Strange Highways

As Joey finished stuffing spare shells into the pockets of his sheepskin-lined denim jacket, Celeste said, "Do you think Beverly is the first?"

"The first?"

"That he's ever killed."

"I hope so… but I don't know."

"I think there've been others," she said solemnly.

"After that night, after Beverly, when I let him go… I know there must've been others. That's why he was a gypsy. Poet of the highway, my ass. He liked the life of a drifter 'cause he could keep moving through one police jurisdiction after another. Hell, I never realized it before, didn't want to realize it, but it's the classic sociopathic pattern

the loner on the road, the outsider, a stranger everywhere he goes, the next thing to invisible. Easier for a man like that to get caught if the bodies keep piling up in the same place. P.J.'s brilliance was to make a profession out of drifting, to become rich and famous for it, to have the unstructured lifestyle of a rootless serial killer but with the perfect cover — a respectable occupation that all but required rootlessness, and a reputation for writing uplifting stories about love and courage and compassion."

"But all that's in the future, as far as I'm concerned," Celeste said. "Maybe my future, our future. Or maybe only one possible future. I don't know how that works — or that it'll even help to think about it."

Joey had a bitter taste in his mouth — as though biting into a hard truth could produce a flavor as acrid as chewing on dry aspirin. "Whether it was one possible future or the only future, I still have to carry some of the guilt for all those he killed after Beverly, because could've put an end to it that night."

"Which is why you're here now, tonight, with me. To undo it all, Not just to save me but everyone who came after… and to save yourself." She picked up the 12-gauge and chambered a shell. "But what I meant was that I think he's killed before Beverly. He was just too cool with you, Joey, too smooth with that story about her running in front of his car up on Pine Ridge. If she'd been his first, he'd have been easily rattled. When you opened that trunk and found her, he'd have been more shaken. The way he handled you — he's used to carting dead women around in his car, looking for a safe place to dump them. He's had a lot of time to think about what he'd do if anyone ever caught him with a body before he was able to dispose of it."

Joey suspected that she was right about this, just as she was right about the weather not being responsible for the dead telephone.

No wonder he had reacted with blind panic in Henry Kadinska's office when the attorney revealed the terms of his father's last will and testament. The money in the estate had originally come from P.J. It was blood money in more ways than one, as tainted as Judas's thirty pieces of silver. Cash accepted from the devil himself could have been no less clean.

He chambered a shell in his shotgun. "Let's go."

OUTSIDE, THE SLEET STORM HAD PASSED, AND RAIN WAS FALLING ONCE more. The brittle ice on the sidewalks and in the streets was swiftly melting into slush.

Joey had been wet and cold all night. In fact, he had lived in a perpetual chill for twenty years. He was used to it.

Halfway along the front walk, he saw that the hood was standing open on the Mustang. By the time he got to the car, Celeste was shining the flashlight into the engine compartment. The distributor cap was gone.

"P.J.," Joey said. "Having his fun."

"Fun."

"To him it's all fun."

"I think he's watching us right now."

Joey surveyed the nearby abandoned houses, the wind-stirred trees between them: south to the end of the next block where the street terminated and the forested hills began, north one block to the main drag through town.

"He's right here somewhere," she said uneasily.

Joey agreed, but in the tumult of wind and rain, his brother's presence was even less easily detected than a reluctant spirit at a seance.

"Okay," he said, "so we're on foot. No big deal. It's a small town anyway. Who's closer — the Dolans or the Bimmers?"

"John and Beth Bimmer."

"And his mother."

She nodded. "Hannah. Sweet old lady."

"Let's hope we're not too late," Joey said.

"P.J. can't have had time to come here from the church ahead of us, cut the phone line, wait around to disable the car, and still go after anyone."

Nevertheless, they hurried through the slush in the street. On that treacherous pavement, however, they didn't dare to run as fast as they would have liked.

They had gone only half a block when the subterranean rumble began again, markedly louder than before, building swiftly until the ground quivered under them — as though no boats plied the River Styx any more, leaving the transport of all souls to deep-running, clamorous railroads. As before, the noise lasted no more than half a minute, with no catastrophic surface eruption of the seething fires below.

The Bimmers lived on North Avenue, which wasn't half grand enough to be called an avenue. The pavement was severely cracked and buckled as though from a great and incessant pressure below. Even in the gloom, the once-white houses appeared too drab — as if they were not merely in need of a fresh coat of paint but were all heavily mottled with soot. Some of the evergreens were deformed, stunted; others were dead. At least North Avenue was on the north side of town: across Coal Valley Road from the Baker house and one block farther east.

Six-foot-tall vent pipes, spaced about sixty feet on center and encircled by high chain-link safety barriers, lined one side of the street. From those flues, out of realms below, arose gray plumes of smoke like processions of fugitive ghosts, which were torn into rags by the wind and exorcised by the rain, leaving behind only a stink like that of hot tar.

The two-story Bimmer residence was curiously narrow for its lot, built to the compressed horizontal dimensions of a row house in a downtown neighborhood in some industrial city like Altoona or Johnstown. It appeared taller than it actually was — and forbidding.

Lights were on downstairs.

As he and Celeste climbed the porch steps, Joey heard music inside, and a tinny laugh track. Television.

He pulled open the aluminum-and-glass storm door and knocked on the wood door behind it.

In the house, the phantom studio audience laughed uproariously and a lighthearted tinkle of piano music further cued the folks at home that they were supposed to be amused.

After the briefest hesitation, Joey knocked again, harder and longer.

"Hold your horses," someone called from inside.

Relieved, Celeste exhaled explosively. "They're okay."

The man who opened the door — evidently John Bimmer — was about fifty-five, shiny bald on top with a Friar Tuck fringe of hair. His beer belly overhung his pants. The bags under his eyes, his drooping jowls, and his rubbery features made him appear as friendly and comfortable as an old hound dog.

Joey was holding the shotgun down at his side, safely aimed at the porch floor, and Bimmer didn't immediately see it. "You're an impatient young fella, ain't you?" he said affably. Then he spotted Celeste and broke into a wide smile. "Hey, missy, that lemon meringue pie you brought by yesterday was every bit of a first-rate job."

Celeste said, "Mr. Bimmer, we—"

"First rate," he repeated, interrupting her. He was wearing an unbuttoned flannel shirt, a white T-shirt, and tan pants held up by suspenders, and he patted the bulge of his belly to emphasize how good the pie had been. "Why, I even let Beth and Ma take a smell of that beauty before I ate it all myself?"

The night echoed with a hard crack, as if the wind had snapped off a big tree branch somewhere nearby, but it was not a branch and had nothing to do with the wind, because simultaneously with the sound, arterial blood brightened the front of John Bimmer's T-shirt. His engaging smile turned strange as he was half lifted off his feet and thrown backward by the power of the shot.

Joey shoved Celeste through the open doorway and to the living-room floor. He scrambled after her, dropped beside her, rolled onto his back, and kicked the front door shut hard enough to rattle a pair of pictures — John Kennedy, Pope John XXIII — and a bronze crucifix on the wall above the sofa.

Bimmer had been thrown backward with such force that he wasn't even lying in their way, which meant that the caliber of the weapon was big, damn big, a deer rifle, maybe even bigger than that, a lot of punch. Probably hollow-point cartridges too.

In a blue bathrobe and a crown of pink hair curlers, Bimmer's wife rose from an armchair in front of the television, even as the door was slamming shut, stunned into silence but only for an instant. When she saw her husband's vest of blood and the two shotguns, she reached the logical but incorrect conclusion. Screaming, she turned away from them.

"Get down!" Joey shouted, and Celeste cried out, "Beth, stay down!"

Unheeding, in a blind panic, heading toward the back of the house, Beth Bimmer crossed in front of a window. It imploded with an incongruously merry, bell-like ringing of shattering glass. She took a shot in the temple, which snapped her head to the side so hard that it might also have broken her neck, and as the phantom audience on the television laughed uproariously, she crashed to the living-room floor in front of a birdlike elderly woman in a yellow sweatsuit, who was sitting on the sofa.

The older woman had to be Hannah, Bimmer's mother, but she had no time to grieve for her son and daughter-in-law, because two of the next three shots were generous destiny's gifts for her, pumped through the same window but delivered without the merry-bell music of breaking glass, killing her where she sat, as she reached for her hickory cane with one palsied hand, before either Joey or Celeste could even cry out to her.

It was late October of 1975, and the Vietnam War had ended back in April, but Joey felt as if he were in one of those Asian battle zones that had filled the television news when he was growing up. The sudden, senseless death might have shocked him into immobility and fatal indecision — except that he was actually a forty-year-old man in a twenty-year-old body, and those additional twenty years of experience had been gained during a time when sudden, senseless violence had grown commonplace. As a product of the latter decades of the millennium, he could cope reasonably well in the midst of gunfire and random slaughter.

The living room was filled with light, making easy targets of him and Celeste, so he rolled onto his side and fired the 20-gauge Remington at a brass floor lamp with a fringed shade. The roar of the shotgun in that confined space was deafening, but he pumped a fresh shell into the breech and fired at one of the end-table lamps flanking the sofa, then pumped it again and took out the lamp on the other end table.

Understanding Joey's intent, Celeste fired one round into the television screen, silencing the sitcom. The burnt-powder stench of gunfire was immediately overlaid with the hot, astringent odor of ruined electronics.

"Stay low, under the windows," Joey instructed. In the ear-stunning aftermath of the shotgun fire, he sounded as though he were speaking through a woolen winter scarf, but even though his voice was muffled, he could hear the tremor of fear in it. He was a child of the premillennium follies, steeled to the savagery of his fellow human beings, but he nevertheless felt as though he might wet his pants. "Follow the walls to a doorway, any doorway, just get out of the room."

Crawling frantically along the floor in the darkness, dragging the shotgun by its strap, Joey wondered what role he was supposed to serve in his brother's nightmare tableau. If Celeste's parents returned to town and stepped into P.J.'s gun sights, locals would provide all twelve bodies needed for the creation of his demented bit of theater. But he must have a use in mind for Joey too. After all, he had raced to catch up with the Mustang on the county route, swung onto Coal Valley Road, and paused tauntingly, daring Joey to follow. Although he perpetrated atrocities that any normal person would call acts of madness, P.J. didn't otherwise behave irrationally. Even within his homicidal fantasies, he operated with an appreciation for structure and purpose, however grotesque they might be.

In the Bimmers' kitchen, the light in the oven clock cast a soft green glow that barely illuminated the room — but even that was bright enough to make most of the details visible and to keep Joey close to the floor.

Two windows. One over the sink. The other beside the breakfast table. Both had side-panel curtains and, better yet, vinyl roll-up blinds that were drawn halfway down.

Cautiously rising to his feet at the side of the breakfast table, with his back pressed to the wall, he reached out and pulled that blind all the way over the glass.

Breathing hard, both from exertion and fear, he was bizarrely convinced that P.J. had circled the house and was now directly behind him, outside, with only the wall between them. In spite of the wind and rain, maybe P.J. could track him by his loud breathing and would shoot him through the wall to which his back was pressed. The moment passed, and the shot in the spine didn't come, and his terror abated somewhat.

Although he would have preferred that Celeste remain on the floor, below any possible line of fire, she risked a bullet in the arm by drawing the blind at the sink window.

"You okay?" he asked, when they eased back to the floor and met again in the center of the kitchen, staying on their knees in spite of having secured the two windows.

"They're all dead, aren't they?" she whispered bleakly.

"Yeah."

"All three."

"Yeah."

"No chance

"No. Dead."

"I've known them all my life."

"I'm sorry."

"Beth used to baby-sit me when I was little."

The eerie green glow from the oven clock made the Bimmer kitchen shimmer as though it were underwater or had passed through a veil into an unnatural realm outside the flow of real time and ordinary events. But the quality of the light alone could not provide him with blessed detachment and his gut remained knotted with tension; his throat was so constricted that he could barely swallow.

Fumbling spare shells from his pockets, dropping them through his shaky fingers, Joey said softly, "It's my fault."

"No, it's not. He knew where they were, where to find them. He knows who's still left in town and where they live. We didn't lead him here. He'd have come on his own anyway."

The dropped shells rolled away from him as he tried to recover them. His fingers were half numb, and his hands were shaking so badly that he gave up trying to reload until he calmed down.

Joey was surprised that his heart could still beat. It felt like cold iron in his chest.

They listened to the deadly night, alert for the stealthy sound of a door slowly easing open or the telltale clink of broken glass underfoot.

Eventually he said, "Back home, earlier, when I found the body in the trunk of his car, if I'd called the sheriff then and there, none of these people would be dead now."

"You can't blame yourself for that."

"Who the hell else should I blame?" He was instantly ashamed that he had responded so harshly. When he spoke again, his voice was bitter and remorseful, but his anger was directed at himself, not at her. "I knew the right thing to do, and I didn't do it."

"Listen," she said, finding one of his hands in the green gloom, holding it tightly, "that's not what I meant when I said you couldn't blame yourself. Think about it, Joey. Not calling the sheriff — you made that mistake twenty years ago, but you didn't make it tonight because your second chance didn't begin with P.J. at the house today, didn't begin with the finding of the body. It began only when you reached Coal Valley Road. Right?"

"Well…"

"You weren't given a second chance to turn him in to the sheriff earlier."

"But twenty years ago I should've—"

"That's history. Terrible history, and you'll have to live with that part of it. But now all that matters is what happens from here on. Nothing counts except how you chose — and continue to choose — to handle things after you took the right highway tonight."

"Haven't handled them well so far, have I? Three people dead."

