The Storm King: A Novel

by Brendan Duffy

  The night declined, and the party diminished with it. The pace slowed, the fervor cooled, and their pack fractured. Nate found himself by the remains of a keg with Jim Tatum, Parker Lang, and Winston Chu. The beer tasted pleasantly of cigarettes.

  The smoke from the bonfire brought a wistful ache to his eyes. This was the climax of their childhood, and it was ending all around him.

  Tom reappeared, and Nate’s energy returned at the sight of him. His friend. The best friend anyone could hope to have.

  He looked unsteady, his Tom. The whole world was unsteady.

  It became even more so when Nate saw Lucy being hoisted into the air by the large man on the edge of the clearing.

  Nate was not jealous about such things. Seeing her lifted by the waist by most people wouldn’t have triggered more than a wry smile. But Adam Decker wasn’t just anyone.

  There was a sensation of falling. Not falling down, but falling away, or falling into. The abyss appeared beneath him, and it took him whole.

  The world turned black and red, and he had the sense of movement and electricity. The unquenchable fire bloomed within him, and Nate ceded himself to it. Adam Decker’s vacant shark eyes grew and then diminished. There was wetness on Nate’s skin. Ripples from impacts hummed from his fists and feet.

  He came back to himself with his hands raised over his head, the glade a riot of rain and mud and smoke. A deluge of sound filled the space. He was soaked, and when he unclenched his fists they were tacky with blood. He felt his face, and it was not his own. Its lips were stretched into the most savage smile.

  A figure was curled on the ground, a fallen giant of a man. A single hand raised in submission.

  Nate became aware of the crowd around him. They were his friends, but with their voices blaring he couldn’t recognize them. They were howls and screams.

  The fury had left him exhausted, but he became deeply conscious of a single fact.

  Something is wrong.

  Nate turned to scour the gathered and the palisade of trees.

  Where was she?

  She’d been here a moment ago. But had it only been a moment?

  He stepped over Adam’s crumpled form on his way to the tree line. Had she run away? he wondered. Had she run away from him?

  Behind him, the screams of the crowd faded. A moment broken. An era ended.

  Nate crashed into the undergrowth. Branches snapped, and brambles scraped his bare chest. “Lucy!” he called into the trees. Away from the party, the forest was strange. Faint smoke brushed with firelight lanced the air between the trees in spectral geometry.

  Where had she gone and why had she gone there without him? He called for her again.

  Arrhythmic footfalls broke through the brushwood behind him.

  “You did it,” Tom said. He was breathless. “You really did it.”

  “Did you see where she went?”

  “You destroyed him.”

  “Lucy!” Nate screamed into the trees.

  “Forget her.”

  He couldn’t see Tom’s face, but his friend’s voice was thick, as if he was crying.

  “Where is she, Tom? Help me find her.”

  “How’d you do it?”

  Nate tried to remember why he’d fought Adam, but the tethers of logic had come undone. Its ropes unspooled around him, the universe unanchored and free to stack chance upon chance.

  “What are you, Nate?”

  “Help me, Tommy. Please.” Desperation crept up his throat like an ice lattice. He didn’t know where it had come from. Something is wrong. He felt it in the ache of his arm and heard it in the skirl of wind through the branches.

  Tom grabbed Nate’s face and mashed his lips into his. Nate was somewhere else. Wondering where Lucy was and why she’d gone there. When he realized what was happening, he carefully pulled his mouth away from Tom’s.

  Tom opened his eyes and startled as if seeing Nate for the first time.

  “Oh, shit.” His face fell like a collapsing building. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “It’s okay,” Nate said.

  But Tom swore again and crushed his face into his hands as if to wring it dry. His temper overtook him like a squall. He slammed his head into the trunk of a tree. A wrenching sound poured from his chest, something raw and stripped of everything but anguish.

  “Cut it out, Tom.” Nate tried to pull his friend away from the tree. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

  “Don’t touch me!” Tom screamed as he wheeled on him.

  Nate raised his hands in surrender. He didn’t know what to do, but he had to find Lucy.

