Outside, he let his eyes adjust to the dark.
The town was battened down. No cars, no voices. The only sounds were from the rain and the wash of leaves in the branches above him.
After the accident, Nate had sometimes spent nights listening to these trees as they were tossed by the breeze that swept in from the lake. The leaves murmured like a stadium of people. He’d lie between two knotted roots, close his eyes, and try to pry meanings from the sound. Was that Gabe’s whisper? Was that Mom’s laugh? But if there were messages to be heard, they weren’t meant for his ears.
Sometimes their sound lulled him to sleep, and he dreamed.
In these dreams Nate ran along an endless loop of a hallway somewhere in the depths of the Night Ship. The floors were lined with wooden planks, as were the walls and ceiling. He ran but also fell, as if the corridor sometimes became as vertical as a mineshaft. The hall was empty, but Nate wasn’t alone. There was someone else, a shadow always just out of sight—either ahead or behind Nate, he wasn’t sure. In this chase, Nate couldn’t tell if he was the hunter or the prey.
The dream always ended the same way. His feet began to slap against water as the lake slowly filled the space. At first, the flood was easy to run through, but soon the planks pulled away from one another to let more of the lake in. The water was so cold that it burned his skin. The pressure of its weight crushed his rib cage and squeezed his lungs to bursting.
He’d wake up gasping, his shirt drenched with sweat, Grams shaking his shoulder. From the way she pursed her lips, he’d know he’d been screaming.
“You’re okay,” she’d whisper. He never knew if she was asking or telling.
Nate hadn’t had that dream in years, but sweat pricked across his forehead thinking about it.
The backyard was littered with leaves and broken twigs. The rain had picked up, and the wind had gotten stronger. The tops of trees rocked against the opaque sky.
Lucy’s funeral is tomorrow, Nate thought as thunder throbbed somewhere behind the mountains.
Tomorrow, Lucy will be laid to rest.
We are burying Lucy tomorrow.
No matter how he framed it, this was a fact he couldn’t grab hold of.
Everything in the backyard looked as it should, so he moved on to the front. Wrought iron lamps lit the street. The halos they cast hung in the rain like orbs of static.
The neighborhood was empty, the town was asleep. Even after so many years, this lit a fuse in Nate’s chest. It was the perfect kind of night. If these vandals were like Nate and his friends had been, he wouldn’t have long to wait.
He sat on a rim of masonry behind a stringy hydrangea, where he could watch the street without being easily seen.
The minutes ticked away, then hours. In the dark Nate thought about Meg and Livvy and how they’d both be warm in their beds as the night wailed outside. He thought about little Nia Kapur. Most of all, he thought of Lucy, and how what remained of her was on a tray, waiting to be put out of sight forever.
Finally, movements out of time with the storm tugged Nate’s gaze down the street. Two figures walked toward him, avoiding the puddles of illumination from the streetlights. One was tall and the other was short. Both wore dark, hooded coats similar to the one Nate had wrapped himself in. They carried something awkwardly between them.
Nate shielded the light of his phone with his raincoat. He pulled up Tom’s number so it’d be right there when he needed it. He eased himself off the masonry and onto his haunches.
The duo stopped at the base of the driveway. Nate could now see that the object between them was a bucket. The larger of the two also carried a stepladder.
There was a time when Nate might have torn through the bushes to seize the vandals. A black specter like a shard from the storming night itself. He would frighten, then capture. Because terror lays bare a person’s secrets as surely as a scalpel reveals bone. He’d envelop them like a nightmare thing and tear loose what they knew and thought and dreamt.
What did they want? What did they know?
He’d turn the full eye of his rage onto them and—
No.
Nate pictured Meg’s smile and imagined Livvy’s laugh. Finger by finger, he forced his hands from the fists they’d locked themselves into. He raised his face to the rain and remembered who he was supposed to be.
He had to be patient. To do the damage Johnny had credited them with, these vandals would need to exceed this mismatched pair. He had to be sure none of their friends lagged in the shadows.
