faith of his youth.

Thirteen.

Judas.

Betrayal.

Rather than dismiss that train of thought as superstition, he took it seriously and decided to be more cautious than ever.

Sleet had not yet mantled the sidewalk in ice, and the scattered pellets crunched under their feet.

At the top of the steps, at the open doors, Celeste clicked on the small flashlight that she had brought from the car, dispelling some of the darkness inside.

They crossed the threshold side by side. She slashed left and right with the beam, quickly revealing that no one was waiting for them in the narthex.

A white marble holy-water font stood at the entrance to the nave. Joey discovered that it was empty, slid his fingers along the dry bottom of the bowl, and crossed himself anyway.

He advanced into the church with the crowbar raised and ready, holding it firmly in both hands. He wasn't willing to trust to the grace of God.

Celeste handled the flashlight expertly, probing quickly to all sides, as though accustomed to conducting searches for homicidal maniacs.

Although no Masses had been said in St. Thomas's for the past five or six months, Joey suspected that the electrical service had not been disconnected. For safety reasons, the power might have been left on, because all the dangers inherent in an abandoned building were greater in darkness. Now that official indifference and incompetence had resulted in the loss of the entire town to the hidden, hungry fire below, the authorities were uniformly enthusiastic proponents of safety measures.

A faint scent of incense lingered from past Masses, but it was largely masked by the smell of damp wood and mildew. A trace of sulfurous fumes laced the air as well, and that stink gradually grew stronger till it drowned the spicy aroma from all the old ceremonies of innocence.

Although volleys of sleet rattled against the roof and the windows, the nave was filled with the familiar hush of all churches and with a sense of quiet expectation. Usually it was an expectation of the subtle visitation of a divine presence, but now it was the apprehension of a hateful intrusion into that once-consecrated space.

Holding the crowbar in one fist, he slid his other hand along the wall to the left of the narthex arch. He couldn't locate any switches.

Encouraging Celeste to move to the right of the arch, he felt along that wall until he found a panel of four switches. He snapped them all up with one sweep of his hand.

From overhead, cone-shaped fixtures cast dim, chrome-yellow light on the ranks of pews. Along the walls, hooded sconces directed soft light down across the fourteen stations of the cross an onto the dusty wood floor.

The front of the church beyond the sanctuary railing remained shrouded in shadows. Nevertheless, Joey could see that everything sacred had been removed, including all the statuary and the great crucifix that had graced the wall behind the altar.

Occasionally, as a boy, he had traveled with the priest from Asherville to Coal Valley, to serve when the local altar boys were ill or were for some other reason unavailable, so he was familiar with the appearance of St. Thomas's prior to its deconsecration. Carved by a villager in the latter part of the previous century, the twelve-foot-high crucifix had been a rough piece of work, but Joey had been fascinated by it, for it had possessed a power that he'd never seen in more professionally carved and polished versions.

When his gaze settled from the blank wall where the crucifix had been, he saw a pale and shapeless mound on the elevated altar platform. A soft radiance seemed to issue from it, but he knew that was only a trick of reflection — and his imagination.

They walked cautiously along the center aisle, checking the pews to the left and right, where someone could have been crouching out of sight, waiting to spring at them. The church was small, capable of seating approximately two hundred people, but this night there was neither a single worshiper nor a beast among the pews.

When Joey opened the gate in the sanctuary railing, the hip squealed.

Celeste hesitated, then preceded him into the sanctuary. She was riveted by the pale mound on the altar platform, but she didn't direct tie flashlight at it, evidently preferring, as he did, to delay the inevitable revelation.

As the low gate creaked shut behind him, Joey glanced back into the nave. No one had entered behind them.

Directly ahead was the choir enclosure. The chairs, the music stands, and the organ had all been hauled away.

They followed the ambulatory to the left, around the choir. Though they tried to tread lightly, their footfalls on the oak floor echoed hollowly through the empty church.

On the wall beside the door to the sacristy were more switches. Joey flicked them, and the sanctuary filled with sour light no brighter than that in the nave.

He motioned for Celeste to slip past the closed door, and when she was out of the way, he kicked it open as he had seen cops do in countless movies, rushed across the threshold, and swung the crowbar with all his might, right to left and back again, on the assumption that someone was waiting for him there. He hoped to surprise and cripple the bastard with a preemptive blow, but the length of iron cut the empty air with a whoosh.

Enough light spilled past him from the sanctuary to confirm that the sacristy was deserted. The outer door was standing open when he entered, but a gust of cold wind threw it shut.

"He's already gone," Joey told Celeste, who stood rigid with fear in the inner doorway.

They returned to the sanctuary, followed the ambulatory to the presbytery, and stopped at the foot of the three altar steps.

Joey's heart slammed in his breast.

Beside him, Celeste made a soft, plaintive sound — not a gasp of horror but a murmur of compassion, regret, despair. "Ah, no."

The high altar, with its hand-carved antependium, was gone.

Only the altar platform remained.

The mound that they had seen from the nave was neither as pale nor as shapeless as it had appeared to be when the sanctuary lights had been off. Portions of the fetally curled corpse were visible through the heavy-gauge, rumpled plastic. Her face was concealed, but a limp flag of blond hair trailed out of a gap in the folds of the tarp.

This was no precognitive vision.

Not an hallucination either.

Not merely a memory.

This time the body was real.

Nevertheless, the events of the past twenty-four hours had left Joey in doubt about what was real and what was not. He distrusted his own senses enough to seek confirmation from Celeste: "You see it too, don't you?"

"Yes."

"The body?"

"Yes."

He touched the thick plastic. It crackled under his fingers.

One slender, alabaster arm was exposed. The hand was cupped, and a nail hole marked the center. The fingernails were torn and caked with blood.

Although he knew that the blonde was dead, in his heart Joey harbored a fragile and irrational hope that the eyes in the jar were not hers, that a thread of life still sewed her to this world, and that she might yet be resuscitated. He dropped to his knees on the top altar step and put his fingertips against her wrist, seeking at least a feeble pulse.