  “Just don’t.” A look of utter exhaustion bleached Tom’s features. Then he broke into a full sprint into the watchful trees.

  “Tommy!” Nate tried to chase him, but the nighttime woods were too dense. He heard his friend tearing through the brush but couldn’t see him.

  Nate picked his way through the trees, calling Tom’s name and then Lucy’s into its pillars. But the forest was dark and thick, and deep enough to hide anyone who didn’t want to be found.

  —

  HE REMEMBERED WALKING. He remembered the chafe of sore feet against wet shoes.

  There was a place in the fever of the night when time had no meaning and events had no lucidity, and that’s where he was. Where were his friends? Why was he alone? Where was he going? Dream logic supplanted the rules of the world. He thought of something or someone—the Night Ship, Lucy, Tom—and there it was. Maybe they’d been there all along.

  He was jostled by choppy water near the shore, watching a mass of people on the stony beach. The lake was all around, trapping him as a star is imprisoned in the void. Its cold water erased everything it touched. He was erased. A boy wrapped in a Mylar blanket was on the beach ahead of him. The boy was huddled alongside police and EMS workers. Nate knew the boy: He felt sure of it. The boy needed help—he needed so much.

  For a moment it seemed like the boy finally noticed him. It seemed like Nate might be able to shout to him, but the lake shook him like a boat caught in another’s wake. Soon he couldn’t see the boy, he couldn’t see the beach, he couldn’t even see the—

  “Nate. Nate! Wake up, boy.”

  It took every ounce of will he possessed to open his right eye.

  He was not in the lake or on the Night Ship or in the forest in some far-flung part of the headlands. He was in his bed.

  “The chief’s here,” Grams told him. “Wants to talk to you.”

  Nate sat up, and the room lurched dangerously. An alien heat resided in his brain. His eyes remained blurry no matter how many times he blinked. His fingers felt rusted at the joints.

  “Might want a quick washup first.”

  Grams flipped on the lights as she went back into the hall. He felt his pupils strain to contract as a shadow of sense snapped back into him. Greystone Lake’s chief of police was downstairs, and Nate was a mess. In the bathroom he hurriedly washed mud and blood from his hands. He shook twigs and leaves out of his hair and slapped some of the pallor from his face.

  The chief could be here for a multitude of reasons, but at four in the morning, none of them could be good.

  Nate still looked rough when he was finished. His eyes were an atrocity of blood vessels, and there was a nascent bruise on his temple, but his smile was gold and gold doesn’t tarnish.

  He slipped into an undershirt, pulled on jeans, and trotted downstairs. His grandmother, wrapped in her robe, stood with the chief in the foyer. No one looked their best.

  “Hey, Chief.”

  “Sorry to wake you. Lucy didn’t come home.”

  “She didn’t?”

  “Mrs. Bennett called the station, and they radioed me. Normally wouldn’t draw up a search so soon, but I know you’re all close. Thought you and Tommy might have some ideas.”

  A shriek tore from the kitchen. The kettle. Grams scurried past Nate, leaving him with the chief.

  “You’ve been drinking, I think.” The chief squinted
at him.

  “A little,” Nate admitted. His face wasn’t built for sheepishness, but he did his best.

  “You boys were safe, though.”

  “The safest.”

  “Your Grams is brewing me a bit of coffee. Tommy’s in the car. How about you two put your heads together about where she might have gotten to.”

  After wedging sneakers onto his feet, Nate made his way to the cruiser parked in front. The shadow of Tom’s profile was in the backseat.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey,” Tom said. He wore a polo shirt and khakis, like they were heading to school. Like it wasn’t predawn and they weren’t blitzed into another plane of existence. He didn’t look at Nate.

  “I feel about nine-tenths dead right now.” Nate slid in next to Tom.

  Tom didn’t answer.

  “I figure there’s, like, an eighty percent chance this is a hallucination.”

  Still nothing.

  “I never found Lucy,” Nate said. “Wouldn’t be surprised if half our year’s passed out somewhere. She could be staying at Emma’s.”

