driver's door, the trunk popped open by itself and the lid eased up a few inches. From 
the dark interior, a slender hand reached feebly toward him, as if in desperation, 
beseechingly. A woman's hand. The thumb was broken and hanging at a queer angle, and 
blood dripped from the torn fingernails.
    Around him, Asherville seemed to fall under a dark enchantment. The wind died. The 
clouds, which had been moving ceaselessly out of the northwest, were suddenly as 
unchanging as the vaulted ceiling of Hell. All was lifeless. Silence reigned. Joey was 
frozen by shock and cold fear. Only the hand moved, only the hand was alive, and only the 
hand's pathetic groping for salvation had any meaning or importance in a world turned to 
stone.
    Joey couldn't bear the sight of the dangling thumb, the torn nails, the slow 
drip-drip of blood-but he felt powerfully compelled to stare. He knew that it was the 
woman in the transparent gown, come out of his dream from the night before, into the 
waking world, though such a thing was not possible.
    Reaching out from the shadow of the trunk lid, the hand slowly turned palm up. In the 
center was a spot of blood and a puncture wound that might have been made by a nail.
    Strangely, when Joey closed his eyes against the horror before him, he could see the 
sanctuary of Our Lady of Sorrows as clearly as if he were standing upon the altar 
platform at that very moment. A silvery ringing of sacred bells broke the silence, but it 
was not a real sound in that October afternoon; they rang out of his memory, from morning 
Masses in the distant past. Through my fault, my fault, my most grievous fault. He saw 
the chalice gleaming with the reflections of candle flames. The wafer of the host was 
held high in the priest's hands. Joey strained hard to detect the moment of 
transubstantiation. The moment when hope was fulfilled, faith rewarded. The split instant 
of perfect mystery: wine into blood. Is there hope for the world, for lost men like me?
    The images in his mind became as unbearable as the sight of the blood-smeared hand, 
and he opened his eyes. The hand was gone. The trunk lid was closed. The wind was blowing 
again, and the dark clouds rolled out of the northwest, and in the distance a dog barked.
    The trunk had never actually popped open, and the hand had never reached toward him. 
Hallucination.
    He raised his own hands and gazed at them as though they were the hands of a 
stranger. They were trembling badly.
    Delirium tremens. The shakes. Visions of things crawling out of the walls. In this 
case, out of a car trunk. All drunks had them from time to time-especially when they 
tried to give up the bottle.
    In the car, he withdrew a flask from an inside pocket of his suit jacket. He stared 
at it for a long time. Finally he unscrewed the cap, took a whiff of the whiskey, and 
brought it to his lips.
    Either he had stood half mesmerized by the car trunk far longer than he'd realized or 
he had sat for an awfully long time with the flask, struggling against the urge to open 
it, because the funeral-home hearse pulled out of the driveway and turned right, heading 
across town toward Our Lady of Sorrows. Enough time had passed for his father's casket to 
be transferred from the viewing room.
    Joey wanted to be sober for the funeral Mass. He wanted that more than he had wanted 
anything in a long time.
    Without taking a drink, he screwed the cap back onto the flask and returned the flask 
to his pocket.
    He started the car, caught up with the hearse, and followed it to the church.
    More than once during the drive, he imagined that he heard something moving in the 
trunk of the car. A muffled thump. A tapping. A faint, cold, hollow cry.
    
    
    4
    
    OUR LADY OF SORROWS WAS AS HE REMEMBERED IT: DARK WOOD lovingly polished to a satiny 
sheen; stained-glass windows waiting only for the appearance of the sun to paint bright 
images of compassion and salvation across the pews in the nave; groin vaults receding 
into blue shadows above; the air woven through with a tapestry of odors-lemon-oil 
furniture polish, incense, hot candle wax.
    Joey sat in the last pew, hoping that no one would recognize him. He had no friends 
in Asherville any more. And without a long drink from his flask of whiskey, he wasn't 
prepared to endure the looks of scorn and disdain that he was sure to receive and that, 
in fact, he deserved.
    More than two hundred people attended the service, and to Joey the mood seemed even 
more somber than could be expected at a funeral. Dan Shannon had been well and widely 
liked, and he would be missed.
    Many of the women blotted their eyes with handkerchiefs, but the men were all dry 
eyed. In Asherville, the men never wept publicly and rarely in private. Although none had 
worked the mines in more than twenty years, they came from generations of miners who had 
lived in constant expectation of tragedy, of friends and loved ones lost to cave-ins and 
explosions and early-onset black-lung disease. Theirs was a culture that not only valued 
stoicism but could never have existed without it.
    Keep your feelings to yourself. Don't burden your friends and family with your own 
fear and anguish. Endure. That was the creed of Asherville, a guiding morality stronger 
even than that which was taught by the rector of Our Lady and the two-thousand-year-old 
faith that he served.
    The Mass was the first that Joey had attended in twenty years. Evidently at the 
insistence of the parishioners, it was a classic Mass in Latin, with the grace and 
eloquence that had been lost when the Church had gone trendy back in the sixties.
    The beauty of the Mass did not affect him, did not warm him. By his own actions and 
desire over the past twenty years, he had placed himself outside the art of faith, and 
now he could relate to it only in the manner of a man who studies a fine painting through 
the window of a gallery, his perception hampered by distorting reflections on the glass.
    The Mass was beautiful, but it was a cold beauty. Like that of winter light on 
polished steel. An Arctic vista.
    From the church, Joey drove to the cemetery. It was on a hill. The grass was still 
green, littered with crisp leaves that crunched under his shoes.
    His father was to be buried beside his mother. No name had yet been cut into the 
blank half of the dual-plot headstone.
    Being at his mother's graveside for the first time, seeing her name and the date of 
her passing carved in granite, Joey did not suddenly feel the reality of her death. The 
loss of her had been excruciatingly real to him for the past sixteen years.
    In fact, he had lost her twenty years ago, when he had seen her for the last time.
    The hearse was parked on the road near the grave site. Lou Devokowski and his 
assistant were organizing the pallbearers to unload the casket.
    The open grave awaiting Dan Shannon was encircled by a three-foot-high black plastic 
curtain, not to provide a safety barrier but to shield the more sensitive mourners from 
the sight of the raw earth in the sheer walls of the pit, which might force them into too 
stark a confrontation with the grim realities of the service that they were attending. 
The undertaker had also been discreet enough to cover the mound of excavated earth with