He found no pulse, but the contact with her cold flesh jolted him as if he'd grasped a live electrical wire, and he was shocked into another memory that had been long suppressed:

… only wanting to help, carrying the two suitcases through the icy rain to the back of the car, putting them down on the gravel driveway to unlock the trunk. He raises the lid, and the small bulb inside the trunk is as dim as a half-melted votive candle in a ruby-dark glass. The light is tinted red, in fact, because the bulb is smeared with blood. The hot-copper stench of fresh blood virtually steams from that cramped space, making him gag. She is there. She is there. She is completely and totally there — so utterly unexpected that she might have been mistaken for an hallucination, but instead she is more solid than granite, more real than a punch in the face. Naked but swaddled in a semitransparent tarp. Face hidden by her long blond hair and by smears of blood on the inner surface of the plastic. One bare arm is free of the shroud, and the delicate hand is turned with the palm up, revealing a cruel wound. She seems to reach out beseechingly to him, seeking the mercy that she has found nowhere else in the night. His heart swells so terribly with each apocalyptic beat that it cramps his lungs and prevents him from drawing a breath. As the iron treads of thunder roll across the mountains, he hopes that lightning will strike him, that he will join the blonde in death, because trying to carry on with life after this discovery will be too hard, too painful, joyless, and pointless. Then someone speaks behind him, barely louder than the susurrant song of the rain and wind: "Joey." If he's not permitted to die here, right now, in this storm, then he prays to God to be struck deaf, to be blinded, to be freed from the obligations of a witness. "Joey, Joey." Such sadness in the voice. He turns from the battered corpse. In the nebulous blood-tinted light, he faces tragedy, faces the ruination of four lives in addition to that of the woman in the car trunk — his own, his mother's, his father's, his brother's. "I only wanted to help," he tells P.J. "I only wanted to help."

Joey exhaled explosively, then inhaled with a shudder. "It's my brother. He killed her."

THERE WERE RATS IN THE CHURCH. TWO FAT ONES SCUTTLED ALONG THE back of the sanctuary, squeaking, briefly casting elongated shadows, vanishing into a hole in the wall.

"Your brother? P.J.?" Celeste said in disbelief.

Although she had been five years behind P.J. in school, she knew who he was. Everyone in Asherville and all the surrounding villages had known P.J. Shannon even before he'd become a world-famous author. As a sophomore at County High, he had become the youngest quarterback in the history of the football team, a star player who had led his teammates to the divisional championship — and then he had done it twice again, in his junior and senior years. He was a straight-A student, valedictorian of his graduating class, humble in spite of his natural gifts and achievements, a real people-loving guy, handsome, charming, funny.

And the most difficult thing to reconcile with the body in the trunk: P.J. was kind. He gave a lot of time to charitable activities at Our Lady of Sorrows. When a friend was ill, P.J. was always first in attendance with a small gift and get-well wishes. If a friend was in trouble, P.J. was at his side to provide whatever help he could. Unlike many other jocks, P.J. wasn't cliquish — he was as likely to be found hanging out with the skinny, myopic president of the chess club as with members of the varsity team, and he had no tolerance for the nerd baiting and other cruelties in which popular, good-looking kids sometimes indulged.

P.J. had been the best brother in the world.

But he was also a brutal killer.

Joey couldn't reconcile those two facts. It would've been easy to go mad trying.

Remaining on his knees on the top altar step, Joey released the dead woman's cold wrist. From the touch of her flesh, in a manner almost mystical, he'd received a dreadful and shattering revelation. He could have been no more profoundly affected if he had, instead, just now seen a Eucharist transformed from a wafer of unleavened bread into the sacred flesh of God.

"P.J. was home on a visit from New York City that weekend," he told Celeste. "After college he'd landed a job as an editorial assistant at a major publishing house, figuring to work there until he could get a foot in the door of the film business. We'd had a lot of fun together on Saturday, the whole family. But after Mass on Sunday morning, P.J. was out all day, seeing old friends from high school to talk about the glory days, and driving around a little to enjoy the fall foliage. 'Taking a long, lazy nostalgia bath,' he called it. At least that was what he said he'd been doing."

Celeste turned her back to the altar platform and stood facing the nave, either because she could no longer tolerate the sight of the dead woman or because she feared that P.J. would creep back into the church and take them unaware.

"We usually had Sunday supper at five o'clock, but Mom held it up for him, and he didn't get home till six," Joey said, "well after dark. He apologized, shamefaced, said he'd been having so much fun with his old friends, he'd lost track of time. All through dinner he was so on, spinning out jokes, full of energy, as if being in his old stomping grounds had given him a big kick and revitalized him."

Joey folded the loose flap of the plastic tarp over the dead woman's bare arm. There was something obscene about her punctured hand being exposed on the altar, even if St. Thomas's had been deconsecrated.

Celeste waited silently for him to continue.

"Looking back on it," he said, "maybe there was a weird manic quality about him that evening… a dark energy. Right after dinner, he rushed down to his room in the basement to finish packing, then brought up his suitcases and put them by the back door. He was eager to get going, because the weather was bad and he had a long drive back to New York, wasn't likely to get there until two in the morning at the earliest. But Dad didn't want to see him leave. God, he loved P.J. so much. Dad brought out his scrapbooks about all those high-school and college football triumphs, wanted to reminisce. And P.J. gives me this wink, like to say, Hell, what's another half hour matter if it makes him happy? He and Dad went into the living room to sit on the sofa and look through the scrapbooks, and I decided I could save P.J. some time later by putting his suitcases in the trunk of his car. His keys were right there on the kitchen counter."

Celeste said, "I'm so sorry, Joey. I'm so, so sorry."

He hadn't become desensitized to the sight of the murdered woman in the bloodstained plastic tarp. The thought of what she'd suffered was enough to make him sick to his stomach, weigh down his heart with anguish, and thicken his voice with grief, even though he didn't know who she was. But he could not get up and turn his back on her. For the moment he felt that his rightful place was on his knees at her side, that she deserved no less than his attention and his tears. Tonight, he needed to be the witness for her that he had failed to be twenty years ago.

How strange that he had repressed all memory of her for two decades — yet now, in this replay of that worst night of his life, she had been dead only a few hours.

Whether by twenty years or by a few hours, however, he was too late to save her.

"The rain had let up a little," he continued, "so I didn't even bother to put on my hooded windbreaker. Just snatched the keys off the counter, grabbed both suitcases, and took them out to his car. It was parked behind mine at the end of the driveway, in back of the house. I guess maybe Mom must've said something to P.J., I don't know, but somehow he realized what was happening, what I was doing, and he left Dad with the scrapbooks to come after me, stop me. But he didn't get to me in time."

… a thin but bitterly cold rain, the blood-filtered light from the trunk bulbs and P.J. standing there as if the whole world hasn't just fallen apart, and Joey saying again, "I only wanted to help."

P.J. is wide-eyed, and for an instant Joey wants desperately to believe that his brother is also seeing the woman in the trunk for the first time, that he is shocked and has no idea how she got in there. But P.J. says, "Joey, listen, it isn't what you think. I know it looks bad, but it isn't what you think."

"Oh, Jesus, P.J. Oh, God!"