They stood at the edge of the driveway for several long moments before trudging onto the lawn. It seemed to Nate that they’d been evaluating the house rather than waiting for accomplices. As they crossed the soggy grass, Bonaparte Street remained desolate of anything but scattered branches and storm-blown leaves.
Soon the vandals were close enough that Nate could see the material of their sturdy coats billow around their skinny teenaged bodies. He wouldn’t have trouble handling either of them.
His plan was to tackle the smaller of the two and be rough enough to frighten the tall one away. The violence was regrettable, but necessary. Then Nate would call Tom. Tom would be the policeman he was, and the kid would tell them who else was involved. They’d pick up the ringleader. Whoever they were, Nate had a constellation of questions for them.
The taller of the two turned his attention to the ladder as the short one stooped toward the bucket.
Four strides was all it took to get right behind the gangly one. Nate extended his leg and grabbed a fistful of the boy’s jacket. The kid was all limbs. Nate yanked him backward and the teen tripped against Nate’s foot. He gasped when he hit the wet grass, the wind knocked from him.
Neither had said a word, but the boy’s wheeze got the smaller one’s notice. The little figure was half turned toward them when Nate pushed him with all his strength.
The kid hardly weighed anything. Nate could have picked him up and thrown him across the street. The little guy squealed when Nate knelt on his chest.
Nate should have called Tom then. He meant to. But his adrenaline was thrumming and he was seized with the need to see this kid’s face. He had to see the face of this child who thought he could get away with vandalizing Grams’s home and pub. If these vandals knew about the Storm King and his Thunder Runs, then they had to know that Nate McHale’s enemies didn’t go unpunished.
He pulled aside the kid’s hood, and a shocked young face stared back at him. Nate couldn’t see much in the glow of the streetlight—soft blond hair quickly becoming soaked, babyish cheeks without a blemish—but it was enough to be sure he had no idea who this child was, and that the figure he’d taken for a small boy was actually a girl.
But that didn’t change anything.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
She was speechless, astonished from being tossed onto the ground and subdued. She broke his gaze, her attention seized by something to Nate’s right.
The tall one.
He turned just in time to see the top of the stepladder whipping toward his head, then there was a crash of light and he saw nothing at all.
THEY PILE BLANKETS on Nate, but these do not warm him.
He doesn’t remember when the boats pulled alongside the rocks, but they’re here. People in brown come first, then people in blue. The ones in blue have the blankets. Theirs are the hands on his back and along his arm. He doesn’t want them to touch his arm, but one of them makes noises into his ear. He knows her, he thinks. Someone’s mother.
He lets her see his arm and her eyes widen. Don’t look, she tells him. Don’t look.
They have many questions. He has only one. Where are they? he asks. The people in blue say many things, but none of these are answers.
He’s wet and he’s cold. The blankets catch the sun like the lake. Smooth stones are at his feet. He doesn’t know where his shoes are.
Two policemen stand nearby. Nate knows them but cannot think of their names. They
stare up the face of rock. They whisper, but Nate can hear them.
Impossible, one of them says. Two hundred feet, he says. At least. Into shallow water. Two men in black wet suits are on one of the boats. They fall backward into the lake. It’s not a loud sound, but the splash makes Nate jump. Someone’s mother whispers to him, and he tries not to pull his arm away from her.
Another boat is coming now. More men in brown. Nate knows the one on the bow. He knows him well. The chief doesn’t wait for the boat to stop, but jumps into the water to his knees. He runs for Nate, but it’s hard to run through the lake. Its waters are hungry.
He puts his hand on Nate’s head. It hurts, but not badly. The chief starts to say something but he stops. His face goes white, and Nate knows he’s seen his arm. The woman in blue doesn’t let Nate hide it.
