Nate remembered hearing that Owen’s father had died a few years ago, and that his mother had suffered a serious stroke not long after.
“I’m the manager these days,” Owen said. “Speaking of which, and apologies for mixing business and pleasure, but Lindsay Stone called back,” he told Johnny. “She’s fine with the raw bar changes, but she wants a gratis upgrade of the wines.”
“Of course she does.” Johnny uncapped the bourbon and sloshed a generous amount into the tumblers. “Lindsay’s wedding reception was supposed to be in the Greenhouse this Saturday.” An amber stain crept across the tablecloth. “The hurricane’s been less of a hassle.”
“I thought she was already married,” Nate said.
Johnny shook his head. “Is this engagement three or four for our lovely Lindsay, Owen?”
“Three, I think. She came awfully close last time.”
“Who’s she marrying?”
“Some idiot,” Johnny said. “Anyway, her dad lost the deposits the last couple times so I offered the house as an alternative space. I’d go the Vegas route if I had to do it again, but she loves the attention. The back lawn has enough space for two big tents, and as far as settings go, they can do a lot worse.”
The Vanhouten mansion was a massive Georgian on the waterfront side of the Strand. No matter the season, its grounds were immaculately maintained by the same gardeners who handled the landscaping at the Empire. In the boys’ youth, a person would never guess that the sprawling place housed only a teenager and an alcoholic.
“Still, it’s going to suck. For me, at least. Have to host a day care too, just for Sarah Carlisle’s kid, who looks like a thing that roams the forest eating campers. Of course, Lindsay’s spitting blood about the funeral being the day before her wedding. Like some final revenge of Lucy’s, she said.”
Lindsay had always been difficult. Some people mellow with age; others ferment.
Owen’s phone chimed, and he checked its screen. “Front desk. We’ll catch up tomorrow, okay? At the funeral?”
A chord of dread thrummed within Nate. He’d hardly let himself think of the funeral, but he had a convincing, ready smile that kept him a favorite with the nurses and children on his ward. He shook Owen’s hand.
“He was a late bloomer, wasn’t he?” Nate said once Owen was out of earshot.
Johnny rolled his eyes.
“He used to want to be a veterinarian, right?”
“And Tom wanted to be an architect, and I wanted to live someplace where the temperature occasionally wanders above freezing,” Johnny said. “O probably didn’t count on being sole caregiver to his shrew of a mother, either. Not everybody gets what they want, Nate.”
“The cut on his forehead. That’s from—”
“Rolling down Snake Hill without brakes, crashing through the barrier on Finch, and slamming into an elm tree,” Johnny said.
“He’s lucky to be alive,” Tom said. “His car was totaled.”
“So how’d they do it?” Nate asked. “You’re saying these vandals pulled off, what, five attacks during one storm?” Even at the height of their mischief, Nate and his friends had never attempted more than one Thunder Run a night. Burst pipes and backed-up sewage were complicated undertakings, while cutting someone’s brake lines could easily have fatal consequences. He wondered what kind of people he was dealing with.
“We don’t know how many there are,” Tom said. “We asked the high school to keep their ears open for anything. The middle school, too.”
Kids. Nate knew as well as anyone that vandalism was the province of the young.
“There’d have to be a whole pack of them to get us at once,” Johnny said. “That or they’re real overachievers.”
“They didn’t get Tommy,” Nate said.
“Tom, you’d tell us if you secretly spent your free time leading a band of urchins on a terror campaign, wouldn’t you, buddy?”
“They didn’t get Lindsay, either,” Tom said. “If Adam’s on their list, you’d think she’d be there, too.” The people who’d suffered damages were an odd combination of old friends and enemies. “Maybe there are a lot of vandals, but not enough to get all of us at once? Or maybe they don’t want to mess with a cop, or, you know, Lindsay?”
A slow breaking roll of thunder shuddered from the ceiling.
“Sneaky and smart and totally amoral,” Johnny mused as he poured himself more bourbon. “Dangerous combo, huh, Nate? The makings of a real monster, don’t you think?”
