Strange Highways

Valley had been home to fewer than five hundred people. Simple frame houses with tar-shingle roofs. Yards full of peonies and lush huckleberry bushes in the summer, hidden under deep blankets of snow in the winter. Dogwood trees that blazed white and pink and purple in the spring. A small branch of County First National Bank. A one-truck volunteer fire station. Polanski's Tavern, where mixed drinks were rarely requested and most orders were for beer or for beer with shooters of whiskey on the side, where huge jars of pickled eggs and hot sausages in spicy broth stood on the bar. A general store, one service station, a small elementary school.
     The village wasn't big enough to have streetlights, but before the government had finally begun condemning properties and offering compensation to the dispossessed, Coal Valley had produced a respectable warm glow in its snug berth among the surrounding night-clad hills. Now all the small businesses were shuttered and dark. The beacon of faith in the church belfry had been extinguished. Lights shone at only three houses, and those would be switched off forever when the final residents departed before Thanksgiving.
     On the far side of town, an orange glow rose from a pit where the fire in one branch of the mine maze had burned close enough to the surface to precipitate a sudden subsidence. There the seething subterranean inferno was exposed, where otherwise it remained hidden under the untenanted houses and the heat-cracked streets.
     "Is he down there?" Celeste asked, as though Joey might be able to sense clairvoyantly the presence of their faceless enemy.
     The fitful precognitive flashes he had experienced thus far were beyond his control, however, and far too enigmatic to serve as a map to the lair of the killer. Besides, he suspected that the whole point of his being allowed to replay this night was to give him the chance to succeed or fail, to do right or do wrong, drawing only on the depth of his own wisdom, judgment, and courage. Coal Valley was his testing ground. No guardian angel was going to whisper instructions in his ear - or step between him and a razor-sharp knife flashing out of shadows.
     "He could've driven straight through town without stopping," Joey said. "Could've gone to Black Hollow Highway and maybe from there to the turnpike. That's the route I usually took back to college. But ... I think he's down there, somewhere down there. Waiting."
     "For us?"
     "He waited for me after he turned off the county route onto Coal Valley Road. Just stopped on the roadway and waited to see if I was going to follow him."
     "Why would he do that?"
     Joey suspected that he knew the answer. He sensed suppressed, sharp-toothed knowledge swimming like a shark in the lightless sea of his subconscious, but he couldn't entice it to surface. It would soar out of the murky depths and come for him when he was least expecting
     "Sooner or later we'll find out," he said.
     He knew in his bones that confrontation was inevitable. They were captured by the fierce gravity of a black hole, pulled toward an inescapable and crushing truth.
     On the far side of Coal Valley, the glow at the open pit pulsed brighter than before. Streams of white and red sparks spewed out of the earth, like great swarms of fireflies, expelled with such force that they rose at least a hundred feet into the heavy rain before being quenched.
     Fearful that a fluttering in his belly could quickly grow into a paralyzing weakness, Joey switched off the dome light, steered the Mustang back onto Coal Valley Road, and drove toward the desolate village below.
     "We'll go straight to my house," Celeste said.
     "I don't know if we should."
     "Why not?"
     "It might not be a good idea."
     "We'll be safe there with my folks."
     "The idea isn't just to get safe."
     "What is the idea?"
     "To keep you alive."
     "Same thing."
     "And to stop him."
     "Stop him? The killer?"
     "It makes sense. I mean, how can there be any redemption if I knowingly turn my back on evil and walk away from it? Saving you has to be only half of what I need to do. Stopping him is the other half."
     "This is getting too mystical again. When do we call in the exorcist, start spritzing holy water?"
     "It is what it is. I can't help