In the days leading up to World War II, young Sam McCord searches for an escape from the world crumbling around him through the pursuit of a local legend, the Light on the Tracks. The Light appears every fall around Halloween and dances and shimmer on the railroad tracks south of town . . . beckoning, shifting, hinting. Some say it's a ghost; others say it's an angel. Some claim they have heard it whisper words to them as they rode past on the midnight train; others claim it has reached for them as if it had human hands. They felt its shimmering heat caress their skin, but was it a gesture of affection or hunger? The legend grows as the sightings continue,and Sam is enraptured by his pursuit of the legend. It's his escape from a life gone awry. His father was once the most respected, most influential man in town as he preached from the pulpit in the little, one-room church, but a deadly illness swept Sam's mother from this life and stole his father's sight, and the people of Black Mountain claim the blindness is God's judgment, the reckoning of the Almighty for some secret sin the McCord's were hiding. Of course, life didn't get any easier when his father adopted Sam's older brother Simon, named after the man that bore Jesus' cross to Golgotha. Simon has his own cross to bear -- he's the adopted son of the town's outcast -- but more importantly, he's black . . . in a city of white Southerners. The Ku Klux Klan has been active in the last few months, and Simon's name continually makes the circuits of the town rumor mill. The Klan is coming for him. The question isn't if . . . it's when. And then there's the strange, old man that drifts into town like the breeze and stays with the McCords for a few days before vanishing again. Sam's father calls him a friend, a comforter for dark times, but the townspeople of Black Mountain call him the "harbinger." He's the bearer of bad news, the toll of the funeral bell, for whenever the old man arrives in town, something bad is destined to occur. Someone dies, someone is severely injured in the coal mine, or valuables begin to disappear. The harbinger brings evil . . . that much seems clear. For Sam, life is almost too much for a fifteen-year-old to bear. Surrounded by a family of the town's outcasts and a legend somewhat bigger than life, he searches for meaning and freedom. And as a series of mysterious robberies begin to occur in increasing frequency and violence and the Klan starts a crusade to rid the town of "evil" and "outsiders," Sam's life is turned further upside down. And, through it all, there's the mystery of the light on the tracks. Somehow, someway, Sam knows the Light holds the secret to his future.