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.