  “Dad tried there already.”

  “She didn’t seem messed up enough to get lost and end up somewhere really random, but I’m not the best judge.”

  Tom turned to look out the window.

  “She’s probably just asleep somewhere. Kinda jealous, actually.”

  All he got from Tom was a sound of movement that might have been a shrug.

  “Tommy, that whole thing—in the forest. Don’t worry about it. Crazy night, huh?” He patted his friend on the leg. “You’re making it weird, and it doesn’t have to be. I don’t feel weird.”

  Tom was silent for a few long moments before speaking. “I think I’m still drunk.”

  “Well, yeah, of course. You were annihilated. Me, too. Still am. Mixing pills with everything else was a crappy idea. Lesson learned.”

  It was dark in the car, but Tom seemed to nod. “Yeah.”

  Nate was pleased to lay the issue of that kiss—if that’s what it was—to rest. He hadn’t thought much about it, but when he did the strongest feeling he could detect was one of mild surprise. But the Creature of Catastrophic Futures was no doubt parsing and replaying and lamenting those two seconds in the forest and imagining the devastation wrought by its repercussions. It was good to put it in the open so they could brush it aside.

  “So, for Lucy, I say we get your dad to check out the Wharf and boathouse while he drops us off at Johnny’s.”

  “Johnny’s?”

  “Yeah, we tell the chief we’ll check there, look in the gazebo, the pool house, the dock, whatever, but we’ll really take one of the Vanhoutens’ canoes to the Night Ship.”

  His eyes had adjusted to the dark enough to see Tom shake his head.

  “I can’t go there. Not tonight. I just can’t.”

  “Lucy’ll stumble home once it’s light out, but if the chief’s got it into his head to turn the town upside down, then we’ve got to clean out the Night Ship. Our stuff’s still there, and they’ll know we’ve taken over the place. Who knows, maybe she even crashed there for the night. Either way, we’ve got to play it safe. You’d think it’d be normal to wait until morning to start a search. I don’t know how the chief thinks he’s doing us a favor.”

  “Dad will flip if he finds out we’re in the Night Ship.”

  “That’s why we have to check it out first. If she’s there, we’ll wake her up, paddle her to the Vanhoutens, and tell the chief she was in their gazebo the whole time. No harm done. If not, we’ll pull our things out of the Night Ship in case anyone decides to look there before she turns up.”

  “We’re done with that place, Nate. You promised. You promised Lucy, too.”

  The chief exited the house and made his way toward them across the lawn.

  “Christ,” Nate hissed. The chief was close enough that he couldn’t risk speaking at full volume. He hadn’t expected pushback on this. “Fine. I’ll go by myself. Just stay in the gazebo and do nothing. Perfect.”

  Chief Buck pulled open the door and settled into the driver’s seat. The smells of coffee and the wet night entered the car with him.

  “Ideas, boys?”

  Nate answered and the chief replied. The conversation unwound in the inevitable ways and concluded in the only manner it could have: with Nate getting what he wanted. Tom would go along with him, just as he always did.

  The chief dropped them in front of the Vanhoutens’ home on his way to the Wharf.

  Nate thought the mansion was asleep, but when he reached the rear he saw that the conservatory was lit. This was a glass-domed enclosure that jutted from the back of the house and opened onto the veranda. They gave it a wide berth, but Nate saw Mr. Vanhouten at the room’s center, seated at a table staring at a near-empty bottle. The man had a profile that would look at home printed on currency, but he was trapped in the snow globe of the conservatory, braced against the table as if waiting for the shaking to begin.

  The house and grounds were quiet as they picked through the gardens. Nate doubted Mr. Vanhouten would notice a 747 landing in his backyard, but they were still careful. A bruise of light gathered above the eastern mountains.

  The Vanhoutens kept a variety of watercraft by their dock. Without a word, Nate and Tom hoisted a canoe from its rack and lowered it into the onyx water.

  “What if Dad finishes at the Wharf and gets back to Johnny’s before we do?”

  “If you have to worry out loud, do it quietly. My head feels like a marching band’s trying to escape it.”