P.J. glances toward the house, which is only fifty or sixty feet away, to be sure that neither of their parents has come out onto the back porch. "I can explain this, Joey. Give me a chance here, don't go bugshit on me, give me a chance."

"She's dead, she's dead."

"I know."

"All cut up."

"Easy, easy. It's okay."

"What've you done? Mother of God, P.J., what've you done?"

P.J. crowds close, corners him against the back of the car. "I haven't done anything. Not anything I should rot in jail for."

"Why, P.J.? No. Don't even try. You can't… there can't be a why, there can't be a reason that makes any sense. She's dead in there, dead and all bloody in there."

"Keep your voice down, kid. Get hold of yourself." P.J. grips his brother by the shoulders, and amazingly Joey isn't repelled by the contact. "I didn't do it. I didn't touch her."

"She's there, P.J., you can't say she isn't there."

Joey is crying. The cold rain beats on his face and conceals his tears, but he is crying nonetheless.

P.J. shakes him lightly by the shoulders. "Who do you think I am, Joey? For Christ's sake, who do you think I am? I'm your big brother, aren't I? Still your big brother, aren't I? You think I went away to New York City and changed into someone else, something else, some monster?"

"She's in there," is all Joey can say.

"Yeah, all right, she's in there, and I put her in there, but I didn't do it to her, didn't hurt her."

Joey tries to pull away.

P.J. grips him tightly, presses him against the rear bumper, nearly forcing him backward into the open trunk with the dead woman. "Don't go off halfcocked, kid. Don't ruin everything, everything for all of us. Am I your big brother? Don't you know me any more? Haven't I always been there for you? I've always been there for you, and now I need you to be there for me, just this once."

Half sobbing, Joey says, "Not this, P.J. I can't be there for this. Are you crazy?"

P.J. speaks urgently, with a passion that rivets Joey: "I've always taken care of you, always loved you, my little brother, the two of us against the world. You hear me? I love you, Joey. Don't you know I love you?" He lets go of Joey's shoulders and grabs his head. P.J.'s hands are like the jaws of a vise, one pressed against each of Joey's temples. His eyes seem to be full of pain more than fear. He kisses Joey on the forehead. The fierce power with which P.J. speaks and the repetition of what he says are hypnotic, and Joey feels as though he's half in a trance, so deeply in P.J.'s thrall that he can't move. He's having difficulty thinking clearly. "Joey, listen, Joey, Joey, you're my brother — my brother! — and that means everything to me, you're my blood, you're a part of me. Don't you know I love you? Don't you know? Don't you know I love you? Don't you love me?"

"Yes, yes."

"We love each other, we're brothers."

Joey is sobbing now. "That's what makes it so hard."

P.J. still holds him by the head, eye to eye with him in the cold rain, their noses almost touching. "So if you love me, kid, if you really love your big brother, just listen. Just listen and understand how it was, Joey. Okay? Okay? Here's how it was. Here's what happened. I was driving out on Pine Ridge, the old back road, cruising like we used to cruise in high school, going nowhere for no reason. You know the old road, how it winds all over, one damn twist and turn after another, so I'm coming around a turn, and there she is, there she is, running out of the woods, down a little weedy slope, onto the road. I hit the brakes, but there's no time. Even if it hadn't been rainy, there wouldn't have been time to stop. She's right in front of me, and I hit her, she goes down, goes under the car, and I drive right over her before I get stopped."

"She's naked, P.J. I saw her, part of her, in the trunk there, and she's naked."

"That's what I'm telling you, if you'll listen. She's naked when she comes out of the woods, naked as the day she was born, and this guy is chasing her."

"What guy?"

"I don't know who he was. Never saw him before. But the reason she doesn't see the car, Joey, the reason is because just then she's glancing back at this guy, running for all she's worth and glancing back to see how close he is, and she runs right in front of the car, looks up and screams just as I hit her. Jesus, it was awful. It was the worst thing I hope I ever see, ever happens to me my whole life. Hit her so hard I knew I must've killed her."

"Where's this guy that was chasing her?"

"He stops when I hit her, and he's stunned, standing there on the slope. When I get out of the car, he turns and runs back to the trees, into the trees, and I realize I gotta try to nail the bastard, so I go after him, but he knows the woods around there and I don't. He's gone by the time I make it up the slope and into the trees. I go in after him, ten yards, maybe twenty, along this deer trail, but then the trail branches off, becomes three paths, and he could've followed any of them, no way for me to know which. With the storm, the light was bad, and in the woods it's like dusk. With the rain and the wind, I can't hear him running, can't follow him by sound. So I go back to the road, and she's dead, just like I knew she'd be." P.J. shudders at the memory and closes his eyes. He presses his forehead to Joey's. "Oh, Jesus, it was terrible, Joey, it was terrible what the car did to her and what he'd done to her before I ever came along. I was sick, threw up in the road, puked my guts out."

"What's she doing in the trunk?"

"I had the tarp. I couldn't leave her there."

"You should've gone for the sheriff."

"I couldn't leave her there alone on the road. I was scared, Joey, confused and scared. Even your big brother can get scared." P.J. raises his head from Joey's, lets go of him, gives him a little space for the first time. Looking worriedly toward the house, P.J. says, "Dad's at the window, watching us. We stand here like this much longer, he's going to come out to see what's wrong."

"So maybe you couldn't leave her there on the road, but after you put her in the trunk and came back to town, why didn't you go to the sheriff's office?"

"I'll explain it all, tell you the whole thing," P.J. promises. "Let's just get in the car. It looks strange, us standing here in the rain so long. We get in the car, turn on the engine, the radio, then he'll think we're just having a private chat, a brother thing."

He puts one suitcase in the trunk with the dead woman. Then the other. He slams the trunk lid.

Joey can't stop shaking. He wants to run. Not to the house. Into the night. He wants to sprint into the night, through Asherville and across the whole county, on to places he's never been, to towns where no one knows him, on and on into the night. But he loves P.J., and P.J. has always been there for him, so he's obligated at least to listen. And maybe it'll all make sense. Maybe it isn't as bad as it looks. Maybe there's hope for a good brother who will take the time to listen. He's only being asked for time, to listen.

P.J. locks the trunk and takes the keys out of it. He puts his hand against the back of Joey's neck and squeezes lightly, partly as a gesture of affection, partly to urge him to move. "Come on, kid. Let me tell you about it, all about it, and then we'll try to figure out what's the right thing to do. Come on, in the car. It's just me, just me, and I need you, Joey."

So they get in the car.

Joey takes the passenger seat.

The car is cold, and the air is damp.