"Three people who would've died anyway," she argued, "who probably did die the first time you lived through this night. It's horrible, it's painful, but it looks as if that part of it was meant to be, and there's no changing it."

Sinking deeper into anguish, Joey said, "Then what's the point of being given a second chance if it isn't to save these people?"

"You might be able to save others before the night is through."

"But why not all of them? I'm screwing up again."

"Stop beating yourself up. It's not for you to decide how many people you can save, how much you can change destiny. In fact, maybe the purpose of being given a second chance wasn't to save anyone in Coal Valley."

"Except you."

"Maybe not even me. Maybe I can't be saved either."

Her words left him speechless. She sounded as though she could accept the possibility of her own death with equanimity — while for Joey, the thought of failing her was like a hammer blow to the heart.

She said, "It may turn out that the only thing you can really accomplish tonight is to stop P.J. from going on from here. Stop him from committing twenty more years of murder. Maybe that's the only thing expected of you, Joey. Not saving me. Not saving anyone. Just stopping P.J. from doing even worse than what he'll do tonight. Maybe that's all God wants from you."

"There's no God here. No God in Coal Valley tonight."

She squeezed his hand, digging her fingernails into his flesh. "How can you say that?"

"Go look at the people in the living room."

"That's stupid."

"How can a god of mercy let people die like that?"

"Smarter people than us have tried to answer the same question."

"And can't."

"But that doesn't mean there isn't an answer," she said with rising anger and impatience. "Joey, if God didn't give you the chance to relive this night, then who did?"

"I don't know," he said miserably.

"You think maybe it was Rod Serling, and now you're stuck in the Twilight Zone?" she asked scornfully,

"No, of course not."

"Then who?"

"Maybe it was just… just an anomaly of physics. A random fold in time. An energy wave. Inexplicable and meaningless. I don't know. How the hell could I know?"

"Oh. I see. Just some mechanical breakdown in the great cosmic machinery," she said sarcastically, letting go of his hand.

"Seems to make more sense than God."

"So we're not in the Twilight Zone, huh? Now we're aboard the starship Enterprise with Captain Kirk, assaulted by energy waves, catapulted into time warps."

He didn't reply.

She said, "You remember Star Trek? Anyone still remember it up there in 1995?"

"Remember? Hell, I think maybe it's a bigger industry than General Motors."

"Let's bring a little cool Vulcan logic to the problem, okay? If this amazing thing that happened to you is meaningless and random, then why didn't you get folded back in time to some boring day when you were eight years old and had the puking flu? Or why not to some night a month ago, when you were just sitting in your trailer out in Vegas, half drunk, watching old Road Runner cartoons or something? You think some random anomaly of physics would just by purest chance bring you back to the most important night of your life, this night of all nights, to the very moment it all went wrong beyond any hope of recovery?"

Just listening to her had calmed him, although his spirits had not been lifted. At least he was able to pick up the spilled shells and reload his shotgun.

"Maybe," she said, "you're living this night again not because there's something you have to do, not to save lives and bring down P.J. and be a hero. Maybe you're living this night again only so you'll have one last chance to believe."

"In what?"

"In a world with meaning, in life with some greater purpose."

At times she seemed able to read his mind. More than anything, Joey wanted to believe in something again — as he had when he'd been an altar boy, so many years ago. But he vacillated between hope and despair. He remembered how filled with wonder he'd been a short while ago when he'd realized that he was twenty again, how grateful he had been to something-someone for this second chance. But already it was easier to believe in the Twilight Zone or in a fluke of quantum mechanics than in God.

"Believe," he said. "That's what P.J. wanted me to do. Just believe in him, believe in his innocence, without one shred of proof. And I did. I believed in him. And look where that got me."

"Maybe it wasn't believing in P.J. that ruined your life."

"It sure didn't help," he said sourly.

"Maybe the main problem was that you didn't believe in anything else."

"I was an altar boy once," he said. "But then I grew up. I got an education."

"Having gone to college a little, you've surely heard the word,sophomoric,'" Celeste suggested. "It describes the kind of thinking you're still indulging in."

"You're really wise, huh? You know it all?"

"Nope. I'm not wise at all, not me. But my dad says — admitting you don't know everything is the beginning of wisdom."

"Your dad the jerkwater high-school principal — suddenly he's a famous philosopher?"

"Now you're just being mean," she said.

After a while, he said, "Sorry."

"Don't forget the sign I was given. My blood on your fingertips. How can I not believe? More important, how can you not believe after that? You called it a 'sign' yourself."

"I wasn't thinking. I was all… emotional. When you take time to think about it, apply just a little of that cool Vulcan logic you mentioned—"

"If you think hard enough about anything, you won't be able to believe in it. If you saw a bird fly across the sky — the moment it's out of sight, there's no way to prove it existed. How do you even know Paris exists — have you ever been there?"

"Other people have seen Paris. I believe them."

"Other people have seen God."

"Not the way they've seen Paris."

"There are a lot of ways to see," she said. "And maybe neither your eyes nor a Kodak is the best way."

"How can anyone believe in any god so cruel that he'd let three people die like that, three innocent people?"

"If death isn't permanent," she said without hesitation, "if it's only a transition from one world to the next, then it isn't necessarily cruel."

"It's so easy for you," he said enviously. "So easy just to believe."

"It can be easy for you too."

"No."

"Just accept."

"Not easy for me," he insisted.

"Then why even bother to believe that you're living this night again? Why not write it off as just a silly dream, roll over, go on sleeping, and wait to wake up in the morning?"

He didn't answer. He couldn't.

Although he knew it was pointless to try, he crawled to the wall phone, reached up, and pulled the receiver off the cradle. No dial tone.

"Can't possibly work," Celeste said with an edge of sarcasm.

"Huh?"

"Can't work because you've had time to think about it, and now you realize — there's no way to prove there's anyone else in the world to call. And if there's no way to prove beyond a doubt, right here, right now, that other people exist — then they don't exist. You must have learned the word for that in college. 'Solipsism.' The theory that nothing can be proven except your own awareness, that there is nothing real beyond yourself."

Letting the telephone handset dangle on its springy cord, Joey leaned back against the kitchen cabinet and listened to the wind, to the rain, to the special hush of the dead.

Eventually Celeste said, "I don't think P.J.'s going to come in after us."

Joey had arrived at the same conclusion. P.J. wasn't going to kill them. Not yet. Later. If P.J. had wanted to waste them, he could have nailed them easily when they were on the front porch, standing in the light with their backs to him. Instead, he had carefully placed his first shot in the narrow gap between their heads, taking out John Bimmer with a perfectly placed bullet in the heart.

For his own twisted reasons, P.J. evidently wanted them to bear witness to the murders of everyone in Coal Valley, then waste them. Apparently he intended that Celeste should be the twelfth and final apostle in the freeze-frame drama that he was creating at the church.

And me? Joey wondered. What do you have in mind for me, big brother?

THE BIMMER KITCHEN WAS PURGATORY WITH LINOLEUM FLOORS AND Formica countertops. Joey waited to be propelled from that place either by events or by inspiration. There must be something that he could do to stop P.J.

Nevertheless, merely proceeding to the Dolan house with the intention of preventing those five pending murders would be sheer folly. He and Celeste would only serve as witnesses to the deaths.

Maybe they could slip into the Dolan place without anyone being shot down at the front door or at the windows. Maybe they could even convince the Dolans of the danger and conspire with them to turn the house into a fortress. But then P.J. could easily set a fire to kill them where they hid or to drive them out into the night where he could shoot them down.

If the Dolan house had an attached garage, and if the Dolans could get in their car and make a run for it, P.J. would shoot out the tires as they tried to flee. Then he would kill them with a spray of gunfire while they were helpless in the disabled vehicle.

Joey had never met the Dolan family. At that moment, convincing himself that they actually existed was, in fact, harder than he would have thought. How easy it would be to sit there in the kitchen and do nothing, let the Dolans — if they existed — look out for themselves, and believe only in the bottle-green shadows around him, the faint smell of cinnamon, the strong aroma of fresh coffee warming in the pot, the hard wood against his back, the floor beneath him, and the hum of the refrigerator motor.

Twenty years ago, when he turned his back on the grisly proof of what his brother had done, he had been equally unable to believe in all the victims to come. Without their bloodied faces before him, without their battered bodies piled high, they had been as unreal to him as the citizens of Paris were unreal to a man convinced of the wisdom of solipsism. How many people had P.J. killed in those twenty years following the first passage of this night? Two per year, forty in all? No. Too low. Killing that infrequently would be too little challenge, too little thrill. More than one a month for twenty years? Two hundred fifty victims: tortured, mutilated, dumped along back roads from one end of the country to the other or buried in secret graves? P.J. seemed more than sufficiently energetic to handle that. By refusing to believe in future horrors, Joey had ensured that they would come to pass.

For the first time he was aware of the true size of his burden of responsibility, which was far greater than he wanted to believe. His acquiescence to P.J. on that long-ago night had resulted in a triumph of evil — so enormous that now he was half crushed by the belated recognition of its weight, under which his soul was pinned.

The ultimate consequences of inaction could be greater than the consequences of action.

"He wants us to go to the Dolans' place, so I can see them being murdered," Joey said thickly. "If we don't go right away… we'll be buying them a little time at least."

"We can't just sit here," she said.

"No. Because sooner or later, he'll go kill them anyway."

"Sooner," she predicted.

"While he's still watching us here, waiting for us to come out, we have to do something he's not expecting, something that'll make him curious and keep him close to us, away from the Dolans, something that'll surprise and unsettle him."

"Like what?"

The refrigerator motor. The rain. Coffee, cinnamon. The oven clock: ticking, ticking.

"Joey?" she prodded.

"It's so hard to think of something that might rattle him," he said miserably. "He's so sure of what he's doing, so bold."

"That's because he has something to believe in."

"P.J.? Something to believe in?"

"Himself. The sick creep believes in himself, in his cleverness and charm and intelligence. In his destiny. It's not much in the way of a religion, but he believes in himself with a real passion, which gives him a whole lot more than confidence. It gives him power."

Celeste's words electrified Joey, but at first he didn't quite understand why.

Then, with sudden excitement, he said, "You're right. He does believe in something. But he doesn't believe only in himself. He believes in something else all right. It's clear, isn't it? All the evidence is there, easy to see, but I didn't want to admit it. He believes, he's a true believer, and if we play into that belief, then we might be able to rattle him and get an advantage."

"I'm not following you," Celeste said worriedly.

"I'll explain later. Right now we don't have much time. You have to search the kitchen, see if you can find candles, matches. Get an empty bottle or jar and fill it with water."

Scrambling to his feet but staying in a crouch, he said, "Just find it if you can. I'll have to take the flashlight with me, so open the refrigerator door for more light if you need it. Don't turn on the overhead fluorescents. They're too bright. You'll throw a shadow on one of the blinds just when he's tired of waiting for us and ready to take a shot after all."

As Joey headed toward the open door to the dining room, leaving Celeste alone in the green gloom, she said, "Where're you going?"

"The living room. And upstairs. There's some stuff I need."

"What stuff?"

"You'll see."

In the living room, he used the flashlight judiciously, twice flicking it on and immediately off, to orient himself and avoid the three dead bodies. The second burst of light revealed Beth Bimmer's wide eyes as she stared at something beyond the ceiling of the room, beyond the confines of the house, far above the storm clouds outside, somewhere past the North Star.

To take down the crucifix, he had to climb onto the sofa and stand beside the body of the old woman. The long, affixing nail was driven not simply into plaster or dry wall but into a stud, and the head of it was larger than the brass loop through which it was driven, so he had to work hard to remove the stubborn cross from the wall. As he struggled in the darkness, he was afraid that Hannah's body would tip on its side and slump against his legs, but he managed to pry loose the prize and get down on the floor again without coming into contact with her.

A third flick of the light, a fourth, and he was at the stairs.

The second floor offered three small rooms and a bath, each revealed with a quick sweep of the flashlight.

If P.J. was watching outside, perhaps his curiosity had begun to be pricked by Joey's exploration of the house.

In spite of her advanced years and her cane, Hannah had slept on the second floor, and in her bedroom Joey found what he needed. A shrine to the Holy Mother stood in one corner, on a three-legged table in the shape of a pie slice: a ten-inch-tall ceramic statuette with a built-in three-watt bulb at the base, which cast a fan of light over the Virgin. Also on the table were three small ruby-red glasses containing votive candles — all extinguished.

Using the flashlight, he confirmed that the sheets on the bed were white, and then he pulled them off. He carefully bundled the statuette and other items in the sheets.

He went down to the living room again.

The wind was pushing through the broken window, tossing the drapes. He stood tensely at the foot of the stairs for a moment, until he was certain that, in fact, nothing else was moving at the window besides those streaming panels of fabric.

The dead remained dead, and in spite of the inrushing night air, the room stank like the car trunk in which the tarp-wrapped blonde had been kept.

In the kitchen, the refrigerator door was open a few inches, and by that cold light, Celeste was still searching the cabinets. "Found a half-gallon plastic jug, filled it with water," she said. "Got some matches too, but no candles yet."

"Keep looking," Joey said as he put down the sheet-wrapped articles from Hannah's room.

In addition to the entrance to the dining room and the exit to the back porch, the kitchen contained a third door. He cracked it open. The influx of freezing air, bringing the faint scent of gasoline and motor oil, told him that he'd found the attached garage.

"Be right back," he said.

The flashlight revealed that the only window in the garage was in the back wall and covered with a flap of oilcloth. He switched on the overhead light.

An old but well-maintained Pontiac with a toothy chrome grin stood in the single stall.

