Strange Highways

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.

    18

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