P.J. starts the engine. Turns on the heater.

The rain begins to fall harder than before, a real downpour, and the world dissolves beyond the windows. The interior of the car seems to shrink around them, humid and intimate. They are in a steel cocoon, waiting to metamorphose into new people and be reborn into an unguessable future.

P.J. tunes the radio until he finds a station that is coming in clear and strong.

Bruce Springsteen. Singing about loss and the difficulty of redemption.

P.J. turns down the volume, but the music and the words are as melancholy when played softly as they are when played louder.

"I figure the sonofabitch must've kidnapped her," P.J. says, "been holding her somewhere in the woods, in a shack or a hole somewhere, raping her, torturing her. You read about that sort of thing. Year by year there's more of it. But who'd ever think it would happen here, in a place like Asherville? She must've gotten away from him somehow when he let his guard down."

"What did he look like?"

"Rough."

"What's that mean?"

"Dangerous. He looked dangerous, a little crazed. He was a big guy, maybe six four, a good two hundred forty pounds. Maybe it's a good thing I didn't catch up with him. He could've creamed me, Joey, that's how big he was. I'd probably be dead now if I'd caught up with him. But I had to try, couldn't just let him run away without trying to bring him down. Big guy with a beard, long greasy hair, wearing dirty jeans, a blue flannel shirt with the tail hanging out."

"You have to take her body to the sheriff, P.J. You have to do that right now."

"I can't, Joey. Don't you see? It's too late now. She's in my trunk. It could look like I was hiding her there until you found her by accident. All sorts of interpretations could be put on it — and none of them good. And I don't have any proof that I saw the guy chasing her."

"They'll find proof. His footprints, for one thing. They'll search the woods out there, find the place where he was keeping her."

P.J. shakes his head. "In this weather, the footprints have all been washed away. And maybe they won't find where he was keeping her, either. There's no guarantee. I just can't take the chance. If they don't turn up any proof, then all they have is me."

"If you didn't kill her, they can't do anything to you."

"Get serious, kid. I wouldn't be the first guy to be railroaded for something he never did."

"That's ridiculous! P.J., everyone around here knows you, likes you. They know what kind of guy you are. They'll all give you the benefit of the doubt."

"People can turn on you for no reason, even people you've been good to all your life. Wait till you've been away at college longer, Joey. Wait until you've lived awhile in a place like New York City. Then you'll see how hateful people can be, how they can turn on you for little or no reason."

"Folks around here will give you the benefit of the doubt," Joey insists.

"You didn't."

Those two words are like a pair of body blows, a one-two punch of truth that leaves Joey deeply shaken and more confused than ever. "God, P.J., if only you'd left her back there on the road."

P.J. slumps in the driver's seat and covers his face with his hands. He's weeping, Joey has never seen him weep before. For a while P.J. can't speak, nor can Joey. When at last P.J. finds his voice, he says, "I couldn't leave her. It was so awful — you didn't see, you can't know how awful. She's not just a body, Joey. She's somebody's daughter, somebody's sister. I thought about what if some other guy had hit her and I was her brother, what would I want him to do in my place. And I'd have wanted him to take care of her, to cover her nakedness. I'd never want him to just leave her there like a piece of meat. Now I see… maybe it was a mistake. But at the time I was rattled. I should have handled it differently. But it's too late now, Joey."

"If you don't take her to the sheriff's office and tell them what happened, then the guy with the beard, the long hair — he's going to get away. Then he'll do to some other girl the same as he did to this one."

P.J. lowers his hands from his face. His eyes are pools of tears. "They'll never catch him anyway, Joey. Don't you see that? He's long gone by now. He knows I saw him, can describe him. He wouldn't have hung around these parts ten minutes. He's out of the county by now, running fast as he can for the state line, headed for someplace as far away from here as he can get. You better believe it. Probably already shaved off his beard, hacked at his long hair, looks totally different now. What little I can tell the cops won't help them find him, and I sure as hell can't testify to anything that would convict the bastard."

"It's still the right thing to do — going to the sheriff."

"Is it? You're not thinking about Mom and Dad. Maybe if you thought about them, it wouldn't be such a right thing."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm telling you, kid, when the cops don't have anybody else to pin this on, they'll try to pin it on me. They'll try real hard. Imagine the stories in the paper. The star football player, the local boy who made good and won a full scholarship to a big-time university, gets caught with a naked woman in the trunk of his car, tortured to death. Think about it, for God's sake! The trial's going to be a circus. Biggest circus in the history of the county, maybe the state."

Joey feels as though he is repeatedly throwing himself against a giant, furiously spinning grindstone. He is being worn down by his brother's logic, by the sheer power of his personality, by his unprecedented tears. The longer Joey struggles to discern the truth, the more confused and anguished he becomes.

P.J. switches off the radio, turns sideways in his seat, leans toward his brother, and his gaze is unwavering. It's just the two of them and the sound of the rain, nothing to distract Joey from the fiercely persuasive rhythms of P.J.'s voice. "Please, please, listen to me, kid. Please, for Mom's sake, for Dad's, think hard about this and don't ruin their lives just because you can't grow up and shake loose of some altar-boy idea of what's right and wrong. I didn't hurt this girl in the trunk, so why should I risk my whole future to prove it? And suppose I come out all right, the jury does the right thing and finds me innocent. Even then there'll be people around here, lots of people, who'll continue to believe I did it, believe I killed her. All right, I'm young and educated, so I get out of here, go anywhere, start a new life where no one knows that I was once tried for murder. But Mom and Dad are middle-aged and dirt poor, and what they have now is pretty much all they're ever going to have. They don't have the resources to pull up stakes and move. They don't have the options that you and I have, and they never will. This four-room shack they call a house — it isn't much, but it's a roof over their heads. They almost don't have a pot to piss in, but at least they've always had a lot of friends, neighbors they care about and who care about them. But that'll change even if I'm cleared in a courtroom." The arguments rolled from him, a persuasive tide of words. "The suspicion is going to come between them and their friends. They'll be aware of the whispering… the unceasing gossip. They won't be able to move away, because they won't be able to sell this dump, and even if they could sell it, they don't have any equity to speak of. So here they'll stay, trapped, gradually withdrawing from friends and neighbors, more and more isolated. How can we let that happen, Joey? How can we let their lives be ruined when I'm innocent in the first place? Jesus, kid, okay, I made a mistake not leaving her back there and not taking her to the cops after I wrapped her up and put her in the trunk, so go get a gun and shoot me if you have to, but don't kill Mom and Dad. Because that's what you'll be doing, Joey. You'll be killing them. Slowly."

