Twenty yards away, Ronnie stopped again. Evidently he was now close enough to have heard. "Sister Carrie," he shouted.

Balenger was startled by the incongruity of the statement. "What?"

"Dreiser's novel! When your friend talked about it, he said almost everything that matters! Our bodies and our surroundings doom us! He forgot to say that the past dooms us!"

"Not always! Not if you fight it! But that hellhole of a building sure can trick us into believing that!"

Lightning again paralyzed Ronnie. What's wrong with him? Balenger wondered. Why isn't he coming closer?

The goggles! Balenger realized. When the lightning flashes, the goggles need a moment to adjust! The lightning causes a flare that temporarily blinds him!

Ronnie lifted the shotgun to his shoulder.

As lightning cracked, again blinding Ronnie, Balenger pulled his gun from behind his back and charged. Ronnie came out of his paralysis and shifted his aim.

Balenger dove to the sand, shooting upward. Ronnie's shotgun blast hit behind him. Balenger fired toward Ronnie's face.

Then his pistol clicked on empty, its slide back. No more ammunition.

Did I hit him? Balenger rolled. A blast struck next to him, pellets hitting his calf.

He came to his feet, hobbling, trying to lead Ronnie away from the boardwalk.

A groan behind him made him turn. Lightning showed Ronnie sinking to his knees. His shoulder was bloody where one of Balenger's shots had hit him above the Kevlar vest. A raging figure stood behind him, swinging a two-by-four. Diane. Swinging. Shrieking. The shotgun went off, blasting into the sand, as Diane swung the board like a baseball bat. The flames in the hotel showed a chunk of bloody hair flying into the rain. In a Windbreaker, with only a nightgown covering her legs, both garments clinging to her, soaked, she swung the board again, whacking the rear of Ronnie's skull so hard that he dropped forward onto the beach. She stood over him, hitting, hitting, stopping only when the board snapped. Then she cursed and plunged the sharp end into his back.

Ronnie shuddered and lay still.

Amanda stood over him, sobbing. Balenger hobbled toward her.

"Is he dead?" she asked.

"Right now, he's entering hell."

They clung to each other, trying not to fall.

"He put a lot of others through it. Now it's his turn," she said.

"Because of something that wasn't his fault. A Fourth of July weekend a lifetime ago." Balenger was sickened.

Clang.

The wind whipped the flap of sheet metal.

Clang.

It tolled for Ronnie, for his victims, for the Paragon Hotel.

Clang.

Balenger watched the flames in the upper stories. "Diane," he said.

"I'm not Diane."

He stared at her. He touched her cheek.

"I know," he said, finally believing it. "God, how I wish."

"You were ready to die to save me."

"I lost Diane once. I couldn't bear to lose her twice. If I couldn't save you and Vinnie, I didn't want to live."

"You haven't lost me."

Sorrow made him feel choked. "We'd better go. We need to help Vinnie."

They stumbled through the dark rain toward the boardwalk. When they reached the hollow in the beach, Vinnie was unconscious. They lifted him from the sand.

"Do I hear…" Amanda turned.

"Sirens."

Out of breath, they staggered with Vinnie, following the boardwalk toward the sound. Balenger's legs didn't seem a part of him, but he kept struggling forward just as Amanda did. He looked at her. How he wished she was Diane, or at least that he could believe she was Diane.

Delirious, he must have said that out loud, because Amanda turned to him. "Keep remembering, I'm not her, but you haven't lost me."

They reached stairs to the boardwalk. Avoiding broken planks, they ascended wearily, sinking to their knees, then continuing upward. The light of the flames grew. Balenger felt a warm wind from the fire. Then the wind was hot, although Balenger couldn't stop shivering. The sirens wailed to a halt. Firemen jumped from a truck. Policemen scrambled from cruisers.

The top of the hotel's pyramid caved in. Sparks flew. Consumed by fire, the sixth level collapsed. There go the gold coins, Balenger thought. He remembered the double eagle in his pocket. The words on it: In God We Trust.

Policemen ran to them, one of them shouting, "What happened to you?"

As Balenger slumped to the ground, he heard the clang clang clang of the tolling sheet metal. Another section of the building collapsed. But hell had many levels. So did the past. "What happened to us?" he murmured. He could barely force the words out. "The Paragon Hotel."

AUTHOR'S NOTE: AN OBSESSION WITH THE PAST

As every author knows, the most frequent question we're asked is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Creepers. Although I wasn't familiar with that term until recently, my fascination with the concept has gripped me for most of my life.

When I was nine, my family lived in a cramped apartment above a restaurant that catered to drinkers from the area's numerous bars. (This was in a city called Kitchener in southern Ontario in Canada.) I often heard drunks fighting in the alley beneath my bedroom window. There was plenty of fighting in the apartment, as well. Although my mother and my stepfather never came to blows, their arguments made me so afraid that many nights I stuffed pillows under my bedding to make it look as if I slept there while I lay awake under the bed.

I often escaped that apartment and wandered the streets, where I learned the secrets of every alley and parking lot within ten blocks. I also learned the secrets of abandoned buildings. In retrospect, I'm amazed that I didn't run into fatal trouble in some of those buildings. But I was a street kid, a survivor, and the worst that happened to me was a cat bite on a wrist and a nail through a foot, both of which caused blood poisoning.

Those abandoned buildings-a house, a factory, and an apartment complex-fascinated me. The smashed windows, the moldy wallpaper, the peeling paint, the musty smell of the past, lured me back repeatedly. The most interesting building was the apartment complex because, although deserted, it wasn't empty. Tenants had abandoned tables, chairs, dishes, pots, lamps, and sofas. Most were in such poor shape that it was obvious why the objects hadn't been taken. Nonetheless, combined with magazines and newspapers left behind, the tables and chairs and dishes created the illusion that people still lived there-ghostly remnants of the life that once flourished in the building.

I felt this more than I understood it. Treading cautiously up creaky staircases, stepping around fallen plaster and holes in floors, peering into decaying rooms, I gazed in wonder at discoveries I made. Pigeons roosted on cupboards. Mice nested in sofas. Fungus grew on walls. Weeds sprouted on watery windowsills. Some of the yellowed newspapers and magazines dated back to when I was born.

But no discovery meant more to me than a record album I found on a cracked linoleum floor next to a three-legged table that lay on its side. Eventually, I learned that it was called an album because, prior to the 1950s, phonograph records were made from thick, easily breakable shellac, had only one song on each side, and were stored in paper sleeves within binders that resembled photograph albums. At the time of my discovery, discs of this sort (which played at 78 rpm) had been superseded by thin, long-playing, vinyl discs that were far more sturdy, had as many as eight songs on each side, and played at 33 1/3 rpm.

I'd never seen an album. When I opened its cover, I felt an awe that was only slightly reduced by the scrape of broken shellac. Two of the discs were shattered. But the majority (four, as I recall) remained intact. Clutching this treasure, I hurried home. Our radio had a record player attached to it. I switched its dial to 78 rpm (a common feature in those days) and put on one of the discs.