Dean Koontz - Strange Highways

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."