Joey cannot speak.

"It's so easy to destroy them, me. But it's even easier to do the right thing, Joey, even easier just to believe."

Pressure. Crushing pressure. Joey might as well be in a deep-sea submersible instead of a car, at the bottom of a trench four miles under the ocean. Thousands upon thousands of pounds of pressure per square inch. Testing the integrity of the car. Bearing down on him until he feels as though he will implode.

At last, when he finds his voice, it sounds younger than his years and dismayingly equivocal: "I don't know, P.J. I don't know."

"You hold my life in your hands, Joey."

"I'm all mixed up."

"Mom and Dad. In your hands."

"But she's dead, P.J. A girl is dead."

"That's right. Dead. And we're alive."

"But… what will you do with the body?"

When he hears himself ask that question, Joey knows that P.J. has won. He feels suddenly weak, as if he is a small child again, and he is ashamed of his weakness. Bitter remorse floods him, as corrosively painful as an acid, and he can deal with the agony only by shutting down a part of his mind, switching off his emotions. A grayness, like a fall of ashes from a great fire, sifts down through his soul.

P.J. says, "Easy. I could dump the body somewhere it'll never be found."

"You can't do that to her family. They can't spend the rest of their lives

wondering what happened to her. They won't ever have any hope of peace if they think she's… somewhere in pain, lost."

"You're right. Okay. I'm not myself. Obviously, I should leave her where she can be found."

The internal grayness — sifting, sifting — gradually anesthetizes Joey. Minute by minute he feels less, thinks less. This strange detachment is vaguely disturbing on one level, but it is also a great blessing, and he embraces it.

Aware of a new flatness in his voice, Joey says, "But then the cops might find your fingerprints on the tarp. Or find something else, like some of your hair. Lots of ways they might connect you to her."

"Don't worry about fingerprints. There aren't any to find. I've been careful. There's no other evidence either, none, no connections except…"

Joey waits with bleak resignation for his brother — his only and much loved brother — to finish that thought, because he senses that it will be the worst thing with which he has to deal, the hardest thing he will have to accept, other than the discovery of the brutalized body itself.

"… except I knew her," says P.J.

"You knew her?"

"I dated her."

"When?" Joey asks numbly, but he is almost beyond caring. Soon the deepening grayness in him will soften all the sharp edges of his curiosity and his conscience.

"My senior year in high school."

"What's her name?"

"A girl from Coal Valley. You didn't know her."

The rain seems as if it might never end, and Joey has no doubt that the night will go on forever.

P.J. says, "I only dated her twice. We didn't hit it off. But you can see, Joey, how this will look to the cops. I take her body to the sheriff, they find out I knew her… they'll use that against me. It'll be that much harder to prove I'm innocent, that much worse for Mom and Dad and all of us. I'm between a rock and hard place, Joey."

"Yes."

"You see what I mean."

"Yes."

"You see how it is."

"Yes."

"I love you, little brother."

"I know."

"I was sure you'd be there for me when it counted."

"All right."

Deep grayness.

Soothing grayness.

"You and me, kid. Nothing in the world is stronger than you and me if we stick together. We have this bond, brothers, and it's stronger than steel. You know? Stronger than anything. It's the most important thing in the world to me — what we have together, how we've always hung in there, brothers."

They sit in silence for a while.

Beyond the streaming windows of the car, the mountain darkness is deeper than it has ever been before, as if the highest ridges have tilted toward one another, fusing together, blocking out the narrow band of sky and any hope of stars, as if he and P.J. and Mom and Dad now exist in a stone vault without doors or windows.

"You've got to be getting back to college soon," P.J. says. "You've got a long drive tonight."

"Yeah."

"I've got a long one too."

Joey nods.

"You'll have to come visit me in New York."

Joey nods.

"The Big Apple," P.J. says.

"Yeah."

"We'll have some fun."

"Yeah."

"Here, I want you to have this," P.J. says, taking Joey's hand, trying to push something into it.

"What?"

"A little extra spending money."

"I don't want it," Joey says, trying to pull away.

P.J. grips his hand tightly, forcing a wad of bills between his reluctant fingers. "No, I want you to have it. I know how it is in college, you can always use a little extra."

Joey finally wrenches away without accepting the bills.

P.J. is relentless. He tries to shove the money into Joey's coat pocket. "Come on, kid, it's only thirty bucks, it's not a fortune, it's nothing. Humor me, let me play the big shot. I never get to do anything for you, it'll make me feel good."

Resistance is so difficult and seems so pointless — only thirty dollars, an insignificant sum that Joey finally lets his brother put the money in his pocket. He is worn out. He hasn't the energy to resist.

P.J. pats him on the shoulder affectionately. "Better go inside, get you packed up and off to school."

They return to the house.

Their folks are curious.

Dad says, "Hey, did I raise a couple of sons who're too dumb to come in out of the rain?"

Putting an arm around Joey's shoulders, P.J. says, "Just some brother talk, Dad. Big-brother-little-brother stuff. Meaning of life, all that."

With a smile, Mom teasingly says, "Deep, dark secrets."

Joey's love for her at the moment is so intense, so powerful, that the force of it almost drives him to his knees.

In desperation, he retreats deeper into the internal grayness, and all the bright hurts of the world are dimmed, all the sharpness dulled.

He packs quickly and leaves a few minutes before P.J. Of all the goodbye hugs that he receives, the one from his brother is the most all-encompassing, the most fierce.

A couple of miles outside of Asherville, he becomes aware of a car closing rapidly behind him. By the time he reaches the stop sign at the intersection of the county route and Coal Valley Road, the other vehicle has caught up with him. The driver doesn't stop behind Joey but swings around him, casting up great sheets of dirty water, and takes the turn onto Coal Valley Road at too high a speed. When the tire-thrown water washes off the windshield, Joey sees that the car has stopped after traveling a hundred yards onto the other highway

He knows it is P.J.

Waiting.

It isn't too late.

There is still world enough, and time.

Everything hinges on making a left turn.

That is the route he had intended to take anyway.

Just turn left, as planned, and do what must be done.

Red taillights, beacons in the dismal rain. Waiting.

Joey drives through the intersection, straight ahead, passing the turnoff to Coal Valley, taking the county route all the way to the interstate.

And on the interstate, although he still invites the devil of detachment into his heart, he can't prevent himself from recalling certain things that P.J. said, statements that have a more profound meaning now than they'd had earlier: "It's so easy to destroy me, Joey… but… even easier just to believe." As if truth were not an objective view of the facts, as if it could be whatever a person chose to believe. And: "Don't worry about fingerprints. There aren't any to be found. I've been careful." Caution implied intent. A frightened, confused, innocent man wasn't rational enough to be cautious; he didn't take steps to ensure that he'd eradicated all the evidence linking him to a crime.