Beside a rough workbench was an unlocked cabinet that proved to be full of tools. After choosing the heftiest of three hammers, he searched through boxes of nails until he found the size that he needed.

By the time Joey returned to the kitchen, Celeste had located six candles. Beth Bimmer evidently had bought them to decorate the house or the dining table at Christmas. They were about six inches tall, three to four inches in diameter: three red, three green, all scented with bayberry.

Joey had been hoping for simple, tall, white candles. "These will have to do."

He opened the sack that he'd made by gathering the bed sheets, and he added the candles, matches, hammer, and nails to the items that he had collected earlier.

"What is all this?" she asked.

"We're going to play into his fantasy."

"What fantasy?"

"No time to explain. You'll see. Come on."

She carried her shotgun and the half-gallon jug of water. He carried the makeshift sack in one hand and his shotgun in the other. Thus encumbered, if they were threatened, they wouldn't be able to raise a weapon and fire with any accuracy or quickly enough to save themselves.

Joey was counting on his brother's desire to play games with them for a while yet. P.J. was enjoying their fear, feeding on it.

They left by the front door — boldly, without hesitation. The point was not to give P.J. the slip but to draw his attention and engage his curiosity. Joey's gut was clenched in dread anticipation of a rifle shot — not so much one aimed at him but one that might smash the porcelain beauty of Celeste's face.

They descended the porch steps into the rain, went to the end of the front walk, and turned left. They headed back toward Coal Valley Road.

The series of mine vents along North Avenue, set sixty feet on center, suddenly whooshed like a row of gas-stove burners being ignited all at once. Columns of baleful yellow fire, shot through with tongues of blue, erupted from the top of every pipe along the street.

Celeste cried out in surprise.

Joey dropped the bed-sheet sack, grabbed the shotgun with both hands, spun to the left swung to the right. He was so jumpy that he half thought P.J. was somehow responsible for the spontaneous venting of the fires under the town.

If he was nearby, however, P.J. did not reveal himself.

Fire didn't merely flap like bright banners at the tops of the vent pipes and dissolve in the storm wind. Instead, it shot four or five feet above the iron rims, under considerable pressure, like flames from the nozzles of blowtorches.

The ground didn't rumble, as it had done earlier, but the fierce rush of gases escaping up those metal shafts from far below produced a great roar that vibrated in Joey's bones. Strangely, the sound had a disturbing quality of rage about it, as though it had been produced not by natural forces but by some colossus trapped in the inferno and less pained than infuriated by it.

"What's happening?" he asked, raising his voice though Celeste was close beside him.

"I don't know."

"Ever see anything like this before?"

"No!" she said, looking around in fearful wonder.

As though they were the pipes of a gargantuan carnival calliope, the vents pumped forth a midnight music of roars and growls and huffs and whistles and occasional mad shrieks. Echoes ricocheted off the smoke-mottled walls of the abandoned houses, off windows as dark as blind eyes.

In the backwash of spectral light from the ferocious gushes of fire, pterodactyl silhouettes swooped through the rain-shattered night. Mammoth shadows lurched across North Avenue as if thrown by an army of giants marching through the street one block to the east.

Joey picked up the bundle that he had dropped. With a sense that time was swiftly running out, he said, "Come on. Hurry."

While he and Celeste sprinted along the deeply puddled street toward Coal Valley Road, the burn-off of subterranean gases ended as abruptly as it had begun. The queer light throbbed once, then again, and was gone. The flying-lurching shadows vanished into an immobilizing darkness.

Rain turned to steam when it struck the fiercely hot iron pipes, and even above the sounds of the storm there arose a hissing as if Coal Valley had been invaded by thousands upon thousands of serpents.

THE DOORS OF THE CHURCH STILL STOOD OPEN. THE LIGHTS GLOWED softly inside, as Joey had left them.

After following Celeste into the narthex, he pulled the double doors shut behind them. The big hinges rasped noisily — as he had expected. Now, if P.J. followed them by that route, he would not be able to enter quietly.

At the archway between the narthex and the nave, Joey indicated the marble font, which was as white as an ancient skull and every bit as dry. "Empty the jug."

"Just do it," he said urgently.

Celeste propped her shotgun against the wall and unscrewed the cap from the half-gallon container. The water splashed and gurgled into the bowl.

"Bring the empty jug," Joey said. "Don't leave it where he can see it."

He led her down the center aisle, through the low gate in the sanctuary railing, along the ambulatory that curved around the choir enclosure.

The body of Beverly Korshak, swaddled in heavy plastic, still lay on the altar platform. A pale mound.

"What now?" Celeste asked, following him along the presbytery to the altar platform.

Joey put down the white bundle, behind the dead woman. "Help me move her."

Grimacing in disgust at the prospect of that task, Celeste said, "Move her where?"

"Out of the sanctuary into the sacristy. She shouldn't be here like this. It's a desecration of the church."

"This isn't a church any more," she reminded him.

"It will be again soon."

"What are you talking about?"

"When we're done with it."

"We don't have the power to make it a church again. That takes a bishop or something, doesn't it?"

"We don't have the authority officially, no, but maybe that's not necessary to play into P.J.'s twisted fantasy. Maybe all we need is a little stage setting. Celeste, please, help me."

Reluctantly she obliged, and together they moved the corpse out of the sanctuary and put it down gently in a corner of the sacristy, that small room where priests had once prepared themselves for Mass.

On the first visit to St. Thomas's, Joey had found the exterior sacristy door open. He had closed and locked it. When he checked it now, he found that the door was still securely locked.

Another door opened onto a set of descending stairs. Gazing into that darkness, Joey said, "You've gone to church here for most of your life, right? Is there an outside entrance to the basement?"

"No. Not even windows. It's all below ground."

P.J. wouldn't be able to get into the church that way either, which left only the front doors.

Returning with Celeste to the sanctuary, Joey wished that they had been able to bring a card table or other small piece of furniture to serve as an altar. But the low, bare platform itself would have to suffice.

He unfolded the twisted ends of the sheets, with which he had formed the sack, and he set aside the hammer, box of nails, red and green candles, votive candles, matches, crucifix, and statuette of the Holy Mother.

At Joey's instruction, Celeste helped him cover the platform with the two white sheets.

"Maybe he nailed her to a floor while he… did what he wanted," he said as they worked. "But he wasn't just torturing her. It meant more to him than that. It was a sacrilegious act, blasphemy. More likely than not, the whole rape and murder was part of a ceremony."

"Ceremony?" she asked with a shudder.

"You said that he's strong and difficult to rattle because he believes in something. Himself, you said. But I think he believes in more than that. He believes in the dark side."

"Satanism?" she asked doubtfully. "P.J. Shannon, football hero, Mr. Nice Guy?"

"We both already know that person doesn't exist any more — if he ever did. Beverly Korshak's body tells us that much."

"But he got a scholarship to Notre Dame, Joey, and I don't think they encourage Black Masses out there in South Bend."

"Maybe it all began right here, before he ever went away to the university or eventually to New York."

"It's so far out," she said.

"Here in 1975, okay, it's a little far out," he agreed as he finished straightening the sheets. "But by 1995, a troubled high-school kid getting into Satanism — it's not so unusual. Believe me. And it was happening in the sixties and seventies too — just not as often."

"I don't think I'd much like this 1995 of yours."

"You're not the only one."

"Did P.J. seem troubled in high school?"

"No. But sometimes the most deeply disturbed ones don't much show it."

The cloth was pulled taut across the altar platform. Most of the wrinkles had been smoothed. The white cotton seemed to be whiter now than when they had first unfolded the sheets — radiant.

"Earlier," Joey reminded her, "you said he behaves recklessly, so arrogantly it's as if he thinks he's blessed. Well, maybe that's exactly what he thinks. Maybe he thinks he's made a bargain that protects him, and now he can get away with just about anything."

"You're saying he sold his soul?"

"No. I'm not saying there is a soul or that it could be sold even if it existed. I'm only telling you what he might think he's done and why that ugly little fantasy gives him such extraordinary self-confidence."

"We do have souls," she said quietly, firmly.

Picking up the hammer and the box of nails, Joey said, "Bring the crucifix."

He went to the back of the sanctuary where a twelve-foot-high carving of Christ in blessed agony had once hung. No overhead spots were focused on the wall; instead, the plaster was washed with light from a pair of floor-mounted lamps. The rising light had been meant to lead the eye upward to the contemplation of the divine. He drove a nail into the plaster slightly above eye level.

Celeste slipped the brass loop over the nail, and once more St. Thomas's had a crucifix behind and above its altar platform.

Glancing at the rain-streaked windows and the unrelieved night beyond, Joey wondered if P.J. was watching them. What interpretation might he put upon their actions? Did he find these developments laughable — or alarming?

Joey said, "The tableau that he seems to want to create here — a mockery of the twelve apostles, arranged in a deconsecrated church, at the expense of twelve lives — it's not just an act of madness. It's almost… an offering."

"A while ago, you said he thinks he's like Judas."

"The Betrayer. Betraying his community, his family, his faith, even God. And passing along the corruption wherever he can. Pushing thirty dollars into my pocket in his car that night before sending me back to school."

"Thirty dollars — thirty pieces of silver."

Returning to the altar platform and putting aside the hammer, he grouped the six Christmas candles at one end of the white sheet. "Thirty dollars. Just a little symbolic gesture to amuse himself. Payment for my cooperation in letting him get away with her murder, making a little Judas out of me."

Frowning as she picked up the pack of matches and began to light the candles, Celeste said, "So he sees Judas Iscariot as — what? — like his patron saint on the dark side?"

"Something like that, I think."

"Did Judas go to Hell for betraying Christ?" she wondered.

"If you believe there's a Hell, then I guess he has one of the deepest rooms there," Joey said.

"You, of course, don't believe in Hell."

"Look, it doesn't really matter what I believe in, only what P.J. believes in."

"You're wrong about that."

Ignoring her comment, he said, "I don't pretend to know all the twists and turns of his delusions — just maybe the overall design of it. I think even a first-rate psychiatrist would have trouble mapping the weird landscape in my big brother's head."

As she finished lighting the six bayberry candles, Celeste said, "So P.J. comes home from New York, takes a ride around the county, and he sees how weird things have gotten here in Coal Valley. All the abandoned houses. The subsidence everywhere. More vent pipes than ever. The open pit of fire out on the edge of town. The church deconsecrated, condemned. It's as if the whole town's sliding into Hell. Sliding pretty fast, in fact, and right before his eyes. And it excites him. Is that what you think?"

"Yeah. A lot of psychotics are very susceptible to symbolism. They live in a different reality from ours. In their world, everyone and everything has secret meanings. There are no coincidences."

"You sound like you've crammed the subject for a test."

"Over the years I read lots of books about aberrant psychology. At first I told myself it was all research for novels I'd write. Then, when I admitted I'd never be a writer, I kept reading — as a hobby."

"But subconsciously, you were trying to understand P.J."

"A homicidal sociopath with religious delusions, of the sort that P.J. seems to have, might see demons and angels masquerading as ordinary people. He believes cosmic forces are at work in the simplest events. His world is a place of constant high drama and immense conspiracies."

Celeste nodded. She was the principal's daughter, after all, raised in a house full of books. "He's a citizen of Paranoialand. Yeah, okay, so maybe he's been killing for years, since he went away to college if not before, one girl here, one there, little offerings from time to time. But the situation in Coal Valley really gets his juices up, makes him want to do something special, something big."

Joey placed the ceramic statuette of the Holy Mother at the far end of the white sheets from the candles and plugged the cord into a socket on the side of the altar platform. "So now we'll screw up his plans by opening the door to God and inviting Him back into the church. We'll step straight into P.J.'s fantasy and fight symbolism with symbolism, counter superstition with superstition."

"And how will that stop him?" she asked, moving to Joey's end of the altar to light the three votive candles in the ruby glasses, which he had carefully arranged in front of the statuette of the Virgin.

"It'll rattle him, I think. That's the first thing we have to do — rattle him, shake his confidence and get him to come in out of the darkness, where we have a chance at him."

"He's like a wolf out there," she agreed, "just circling beyond the campfire light."

"He's promised this offering — twelve sacrifices, twelve innocent people — and now he feels he's got to deliver. But he's committed to setting up his tableau of corpses in a church from which God's been driven out."

"You seem so sure… as if you're in tune with him."

"He's my brother."

"It's a little scary," she said.

"For me too. But I sense that he needs St. Thomas's. He has no chance of finding another place like it, not tonight. And now that he's started all this, he feels compelled to finish it. Tonight. If he's watching us right now, he'll see what we're doing, and it'll rattle him, and he'll come in here to make us undo it all."

"Why won't he just shoot us through the windows, then come in and undo it all himself?"

"He might have handled it that way — if he'd realized soon enough what we were up to. But the moment we hung the crucifix, it was too late. Even if I'm only half right about his delusions, even if he's only half as deeply lost in his fantasy as I think he is… I don't believe he'll be able to touch a crucifix on a sanctuary wall any more easily than a vampire could."

Celeste lit the last of the three votive candles.