Nate ignored the jab, because he’d just realized something that should have occurred to him half an hour ago. If these vandals were taking a page from his old playbook, then they’d wait until the next storm to carry out more destruction. And the next storm was happening right now.
He worked his arms into his jacket as he got up. Whoever was doing this, they’d already attacked Grams twice. Two broken windows—one at the Union and one at the house on Bonaparte Street.
It was just before nine o’clock, and Nate figured the pub would be safely occupied for hours. That left the house. He wasn’t going to let his grandmother suffer anymore because of him.
“I have to get back to Bonaparte Street,” Nate said. He retrieved his umbrella from the floor. “They might come back.”
“Patrols are running all night monitoring wind damage,” Tom said. “I asked them to keep a special eye out around places vandalized last time, and I added Grams’s house to the list.”
“What happened to ‘no evidence,’ Tom?” Johnny asked. His glass was somehow empty again. “How about ‘jumping to conclusions’?”
“I’m the cautious one, remember?”
“What does that make the rest of us?” Johnny asked.
Tom started to edge his way out of the booth. “I’ll drive you to Grams’s,” he told Nate.
“It’s fine, I’ll walk.” It wasn’t far. Besides, if these vandals were anything like Nate and his friends had been, they’d be on their feet, dipping in and out of darkness on the side streets of the battened-down town. If he was with them in the throes of the storm, Nate had a chance of catching them. Then he could find out what they wanted. Then he could find out what they knew.
“Maybe you haven’t been keeping abreast of current events,” Johnny said. “But it’s pouring out.”
Nate turned to him. “Don’t you remember, Johnny?” He flipped up his jacket collar and smiled. “I like the rain.”
FEET SHATTERED THE puddles behind Nate as he and his friends sprinted for the Night Ship’s barricade. Adam Decker and the others were close.
The town children’s altar of green glow sticks gave the scene ahead an infernal quality, as if the barricade marked not only the division between the Strand and the pier, but the border between this world and another. This thought set a hook in Nate’s mind, distracting him enough that he didn’t notice the boy crouched in front of the shrine until he collided with him.
They tumbled over the sidewalk in a tangle of limbs and phosphorescent batons.
Tom yanked Nate back to his feet. With more difficulty, Johnny helped the other boy off the ground. In the unearthly light, Nate recognized the overweight boy they’d earlier seen being assailed by his mother. He wore a catastrophic rendition of a robot costume. His chest piece was a box studded with corks and stray keyboard pieces. His mask might have begun as a brown paper bag, but it had been pulped by the rain. Past its oatmeal clots Nate recognized the pudgy jowls of Owen Liffey, one of their classmates. The big guy got to his feet, ungainly as a newborn elephant.
Behind them, Adam yelled something indecipherable into the wind.
Nate scrambled over the planks of the barricade. He reached back to help Tom, but found Owen in his place. The sound of the seniors’ rage must have spurred the heavy boy to run, and the Night Ship was the only place to go.
Tom and Johnny followed Owen over the barrier, and the four of them sprinted down the long, battered pier.
“They’re not following,” Johnny s
houted after a minute.
“Would you?” Tom asked.
They slowed to a jog. They were halfway down the pier. The storm had obscured the moon, and what light the town cast broke across the waves. Nate felt a spike of vertigo as he crossed the lake’s restless surface.
The reality of what they’d just done began to sink in.
Owen had been bringing up the rear. He was as out of shape as he looked. “What’s going on?” he asked, doubling over from the exertion.
“Running for our lives, obviously,” Johnny said.
“And you came here?”
Nate peered back down the taper of the pier. Shadows shifted in the radiance of the glow sticks. Adam and the others were still there, but appeared unwilling to cross the threshold. Nate hadn’t hesitated. Before April, he’d been as afraid and fascinated by the Night Ship as any other kid in town. But now…
“We have to get out of the rain,” he said.
“How?” Tom asked, though he surely knew the answer.
