The Storm King: A Novel

by Brendan Duffy

  June started after her, then remembered the suitcases packed with their clothes and lined with their life savings. She forced the bags shut and dragged them to the closet.

  A tremendous crash shook the pier, and June couldn’t imagine what had caused it. She locked the door to their room and ran down the passageway to the kitchen stairs. The screams were a roar, and she could hear now that they belonged to both women and men. Their cries reverberated through the planks even louder than had the band’s music. Water poured in streams down the walls as if the pier had sunk and the lake now sat above it instead of below.

  The kitchen was empty when she got there. Faucets ran into the sinks, and smoke billowed from the ovens. June had been in the undercroft for little more than half an hour, but in that time Armageddon had descended upon the Night Ship.

  “May!” Panic threatened, but she forced it down. She was Just June. She was queen of this place. She was a terrifying creature to behold, and there was nothing she could not do.

  She burst through the kitchen doors into the smoke and shouts of the nightclub.

  Tabletops were pillars of flame that clawed for the ceiling. Blazing curtains wreathed the windows in fire. There were bodies, too. Crowds were packed as tight as herded animals at either end of the club. Three women and a man lay in the center of the dance floor vomiting onto the black planks as the bright curves of fish flapped around them like bacon on a skillet. June could only assume that Strong had shared his special punch after all.

  A man and woman were stooped over an elderly gentleman in the throes of a seizure. Alone among the guests, this couple tried to help. They protected the convulsing man from the violence of his own limbs, while the rest of the guests tore at each other to get to the exits.

  The sparklers and candle centerpieces must have toppled and begun the fires that triggered the panic. Apparently, in their frenzy to escape, the crowd had also destroyed the club’s immense aquarium.

  The stampede for the doors had left a trail of men and women trampled amid shattered glass and wrecked furniture. Legs were buckled at unreal angles and rib cages rendered concave.

  Looking at their broken bodies, June’s fear crested and then overwhelmed everything else. She screamed for her sister, but her voice was lost in the bedlam.

  The Century Room had vanished in a tempest of smoke. The air was thick and biting, and the edges of things began to blur. June ran to search the faces of the fallen. Some were conscious and others were not. Some were familiar and others were strangers. May wasn’t among them.

  Like a levee overwhelmed by floodwater, something finally broke loose. The people pressing for the boardwalk exit burst from the suffocating space, taking with them some of the Night Ship’s smoke and noise.

  June tried to regain her internal balance. May was here. She would never leave without June, just as June would never leave without her. May was June’s heart, and June had to find her. She must have gotten caught when the crowd bolted for the exits.

  On the boardwalk, wind scattered the smoke across the lake as if it were fog. As if it signified a change in temperature and not absolute catastrophe. Across the water, celebrations continued at the Wharf. There, it was still Independence Day. It was little more than a mile away, but from where June stood, it might as well have been a portrait of a lost world.

  There were bodies here too, some silent and skewered by broken windows and others wretchedly loud as they thrashed on the ground. Part of the boardwalk railing had given way, and the shouts of those who’d fallen into the cold water rose through the planks like the damned.

  This was hell, and June was its architect.

  She found May crumpled against the south railing. Her neck was turned in an impossible direction. She was examining a region of her back that should have required a mirror to see.

  June didn’t remember walking to May, but then there she was. She stepped outside her body as it curled against that of her twin. From above, the two of them looked as she imagined they had in the womb. Nested into each other like two halves of a single perfect thing.

  “Dearest.” June sobbed into May’s forehead. She put her hands on either side of May’s head, willing the pulse in her wrists into her sister’s temples. In one of the Lake’s stories, there would have been enough life left for May to utter a last sentence. One last word that June could dip in gold and carry around like a locket. But May’s eyes were empty. Her twin was gone.

  For the first time, June was alone.

  June once believed that she could do anything, but in her first moment of solitude, she knew that she couldn’t do this.

  May was June’s heart. No one can live without their heart.

  She didn’t think. The time for plots and schemes was over. These were relics of an era as dead as the sister she lay beside. With May gone, there was nothing left to plan for. There was only one last thing to do.

  When the crowd had broken through the back windows, they’d taken a set of drapes with them. Many of the curtains from the other windows burned and charred, but these were still velvet and crimson as deep as blood. June found their cord and tied one end around her ankle and the other around a wrought iron bench that sat not far from the boardwalk’s broken railing.