  The lake was choppy, and Nate didn’t like the idea of paddling across it in the dark. He prepared himself and stepped into the craft. Tom rocked the canoe as he got in, and Nate closed his eyes to help dispel a wave of nausea. Even on land, his vision had a drunken gradient to it. Half of his synapses skated the rings of Saturn. Was going to the Night Ship the right thing to do? Would it help them find Lucy? Did Lucy need finding?

  A siren song of pain played in the pieces of his bad arm. It was this more than anything that called him across the water.

  When they reached the Night Ship, they lowered the boat launch and secured the canoe. The undercroft was damp with humidity. The chief had given them a flashlight, though Nate could have found his way through this tangle of halls half asleep and without benefit of a single lumen. They ascended the spiral staircase to the main floor of the nightclub.

  One of the camp lanterns shined in a corner, blazing the wall’s rippling crimson paint and bristling the shadows of chairs and tables across the dance floor. Whatever intuition had led Nate to the Night Ship was on target. Someone had been here and not long ago.

  “Lucy!” His voice reverberated from the walls and echoed down the hall of the Century Room above. See, see, see, see…

  The sleeping bags and foam pads were where he’d left them the morning before. The only thing out of place was a tumbler of clear liquid on the scarred bar. He took a tentative sip and spat it out when his stomach rebelled at the taste of it. Vodka. Lucy’s drink. He called for her again.

  Behind him, Tom wandered in a circle around the dance floor.

  “Are you going to help, or what?” Nate asked him.

  “I’ll check the Century Room.”

  Nate gave Tom the flashlight and took the lantern for himself. Sunlight stained the eastern clouds, but the interior of the old nightclub remained stubbornly unlit.

  This floor had a limited number of places to look, but Nate checked them all. Though they’d spent many a cloudy afternoon searching, they’d never found the hidden passages the old stories spoke of. They rarely went into the sprawling, filthy kitchen, but he inspected its cupboards and empty freezers. He told himself that in a haze of alcohol, Lucy might have passed out anywhere, but this didn’t explain where he was searching for her. An exhausted girl doesn’t climb onto a counter to wedge herself into a cabinet.

  A sensation wormed through his gut. It was a feeling but it was also a mem
ory. Something is wrong.

  “Tom!” he called into the chasm of the pier.

  His friend’s response was muffled by distance and the vagaries of the Night Ship. The sound arrived as if filtered through time or a membrane of pure cold water.

  Nate noticed that a door to the boardwalk was open. He followed a sliver of light into the morning. Low clouds blurred into gold against the forested mountains.

  The weathered wood of the old pier looked like ancient skin, its planks bulging and puckered with a century of wear. Whole sections of the boardwalk railing had fallen away, leaving nothing but a single step between these planks and a drop into the lake’s insatiable gorge.

  The plain of water was empty and dark. Skeins of mist caught the blue dawn. Its surface was usually like that of a mirror, reflecting without revealing. But in this moment of strange light, the lake became transparent.

  Nate probed its ripples with the beam of his flashlight. It sliced through the clean water as easily as if it were glass. The light caught a whirl of jade encased in the crystal of the water.

  When he saw it, Nate’s absent neurons were recalled from the outer planets with a speed that broke all natural laws. His attention coalesced into a single unwavering focus.

  A knot of sublime green was wrapped around the pier’s pilings just below the waterline.

  No was all Nate could think. No.

  “Nate?” Tom’s voice and a patter of running feet.

  He was dimly aware of shouting. His own shouting. The sun cracked the line of mountains and the secrets of the lake were laid bare.

  Lucy’s kimono wrap.

  The water’s talons raked him as he dove into the throat of the lake. The frigid water hit him like a blow to the chest. But he tore through it, swimming below the dark wedge of the Night Ship, groping where the light failed. The warble of his yell thrummed around him.

  He swam and searched and struggled in the black. He ran out of breath. He ran out of everything. But this didn’t stop his wordless scream.

  The lake took his cry as easily as it had taken everything else.