interstate and had taken the interstate in a roundabout loop toward Black Hollow Highway 
and the turnpike. On the interstate he'd had the accident, and thereafter nothing had 
ever gone right for him again.
    He had been driving his ten-year-old '65 Ford Mustang, which he had salvaged and 
restored-with his dad's help-from an auto junkyard after the original owner had rolled 
it. God, how he had loved that car. It had been the only thing of beauty he'd ever owned, 
and most important, his own hands had brought it back from ruin to glory.
    Recalling the Mustang, he hesitantly touched the left side of his forehead just below 
the hairline. The scar was an inch long, barely visible but easily felt. He remembered 
the sickening slide, his car spinning on the rain-slick interstate, the collision with 
the signpost, the shattering window.
    He remembered all the blood.
    Now he sat at the three-way stop, staring down Coal Valley Road to his left, and he 
knew that if he took this route, as he should have taken it on that eventful night long 
ago, he would at last have a chance to put everything right. He would get his life back 
on track.
    That was a crazy notion, perhaps as superstitious as his earlier certainty that fate 
would not allow him to drive out of Asherville but this time he was right. It was true. 
He had no doubt that he was being given another chance. He knew that some superhuman 
power was at work in the fading October twilight, knew that the meaning of his troubled 
life lay along that two-lane mountain route-because Coal Valley Road had been condemned 
and torn up more than nineteen years ago, yet now it waited to his left, exactly as it 
had been on that special night. It was magically restored.
    
    
    7
    
    JOEY EASED THE RENTAL CHEVY PAST THE STOP SIGN AND PARKED ON the narrow shoulder, on 
the dead-end side of the three-way intersection, directly across from the entrance to 
Coal Valley Road. He switched off the headlights but left the engine running.
    Overhung by autumnal trees, those two lanes of wet blacktop led out of the deepening 
twilight and vanished into shadows as black as the oncoming night. The pavement was 
littered with colorful leaves that glowed strangely in the gloom, as though irradiated.
    His heart pounded, pounded.
    He closed his eyes and listened to the rain.
    When at last he opened his eyes, he half expected that Coal Valley Road wouldn't be 
there any more, that it had been just one more hallucination. But it hadn't vanished. The 
two lanes of blacktop glistened with silver rain. Scarlet and amber leaves glimmered like 
a scattering of jewels meant to lure him into the tunnel of trees and into the deeper 
darkness beyond.
    Impossible.
    But there it was.
    Twenty-one years ago in Coal Valley, a six-year-old boy named Rudy DeMarco had 
tumbled into a sinkhole that abruptly opened under him while he was playing in his 
backyard. Rushing out of the house in response to her son's screams, Mrs. DeMarco had 
found him in an eight-foot-deep pit, with sulfurous smoke billowing from fissures in the 
bottom. She scrambled into the hole after him, into heat so intense that she seemed to 
have descended through the gates of Hell. The floor of the pit resembled a furnace grate; 
little Rudy's legs were trapped between thick bars of stone, dangling into whatever 
inferno was obscured by the rising smoke. Choking, dizzy, instantly disoriented, Mrs. 
DeMarco nevertheless wrenched her child from the gap in which he was wedged. As the 
unstable floor of the pit quaked and cracked and crumbled under her, she dragged Rudy to 
the sloped wall, clawed at the hot earth, and frantically struggled upward. The bottom 
dropped out altogether, the sinkhole rapidly widened, the treacherous slope slid away 
beneath her, but still she pulled her boy out of the seething smoke and onto the lawn. 
His clothes were ablaze. She covered him with her body, trying to smother the flames, and 
her clothes caught on fire. Clutching Rudy against her, she rolled with him in the grass, 
crying for help, and her screams seemed especially loud because her boy had fallen 
silent. More than his clothes had burned: Most of his hair was singed away, one side of 
his face was blistered, and his small body was charred. Three days later, in the 
Pittsburgh hospital to which he had been taken by air ambulance, Rudy DeMarco died of 
catastrophic burns.
    For sixteen years prior to the boy's death, the people of Coal Valley had lived above 
a subterranean fire that churned relentlessly through a network of abandoned mines, 
eating away at untapped veins of anthracite, gradually widening those underground 
corridors and shafts. While state and federal officials debated whether the hidden 
conflagration would eventually burn itself out, while they argued about various 
strategies for extinguishing it, while they squandered fortunes on consultants and 
interminable hearings, while they strove indefatigably to shift the financial 
responsibility for the clean-up from one jurisdiction to another, Coal Valley's residents 
lived with carbon-monoxide monitors to avoid being gassed in the night by mine-fire fumes 
that seeped, up through the foundations of their homes. Scattered across the town were 
vent pipes, tapping the tunnels below to release smoke from the fire and perhaps minimize 
the build-up of toxic gases in nearby houses; one even thrust up from the 
elementary-school playground.
    With the tragic death of little Rudy DeMarco, the politicians and bureaucrats were at 
last compelled to take action. The federal government purchased the threatened 
properties, beginning with those houses directly over the most hotly burning tunnels, 
then those over secondary fires, then those that were still only adjacent to the deep, 
combustible rivers of coal. During the course of the following year, as homes were 
condemned and the residents moved away, the reasonably pleasant village of Coal Valley 
gradually became a ghost town.
    By that rainy night in a long-ago October, when Joey had taken the wrong road back to 
college, only three families remained in Coal Valley. They had been scheduled to move out 
before Thanksgiving.
    In the year that followed the departure of those last residents, bulldozers were to 
knock down every building in the village. Every scrap of the demolished structures was to 
be hauled away. The streets, cracked and hoved from the pressures of the hidden fires 
below, would be torn up. The hills and fields would be seeded with grass, restoring the 
land to something resembling a natural state, and the mine fires would be left to 
burn-some said for a hundred or two hundred years-until the veins of coal were at last 
exhausted.
    Geologists, mining engineers, and officials from the Pennsylvania Department of 
Environmental Resources believed that the fire would eventually undermine four thousand 
acres-an area far greater than that encompassed by the abandoned village. Consequently, 
Coal Valley Road was likely to suffer sudden subsidence at numerous points along much of 
its length-a deadly danger to motorists. More than nineteen years ago, therefore, after 
the ghost town had been demolished and hauled away, Coal Valley Road had been torn up as 
well.
    It had not been there when he had driven into Asherville the previous day. Now it