Mindy gripped the dashboard with both hands. "She's laughing. She burned the church down and she's laughing."

As if she heard Mindy's gasp, Alma turned her gaze on us. The headlights reflected off the pure black of her eyes.

Even as Mindy reached for the door handle, I shifted and turned hard. The car bumped over the low curb and retreated away from the horrible scene. No sound of fire sirens pierced the air, though the neighbors up and down the street must surely have been aware of the conflagration.

Back at the intersection I turned left away from the heart of town, rather than returning to the main road. The salt truck had preceded me and the rock salt crunched beneath the Audi's tires as if I were driving over a field of dry, brittle bones.

"Where are you going?" Mindy pressed.

"I'm getting out of this town."

She rode quietly beside me while we left the neighborhoods of the downtown area and came to homes with four acre plots that would be filled with lush vegetable gardens and children's toys in the summertime. I guessed three miles or so separated us from the township limit. There was no overpass crossing this road. Would we find nothing but a wall? How elaborate was Jake's set, really?

When we were children, Jake built a model of the town in the basement. From toothpicks and bits of stone and bark gathered in the yard he made a scale replica of every building, every tree, and every landmark in the town. Sometimes I'd sit and watch him work, marveling at the detail. The painted windows of the bank had diamond-shaped panes, exactly as did the windows in the real bank. I counted them once. Twenty four full diamonds and ten half diamonds. Next time we sat in the back of our father's truck in the drive-thru, I counted the diamonds on the real building. Twenty four full diamonds and ten half diamonds.

Jake's model was elaborate to the point of perfection.

"Why do you work so hard on this?" I asked him once when he had a moment of frustration over his inability to get the proportions of an extraordinary old angel oak just right.

"In this version of the world, everything that happens is in my control."

We passed the village limit sign without incident, but only moments later came to a massive fir tree that had fallen across the road. By all appearances, the tree was a victim of the recent storm The branches still bore a heavy mantle of snow, but the gaping wound in the earth where the roots had torn free was fresh black soil. To the right of the tree, lay the river. There was no getting around that way. To the left, on the other side of a deep, narrow ditch a field of winter wheat danced in the gentle breeze.

"Stay here a sec," I told Mindy.

She grabbed my wrist. "Where are you going?"

"I'm getting out of this town." Pulling away from her, I pushed the car door open and stood on the freshly-salted road. Behind us, against the dark sky, even from a distance of miles, I could make out the glow of the massive church fire. For the first time since I left, I realized I still wore my father's boots. They were immensely heavy and two sizes too big, but they were dry and warm and sturdy. I pulled the laces as tight as I could and stepped to the edge of the ditch. A slip would give me my second frigid dunking of the day, but the gap was not much more than a wide step. I hopped across and landed hard on the frozen edge of the field. Wheat swirled around my knees like ocean waves as I picked my way around the top of the tree.

The wall was so perfectly camouflaged I bumped into it. It was not perfectly smooth, but rough and contoured. Probably, in daylight, the texture helped create a more realistic image. My hands searched in the poor light, high and low, for anything that resembled a door. I made my way back toward the ditch and lay down on the dirt and stretched my arm downward. The wall followed the slope of the land. I hopped across the ditch again and stood on the road. My toes pressed against the wall where it met the road. Reaching up high, I felt nothing but more of the same. I snatched a pine cone from the tree and threw it as high as I could. It thunked dully against the surface and fell back to land among the branches from which it had come.

I shouted a curse into the night and it bounced back to me, mocking my fury.

No doubt, Jake was watching me, even now.

Inside the car, I cranked the heat and held my hands in front of the heater vent.

Mindy sat still and silent—a first for her, maybe in her whole life.

"Aren't you going to ask where I'm going?" I asked her.

"I was just thinking about something."

With my head laid back against the headrest and my eyes focused on nothing in particular, I asked what was on her mind.

"Mrs. James's eyes, have you ever seen anything like that?"

I rolled my head sideways to look at her. "Yup."

She pushed her hair away from her face, twisted it up on top of her head and let go so that her curls fell down around her shoulders like little springs dropped in a watchmaker's shop. "Well, you know, it makes sense, what with the stories about this town."

"What stories?"

"About the," she glanced around as if to check if anyone was watching. Of course they were watching. There was probably a camera inside the rear-view mirror or something. She'd never find it, though. Jake was a genius. He always had been.

"About the devil worshippers," she said at last in a hoarse whisper.

I almost laughed out loud. Sure. Devil worship. That made as much sense as anything. "Do tell," I prompted.

"I can't believe you never heard. Kids talked about it all the time when we were growing up."

"I wasn't really allowed to talk to other kids growing up. My dad was an abusive, controlling asshole." Letting the words out was like burping and relieving a gas pain—both fantastically relieving and embarrassing.

Mindy fiddled with the buttons on her coat and looked everywhere but at my face. "Well, people talked. They said there was a cult of some kind in this town. They played with black magic and made things happen."

"What kind of things?"

"Well, remember that gas line explosion that killed Steve Harmon? They hated him. That was murder, vengeance for him filing that lawsuit about the chemicals in the water. But good things, too. When that mine collapsed but all six guys got out? They did that because some of their members were stuck down there. They saved those guys."

"With black magic." How could I be skeptical after everything I'd seen? If Reverend Hobbs hadn't been performing some kind of black magic, what the hell had he been doing?

"Yes," she answered in a tiny, flustered voice.

"Jake isn't a Satanist."

"How do you know?"

I gazed upward at the looming black wall of my enormous prison and admitted to myself that I had no idea. I realized then, I'd barely spoken to my brother in years. I had no idea who he was. If he was a murderer, why not a devil worshiper? The world had turned upside down and I was willing to believe damn near anything.