  June was not physically strong, but she could summon the energy to push the iron bench through the gap in the railing. She could find the strength to do this one final thing.

  “I’d do it all differently if I could.” June kissed May on the forehead for the last time. She savored the jasmine scent of her sister’s hair and the slender arch of her nose. June didn’t know if there were worlds beyond this one. If there were, it seemed unlikely that their paths would lead to the same clearing. This was goodbye.

  Behind June, a woman gasped. “Your sister.” She knelt in front of May and rested two fingers against her neck and then concentrated with an intensity June found transfixing. This was the same lady who’d been helping the stricken people inside.

  June had walked through the same room, cluttered with her own victims, and barely spared them a glance. May never would have done such a thing. No person with an ounce of humanity would. The first of the sirens sounded in the distance.

  I’d do it all differently if I could.

  “I’m so sorry. Such a gentle girl.” She removed her fingers from May’s neck.

  June’s vision cleared enough to realize that she knew this woman. She was married to the owner of the pub in town, Union Points. Mrs. McHale. She was a severe-looking one. Yankee stock. A spine of steel and chips of glass for eyes. June had seen her at the grocery and at the docks. She’d never scorned the twins like most of the others in town. If they met, she’d nod and give them a polite “Good day,” as if they were anyone else.

  “I killed her.” June realized she was sobbing again. Only an hour ago, such a display would have disgusted her, but that life was over. May was gone, and June would soon be fast on her heels. “I killed them all. It was an accident, but it was my fault. If I could do it all again, I’d do it better. I’d be better. I wouldn’t hurt anyone. I’d be like May.” She was aware of the woman’s gaze trailing along the artery of curtain cord that fastened June’s ankle to the leg of the wrought iron bench.

  “So much loss tonight,” Mrs. McHale said. “Little sense in adding to it.”

  “I can’t.” June moved closer to the bench. Like a wounded beast protecting her injury, June would defend the braid of velvet that tethered her to the future for which she’d set her sails. “I can’t live without May.”

  June and Mrs. McHale gazed across the waters to the prelapsarian festivities at the Wharf. Concoctions were drunk by the gallon there, too, but they weren’t laced with antifreeze. Their hangover would not consist of riots and fires and death.

  The two of them were about the same age, June realized. But Mrs. McHale was a wife and mother. June was nothing. She wasn’t Strong’s right hand. She wasn’t queen of the Night Ship. She wasn’t even a sister anymore. The
Night Ship Girls were gone.

  They were quiet like that for long, still moments. There was sanctuary in this. The peace before the plunge.

  “June can’t live without May.” Mrs. McHale spoke deliberately. Like each word was its own sentence. “But can May live without June?”

  June didn’t understand the woman. “She was everything.”

  “She wouldn’t want you to die.”

  The sirens were louder now.

  “The police will come for me. They’ll lock me in a cell and there’ll be no way out.”

  “They’d never put you in jail, dear. Everyone knows May wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “Are you some kind of moron?” June wept. The woman didn’t have stupid eyes, but what she said was nonsense. “I’m June. She’s May.”

  “It isn’t what you’re called that matters; it’s what you do that counts.”

  “She’s dead because of me.”

  “She doesn’t have to be dead. Not really.” Mrs. McHale placed a finger to June’s chest. “You can be May. You can live for her. Live it like you say you would if you could do it all again. Live it like she’d have wanted to.”

  “I’m June.” Her voice had shrunk into a mewling thing. The world seemed to tilt.

  “June’s the dead one,” Mrs. McHale said, shaking her head. The blue gems of her eyes lit through June like flames through wax paper. “You’re the one who lived. You’re May. And you’re going to make up for it. You’re going to make it matter.” She began to unloop the dirty apron from June’s neck. “It’s never too late to be good.”

  June realized that for once she was being the slow one. Mrs. McHale was ten miles ahead, where the country was green and gentler than any June could fathom. She couldn’t imagine it now, but maybe one day she would. Maybe one day she’d make up for the suffering she’d caused.

  “I’m May.” She tried the words out to see how they fit. “I’m May.” She heard her new voice, layered with humility and wonder and maybe even the tiniest measure of hope. “I’m May.”

  And from then on, she was.

  Seventeen

  “You’re Just June.” Nate squinted at her. She might as well have confessed to being the Easter Bunny.