Had there been any bearded man with greasy hair — or had that been a Charles Manson-inspired convenience? If he'd hit the woman up on Pine Ridge, hit her hard enough to kill her instantly, why wasn't his car damaged?

Southbound in the night, Joey becomes increasingly distraught, and he drives faster, faster, faster, as though he believes that he can outrun all the facts and their dark implications. Then he finds the jar, loses control of the Mustang, spins out, crashes…

… and finds himself standing by the guardrail, staring out at a field full of knee-high grass and taller weeds, not quite sure what he's doing there. Wind howling down the interstate with a sound like legions of phantom trucks hauling strange cargo.

Sleet stings his face, his hands.

Blood. A cut above his right eye.

A head injury. He touches the wound, and a brightness spirals behind his eyes, brief hot fireworks of pain.

A head injury, even one as small as this, provides infinite possibilities, not the least of which is amnesia. Memory can be a curse and a guarantee against happiness. On the other hand, forgetfulness can be a blessing, and it can even be mistaken for that most admirable of all virtues — forgiveness.

He returns to the car. He drives to the nearest hospital to have his bleeding wound stitched.

He is going to be all right.

He is going to be all right.

At college again, he attends classes for two days, but he finds no value in following the narrow highways of formal education. He is a natural autodidact anyway and will never find a teacher as demanding of him as he is of himself. Besides, if he is going to be a writer, a novelist, then he needs to acquire a fund of real-world experiences from which to draw on for the creation of his art. The stultifying atmosphere of classrooms and the outdated wisdom of textbooks will only inhibit development of his talent and stifle his creativity. He needs to venture far and wide, leave academia behind, and plunge into the turbulent river of life.

He packs his things and leaves college forever. Two days later, somewhere in Ohio, he sells the damaged Mustang to a used-car dealer, and thereafter he hitchhikes west.

Ten days after leaving college, from a desert truck stop in Utah, he drops a postcard to his parents, explaining his decision to begin the experience-gathering process that will give him the material he needs to be a writer. He tells them that they should not worry about him, that he knows what he's doing, that he'll keep in touch.

He's going to be all right. He's going to be all right.

"Of course," Joey said, still kneeling beside the dead woman in the deconsecrated church, "I was never all right again."

The rain on the roof was a mournful sound, like a dirge for her, the doubly dead, in that she died so young.

Joey said, "I drifted from place to place, job to job. Fell out of touch with everyone… even with the dream of becoming a writer. I was too busy for dreams. Too busy playing the game of amnesia. Didn't dare see Mom and Dad… and risk coming apart, spilling the truth."

Turning away from the deserted nave over which she had been keeping watch, returning to his side, Celeste said, "Maybe you're being too hard on yourself. Maybe the amnesia wasn't just self-delusion. The head injury could explain it."

"I wish I was able to believe that," Joey said. "But the truth is objective, not just what we'd like to make it."

"Two things I don't understand."

"If there're only two, then you're way ahead of me.'

"In the car with P.J. that night—"

"Tonight. It was twenty years ago… but also just tonight."

"— he'd already convinced you to believe him, or at least to go along and get along. Then, after he had you in the palm of his hand, he told you he knew the dead girl. Why would he make a revelation like that when he'd already won? Why would he risk raising your suspicions again and losing you?"

"You had to know P.J. well to understand. There was always this… dangerous quality about him. Not recklessness, not anything that anyone found truly scary in any way. Just the opposite. It added to his allure. It was a wonderful, romantic sort of dangerousness, a thing that people admired. He liked to take chances. It was most obvious on the football field. His maneuvers were often so bold and unorthodox — but they worked."

"They always said he liked to play on the edge."

"Yeah. And he enjoyed driving fast, really fast — but he could handle a car about as well as anyone in the Indy 500, never had an accident or traffic ticket. In a poker game, he'd bet everything he had on a single hand, even a bad one if the timing felt right to him — and he nearly always won. You can live dangerously, almost to any extreme, and as long as you win, as long as the risks you take pay off — then people admire you for it."

Standing over him, she put her hand on his shoulder. "I guess that also explains the other thing I didn't understand."

"The jar in the glove box," he guessed.

"Yeah. I'm assuming he put it there while you were packing your bags to go back to college."

"He must've cut out her eyes earlier in the day, kept them as a memento, for God's sake. I'm sure he thought it would be funny to put them in my car and let me find them later. Test the strength of our bond."

"After he'd convinced you he was innocent, persuaded you to let him dispose of the body, he was crazy ever to let you see the eyes — let alone give them to you."

"He couldn't resist the thrill. The danger. Walking that thin line along the edge of disaster. And you see — he pulled it off again. He got away with it. I let him win."

"He acts like he thinks he's blessed."

"Maybe he is," Joey said.

"By what god?"

"There's no god involved."

Celeste stepped past him onto the altar platform, moved to the far side of the dead woman, pocketed the screwdriver and flashlight, and knelt. Facing him across the body, she said, "We have to look at her face."

Joey grimaced. "Why?"

"P.J. didn't tell you her name, but he said she's from here in Coal Valley. I probably know her."

"That'll make it even harder on you."

"There's no choice but to look, Joey," she persisted. "If we know who she is, we might have a clue about what he's up to, where he's gone."

They found it necessary to roll the body on its side to pull free a loose end of the plastic tarp. They eased the dead woman onto her back again before uncovering her face.

A thick fall of blood-spotted blond hair mercifully veiled her ravaged features.

With one hand Celeste carefully pushed the hair aside with a tenderness that Joey found deeply touching. Simultaneously, with her other hand, she crossed herself and said, "In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, amen."

Joey tilted his head back and stared at the sanctuary ceiling, not because he hoped to get a glimpse of the Trinity, whose names she had intoned, but because he couldn't bear to look into the empty sockets.

"There's a gag in her mouth," Celeste told him. "One of those things you wash a car with — chamois. I think… yes, her ankles are tied with wire. She wasn't running from any crazed mountain man."

Joey shuddered.

"Her name's Beverly Korshak," Celeste said. "She was a few years older than me. A nice girl. Friendly. She still lived with her folks, but they sold out to the government here and moved into a house in Asherville last month. Beverly had a secretarial job there, at the electric-company office. Her folks are good friends with my folks. Known them a long, long time. Phil and Sylvie Korshak. This is going to be hard on them, real hard."