Nate asks his question and watches the chief’s pale face crumble. The man falls to his knees on the rocks. A new gravity takes grip of Nate. It is so powerful that he feels a breach open within him as if he has shattered under its pressure. Not another break in his ribs or in his ruined arm, but a crack at his foundation. Something is lost, and he is diminished. The sun fades. He doesn’t feel less cold, but he stops shaking. He knows that from now on he will be less than what he was.
Beyond the people in brown and blue, there’s a dark figure watching him from the shallows where the lake breaks against boulders. A smudge of black in a plane of light. He wonders if he’s the only one who can see it. The moment he thinks this, it disappears under the surface. It’s gone, but he still feels it watching him. He thinks it’s been watching him the whole time.
One of the men in wet suits breaks through the mirror of the lake. Three, he calls out. Someone asks a question. No, he says. Crushed like a can of Coke. The chief on his knees in front of Nate whirls around to shout something at the man in the water. His voice is strangled with pain.
The man in the wet suit looks across the water to Nate. He has quieted himself, but Nate can still read the word on his lips.
Impossible.
NATE SAT WITH Johnny in the back of an ambulance, stinging from disinfectants. His friend told him that the fight in the lab had been broken up by Mr. Granger, the high school’s principal, soon after Tom began using the fire extinguisher.
“How long was I out before Granger showed up?” Nate asked. An EMT cleaned a cut along his eyebrow. He’d also bruised two ribs and dislocated his thumb. The head injury had probably caused him to pass out in the lab.
“I didn’t see you go down,” Johnny said. The EMT picking glass out of Johnny’s elbow told him again to stay still. “I only saw you and Adam on the floor when Granger ran in. God, the look on his face.” He laughed and then winced, holding his side. “Bet he thought you were dead. Adam, too, probably. Bye-bye, pension.”
They faced the school, but Nate had the sense of people milling just out of sight. The high school wasn’t far from the commercial streets, and anything that required the EMS squads from three towns would be quite an event.
“How did Granger know to go to the lab?” Nate asked.
“Some janitor heard the racket and tipped him off.”
“Lucky he was here on a Sunday. Lucky someone heard us at all.”
“Yeah, lucky for them. You realize you took out two of them within, like, sixty seconds of each other?”
Nate remembered flashes of color and sound with no more specificity than a dream. Strangely, he recalled the actual bout of unconsciousness better. Sleep was a slide into the folds of self, but this was like a switch being thrown. First he was, and then he was not. Not underpinned by thought and light, the fading was one of annihilation. Nate remembered the shadow by the door and knew that it hadn’t been the school’s principal. He could trace the outline of its chasm of true dark within a field of black.
“Tom and Owen got knocked around a little, but not as bad as us,” Johnny said.
A rap came from the side of the ambulance, and a tall man peered inside. “How’re the patients?” Chief Buck asked the EMTs. They gave him a rundown as he looked Nate over from gashed forehead to splinted thumb.
“We’re fine, Chief,” Nate said.
“Got off easy, then. Those boys being so much bigger.” The chief gave a good impression of avuncular levity, but Nate saw the fear in his eyes.
Sometimes, speaking with the chief reminded Nate too much of his dad and that lost life. He imagined the chief must feel the same way.
“I’m fine. Really.”
“Concussions are serious business.” The chief had been there in April, too. He’d seen the bodies of his best friends and their younger son pulled from the lake. He’d held Nate’s hand in the back of an ambulance as it screamed through the center of town.
The lights, sirens, and medical prodding had already brought Nate perilously close to the memories of that day in April. He knew this feeling would only strengthen once his grandmother arrived. He imagined Grams threading the crowd of gawkers to search the backs of the ambulances for him. He knew exactly what shade of fear would color her face when she found him. This time it would be an expression put there not by chance stacked upon chance, but by basic cruelty.
Pain rippled from his hurt thumb as he clenched his hands.
Mr. Granger appeared and pulled the chief aside.
“We still have to get Adam back, you know,” Nate told Johnny once the chief left.
“But we sent him to the hospital.”
