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 foiclass="underline" 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.