Joey still stared at the ceiling. "P.J. must've seen her in Asherville earlier today. Stopped to chat her up. She wouldn't have hesitated to get in the car with apparently."

"Let's cover her," Celeste said.

"You do it."

He wasn't squeamish about what her eyeless face might look like. He was afraid, instead, that in her empty sockets he would somehow be able to see her blue eyes, still intact, as they had been in the last moments of her terrible agony, when she had screamed for help through the wadded rag in her mouth and had known that no savior would answer her pleas.

The plastic rustled.

"You amaze me," he said.

"Why?"

"Your strength."

"I'm here to help you, that's all."

"I thought I was here to help you."

"Maybe it's both ways."

The rustling stopped.

"Okay," Celeste assured him.

He lowered his head and saw what he first thought was blood on the floor of the altar platform. It had been revealed when they shifted the position of the corpse.

On second look, however, Joey realized that it was not blood but paint from a spray can. Someone had written the number 1 and drawn a circle around it.

"You see this?" he asked Celeste, as she rose to her feet on the other side of the dead woman.

"Yeah. Something to do with the demolition plans."

"I don't think so."

"Sure. Must be. Or maybe just kids vandalizing the place. They painted more of them back there," she said, gesturing in the general direction of the nave.

He got up, turned, and frowned at the dimly lighted church. "Where?"

"The first row of pews," she said.

Against the dark wood backs of the benches, the red paint was difficult to read from a distance.

After picking up the crowbar, Joey swung his legs over the presbytery balustrade, dropped into the three-sided choir enclosure, and went to the sanctuary railing.

He heard Celeste following him, but by way of the ambulatory.

On the front pew to the left of the center aisle, a series of sequential numbers, circled in red, had been painted side by side. They were spaced approximately as people would have been if any had been sitting there. Farthest to the left was the number 2, and the last number, nearest the center aisle, was 6.

Joey felt as though spiders were crawling on the back of his neck, but his hand found none there.

On the pew to the right of the center aisle, the red numbers continued in sequence—7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12—to the far side of the church.

"Twelve," he brooded.

Joining him at the sanctuary railing, Celeste said softly, "What's wrong?"

"The woman on the altar…"

"Beverly."

He stared intently at the red numbers on the pews, which now seemed as radiant as signs of the Apocalypse.

"Joey? What about her? What is it?"

Joey was still puzzling it out, standing in the shadow of truth but not quite able to see the whole icy structure of it. "He painted the number one and then put her on top of it."

"P.J. did?"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

A hard blast of wind battered the old church, and a draft swept through the nave. The faintly lingering scent of stale incense and the stronger smell of mildew were swept away, and the draft brought with it the stink of sulfur.

Joey said, "Do you have any brothers or sisters?"

Clearly puzzled by the question, she shook her head. "No."

"Does anyone else live with you and your folks, like maybe a grandparent, anyone?"

"No. Just the three of us."

"Beverly's one of twelve."

"Twelve what?"

He pointed at Celeste, and his hand shook. "Then your family — two, three, four. Who else still lives in Coal Valley?"

"The Dolans."

"How many of them?"

"Five in their family."

"Who else?"

"John and Beth Bimmer. John's mother, Hannah, lives with them."

"Three. Three Bimmers, five Dolans, plus you and your folks. Eleven. Plus her, there on the altar." With a sweep of his hand, he indicated the numbers on the pews. "Twelve."

"Oh, God."

"I don't need any psychic flash to see where he's going with this one. The number twelve must appeal to him for the obvious reason. Twelve apostles, all dead and lined up in a deconsecrated church. All of them paying silent homage not to God but to the thirteenth apostle. That's how P.J. sees himself, I think — as the thirteenth apostle, Judas. The Betrayer."

Still holding the crowbar, he pushed open the sacristy gate and returned to the nave.

He touched one of the numbers on the left-hand pew. In places, the paint was still tacky.

"Judas. Betraying his family," Joey said, "betraying the faith he was raised in, with reverence for nothing, loyal to nothing, to no one. Fearing nothing, not even God. Walking the most dangerous line of them all, taking the biggest imaginable risk to get the greatest of all thrills: risking his soul for a… for a dance along the edge of damnation."

Celeste moved close to Joey, pressed against his side, needing the comfort of contact. "He's setting up… some sort of a symbolic tableau?"

"With corpses," Joey said. "He intends to kill everyone who still lives in Coal Valley before the night is through and bring their bodies here."

She paled. "Did that come to pass?"

He didn't understand. "Come to pass?"

"In the future that you've already lived — were all the people in Coal Valley killed?"

With a shock, Joey realized that he didn't know the answer to her question.

"After that night, I pretty much stopped reading newspapers, news magazines. Avoided TV news. Changed stations on the radio every time a news report came on. Told myself that I was burnt out on news, that it was all just airplane crashes and floods and fires and earthquakes. But what it really must have been… I didn't want to read about or hear about any women being mutilated, murdered. Didn't want to risk some detail of a crime — eyes cut out, anything like that — making a subconscious connection for me and maybe blowing away my 'amnesia.'

"So for all you know — it happened. For all you know — they found twelve dead people in this church, lined up on the front pews, one of them on the altar platform."

"If it did come to pass — if that's what they found — no one ever nailed P.J. for it. Because in my future, he's still on the loose."

"Jesus. Mom and Dad." She pushed away from him and ran down the center aisle toward the back of the nave.

He rushed after her, through the narthex, through the open front doors, into the sleety night.

She slipped on the icy walkway, fell to one knee, scrambled up, and hurried on, rounding the car to the passenger side.

As he reached the driver's door of the Mustang, Joey heard a rumble that first seemed to be thunder — but then he realized that the sound was coming from beneath him, from under the street.

Celeste looked worriedly at him across the roof of the car. "Subsidence."

The rumble built, the street trembled as though a freight train were passing through a tunnel under them, and then both the shaking and the ominous sound faded away.

A section of a burning mine tunnel had collapsed.

Glancing around them, seeing no disturbance of the ground, Joey said, "Where?"

"Must be somewhere else in town. Come on, come on, hurry," she urged, getting into the car.

Behind the wheel, starting the engine, afraid that a sudden fissure in the street might swallow the Mustang and drop them into fire, Joey said, "Subsidence, huh?"

"I've never felt it that bad. Could be right under us but very deep, so far down that it didn't affect the surface."

"Yet."

EVEN THOUGH THE TIRES HAD WINTER TREAD, THEY SPUN USELESSLY A couple of times on the way to Celeste's place, but Joey concluded the short trip without sliding into anything. The Baker house was white with green trim and had two dormer windows on the second floor.