“It might be haunted, but at least it’s dry,” Johnny said.
Nate started toward the Night Ship.
As he neared the structure, his eyes began to pull apart the layers of darkness. The immense building ahead was a slick of black struck between the silken water and the bleak sky. He was amazed at how large the deserted structure really was. The pier it sat on extended so far into the lake that you couldn’t appreciate its dimensions from the shore. It was a world in itself.
The boardwalk that ringed the enormous place was there for everyone to see, but all that Nate knew of the Night Ship’s interior came from black-and-white photographs and the stories that were traded like contraband among the town’s children. At the height of its popularity, dozens of shops and eateries had populated the pier. He knew that a central promenade lanced the interior of the building like a spine. Many of the establishments that flanked this airy corridor also opened outside onto the boardwalk, so that their patrons could enjoy the fresh air and unparalleled views of the water and mountains.
Nate put both his hands on the wooden doors to the Night Ship. They were battered, warped, and weather scarred, but they were also unlocked. They screamed when Nate pushed them open. Once inside, his eyes adjusted to the dark well enough to see the storm heaving through the ribs of the pier’s ancient steelwork roof. Rain pounded what remained of the glass-paneled ceiling, and the air brimmed with the reek of stagnant water. As he took his first steps down the promenade, he imagined how it might have looked on a summer day eighty years ago. Light streaming onto polished wooden floors, men in linen suits and straw hats arm in arm with women draped in silk and lace.
The ruined pier was a gravestone for a dead world. A faded history filled with grace and style. But elegance wasn’t the same as innocence.
During the day, the Night Ship had been a favorite spot for weekenders and the summer people, but things had been different after sundown. Just June and Morton Strong could have told you that, and their victims would have had a few things to say on the subject as well. Confections far stronger than sodas and ice cream had marked the last days of the Century Room.
“Well, I guess it’s drier,” Tom said. Though water dripped all around them, a surprising number of the glass ceiling panels were intact.
“Just as dark, though,” Johnny said. He hugged his shoulders and began to shiver. His mental patient hadn’t dressed for an all-weather escape.
“I have something,” Owen said. Nate heard the rustling of foil, and a moment later there was a pop as a viridescent light kindled in Owen’s hands. “I was going to leave it at the barricade.” He handed the glow stick to Nate.
Owen was about five years too old for such nonsense, but Nate appreciated the light. He used it to lead them. The wide promenade stretched under riveted arches of steel supports. Creeping through it was like descending the throat of a leviathan. The drumming of water sounded from unseen corners, and the wash of the lake against the pilings below them ebbed and surged like shuddering breath. They passed entrances to shops and restaurants as they made their way down the warped hall. Their distressed signage was barely legible in the scant light. Café des Amis, Burton’s Sodas, Bit o’ Sweet Shop.
Then it appeared in front of them. The promenade ended at its doorstep. Nate could just make out its name and the image of a galleon with its sail full with wind, cutting for the horizon and a huge full moon. The Night Ship.
Every bad thing that had happened on this pier had taken place in there. If the building were a body, this nightclub was its heart.
Nate sensed his friends’ unease as the light skirted the infamous bar’s sign. He felt something himself, but it wasn’t fear. His damaged arm had also begun to hurt, as it sometimes did during storms.
“Let’s go in,” he said.
“Uh-uh,” Tom said. “No way.”
“Nothing else has been mega-creepy yet, I guess,” Johnny said.
“This is where all the people died?” Owen asked. He peered through the stained glass doors.
Nate tried one of the handles, then forced the door with his shoulder. Even then he was able to work it open little more than a foot before it caught on the warped flooring. Nate, Tom, and Johnny slipped through, and with some effort Owen joined them.
Shadows of tables and chairs littered the dark space in front of them. Nate could make out the hulk of a massive bar on the left side of the room. The rear of the nightclub was two stories of windows. Nate couldn’t see the rain hitting the glass, but he could hear it.