The altar should have looked absurd — like a playhouse vignette arranged by children engaged in a game of church. Even with their makeshift stage furnishings, however, they had created a surprisingly convincing illusion of a sacred space. Whether it was a function of the lighting or arose by contrast with the starkness of the stripped, deconsecrated, dusty church, an unnatural glow seemed to emanate from the bed sheets on the altar platform, as though they had been treated with phosphorescent dye; they were whiter than the whitest linens that Joey had ever seen. The crucifix, lighted from below and at an extreme angle, cast an absurdly large shadow across the back wall of the sanctuary, so it almost appeared as though the massive, hand-carved icon that had been removed during deconsecration had now been brought back and lovingly re-hung. The flames on the fat Christmas candles all burned strong and steady in spite of myriad cross drafts in the church; not one guttered or threatened to go out; curiously, the bayberry-scented wax smelled not at all like bayberry but quite like incense. By some fluke of positioning and trick of reflection, one of the votive candles in the ruby-red glasses cast a shimmering spot of crimson light on the breast of the small bronze crucifix.

"We're ready," Joey said.0

He put the two shotguns on the floor of the narrow presbytery, out of sight but within easy reach.

"He saw us with the guns earlier," Celeste said. "He knows we have them. He won't come close enough to let us use them."

"Maybe not. It depends on how deeply he believes in his fantasy, how invincible he feels."

Turning his back to the altar steps, Joey dropped to one knee behind the presbytery balustrade that overlooked the choir enclosure. The heavy handrail and the chunky balusters offered some protection from gunfire, but he wasn't under the illusion that they provided ideal cover. The gaps between the balusters were two to three inches wide. Besides, the wood was old and dry; hollow-point rounds from a high-caliber rifle would chop it into kindling pretty quickly, and some of the splinters would make deadly shrapnel.

Kneeling beside him, as if reading his mind, Celeste said, "It won't be decided with guns, anyway."

"It won't?"

"It's not a question of force. It's a question of faith."

As on more than one previous occasion, Joey saw mysteries in her dark eyes. Her expression was unreadable — and strangely serene, considering their circumstances.

He said, "What do you know that I don't know?"

After meeting his gaze for a long beat, she looked out at the nave and said, "Many things."

"Sometimes you seem… "

"How do I seem?"

"Different."

"From what?"

"From everyone."

A shadow of a smile drew her lips into a suggestion of a curve. "I'm not just the principal's daughter."

"Oh? What else?"

"I'm a woman."

"More than that," he insisted.

"Is there more than that?"

"Sometimes you seem… much older than you are."

"There are things I know."

"Tell me."

"Certain things."

"I should know them too."

"They can't be told," she said enigmatically, and her pale smile faded.

"Aren't we in this together?" he asked sharply.

She looked at him again, eyes widening. "Oh, yes."

"Then if there's anything you know that can help—"

"Deeper than you think," she whispered.

"What?"

"We're in it together deeper than you think."

Either she was choosing to be inscrutable or there was less mystery in the moment than Joey imagined.

She returned her attention to the nave.

They were silent.

Like the frantic wings of trapped birds struggling to break free, rain and wind beat against the church.

After a while he said, "I feel warm."

"It's been heating up in here for some time," Celeste confirmed.

"How can that be? We didn't turn on any furnace."

"It's coming up through the floor. Don't you feel it? Through every chink, every crack in the boards."

He put his hand on the presbytery floor and discovered that the wood was actually warm to the touch.

Celeste said, "Rising from the ground under the church, from the fires far below."

"Maybe not so far any more." Remembering the ticking metal box in the corner of the study at her house, Joey said, "Should we be worried about toxic gases?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"There's worse tonight."

Within only a minute or two, a fine dew of perspiration formed on his brow.

Searching his jacket pockets for a handkerchief, Joey found a wad of money instead. Two ten-dollar bills. Two fives. Thirty bucks.

He kept forgetting that what had happened twenty years in the past had also, in another sense, happened only hours ago.

Staring in horror at the folded currency, Joey recalled the persistence with which P.J. had forced it upon him back there in the humid closeness of the parked car. The body hidden in the trunk. The smell of rain heavy in the night. The odor of blood heavier in his memory.

He shuddered violently and dropped the money.

As they fell out of his hand, the rumpled bills became coins and rang against the wooden floor, making a music like altar bells. Glittering, spinning, clinking, wobbling, rattling, they quickly settled into a silent heap beside him.

"What's that?" Celeste asked.

He glanced at her. She hadn't seen. He was between her and the coins.

"Silver," he said.

But when he looked again, the coins were gone. Only a wad of paper currency lay on the floor.

The church was hot. The window glass, streaming with rain, appeared to be melting.

His heart was suddenly racing. Pounding like a penitent fist upon the wrong side of his breast.

"He's coming," Joey said.

"Where?"

Rising slightly, Joey pointed across the balustrade and along the center aisle to the archway at the back of the nave, to the dimly lighted narthex beyond the arch, to the front doors of the church, which were barely visible in the shadows. "He's coming."

WITH A FORTHRIGHT SHRIEK OF UNCOILED HINGES, THE CHURCH DOORS opened out of darkness into shadow, out of the cold night into the strange heat, out of the blustering storm into a quiet one, and a man entered the narthex. He didn't proceed stealthily or even with any noticeable caution, but walked directly to the nave arch, and with him came the rotten-egg fumes from the vent pipe outside.

It was P.J. He was wearing the same black boots, beige cords, and red cable-knit sweater that he had been wearing earlier in the evening, back at the house, at dinner, and later in the car when he had argued the merits of forgetfulness and brotherly bonds. Since then he had put on a black ski jacket.

This was not the P.J. Shannon whose novels always found a home on the best-seller lists, not the New-Age Kerouac who had crossed the country uncounted times in various vans, motor homes, and cars. This P.J. was still shy of his twenty-fourth birthday, a recent graduate of Notre Dame, home from his new job in New York publishing.

He wasn't carrying the rifle with which he'd shot the Bimmers, and he didn't seem to think he needed it. He stood in the archway, feet planted wide, hands empty at his sides, smiling.

Until now, Joey had forgotten the extreme confidence of P.J. at that age, the tremendous power that he radiated, the sheer intensity of his presence. The word "charismatic" had been overused even in 1975; by 1995, it was employed by journalists and critics to describe every new politician who had not yet been caught stealing, every new rap singer who thought "hate" rhymed with "rape," every young actor with more smoldering in his eyes than in his brain. But whether in 1995 or 1975, the word seemed to have been invented for P.J. Shannon. He had all the charisma of an Old Testament prophet without the beard and robes, commanding attention sheerly by his presence, so magnetic that he seemed to exert an influence upon even inanimate objects, realigning all things around him until even the lines of the church's architecture subtly focused attention toward him.

Meeting Joey's eyes across the length of the church, P.J. said, "Joey, you surprise me."

With one sleeve, Joey blotted the sweat on his face, but he didn't reply.

"I thought we had a bargain," said P.J.

Joey put one hand on his shotgun, which lay on the presbytery floor beside him. But he didn't pick it up. P.J. could dodge out of the archway and back into the narthex before Joey would be able to raise the gun and pump off a round. Besides, at that distance, mortal damage probably couldn't be done with a shotgun even if P.J. failed to get out of the line of fire fast enough.

"All you had to do was go back to college like a good boy, back to your job at the supermarket, lose yourself in the daily struggle of life, the gray grinding boredom that you were born for. But you had to stick your nose in this."

"You wanted me to follow you here," Joey said.

"Well, true enough, little brother. But I was never sure you'd actually do it. You're just a little priest-loving, rosary-kissing altar boy. Why should I expect you to have any guts? I thought you might even go back to college and make yourself accept my cockamamie story about the mountain man up on Pine Ridge."

"I did."

"What?"

"Once," Joey said. "But not this time."

P.J. was clearly baffled. This was the first and only time that he would ever live through this strange night. Joey had been through a variation of it once before, and only Joey had been given a second chance to do it right.

From the floor beside him, Joey scooped up the thirty dollars and, still half sheltered behind the balustrade, threw it at P.J. Although wadded in a ball the paper currency sailed only as far as the end of the choir enclosure and fell short of the sanctuary railing. "Take back your silver."

For a moment P.J. seemed stunned, but then he said, "What an odd thing to say, little brother."

"When did you make your bargain?" Joey asked, hoping that he was right about P.J.'s psychotic fantasy and was playing into it in a way that would shake him out of his smug complacency.

"Bargain?" P.J. asked.

"When did you sell your soul?"

Shifting his attention to Celeste, P.J. said, "You must have helped him puzzle it out. His mind doesn't have a dark bent that would let him see the truth on his own. Certainly not in the couple of hours since he opened my car trunk. You're an interesting young lady. Who are you?"

Celeste didn't answer him.

"The girl by the road," P.J. said. "I know that much. I would hat had you by now if Joey hadn't interfered. But who else are you?"

Secret identities. Dual identities. Conspiracies. P.J. was indeed operating in the complex and melodramatic world of a paranoid psychotic with religious delusions, and he evidently believed that he saw in Celeste some otherworldly presence.

She remained silent. Crouching by the balustrade. One hand on hey shotgun, which lay on the presbytery floor.

Joey hoped she wouldn't use the weapon. They needed either to lure P.J. farther into the church, within range — or they needed to convince him that they didn't need guns at all and felt confident about trusting in the power of the holy ground on which they stood.

"Know where the thirty bucks came from, Joey?" P.J. asked. "From Beverly Korshak's purse. Now I'll have to gather it up and put it its your pocket again later. Preserve the evidence."

At last Joey understood what role P.J. had in mind for him. was expected to take the fall for everything his brother had done — and would do — this night. No doubt his own murder would have been made to look like suicide: Priest-loving, rosary-kissing altar flips out, kills twelve in Satanic ceremony, takes own life, film al eleven.

He had escaped that fate twenty years ago when he had failed to follow P.J. onto Coal Valley Road — but he'd taken a turn into another destiny that had been nearly as bad. This time, he had to avoid both those options.

"You asked when I sold my soul," P.J. said, still lingering in the narthex archway. "I was thirteen, you were ten. I got hold of the books about Satanism, the Black Mass — neat stuff. I was ripe for them Joey. Held my funny little ceremonies in the woods. Small animals on my little altar in the woods. I was ready to slit your throat, kiddo, and cut your heart out if nothing else had worked. But it didn't come to that. It was so much easier than that. I'm not even sure the ceremonies were necessary, you know? I think all that was necessary was to want it badly enough. Wanting it with every fiber of my being, with all my heart, wanting it so badly that I hurt with wanting it — that's what opened the door and let him in."

"Him?" Joey said.

"Satan, Scratch, the devil, spooky old Beelzebub," said P.J. in a jokey and theatrical tone of voice. "Boy, he's not at all like that, Joey. He's actually a warm, fuzzy old beast — at least to those who embrace him."

Though Celeste remained crouched behind the balustrade, Joey rose to his full height.

"That's right, kiddo," P.J. encouraged. "Don't be afraid. Your big brother won't spout green fire out his nose or sprout leathery wings."

Desert-dry heat was still coming through the floor.

Like ectoplasmic faces pressed to the glass, condensation began to form on some of the windows.

"Why did you do it, P.J.?" Joey asked, pretending to believe in such things as souls and bargains with the devil.

"Oh, kiddo, even then I was sick to death of being poor, afraid of growing up to be a useless piece of shit like our old man. Wanted money in my pocket, cool cars when I got old enough for them, my pick of the girls. And there was no way that was ever going to happen to me like I was, not when I was just one of the Shannon boys, living in a room next to the furnace. But after I made the deal — well, look what happened. Football star. Top grades in my class. Most popular boy in school. Girls couldn't wait to spread their legs for me — and even after I'd dump one of them, she'd still love me, moon over me, never say a word against me. Then a full scholarship to a Catholic university, and how's that for irony"

Joey shook his head in denial. "You were always a good athlete, even as a kid. And real smart. And everyone always liked you. You always had those things, P.J."

"The hell I did," P.J. said, raising his voice for the first time. "God gave me nothing when I came into this world, nothing, nothing but crosses to bear. He's a great advocate of suffering, God is. A real sadist. I had nothing until I made a deal for it."

Reason and logic would have no effect on him, especially not if his psychosis had taken root when he'd been a child. He was a long time gone into madness. The only hope of manipulating him into a disadvantageous position was to play into his fantasy, encourage him.

P.J. said, "Why don't you try it, Joey? You won't have to learn a lot of chants, conduct ceremonies in the woods, none of that. Just want it, open your heart to it, and you can have your own companion."

"Companion?"

"Like I have Judas. A rider on the soul. I invited him into me. I let him out of Hell for a while, and in return he takes good care of me. He has big plans for me, Joey. Wealth, fame. He wants me to satisfy every desire I have, because he experiences everything through me — feels the girls through me, tastes the champagne, shares the sense of power, the glorious power, when it's time to kill. He wants only the very best for me, Joey, and he makes sure that I get it. You could have a companion of your own, kiddo. I can make it happen, I really, can."

Joey was rendered speechless by the astonishing complexity of P.J.'s twisted fantasy of Faustian bargains, negotiated damnation, and possession. If he had not spent twenty years reading the most exotic cases of aberrant psychology ever published, he could not have begun to grasp the nature of the human monster with whom he was dealing He could not possibly have understood P.J. the first time that he'd lived through this night, because then he had lacked the special knowledge that allowed him to comprehend.

P.J. said, "You just have to want it, Joey. Then we kill this bitch here. One of the Dolan boys is sixteen. Big kid. We can make it look like he did it all, then killed himself. You and me — we walk away, and from now on we're together, tighter than brothers, together like we've never been before."

"What do you really need me for, P.J.?"

"Hey, I don't need you, Joey. I'm not out to use you for any reason. I just love you. Don't you think I love you? I do. You're my baby: brother. Aren't you my one and only little baby brother? Why shouldn't I want to have you at my side, share my good fortune with you?"

