surprised if he had crashed through the rotting wood.
    The house had deteriorated in the two decades since he had last seen it, which 
surprised him. For the past twelve years, on the first of each month, his brother had 
sent a generous check to their father, enough to allow the old man either to afford a 
better house or to renovate this place. What had Dad been doing with the money?
    The key was under the rubber-backed hemp mat, where he'd been told that he would find 
it. Though Asherville might give him the heebie-jeebies, it was a town where a spare key 
could be kept in an obvious place or a house could even be left unlocked with virtually 
no risk of burglary.
    The door opened directly into the living room. He put his bag at the foot of the 
stairs to the second floor.
    He switched on the lights.
    The sofa and the armchair recliner were not the same as those that had been there 
twenty years ago, but they were so similar as to be indistinguishable from the previous 
furniture. Nothing else appeared to have been changed at all-except the television, which 
was big enough to belong to God.
    The rest of the first floor was occupied by the combined kitchen and dining area. The 
green Formica table with its wide chrome edge band was the one at which they had eaten 
meals throughout his childhood. The chairs were the same too, although the tie-on 
cushions had been changed.
    He had the curious feeling that the house had been untenanted for an age, sealed 
tomb-tight, and that he was the first in centuries to invade its silent spaces. His 
mother had been dead sixteen years, his dad for only a day and a half, but both seemed to 
have been gone since time immemorial.
    In one corner of the kitchen was the cellar door, on which hung a gift calendar from 
the First National Bank. The picture for October showed a pile of orange pumpkins in a 
drift of leaves. One had been carved into a jack-o'-lantern.
    Joey went to the door but didn't open it right away.
    He clearly remembered the cellar. It was divided into two rooms, each with its own 
outside entrance. One contained the furnace and the hot-water heater. The other had been 
his brother's room.
    For a while he stood with his hand on the old cast-iron knob. It was icy under his 
palm, and his body heat didn't warm it.
    The knob creaked softly when he finally turned it.
    Two dim, dust-covered, bare bulbs came on when he flicked the switch: one halfway 
down the cellar stairs, the second in the furnace room below. But neither chased off all 
the darkness.
    He didn't have to go into the cellar first thing, at night. The morning would be soon 
enough. In fact, he could think of no reason why he had to go down there at all.
    The illuminated square of concrete floor at the foot of the steps was veined with 
cracks, just as he remembered it, and the surrounding shadows seemed to seep from those 
narrow fissures and rise along the walls.
    "Hello?" he called.
    He was surprised to hear himself speak, because he knew that he was alone in the 
house.
    Nevertheless, he waited for a response. None came.
    "Is someone there?" he asked.
    Nothing.
    At last he shut off the cellar lights and closed the door.
    He carried his suitcase to the second floor. A short, narrow hallway with badly worn 
gray-and-yellow-flecked linoleum led from the head of the stairs to the bathroom at the 
back.
    Beyond the single door on the right was his parents' room. Actually, for sixteen 
years, since his mother's death, his dad had slept there alone. And now it was nobody's 
room.
    The single door on the left side of the hall led to his old bedroom, into which he 
had not set foot in twenty years.
    The flesh prickled on the nape of his neck, and he turned to look down the stairs 
into the living room, half expecting to discover that someone was ascending after him. 
But who might have been there? Everyone was gone. Dead and gone. The stairs were deserted.
    The house was so humble, small, narrow, plain-yet at the moment it felt vast, a place 
of unexpected dimensions and hidden rooms where unknown lives were lived, where secret 
dramas unfolded. The silence was not an ordinary quiet, and it cut through him as a 
woman's scream might have done.
    He opened the door and went into his bedroom.
    Home again.
    He was scared. And he didn't know why. Or if he knew, the knowledge existed somewhere 
between instinct and recollection.
    
    
    2
    
    THAT NIGHT, AN AUTUMN STORM MOVED IN FROM THE NORTHwest, and all hope of stars was 
lost. Darkness congealed into clouds that pressed against the mountains and settled 
between the high slopes, until the heavens were devoid of light and as oppressive as a 
low vault of cold stone.
    When he was a teenager, Joey Shannon had sometimes sat by the single window of his 
second-floor bedroom, gazing at the wedge of sky that the surrounding mountains permitted 
him. The stars and the brief transit of the moon across the gap between the ridges were a 
much needed reminder that beyond Asherville, Pennsylvania, other worlds existed where 
possibilities were infinite and where even a boy from a poor coal-country family might 
change his luck and become anything that he wished to be, especially if he were a boy 
with big dreams and the passion to pursue them.
    This night, at the age of forty, Joey sat at the same window, with the lights off, 
but the sight of stars was denied him. Instead, he had a bottle of Jack Daniel's.
    Twenty years ago, in another October when the world had been a far better place, he'd 
come home for one of his quick, infrequent visits from Shippensburg State College, where 
with the help of a partial scholarship, he had been paying his way by working evenings 
and weekends as a supermarket stock clerk. His mom had cooked his favorite 
dinner-meatloaf with tomato gravy, mashed potatoes, baked corn-and he had played some 
two-hand pinochle with his dad.
    His older brother, P.J. (for Paul John), also had been home that weekend, so there 
had been a lot of laughter, affection, a comforting sense of family. Any time spent with 
P.J. was always memorable. He was successful at everything that he tried-the 
valedictorian of his high-school and college graduating classes, a football hero, a 
shrewd poker player who seldom lost, a guy at whom all the prettiest girls looked with 
doe-eyed interest-but the best thing about him was his singular way with people and the 
upbeat atmosphere that he created wherever he went. P.J. had a natural gift for 
friendship, a sincere liking for most people, and an uncanny empathy that made it 
possible for him to understand what made a person tick virtually upon first meeting.