“Just June used to live right here,” Tom whispered as if they were in a church. “She and her sister May were twins. They called them the Night Ship Girls. Their mother was one of the prostitutes upstairs in the Century Room. When they were young, before everything happened, they lived in a little room under the dance floor, and at night they’d crawl through the walls, spying on the customers through peepholes.”
It was easy to imagine hidden eyes peering at them through the cavernous dark.
“Just June made all the boys swoon, cost ya just a dollar to bring her to your room,” Johnny sang.
A large cylinder shrouded in disintegrating velvet stood to the right of the nightclub’s entrance. Its color was impossible to determine in the sickly light from the glow stick. When Nate examined it, he saw that it concealed a spiral staircase that led both upstairs and downstairs. Nate knew from the stories that the legendary Century Room, the club’s VIP section, was above.
“They say June wasn’t even in her teens when she started working as one of Morton Strong’s enforcers,” Tom continued. “Old Mort used to own the whole pier. Back then, this place had prostitutes, gambling—you name it. Strong was the North Country’s answer to Al Capone. June was nine when she pulled her first fingernail from one of the Century Room’s welchers.”
“Strong, Strong, don’t ever do him wrong. He’ll set ya on the short pier, but the walk you’ll take is long.”
The Lake loved its stories. Nate knew this, because he’d become one of them. He was the Boy Who Fell. He was the one whose survival cleaved to no logic but the lake’s own ineffable imperatives.
“Check it out,” Johnny said. “Bring over the light.”
Nate followed the sound of his friend’s voice to the sprawling bar. He tripped over something, and the rattle of glass broke the silence of the place.
“Bottles everywhere, man,” Johnny said. “Still stuff in them, too.”
Nate gave Johnny the glow stick. A few dozen bottles remained on shelves where there had surely once been hundreds. There were more on the floor, some intact and others bristling with shards.
“It’s weird that they left all this stuff here, isn’t it?” Owen asked.
“Looks like they left in a hurry,” Johnny said, lowering his voice by an octave. He put the light under his chin to cast his face in eldritch angles.
Shattered glassware was strewn across the floor, and some of the tables appeared to be half-set. Nate
imagined the place packed with crowds: happy patrons one moment, a riotous stampede the next. He imagined them overturning furniture and tearing at one another to escape.
“I don’t remember how it closed,” Tom said. “Did it shut down after Just June got through with it?”
Nate shrugged. A place like this was built of myth and varnished in legend. Like all the Lake’s stories, the truth hardly mattered. Here was a place so strange, girls might scurry as quiet as rats through passages hidden in the walls. Here was a place so vast, dancers might spin to the band never knowing that a room above them rang with screams. Nate sat on one of the stools. The bar’s surface was scarred with marks as if scoured by countless fingernails.
Lucy’s face floated to the surface of his mind. She wore that look she’d had when Adam was only inches from laying into Nate. The look of a person who’d unwrapped a coveted gift only to realize it was something they didn’t at all want.
“Maybe the liquor’s still good,” Johnny said. “I’m freezing.” They were sopping, and it wasn’t any warmer here than it was outside. He uncorked a bottle and sniffed it. “Brandy, I think.” He pushed it over to Nate.
“Alcohol can go bad, you know,” Owen said. “It can make you blind.”
Nate tipped the bottle into his mouth and swallowed a sludge of peach and gasoline.
Lucy had been as angry at him as he was furious with her. But her rage had dissolved at the very moment it seemed sure to deliver its dividends.
“We saw you on the street before,” Johnny told Owen. “Was that your mom with you? She’s a piece of work. I saw her hit you.”
“Oh,” Owen said. He looked at the floor.
It puzzled Nate, this thing with Lucy. They were enemies. They had been since April, though her hatred had never made much sense to him. He’d already lost so much. But if he had to parse the chances that compounded upon other chances to lead to the accident, if he had to scrape past the death and pain that obscured the facts, it was difficult to remember why, for his part, he’d judged Lucy as guilty as he had.
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