Joey's mouth was dry, and not just from the sudden heat. For the first time since turning off the county route onto Coal Valley Road, he longed for a double shot of Jack Daniel's. "I think you just need me to take down the crucifix for you. Maybe hang it upside down instead of the way it is."

P.J. didn't respond.

"I think you're desperate to finish the little tableau that you started to set up here, but now you're afraid to come into the church since we've restored things."

"You haven't restored anything," P.J. said scornfully.

"I bet if I took down the crucifix, blew out the candles, tore up the altar, if I just made the place safe for you again — then you'd kill both of us, just like you planned all along."

"Hey, kiddo, don't you see who you're talking to? This is your brother here. What's wrong with you? Am I your brother, the one who always fought all your fights with you, took good care of you? Am I ever going to hurt you? Hurt you? Does that make any sense at all?"

Celeste rose from her knees to stand beside Joey, as though she sensed that any small show of courage on her part would help convince P.J. that she and Joey were confident about the protection provided by the symbols with which they had surrounded themselves. Their confidence might feed his apprehension.

"If you're not afraid of the church, why won't you come farther in?" Joey asked.

"Why's it so warm in here?" P.J. tried to sound as self-assured as always, but doubt tainted his voice. "What's there to be afraid of? Nothing."

"Then come on in."

"There's nothing sacred here."

"Prove it. Put your fingers in the holy water."

P.J. turned his attention to the marble font at his right side. "It was dry before. You put the water there yourself."

"Did we?"

"It hasn't been blessed," P.J. said. "You're not a damn priest. It's just ordinary water."

"Then put your fingers in it."

Joey had read of psychotics who, swept away by delusions that they possessed Satanic power, were capable of literally blistering when they put their fingers into holy water or touched a crucifix. The injuries they suffered were real, although induced entirely by their own powers of suggestion, by the depth of their belief in their own sick fantasies.

When P.J. continued to regard the shallow pool of holy water with trepidation, Joey said, "Go on, touch it, go on — or are you afraid it'll eat into your hand, burn like an acid?"

P.J. reached hesitantly toward the marble bowl. Like a dragonfly, his spread fingers hovered over the water. Then he pulled his hand back.

"Jesus," Celeste said softly.

They had found a way to use P.J.'s madness to protect themselves from him.

The first time that he had lived through this night, Joey had been little more than a boy, just out of his teens, up against not merely an older brother but a psychopath of extreme cunning and high intelligence. Now, he had twenty years of experience on P.J., which gave him the psychological advantage this time.

"You can't touch us," Joey said. "Not here in this sacred place. You can't do anything that you planned to do here, P.J. Not now, not since we've let God back inside these walls. All you can do now is run for it. Morning will roll around eventually, and we'll just wait here until someone comes looking for us or until someone finds the Bimmers."

P.J. tried again to put his hand in the water, but he couldn't do it. Crying out wordlessly in fear and frustration, he kicked the font.

The wide marble bowl crashed off the fluted pedestal, and P.J. took sufficient courage from that destruction to rush forward into the nave while the font was still toppling.

Joey stooped and reached for the 20-gauge.

Even as the contents of the bowl spilled onto the floor, P.J. stepped into the spreading puddle, and a cloud of sulfurous steam erupted around his feet as if the water had indeed been blessed and had reacted with fierce corrosive power upon encountering the shoe of a demon-ridden man.

Joey realized that the floor must have been much hotter at the back of the nave than in the sanctuary, fearfully hot.

Having noticed the extreme and increasing heat in the church, P.J. should have realized as much himself; however, in his dementia, he reacted not with reason but with superstitious panic. The gush of steam from the "holy" water reinforced his bizarre delusion, and he screamed as if he'd actually been burned. In fact, he surely was suffering, because to anyone afflicted with psychosomatic pain, it seemed as genuine as the real thing. P.J. let out a shriek of abject misery, slipped and fell in the water, into more steam, landing hard on his hands and

knees, wailing, squealing. He raised his hands, fingers smoking, and then put them to his face but tore them away at once, as though the beads of water on them were indeed the tears of Christ and were searing his lips, his cheeks, half blinding him. He thrashed to his feet, stumbled out of the nave into the narthex, to the front doors, into the night, alternately shouting in rage and bleating in purest anguish, like neither a man nor a man possessed but like a wild beast in excruciating torment.

Joey had only half raised the Remington. P.J. had never come close enough to warrant the use of the gun.

"My God," Celeste said shakily.

"That was amazing luck," Joey agreed.

But they were talking about different things.

She said, "What luck?"

"The hot floor."

"It's not that hot," she said.

He frowned. "Well, it must be a lot hotter back there than at this end of the building. In fact, I'm wondering how long we'll even be safe here."

"It wasn't the floor."

"You saw—"

"It was him."

"Him?"

She was as deathly pale as one of the distorted, ghostly faces of condensation on the church windows. Staring at the shallow puddle that was still lightly steaming at the far end of the center aisle, she said, "He couldn't touch it. Wasn't worthy."

"No. Nonsense. It was just the hot floor meeting the cool water, steam—"

She shook her head vigorously. "Corrupt. Couldn't touch something holy."

"Celeste—"

"Corrupt, foul, tainted."

Worried that she was on the brink of hysteria, he said, "Have you forgotten?"

Celeste met his eyes, and he saw such an acute awareness in her that he dismissed all concerns about panic attacks and hysteria. In fact, there was a curiously humbling quality about her piercing stare. She'd forgotten nothing. Nothing. And he sensed that her perception was, in fact, clearer than his.

Nevertheless, he said, "We put the water in the font."

"So?"

"Not a priest."

"So?"

"We put it there, and it's just ordinary water."

"I saw what it did to him."

"Just steam—"

"No, Joey. No, no." She spoke rapidly, running sentences together, frantic to convince him: "I got a glimpse of his hands, part of his face, his skin was blistered, red and peeling, the steam can't have been that hot, not off a wooden floor."

"Psychosomatic injury," he assured her.

"No."

"The power of the mind, autohypnosis."

"There's not much time," she said urgently, looking around at the crucifix and then at the candles, as if to make sure that their stage setting was still in order.

"I don't think he'll be back," Joey said.

"He will."

"But when we played straight into his fantasy, we scared the bejesus —

"No. He can't be frightened. Nothing can scare him."

Even in her urgency, she seemed mildly dazed, in shock. But Joey was overcome by the odd certainty that she was not distracted, as she seemed, but was functioning at a level of awareness and with a degree of insight that he had never known. Heightened perceptions.

She crossed herself. " … in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti… " She was spooking Joey worse than P.J. had done.

"A homicidal psychotic," Joey said nervously, "is full of rage, sure, but he can be as susceptible to fear as any sane person. Many of them—"

"No. He's the father of fear—"

"— many of them live in constant terror—"

"— the father of lies, such inhuman fury—"

"— even when they're on power fantasies like he is, they live in fear of—"

"— fury driving him for eternity." Her expressive eyes were glazed, haunted. "He never gives up, never will, nothing to lose, in a perpetual state of hatred and rage ever since the Fall…. "

Joey glanced toward the spilled water in which P.J. had slipped. The church was hotter than ever, sweltering, but steam had stopped rising from the puddle. Anyway, that wasn't the fall she meant.

After a hesitation, he said, "Who're we talking about, Celeste?"

She appeared to be listening to voices that only she could hear. "He's coming," she whispered tremulously.

"You're not talking about P.J., are you?"

"He's coming."

"What? Who?"

"The companion."

"Judas? There's no Judas. That's fantasy."

"Beyond Judas."

"Celeste, be serious, the devil himself isn't really in P.J."

As alarmed by his insistence on reason as he was alarmed by her sudden descent into full-blown mysticism, she gripped him by the lapels of his denim jacket. "You're running out of time, Joey. Not much time left to believe."

"I believe—"

"Not in what matters."

She let go of him, vaulted over the presbytery balustrade into the choir enclosure, landing solidly on both feet.

"Celeste!"

Rushing to the sanctuary gate, she shouted, "Come touch the floor, Joey, touch where the water spilled, see whether it's hot enough for steam, hurry!"

Frightened for her, frightened by her, Joey also vaulted the balustrade. "Wait!"

She shoved through the sanctuary gate.

Over the incessant drumming of the rain on the roof, another sound arose. An escalating roar. Not from under them. Outside.

She hurried into the center aisle.

He looked toward the windows on the left. Toward the windows on the right. Darkness on both sides.

"Celeste!" he shouted as he pushed through the sanctuary gate. "Show me your hands!"

She was halfway down the aisle. She turned toward him. Her face was slick with sweat. Like a ceramic glaze. Glistening with candlelight. The face of a saint. A martyr.

The roar swelled. An engine. Accelerating.

"Your hands!" Joey shouted desperately.

She raised her hands.

In her delicate palms were hideous wounds. Black holes thick with blood.

From out of the west, shattering windows, smashing through clapboard and wall studs and old wood paneling and stations of the cross, the Mustang exploded into the church, headlights unlit but engine screaming, horn suddenly blaring, tires popping like balloons as the floor splintered under them, driving forward with tremendous power, plowing into the pews, unstoppable. Those benches cracked free of their moorings, tilted up, slammed into one another — pews and kneelers erupting and crashing together and piling one atop the next in a cresting wave of wood, in a geometry of penitence — and still the Mustang surged forward, engine racing, gears grinding, trumpeting as it came.

Joey fell to the floor in the center aisle and shielded his head with his folded arms, certain that he was going to die in the tsunami of pews. He was even more certain that Celeste would die, whether crushed to death now or, later, after being nailed to the floor or to the wall by P.J. Joey had utterly failed her, failed himself. Following the storm of broken glass, the,hail of plaster, the avalanche of wood, there would be a rain of blood. Over the roar of the Mustang, over the banshee horn, over the crack-split-shatter of wood, over the ringing of falling glass, over the ominous creak of sagging ceiling beams, he heard one special sound separate and eerily distinct from all others, and instantly he knew what it was: the bronze clatter and thud of the crucifix dropping off the back wall of the sanctuary.

THE COLD WIND WAS IN THE CHURCH NOW, SNIFFING AND PANTING, LIKE a pack of dogs through the ruins.

Joey lay facedown under a stack of tumbled pews and shattered wall beams, and although he felt no pain, he was afraid that his legs were crushed. When he dared to move, however, he discovered that he was neither injured nor pinned in place.

The rubble was a multitiered, three-dimensional maze. Joey was forced to crawl, writhe, and squirm through it as though he were a rat-seeking ferret exploring the depths of an ancient timberfall.

Shingles, laths, and chunks of other debris still dropped out of the demolished wall and from the damaged ceiling, clattering into the wreckage. The wind played the narrow twisting passages in the destruction as though they were flutes, piping an eerie, tuneless music. But the car engine had died.

After wriggling through an especially cramped space between slabs of prayer-polished oak, Joey came to the front wheel of the Mustang. The tire was flat, and the fender had crumpled around it like paper.

From the undercarriage, greenish antifreeze drizzled like dragon's blood. The radiator had burst.

He squeezed farther along the side of the car. Just past the driver's door, he reached a place where he was able to stand up between the vehicle and the surrounding rubble.

He hoped to see his brother dead in the Mustang, the shaft of the steering wheel driven through his chest by the impact or his body pitched halfway through the windshield. But the driver's door was open just wide enough to allow escape, and P.J. was gone.

"Celeste!" Joey shouted.

No answer.

PT would be looking for her.

"Celeste!"

He smelled gasoline. The fuel tank had burst.

The surrounding pews and slabs of wood paneling and sheared-off two-by-fours had tilted up higher than the car. He couldn't see much of the church.

Joey levered himself onto the roof of the Mustang. He rose to his feet, turning his back to the damaged wall and the rain-slashed night.

St. Thomas's was filled with strange light and swarming shadows. Some ceiling bulbs were still on, but others were out. Toward the rear of the church, showers of white-gold-blue sparks cascaded from a damaged overhead fixture.

In the sanctuary, the candles had toppled when the building had been shaken by the impact of the hurtling car. The sheets on the altar platform were afire.

Shuttling, weaving shadows made a fabric of confusion, but one among them moved with a linear purpose that snapped Joey's attention to it. Coming off the ambulatory onto the presbytery was P.J. He was carrying Celeste. She was unconscious, cradled in his arms, head tilted back, tender throat exposed, black hair trailing almost to the floor.

Christ, no!

For an instant, Joey couldn't breathe.

Then he was gasping.

He plunged off the roof of the Mustang onto the crumpled hood and clambered up from the car onto the surrounding jumble of pews and beams and buckled wallboard. The wreckage shifted under him, threatening to open and swallow him in a maw of wickedly splintered boards and twisted nails, but he kept moving, wobbling and lurching, arms spread like those of a lumberjack trying to maintain his balance in a logrolling contest.

At the three altar steps, P.J. ascended.

The back wall of the sanctuary, without crucifix, crawled with images of fire.

Joey jumped down from the pile of rubble into an open space in front of the sanctuary railing.

On the altar, P.J. dropped Celeste onto the burning sheets, as though she were not a persona special and needed person — but only an armful of trash.

"No!" Joey shouted, leaping across the sanctuary railing, stumbling into the curving ambulatory that would take him around the choir and up to the high altar.

Her raincoat caught fire. He saw the flames leap hungrily from that new fuel.

Her hair. Her hair!

Stung by the flames, she regained consciousness and screamed.

Rounding the ambulatory, reaching the presbytery walkway, Joey saw P.J. standing over Celeste, on the burning sheets, oblivious of the fire around his feet, hunched like some round-backed beast, the hammer in one hand and raised high to strike.