He and Celeste ran clumsily across the lawn to the front-porch steps, avoiding the walkway, which was far more treacherous than the frozen grass.

Lights glowed throughout the downstairs, glittering in laces of ice that filigreed some of the windows. The porch lamp was on as well.

They should have entered with caution, because P.J. might have gotten there ahead of them. They had no way of knowing which of the three families he intended to visit first.

But Celeste was in a panic about her folks, so she unlocked the door and plunged heedlessly into the short front hall, calling out to them as she entered. "Mom! Daddy! Where are you? Mom!"

No one answered.

Aware that any attempt to restrain the girl would prove futile, brandishing the crowbar at every shadow and imagined movement, Joey followed close behind her as she burst through doorways and flung open those doors that were closed, shouting for her mother and father with increasing terror. Four rooms downstairs and four up. One and a half bathrooms. The place wasn't a mansion by any definition, but it was better than any home that Joey had ever known, and everywhere there were books.

Celeste checked her own bedroom last, but her parents weren't there, either. "He's got them," she said frantically.

"No. I don't think so. Look around you — there aren't any signs of violence here no indications of a struggle. And I don't think they would have gone out with him anywhere willingly, not in this weather."

"Then where are they?"

"If they'd had to go somewhere unexpectedly, would they leave a note for you?"

Without answering, she spun around, dashed into the hall, and descended the stairs two at a time to the ground floor.

Joey caught up with her in the kitchen, where she was reading a message that was pinned to a corkboard beside the refrigerator.

Celeste,

Bev didn't come home from Mass this morning.

No one knows where she is. The sheriff is

looking for her. We've gone over to Asherville

to sit with Phil and Sylvie. They're half out

of their minds with worry. I'm sure it's all

going to turn out fine. Whatever happens,

we'll be home before midnight. Hope you had

a nice time at Linda's place. Keep the doors

locked. Don't worry. Bev will turn up. God

won't let anything happen to her. Love, Mom

Turning from the corkboard, Celeste glanced at the wall clock — only 9:02—and said, "Thank God, he can't get his hands on them."

"Hands." Joey suddenly remembered. "Let me see your hands."

She held them out to him.

The previously frightful stigmata in her palms had faded to vague bruises.

"We must be making right decisions," he said with a shiver of relief. "We're changing fate — your fate, at least. We've just got to keep on keeping on."

When he looked up from her hands to her face, he saw her eyes widen at the sight of something over his shoulder. Heart leaping, he swung toward the danger, raising the iron crowbar.

"No," she said, "just the telephone." She stepped to the wall phone. "We can call for help. The sheriff's office. Let them know where they can find Bev, get them looking for P.J."

The telephone was an old-fashioned rotary model. Joey hadn't seen one of those in a long time. Curiously, more than anything else, it convinced him that he was, indeed, twenty years in the past.

Celeste dialed the operator, then jiggled the cradle in which the handset had been hanging. "No dial tone."

"All this wind, ice — the lines might be down."

"No. It's him. He cut the lines."

Joey knew that she was right.

She slammed down the phone and headed out of the kitchen. "Come on. We can do better than the crowbar."

In the den, she went to the oak desk and took the gun-cabinet key from the center drawer.

Two walls were lined with books. Running one hand over their brightly colored spines, Joey said, "Just tonight, I finally realized… when P.J. conned me into letting him… letting him get away with murder, he stole my future."

Opening the glass door of the gun cabinet, she said, "What do you mean?"

"I wanted to be a writer. That's all I ever wanted to be. But what a novelist is always trying to do… if he's any good, he's trying to get at the truth of things. How could I hope to get at the truth of things, be a writer, when I couldn't even face up to the truth about my brother? He left me with nowhere to go, no future. And he became the writer."

She removed a shotgun from the rack in the cabinet and put it on the desk. "Remington. Twenty-gauge. Pump action. Nice gun. So tell me something — how could he be a writer if it's supposed to be all about dealing with truth? He's only about lies and deceit. Is he a good writer?"

"Everyone says he is."

She took another shotgun from the cabinet and put it on the desk beside the first weapon. "Remington too. My dad's partial to the brand. Twelve-gauge. Pretty walnut stock, isn't it? I didn't ask you what everyone else says. What do you think? Is he any good as a novelist — in this future of yours?"

"He's successful."

"So what. Doesn't necessarily mean he's good."

"He's won a lot of awards, and I've always pretended to think he's good. But… I've really never felt he was much good at all."

Crouching, pulling open a drawer in the bottom of the cabinet, quickly pawing through the contents, she said, "So tonight you take your future back — and you will be good."

In one corner stood a gray metal box the size of a briefcase. It was ticking.

"What's that thing in the corner?" Joey asked.

"It monitors carbon monoxide and other toxic gases seeping up from the mine fires. There's one in the basement. This room isn't over the basement, it's an add-on, so it has a monitor of its own."

"An alarm goes off?"

"Yeah, if there's too many fumes." In the drawer she found two boxes of ammunition. She put them on the desk. "Every house in Coal Valley was equipped with them years ago."

"It's like living on a bomb."

"Yeah. But with a long, slow fuse."

"Why haven't you moved out?"

"Bureaucrats. Paperwork. Processing delays. If you move out before the government has the papers ready to sign, then they declare the house abandoned, a public danger, and they aren't willing to pay as much for it. You have to live here, take the risk, let it happen at their pace if you want to get a halfway fair price."

Opening one of the boxes of shells as Celeste opened the other, Joey said, "You know how to use these guns?"

"I've been going skeet-shooting and hunting with my dad since I was thirteen."

"You don't seem like a hunter to me," he said as he loaded the 20-gauge.

"Never killed anything. Always aim to miss."

"Your dad never noticed that?"

"Funny thing is — whether it's shotguns or rifles, whether it's small game or deer, he always aims to miss too. Though he doesn't think I know it."

"Then what's the point?"

As she finished loading the 12-gauge, she smiled with affection at the thought of her father. "He likes just being in the woods, walking in the woods on a crisp morning, the clean smell of the pines — and having some private time with me. He's never said, but I've always sensed he would've liked a son. Mom had complications with me, couldn't carry another baby. So I've always tried to give Dad a little of the son stuff. He thinks I'm a real tomboy."

"You're amazing," he said.

Hastily dropping spare shells into the various pockets of her black raincoat, she said, "I'm only what I'm here to be."

The strangeness of that statement harked back to other enigmatic things that she had said earlier in the night. He met her eyes, and once again he saw those mysterious depths, which seemed too profound for her years, too deep to be plumbed. She was the most interesting girl that he had ever known, and he hoped that she saw something appealing in his eyes.