“That was self-defense. Now he has to be punished. For this, and for what he did to Lucy.” Nate knew this with complete certainty. He kneaded the scar tissue and knitted bone of his bad arm. It ached, and he knew that the weather was going to worsen.
The equations of pain were askew, and they must be balanced.
—
THE STORM NATE’S arm foretold finally arrived.
A blip of a thunderstorm, but it was enough to clear the streets and keep people inside. When he and his friends set out into the rain, the town was cowed under the howling night.
The bruise around Nate’s left eye had blackened along the orbital ridge. Under its brace, his thumb had turned a cadaverous yellow. His ribs were as multihued as mold blossoming on a slice of wet bread. He was sore everywhere.
Grams hadn’t let him go to school that morning. “You look like you’ve been through the wars,” she’d told him.
“I’m hurt, but I want everyone to know I’m okay. Otherwise, they’ll talk.” He didn’t want a repeat of the whispering that had followed the accident last spring. After that, he was the Boy Who Fell. He was precious—and a precious thing is a thing held apart. “I can’t deal with that again.”
Grams nodded and looked away. For an agonizing moment, Nate thought she was going to cry. They could both be stubborn, but he relented. He let her take care of him through the day but convinced her to go to the Union for the night shift, and even got her to agree to him sleeping over at Johnny’s house despite it being a weeknight. He swore he’d take it easy.
But these were lies he told to protect her. Nate didn’t plan to have a relaxed evening any more than he intended to sleep over at the Vanhoutens’.
Johnny had given each of them sturdy black raincoats from the Pharaoh. They were just about the only things salvaged from the sailboat they’d wrecked. The black rubbery skin of the coat dangled heavily just below Nate’s knees. They saw only one car on their way to the Deckers’ house, and its headlights glanced off their coats as if they were just pieces of the dark. They were invisible in the night.
The Deckers’ home sat in the foothills, far beyond the Wharf. This was a remote and wooded section of town, no neighbors within sight. It was a sprawling clapboard farmhouse with a look of neglect about it. Battered shutters along the ground floor were missing slats, their vacancies gaping like mouths. There were no streetlights here, and the black would have been impenetrable if not for a single light by the front door.
Johnny called this adventure a Thunder Run. He and
Owen were enthusiastic about punishing Adam for what he’d done. Tom, less so.
“We could press charges,” he’d said when they’d rendezvoused at the Night Ship. “It’s assault. They’d get in trouble.”
“Adam’s dad is on the town council. You think as chief of police, your dad wants to file charges?” Johnny had asked.
“Boys will be boys. That’s what they’ll say. Besides, we hurt them more than they hurt us,” Nate said. “People are going to think they already got what they deserved.”
“Exactly, Nate, we already hurt them, so—”
“That’s what they’ll say. I don’t agree.”
“But, I mean, when does this end? If we get back at him and then—”
“The Storm King has spoken, Tommy.” Johnny clapped Nate on the shoulder. This was the first time the appellation had been uttered. This was their first full stride into whatever country waited beyond the frontier of the ordinary.
The others all turned to Nate. “So what’s the plan?” Tom asked.
The house looked empty, but Nate knew by now that such appearances could be deceiving. He jogged to the front door and rang the bell before anyone could stop him. When he rang it again and there still wasn’t a twitch from the home, he turned back to his friends. They couldn’t see his smile, but it was there.
“Nobody home.”
“They could be back any second,” Tom said.
Nate set out for the silhouette of a detached garage. He probed its windows with his flashlight. As he did, a rattle descended from the sky. It began at the tops of the trees and then fell to the roofs of the house and garage, filling the night with the percussion of a million drums. Hail. The pellets themselves were a quarter of an inch across, and they covered the ground in no time.
The garage door was unlocked, and Nate was the last one inside. He flicked on the lights and watched the hail skitter across the gravel driveway and bounce into the air like popping corn. He thought he saw a whirl of movement in the dark beyond the scant range of the light. An eddy of shadow in an ocean of black.
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