With his heart knocking as loud as Death's fist on a door, Joey crossed the presbytery, toward the altar steps.

The hammer arced down.

Her cry of terror. Heart piercing. Cut off by the sound of the steel hammer crushing her skull.

A bleat of misery tore free of Joey as he reached the foot of the altar steps.

P.J. whipped around. "Little brother." He was grinning. Eyes adance with reflections of fire. Face blistered by water burns. He triumphantly raised the blood-wet hammer. "Now let's nail her down."

"Noooooooo!"

Something fluttered across Joey's vision. No. Nor across. The flutter wasn't anything in the church, nothing real. Behind his eyes. Like a darting shadow of wings on rippled, sun-spangled water.

Everything had changed.

The fire was gone.

So was P.J.

The crucifix hung on the back wall again. The candles were all upright, the makeshift altar cloth unburned.

Celeste grabbed him by the shoulder, spun him, seized the lapels of his denim jacket.

He gasped in surprise.

She said, "You're running out of time, Joey. Not much time left to believe."

He heard himself say, "I believe—"

"Not in what matters," she interrupted.

She let go of him and vaulted over the presbytery balustrade into the choir enclosure, landing solidly on both feet.

There was as yet no ragged breach in the west wall. The Mustang had not yet exploded into the church.

Replay.

Joey had been thrown back in time again. Not twenty years as before. Only a minute. Two minutes at most.

A chance to save her.

He's coming.

"Celeste!"

Running to the sanctuary gate, she shouted, "Come touch the floor, Joey, touch where the water spilled, see whether it's hot enough for steam, hurry!"

Joey put a hand on the balustrade, ready to vault across it and go after her.

No. Do it right this time. Last chance. Do it right.

Celeste shoved through the sanctuary gate.

Over the incessant drumming of the rain on the roof, another sound arose. An escalating roar. The Mustang.

He's coming.

With a terrifying conviction that he was wasting precious seconds and that this replay was running faster than the original event, Joey snatched the 20-gauge shotgun from the presbytery floor.

Celeste hurried into the center aisle.

He shouted frantically—"Get out of the way! The car!" — as he hurtled over the balustrade with the shotgun in one hand.

She was halfway down the aisle, as she had been the first time. She turned, as before. Her face was slick with sweat. Like a ceramic glaze. Glistening with candlelight. The face of a saint. A martyr.

The roar of the Mustang swelled.

Puzzled, she half turned toward the windows, raising her hands.

In her delicate palms were hideous wounds. Black holes thick with blood.

"Run!" he shouted, but she froze where she was.

This time he didn't even reach the sanctuary railing before the Mustang slammed through the west wall of the church. A tidal wave of glass and wood and plaster and broken pews crested before the running-horse hood ornament, washed back along both fenders, until the car was all but hidden in the debris.

A length of board, spinning like a martial-arts weapon, whistled through the air, hit Celeste, and knocked her to the floor more than halfway down the center aisle — which was something that Joey hadn't been able to see from his previous vantage point, the first time that he had lived through the crash.

With a double bang of blowing tires, the car came to a halt in steepled rubble, and even above the clatter of the last tumbling pews, Joey heard the curiously separate and distinct clank of the bronze crucifix falling off the back wall of the sanctuary.

Instead of lying half trapped under the destruction in the nave, as before, he was still in the sanctuary, untouched by anything other than the cloud of pale dust that the incoming wind swept out of the ruins. And this time he was armed.

Chambering a shell in the 20-gauge Remington, he kicked through the sanctuary gate.

The wreckage was still settling, and debris was falling from the corner of the roof that had sagged inward when the supports had been knocked from under it. The amount of residual noise was greater than it had seemed to Joey when he had been lying under the ruins, but then he had been half dazed.

As far as he was able to discern, the destruction had fallen into precisely the same patterns as before. The Mustang still could not be approached easily or directly. He could see only sections of it through gaps in the ruins.

He had to do it right this time. No mistakes. Finish him off.

Toting the gun, Joey climbed onto the precariously stacked pews. They creaked and groaned, wobbled and shuddered, treacherous beneath him. Wary of protruding nails and glass daggers, he nevertheless clambered quickly across upturned benches, splintered window frames, cracked two-by-fours, and slabs of wallboard, reaching the car much faster than when he'd had to snake his way to it from the bottom of the rubble.

Even as he jumped down from a pew onto the Mustang's hood, he fired a round from the shotgun into the pitch-dark interior of the car. He wasn't well balanced, and the recoil nearly knocked him off his feet, but he stayed upright, pumped the Remington, fired again, and a third time, filled with savage judgmental glee, confident that P.J. could not have lived through that storm of buckshot.

The three shots were thunderous, and in the fading echo of the third, he heard a movement behind him that didn't sound like merely another settling noise, that seemed to be more purposeful. It was impossible that P.J. could have gotten out of the car before Joey had arrived this time, impossible that he could have both gotten out and circled around behind. Joey started to turn, looking back and up — and beheld the impossible from the corner of his eye. P.J. was right there, coming down on him, descending the precarious woodpile with daunting agility, swinging a length of two-by-four.

The flat of the heavy club struck Joey hard along the right temple. He fell onto the car hood, losing his grip on the shotgun, instinctively rolling away from his assailant, drawing his knees up and tucking his head down in the fetal position. The second blow smashed the ribs along his left side and drove all the breath out of him. Wheezing for air, getting none, he rolled again. The third blow landed on his back, and a scintillant pain coruscated along his spine. He rolled through the shot-out windshield, over the dashboard, into the front seat of the dark Mustang, and from there dropped into a far deeper, more profound blackness.

When he came around, rising out of a cloistered inner space of softly scurrying midnight spiders, he was certain that he'd been unconscious for only a few seconds, surely less than a minute. He was still struggling mightily to breathe. Sharp pain in his ribs. The taste of his own blood.

Celeste.

Sliding through gummy safety glass and buckshot, Joey pulled himself behind the steering wheel. He pushed the door open as far as the embracing rubble would allow, but that was far enough to get out into the October wind and the flickering light.

Toward the narthex and the overturned holy-water font, sparks cascaded from a ceiling fixture.

In the other direction, orange reflections of fire and shadows of flames slithered up the back wall of the sacristy, but he couldn't see the blaze itself through the encircling ruins.

Having taken the first blow from the two-by-four on the right side of his head, he had little vision in that eye. Blurred shapes throbbed and swarmed among twinkling phantom lights.

He smelled gasoline.

He dragged-levered-kicked himself onto the roof of the Mustang. He was too dizzy to get all the way to his feet. On his knees, he surveyed the church.

With his left eye, he could see P.J. ascending the altar steps with Celeste unconscious in his arms.

The candles had toppled. The altar cloth was afire.

Joey heard someone cursing, then realized that he was listening to his own voice. He was cursing himself.

Cruelly dropping Celeste onto the seething altar platform, P.J. Snatched up the hammer.

Joey heard sobbing where there had been cursing, and devastating pain detonated along his left side, through his broken ribs.

The hammer. Raised high.

Stung to wakefulness by the fire, Celeste screamed.

From the altar platform, P.J. peered across the church, toward the Mustang, toward Joey, and his eyes were filled with jack-o'-lantern light.

The hammer crashed down.

A flutter. Behind Joey's eyes. Like a darting shadow of wings on rippled, sun-spangled water. Like the flight of angels half seen at the periphery of vision.

Everything had changed.

His ribs were no longer broken.

His vision was clear.

He had not yet been beaten by his brother.

Rewind. Replay.

Oh, Jesus.

Another replay.

One more chance.

Surely it would be the last.

And he hadn't been cast backward in time as far as he had been before. His window of opportunity was narrower than ever, giving him less time to think; his chances of altering their fate were poor, because now he didn't have leeway for even a small error in judgment. The Mustang had already rammed into the church, the high altar was burning, and Joey was already scrambling across the steepled rubble, jumping down onto the hood of the car, squeezing the trigger on the Remington.

He checked himself just in time to avoid his previous mistake, whirled, and instead fired up at the jumbled pews behind him, from which P.J. had attacked him with the two-by-four. The buckshot shredded empty air. P.J. wasn't there.

Confused, Joey turned to the car and blasted out the windshield, as he had done before, but no scream came from inside, so he whipped around to cover his back again. P.J. still wasn't coming at him with the two-by-four.

Jesus! Screwing up again, screwing up, doing the wrong thing again. Think. Think!

Celeste. She was all that mattered.

Forget about taking P.J. Just get to Celeste before he does.

Carrying the shotgun with him even though it inhibited movement, Joey scrambled up the tilted pews and kneelers, across the rubble, toward the rear of the nave, down again into the center aisle where he'd seen Celeste knocked unconscious by the spinning chunk of wood. She wasn't there.

"Celeste!"

In the sanctuary at the front of the church, a slouching figure hunched along the ambulatory, through the dervish reflections of the altar fire above. It was P.J. He was carrying Celeste.

The center aisle was blocked. Joey ran between two rows of pews to the side aisle along the east wall of the church, and then raced forward along the unbroken panes of rain-beaten glass toward the sanctuary railing.

Rather than proceed to the altar as before, P.J. disappeared with Celeste through the door to the sacristy.

Joey leaped over the sanctuary railing, as though too eager to accept a proffered sacrament, and edged swiftly but warily along the wall to the sacristy. He hesitated at the doorway, fearful of stepping face-first into a hard-swung two-by-four or a gun blast, but then he did what must be done — the right thing — and stepped up to the threshold.

The sacristy door was closed, locked.

He stepped back, aimed the shotgun. One round trashed the lock and blew the door open.

The sacristy was deserted — except for Beverly Korshak's body, which lay in a corner, a pale mound in a plastic shroud.

Joey went to the exterior door. It was secured with a deadbolt from the inside, as he had left it.

The cellar door. He opened it.

In the moon-yellow light below, a serpentine shadow slithered into a coil and rolled out of sight around a corner.

The stairs were unpainted wood, and in spite of every effort he made at stealth, his boots met every tread with a hollow knock like the deliberative countdown of a doomsday clock.

Heat rose in parching currents, in torrid waves, in scorching tides, and by the time he reached the basement floor, he felt as if he had descended into a primal furnace. The air was redolent of superheated wood ceiling beams on the brink of charting, hot stone from the masonry walls, hot lime from the concrete floor — and a trace of sulfur from the mine fires below.

When he stepped off the final wooden tread, Joey would not have been surprised if the rubber heels of his boots had melted on contact with the cellar floor. Sweat streamed from him, and his hair fell across his face in lank, dripping strands.

The cellar appeared to be divided into several chambers that were separated by deep, offset archways, so it was impossible to see into one room from another. The first was illuminated only by a single, bare, dust-caked bulb seated in a coffer between two beams that severely limited the spread of the light.

A fat black spider, as if driven mad by the heat and sulfurous fumes, circled frenziedly around and around and around the crystal-glittering strands of its enormous web, in the same coffer as the lightbulb. Its exaggerated shadow jittered and stilted across the floor in a spiral that made Joey nauseous and dizzied him when he trod upon it as he headed toward the archway to the next room.

Aboveground, the structure had been a plain coal-country church, but its masonry underpinnings were more formidable, seemed older than the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania itself, and had a Gothic weight that imprisoned his heart. Joey felt as though he had descended not only into St. Thomas's basement but into haunted catacombs beneath Rome itself — one sea, one continent, one millennium away from Coal Valley.

He paused long enough to reload the Remington with shells from his jacket pockets.

As Joey entered the second room, the serpentine shadow shimmered away from him across the floor again, as though it were a stream of black mercury. It darkled out of the bile-yellow light and around the corner of another archway into the next crypt.

Because the slippery shade was P.J.'s shadow and bore with it the precious shadow of Celeste, Joey swallowed his fear and followed into a third vault, a fourth. Although none of those low-ceilinged spaces was immense, the subterranean portion of the church began to seem vast, immeasurably larger than the humble realm above. Even if the basement architecture proved to be supernaturally extensive, however, he would arrive eventually at a final chamber where brother could come face to face with brother and the right thing at last could be done.

The cellar had no windows.

No outside doors.

Confrontation was inevitable.

Sooner rather than later, holding the shotgun at the ready, Joey edged cautiously through a final archway with carved-scroll keystone, into a bleak hold that measured approximately forty feet from left to right and eighteen from the archway to the back wall. He figured that it lay under the narthex. Here, the floor wasn't concrete but stone, like the walls, either black by its nature or grime-coated by time.

Celeste lay in the middle of the room, in a drizzle of yolk-yellow light from the lone overhead bulb. Wispy beards of dust and tattered spider silk hung from the fixture, casting a faint faux lace over her pale face. Her raincoat was spread like a cape around her, and her silken hair spilled black-on-black across the floor. She was unconscious but, judging by appearances, otherwise unharmed.

P.J. had vanished.

In a socket between two massive beams, the single light didn't reach to every end of the chamber, but even in the farthest corners the gloom was not deep enough to conceal a door. Except for the entrance archway, the stone walls were featureless.

The heat was so intense that Joey felt as though his clothes — if not his body — might spontaneously combust, and he worried that his fevered brain was boiling up hallucinations. No one, not even the soul-mortgaged companion of Judas, could have walked through those walls.

He wondered if the walls were, in fact, as solid as they seemed and if exploration might reveal a panel of masonry cleverly hinged to swing open into an extension of the cellar. But even half roasted in that stone oven, confused and beginning to be disoriented, he couldn't bring himself to believe that there were secret passages, keeps, and dungeons under ramshackle old St. Thomas's. Who would have built them — legions of demented monks in some clandestine and evil brotherhood?

Nonsense.

Yet P.J. was gone.

Heart pounding like a blacksmith's hammer, the anvil ring of it filling his ears, Joey eased across the room to Celeste. She seemed to be sleeping peacefully.

He spun in a crouch and swept the room with the shotgun, finger taut on the trigger, certain that P.J. was looming behind him, having materialized out of thin air.

Nothing.

He needed to wake Celeste, if possible, and quickly lead her out of there — or carry her out as she had been carried in. If she had to be carried, however, he would need to set aside the shotgun, which he was loath to do.

Gazing down at her, at the fine filigree of dust-web shadows that trembled like a veil on her face, Joey recalled the frenzied spider pointlessly circling its web in the first room at the foot of the basement stairs.

Shocked by a sudden dreadful thought, he sucked hot breath between clenched teeth, producing a brief, thin whistle of alarm.

He stepped back from under the coffer that contained the light fixture. He squinted up into the unlighted three-foot-wide, foot-deep recess between the next pair of beams.

P.J. was there, a cunning shadow among shadows, not simply wedged in place and waiting to drop upon his prey, but scuttling straight at Joey from the right side of the chamber with all the horrid grace of a spider, diabolically nimble and impossibly silent, upside down, clinging to the ceiling by means unknowable, softly ricocheting back and forth between the timbers, defying gravity, defying reason, his eyes gleaming like polished coal, teeth bared — and there could no longer be any doubt that he was something other than merely a man.

Joey started to raise the 20-gauge, which felt like a ton weight in his arms. Too late and far too slow, he knew the despair of defeat even as he reacted, felt himself in the cold and paralyzing grip of nightmare though he was awake.

Like a bat erupting from its roost, P.J. sprang out of the well between the rough-hewn beams, swooped down, and knocked Joey off his feet. The shotgun spun away across the concrete, out of reach.

As boys, they had occasionally wrestled and roughhoused, but they had never actually fought each other with serious intention. They had always been too tight for that — the Shannon brothers against the world. But now twenty years of pent-up rage flashed through Joey with atomic heat, instantly purging him of all lingering affection and compassion for P.J., leaving only an energizing remorse-regret-resentment. He was determined not to be a victim any more. He had a passion for justice. He punched and clawed and kicked, fighting for his life and for Celeste's, tapping a wrath that was Biblical in its power, a righteous and frightening fury that freed a savage avenger within him.

But even driven by rage and desperation, Joey was no match for whomever and whatever his brother had become. P.J.'s stone-hard fists landed an avalanche of punches, and no blocking arm or turned head seemed able to deflect the power of a single blow. His fury was inhuman, his strength superhuman. As Joey's resistance collapsed, P.J. grabbed him, lifted him half off the floor, slammed him down, slammed him down, slammed him down again, bouncing the back of his skull off the stone.

P.J. rose from him, stood, loomed over him, looking down with scorching contempt. "Fucking altar boy!" The angry, sneering voice was P.J.'s but changed, deeper than it had ever been before, fierce and reverberant, like a raging voice out of an abysmal stone place, out of iron walls and inescapable prisons, shivering with icy hatred, each word echoing as hollowly as if it were a dropped stone that had found the impossible bottom of eternity. "Fucking altar boy!" With the repetition of those words came the first kick, delivered with incredibly vicious power, landing in Joey's right side, cracking his ribs, as if P.J. was wearing steel-toed boots. "Rosary-kissing little bastard." Another kick, another, and Joey tried to curl up defensively, as though he were a pill bug turning its armor to the world. But each furious kick found a vulnerable spot — ribs, kidneys; the base of his spine — and seemed to have been meted out not by a man but by a pile driver, a mindless robotic torture machine.

Then the kicking stopped.

With one throttling hand clamped on Joey's throat and the other hand on the belt of his blue jeans, P.J. snatched him off the floor as a world champion power lifter might clean-and-jerk a barbell that carried only light-workout weights. He hoisted him overhead, turned, and threw him.

Joey bounced off the wall beside the archway and crashed to the floor in a broken-marionette heap. Mouth full of cracked teeth. Choking on blood. Chest tight. Lungs painfully compressed, maybe even punctured by a splintered rib. Inhaling with a consumptive wheeze, exhaling with a thick wet rattle. His heart was stuttering arrhythmically. Precariously balanced on a high wire of consciousness over a bottomless dark, he blinked through scalding tears and saw P.J. turn away from him and toward Celeste.

He also saw the shotgun. Within reach.

He could not control his extremities. He strove determinedly to reach out to the Remington, but his muscles spasmed. His arm merely twitched, and his right hand flopped uselessly on the floor.

A menacing rumble rose under him. Vibrations in the hot stone.

P.J. crouched over Celeste, turning his back to Joey, giving him up for dead.

The Remington.

So close. Tantalizingly close.

Joey focused all his attention on the shotgun, marshaled all his remaining strength for the task of getting hold of it, put all his faith in the power of the weapon, and willed himself to ignore the ungodly pain that crippled him, to overcome the paralyzing shock of the brutal beating that he had endured. Come on, come on, you fucking altar boy, come on, do it, do it, do the right thing for once in your sorry damn life!

His arm responded shakily. His hand clenched into a fist, then sprang open, then reached out. His trembling fingers touched the walnut stock of the Remington.

Hunched over Celeste, P.J. reached into a pocket of his ski jacket and withdrew a knife. At the touch of a button, the six-inch springloaded blade snapped out of the handle, and the yellow light lovingly caressed the razor-sharp edge.

Smooth walnut. Hot, smooth steel. Joey curled his fingers. They palsied, weak. Not good. He had to get a firm grip. Tight. Tighter. Try to lift. Quietly, quietly.

P.J. was talking — not to Joey, not to Celeste, either to himself or to someone whom he imagined to be present. His voice was low and guttural, still disturbing and strange, and now he seemed to be speaking a foreign language. Or gibberish. Rough and rhythmic, full of hard punctuation and low animal sounds.

The rumble grew louder.

Good. A blessing, that rumble — fearful but welcome. Together, the subterranean disturbance and P.J.'s queer muttering provided some cover for any sounds that Joey made.

He had one chance, and he needed to execute his plan — his feeble, pathetic plan — smoothly, quickly, confidently, before P.J. realized what was happening.

He hesitated. Didn't want to act precipitously, before he was sure that he had summoned all his depleted resources. Wait. Wait. Be sure. Wait forever? The ultimate consequences of inaction could be greater than the consequences of action. Now or never. Do or die. Do and die, but at least, for God's sake, do something!

In one fluid movement, clenching his broken teeth against the explosion of pain that he knew would come — that came — Joey rolled up from his side into a sitting position, pulling the shotgun with him, bracing his back against the wall.

Even over his muttering and the persistent rumbling in the earth under the church, P.J. heard and reacted, simultaneously rising from his crouch and turning.

Joey had both hands on the Remington. The butt of the stock was jammed against his shoulder.

The baleful light that glimmered on the switchblade also leaped in P.J.'s eyes.

Pointblank. Joey squeezed the trigger.

The boom seemed loud enough to shatter the stone around them, and echoes of the shot crashed back and forth from one end of the room to the other, from ceiling to floor, with a volume that seemed to swell rather than diminish.

The recoil from the Remington struck lightning bolts of pain through Joey's entire body, and the shotgun fell out of his hands, clattering to the floor beside him.

The powerful blast took P.J. in the belly and chest, lifted him off his feet, spun him all the way around. He stumbled and went to his knees still facing Joey, folding his arms around his torso, bending forward, hugging himself as though to prevent his buckshot-riddled intestines from spilling out.

If Joey could have lifted his arms, he would have picked up the shotgun and fired again. He would have emptied the magazine. But his muscles would no longer even so much as twitch. His hands wouldn't even flop convulsively at his sides. He suspected that he was paralyzed from the neck down.

The rumble under the church grew louder.

Thin exhalations of sulfurous steam rose through cracks in the mortar between the flooring stones.

P.J. slowly raised his head, revealing a face that was hideously contorted in agony, eyes wide with shock, mouth stretched in a silent scream. He gagged, retched, choked rackingly. A phlegmy gurgle in his throat suddenly became a violent series of disgorging spasms. From his mouth gushed not rich arterial blood but a grotesque silver vomit, a stream of small glittering coins that rang onto the floor, as though he were a human slot machine.

Repulsed, astonished, stone-cold terrified, Joey looked up from the silver hoard as P.J. spat out one last coin and broke into a grin that could have been no more malevolent if it had been on the bare-bone face of Death himself. He unfolded his arms from his blasted torso and held his pale hands out in the manner of a magician saying Presto!, and although his clothes had been torn by the buckshot, he seemed to have suffered no wounds at all.

Joey knew that he must be dying, hallucinating, more than halfway to the Other Side and out of his head with pain. The delirium tremens of death made the crawling walls of a drunkard's nightmares seem amusing by contrast.

He screamed at Celeste to wake up, to run, but the warnings were only whispers that even he could barely hear.

The quaking, steaming floor abruptly cracked the width of the room. Along that jagged line, thin spears of fierce orange light stabbed up from the realm below. Mortar crumbled into the burning mine. Stones broke loose and tumbled out of sight. The overhead timbers cracked, and the cellar walls shook. The fissure in the floor rapidly widened to an inch, two inches, six inches, a foot, two feet, filling the room with blinding light, providing a glimpse of white-hot mine walls below, separating Joey from P.J. and Celeste.

Over the groans and skreeks of the shaken church, over the roar of the fire below and the thunder of subsidence, P.J. said, "Better say goodbye to the bitch, altar boy." He shoved Celeste into the blaze beneath Coal Valley, into volcanic heat and molten anthracite and instant death.

Ah, no! No! Please, God, no, no, please, no, not her, not her. Me, but not her. I'm self-pitying, arrogant, weak, blind to the truth, too ignorant to know what a second chance means, and I deserve whatever happens to me, but not her, not her in all her beauty, not her in all her kindness, not her!

A flutter. Behind Joey's eyes.

A flutter like the feathery shadows of many wings taking flight across a mysterious, great sphere of light.

Everything had changed.

He was uninjured. Free of pain. On his feet.

He was upstairs in the church.

Replay.

The Mustang had already crashed through the wall. P.J. already had Celeste.

Time had been wound backward but not far enough to give him an opportunity to think through his predicament. Only a couple of minutes remained until the subsidence would hit, not a second to waste.

Joey knew beyond doubt that this was his last chance, that the next spiral of events would not be rewound to bring him back to any moment of fatal error. The next damnation he earned would be his to keep. So there must be no errors this time, no mistakes, no failure to believe.

He was running between two rows of pews toward the side aisle along the east wall of the nave.

In the sanctuary at the front of the church, a slouching figure hunched along the ambulatory, through the dervish reflections of the altar fire above. It was P.J. He was carrying Celeste.

Joey reached the side aisle and raced forward along the unbroken panes of rain-beaten glass toward the sanctuary railing. He threw down the shotgun. He had no faith in it any more.

P.J. disappeared with Celeste through the door to the sacristy, slamming it behind him.

Joey vaulted over the sanctuary railing, followed the ambulatory to the sacristy door, but didn't stop there. He continued to the presbytery, to the altar stairs, to the altar platform, sidled around the overturned candles and the burning sheets, and went to the back wall of the sanctuary.

The crucifix had been shaken off its nail when the Mustang had crashed into the church. It lay facedown on the floor.

Joey picked up the bronze figure on the wooden cross and rushed back to the sacristy door. Locked.

The previous time, he'd blown it open with one round from the Remington. Now he considered returning to the nave to retrieve the discarded weapon.

Instead, he reared back and kicked the door as hard as he could, kicked it again, kicked, kicked. The stop molding cracked on the other side, a little play came into the door, he kicked it again, and yet again, was rewarded by a twang of metal, by splintering wood. He kicked it once more. The lock sprang, the stop molding shattered, the door flew open, and he went into the sacristy.

The cellar door.

The wooden stairs.

Because he'd had to batter down the door, Joey was now behind schedule. He was arriving at this point later in the replay than he had the first time. His brother's serpentine shadow had already slithered out of the moon-yellow light below and was nowhere to be seen. P.J. was farther into the labyrinthine cellar than before. With Celeste.

Joey started to descend the stairs two at a time, then realized that caution was still required. By discarding the gun and taking up the crucifix, he had altered the future that would unfold from this point on. Previously, he had reached the final chamber in the cellar before encountering P.J., but this time his brother might be waiting elsewhere along the way. He clutched the stair railing with one hand and continued downward with circumspection.

Such heat. An oven.

The smell of hot lime from the concrete. Hot stone baking in the walls.

In the first room, the jittering shadow of the frenzied spider spiraled ceaselessly on the floor.

Warily crossing toward the archway, Joey searched the long, deep coffers between the ceiling timbers for something other than spiders.

By the time he reached the second room, a railroad rumble had arisen under St. Thomas's.

As he stepped into the third chamber, the ominous sound swelled and was accompanied by tremors in the floor.

No time for caution.

No time for mistakes either.

He gripped the crucifix tightly in his right hand, held it out in front of him: Professor Von Helsing in the castle of the count.

Overhead. Shadows. Only shadows.

Room by room to the final archway.

Celeste lay unconscious under the single lightbulb.

The village-rocking subsidence hit, the church shook, and Joey was thrown through the archway into the final chamber just as the stone floor cracked open. Blades of orange light slashed out of the tunnel below. The fault in the floor widened as mortar disintegrated and stones broke loose, creating a more formidable gap between him and Celeste.

P.J. seemed to have vanished.

Stepping under the ceiling coffer that lay just this side of the fissure, standing with the brink of the raging mine fire to his right, Joey peered up expectantly into the recess between the rough timbers. P.J. was there as before, scuttling toward him, spider quick and spider agile, defying gravity, weirder than ever in the seething firelight. He shrieked, twitched with an arachnid spasm, and flung himself down at his prey.

Joey had no more Twilight Zone explanations to fall back upon, no more quirks of quantum physics, no more Star Trek time warps or energy waves, no more relatively polite monsters from the X-Files that might be taken out with a shotgun, not even any more complex Freudian analyses. There was only the real thing now, the foul and ancient thing, purest evil, the greatest fear of so many other centuries, millennia, here now swooping at him, shrieking hatred, reeking of sulfur, dark devourer of souls, eater of hope: only the fundamentals now, only a beast so primal that believing in it was difficult even when face to face with it. Joey cast out all doubt, however, overcame all cynicism, shed the supposed sophistication of the postmodern age, raised the crucifix in both hands, and thrust it out in front of him.

The top of the crucifix was blunt, not pointed, but it impaled P.J. when he slammed into it. Impaled, however, he was not stopped. He

fell into Joey and drove him backward. They staggered, stumbled, stayed on their feet, but teetered on the edge of the fiery gulf.

P.J. got one hand around Joey's throat. His fingers were as powerful as the jaws of a motorized vise, as shiny and hard as the carapace of

a dung beetle. His yellow eyes reminded Joey of the mongrel dog that he'd seen only that morning on the front porch of his dad's house.

When P.J. spoke, black blood bubbled on his lips: "Altar boy."

In the inferno below, an expansive pocket of toxic gases burst from confinement and exploded, shimmering incandescently. A white ball of flame spun out of the cellar floor, engulfed them, igniting P.J.'s clothes and hair, scorching away his skin in an instant. He released Joey, lost his balance, and with the crucifix embedded in his chest, he dropped through the steadily widening fissure into the old mine tunnel, folding the cape of fire around his body and taking it with him.

Although Joey had been immersed in the flames, he was unharmed. His clothes were not even singed.

He didn't need to ask Rod Setting or Captain Kirk or the ever logical Mr. Spock or anyone else to explain his miraculous escape from injury.

The merciless subterranean light blazed so fiercely that he couldn't see much even when he squinted, but he was sure that his brother fell an immeasurably greater distance than merely to the floor of an old tunnel, farther even than any vertical shaft in any coal mine could have possibly bored into the earth. His body was a frenzied spiky darkness that spiraled down like a spider's shadow, jittering down and around, jittering around and down, around and down and away.

Joey leaped across the fissure in the floor as it cracked wider, and he knelt at Celeste's side.

He lifted her right hand and turned the palm up, then her left hand. No wounds. Not even faint bruises.

When he tried to wake her, she murmured and stirred but didn't regain consciousness.

Substrata of coal, eaten away by years of hidden fires, had left layered cavities under Coal Valley. The weight of the surface world, with all its iron sorrows, at last became too great to be supported by the impaired structures that had once served as its foundations. This section of the valley, if no other, suffered a catastrophic subsidence in which the empty veins of fire-stripped coal imploded, collapsed into one another. The cellar shook, the floor heaved, and the fissure widened in an instant from three to five feet. The upper portion of St. Thomas's was tweaked from a rectangle into a rhomboid; and the wooden walls began to tear loose of the stone substructure to which they had been so long anchored.

As the ceiling sagged dangerously, as plaster fell and beams cracked, Joey scooped Celeste off the floor.

Gasping for breath in the furnace-hot air, blinking through rivers of eye-stinging sweat, he turned to the fissure. It was now six feet across, far too wide to be jumped with the girl in his arms.

Even if he could get across the abyss somehow, he knew that he wouldn't be able to make it all the way back through the cellar chambers to the steps, up to the sacristy, and out of the place before it collapsed.

His heart slammed against his caging ribs. His knees shook not under the weight of the girl but with the hard realization of his own mortality.

They couldn't die like this.

They had come too far, survived too much.

He had done the right thing, and that was what mattered. He had done the right thing, and now, whatever happened, he would not be afraid, not even here in the valley of the shadow of death.

I will fear no evil.

Abruptly the splintering ceiling stopped sagging toward him and pulled up instead, increasing his head room, as the building's superstructure noisily uprooted itself and tipped away from this end of the cellar.

Cold wind howled at his back.

Joey turned to the end wall of the basement and was astonished to see the sill plate wrenching loose of the anchor bolts that had held it to the stone. Jack studs snapped, the sole plate buckled, and all of it rose in an arc through the night as the church slowly tilted up and away from Joey. A wedge-shaped gap had opened between the foundation and the receding wall, through which the storm wind surged down into the exposed cellar. The gap was growing wider as the building tipped backward from him.

A way out.

The cellar wall was still eight feet high. He saw no easy way to scale it. Especially not with Celeste in his arms.

With a thunder of falling stone, the pit widened at his back, and the firestorm raged closer to his heels. Inblown rain steamed off the floor.

His heart raced but not in fear now, only in wonder, as he waited for his destiny to unfold.

Before him, wide cracks opened in the cellar wall, zigzagging along the mortar lines. The shaking ground jarred loose a stone that clattered to the floor, bounced, and knocked painfully against his shin. Here, another stone; there, a third; and a little higher, a fourth, a fifth. The foundation wall retained its integrity, but now it offered handholds.

Joey shifted Celeste, slung her over his left shoulder in a fireman's carry. He climbed out of the suffocating heat into the rain-filled night as the building tilted away, away, away like a giant clipper ship tacking in a strong wind.

He dragged her through sodden grass and thick mud, past the vent pipe from which flames spouted like blood from an arterial tap. Onto the sidewalk. Into the street.

Sitting on the blacktop with Celeste in his arms, holding her tightly

while she began to regain consciousness, Joey watched as the Church

of St. Thomas was torn asunder, as the ruins ignited, and as the burning

walls collapsed into a bright chasm, into far deeper grottoes, and finally

into unknown kingdoms of fire.

Subsidence.

LONG PAST MIDNIGHT, AFTER GIVING THEIR STATEMENTS TO DEPUTIES from the county sheriff's department and to the Pennsylvania State Police, Joey and Celeste were driven back to Asherville.

The police had issued a condemnation order for the village of Coal Valley. Saved from P.J. without ever knowing that they had been in danger, the Dolan family had been evacuated.

The bodies of John, Beth, and Hannah Bimmer would be taken to the Devokowski Funeral Home, where Joey's father had so recently rested.

Celeste's parents, waiting in Asherville with the Korshaks for word of poor Beverly's fate, had not only been given the bad news about the murder but had already been informed that they would not be permitted to return to Coal Valley this night and that their daughter would be brought to them. In addition to the church, subsidence had suddenly claimed half a block of homes in another part of town, and the ground was too unstable to risk continued habitation.

Joey and Celeste sat in the back of the sheriff's-department patrol car, holding hands. After making a few attempts to draw them out, the young deputy left them to their shared silence.

By the time they turned off Coal Valley Road onto the county route, the rain had stopped falling.

Celeste persuaded the deputy to drop them in the center of Asherville and to allow Joey to walk her from there to the Korshaks' place.

Joey didn't know why she preferred not to be driven all the way, but he sensed that she had a reason and that it was important.

He was not unhappy about delaying his own arrival home. By now his mom and dad had no doubt been awakened by the police, who would want to search P.J.'s old basement room. They had been told about the monstrous things their older son had done to Beverly Korshak, to the Bimmers — and to God knew how many others. Even as Joey's world had been rebuilt by making good use of the second chance that he'd been given, their world had been forever changed for the worse. He dreaded seeing the sorrow in his mother's eyes, the torment and grief in his father's.

He wondered if, by changing his own fate, he had somehow freed his mother from the cancer that would otherwise kill her just four years hence. He dared to hope. Things had changed. In his heart, however, he knew that his actions had only made the world better in one small way; paradise on earth was not pending.

As the patrol car drove away, Celeste took his hand and said, "Something I need to tell you."

"Tell me."

"Show you, actually."

"Then show me."

She led him along the damp street, across a carpet of sodden leaves, to the municipal building. All county government except the sheriff's department maintained offices there.

The library was in the annex, toward the back. They entered an unlighted courtyard through an archway in a brick wall, passed under dripping larches, and went to the front door.

In the wake of the storm, the night town was as silent as any cemetery.

"Don't be surprised," she said.

"About what?"

The lower part of the library door was solid, but the upper portion featured four eight-inch-square panes of glass. Celeste rammed her elbow into the pane nearest the lock, shattering it.

Startled, Joey looked around the courtyard and out toward the street beyond the wall. The breaking glass had been a fragile, short-lived sound. He doubted that anyone had heard it at that late hour. Furthermore, theirs was a small town, and this was 1975, so there was no burglar alarm.

Reaching through the broken pane, she unlocked the door from inside. "You have to promise to believe."

She withdrew the small flashlight from her raincoat pocket and led him past the librarian's desk into the stacks.

Because the county was poor, the library was small. Finding any particular volume would not have taken long. In fact, she took no time at all to search, because she knew what she wanted.

They stopped in the fiction aisle, a narrow space with books shelved eight feet high on both sides. She directed the beam of light at the floor, and the colorful spines of the books seemed magically luminescent in the backwash.

"Promise to believe," she said, and her beautiful eyes were huge and solemn.

"Believe what?"

"Promise."

"All right."

"Promise to believe.

"I'll believe."

She hesitated, took a deep breath, and began. "In the spring of '73, when you were graduating from County High, I was at the end of my sophomore year. I'd never had the nerve to approach you. I knew you'd never noticed me — and now you never would. You were going away to college, you'd probably find a girl there, and I'd never even see you again."

The fine hairs on the nape of Joey's neck prickled, but he did not yet know why.

She said, "I was depressed, feeling like the nerd of nerds, so I lost myself in books, which is what I always do when I have the blues. I was here in the library, in this very aisle, looking for a new novel… when I found your book."

"My book?"

"I saw your name on the spine. Joseph Shannon."

"What book?" Puzzled, he scanned the shelves.

"I thought it was someone else, a writer with your name. But when I took it off the shelf and checked the back of the jacket, there was a picture of you."

He met her eyes again. Those mysterious depths.

She said, "It wasn't a picture of you as you are now, tonight — but as you will be in about fifteen years. Still… it was recognizably you."

"I don't understand," he said, but he was beginning to think that he did.

"I looked at the copyright page, and the book was published in 1991."

He blinked. "Sixteen years from now?"

"This was in the spring of '73," she reminded him. "So at that time I was holding a book that wouldn't yet be published for eighteen years. On the jacket it said that you'd written eight previous novels and that six of them had been best-sellers."

The not unpleasant prickling sensation on the nape of his neck increased.

"I took the book to the checkout desk. When I passed it to the librarian with my card, when she took it into her hands… it wasn't your book any more. Then it was a novel by someone else, one that I'd read before, published in '69."

She raised the flashlight, directing the beam at the shelves behind him.

"I don't know if it's too much to ask," she said, "but maybe it's here again tonight, here again for just one moment on this night of all nights."

Overcome by a growing sense of wonder, Joey turned to look at the stacks where the flashlight focused. He followed the beam as it slipped along one of the shelves.

A small gasp of delight escaped Celeste, and the beam came to a halt on a book with a red spine.

Joey saw his name turned on edge, in silver-foil letters. Above his name was a title in more silver foil: Strange Highways.

Trembling, Celeste slid the book out from between two other volumes. She showed him the cover, and his name was in big letters at the top, above the title. Then she turned the book over.

He stared in awe at the photo of himself on the dust jacket. He was older in the photograph, in his middle thirties.

He was familiar with his appearance at that age, for he had already lived five years past it in his other life. But he looked better in this photograph than he had really looked when he'd been thirty-five: not prematurely aged, not dissipated by booze, not dead in the eyes. He appeared to be prosperous too — and best of all, he looked like a happy man.

His appearance in the photograph, however, was not a fraction as important as who was shown with him. It was a group portrait. Celeste was at his side, also fifteen years older than she was now — and two children, a beautiful girl of perhaps six and a handsome boy who might have been eight.

Unexpectedly filled with tears that he could barely repress, heart hammering with a wild joy that he had never known before, Joey took the book from her.

She pointed to the words under the photograph, and he had to blink furiously to clear his vision enough to read them:

Joseph Shannon is the author of eight other acclaimed novels about

the joys and rewards of love and family, six of which have been national

best-sellers. His wife, Celeste, is an award-winning poet. They live with

their children, Josh and Laura, in Southern California.

As he read, he followed the words with his trembling fingers, in precisely the way that he had done, as a child, when following the text in the missal at Mass.

"And so," she said softly, "ever since the spring of '73, I've known that you would come."

Some of the mysteries in her eyes were gone, but by no means all. He knew that regardless of how long a life they shared, she would be to some degree forever mysterious to him.

"I want to take this," he said of the book.

She shook her head. "You know you can't. Besides, you don't need the book to be able to write it. You only need to believe that you will."

He let her take the novel out of his hands.

As she returned the volume to the shelf, he suspected that he had been given a second chance not so much to stop P.J. as to meet Celeste Baker. While resistance to evil was essential, there could be no hope for the world without love.

"Promise me you'll believe," she said, putting one hand to his face, tenderly tracing the line of his cheek.

"I promise."

"Then all things," she said, "are possible."

Around them, the library was filled with lives that had been lived, with hopes that had been realized, with ambitions that had been achieved, with dreams for the taking.