  “It’s only a name,” the woman said. She waved her hands as if her identity did not utterly rewrite the history of the Lake. “May was as sweet as pie, and her head was about as soft. Had to depend on people’s help for everything. I didn’t know people could be so kind. And after everything June did to this town. So much suffering. And the pain, you know how it ripples?” She pointed to the walls lined with newspaper clippings and webbed with string.

  “So, you’re June pretending to be May,” Nate said. “I think I’d know if May, the Night Ship Girl, worked as a janitor at my high school.”

  “It was a good job. Quiet at night. Nice to clean things up instead of making the mess.”

  Nate tried to picture Just June scrubbing the urinals in the boy’s room.

  “But they didn’t call me May. We were born right there on the pier, though old Morton never wanted us born in the first place. Mama was supposed to kill us the second we came out, but she couldn’t. She never even got us birth certificates. That’s how much the Night Ship was our world. When we left it, we didn’t exist. It was well and truly like the lives of May and June had been a dream. Your grandmother helped me. She helped so much. She’s a woman people listen to. At the town hall, they filled out all the forms like I was an adult foundling. Got to choose my new name. A new name for a new life. I was Annabelle Strong. Annabelle, just like our mother. Annabelle, to remember, and Strong so as never to forget.”

  Nate didn’t know what to believe. Still, he was sure that the black-red envelopes around the cellar had come from the Night Ship. And he could imagine Grams acting the way the woman claimed she had all those years ago.

  “I followed you here from the Night Ship. I saw you swimming away from it. Why were you there?”

  “I was following you. And I was watching the children.” She shook her head. “Those poor children.”

  “ ‘Poor children’? They’re not victims.” The smell of Grams’s burned skin built in Nate’s nose, and he fought the tears that surged alongside it. “They’ve been terrorizing the Lake.”

  “But that’s what victims do here, isn’t it? It’s what I did when Old Morton tried to kick me out. You did it, too. You and your friends.”

  “Yeah, this is the part where I ask you why my face is in the middle of your wall of crazy. What does any of this have to do with me?”

  The woman blinked her huge eyes at him. Nate knew from the stories that Just June was supposed to have green eyes. Even in the basement lighting, he could see that the woman’s irises were the color of a tropical lagoon flecked with gold.

  She grabbed his hand, and her old skin was like silk.

  “Everything.”

  THE DEMON JUNE cannot be vanquished, but the lake quiets her. In its clear waters she forgets the screams from the Night Ship. When she pushes her pace she can almost unhear the grind of a sister’s spine as her head lolls unanchored upon her neck.

  June had found the waters intolerably cold, but May adored them. A lap around the lake’s southern bulge helps her become the twin she’s supposed to be.

  All the Daybreakers search for something on their morning circuit: fitness, focus, solitude. She both erases and rewrites herself in the mirrored waters. She pursues the tenderness and generosity that will make her worthy of this second chance.

  May’s life is a simpler and smaller one than June’s. Though the sweetest of creatures, she cannot hope to leave more than a faint mark on the world. She does her menial work humbly and gratefully, and she spreads kindness where she can. But June erupted a mountain of suffering onto the town along the shore. May’s greatest efforts can only pick at this imbalance one pebble at time. After decades, she knows she’s made only the feeblest of dents.

  She swims the lake to become the better of the twins, but she also swims with the hope of discovering how a speck like herself can accomplish something that truly matters.

  One day in April, the lake delivers her answer.

  She first sees the thing as a flutter of shadow, as if the sun has blinked. The waters explode when it appears as a monolith not ten feet in front of her. The waves of its impact crash against her like a rebuke by the angriest of lovers.

  It takes her a moment to understand that it’s a car.

  For an instant, fear takes her and she peers at the faultless sky. If one car decides to fly off the top of a cliff, surely others might follow its example. Then she remembers that she isn’t entitled to be afraid anymore.

  But it doesn’t make sense. A car in the lake.

  Only the trunk is visible from the surface, so she dives to get a better look. The water is blistered with air bubbles, and it’s hard to see anything in detail. The front of the car is crushed. The windshield is a gaping mouth and the passenger-side door is crumpled like discarded paper.

  A groan rises from the wreck as it lists toward her. The water churns as the car topples. She just manages to get out of the way as it crashes to the lake bed.

  The passenger’s side is now pressed against the bottom of the lake, and the entire vehicle is underwater. A stain like tannin clouds the water. It billows from the front of the car. She can taste it in her mouth. Blood.

  The driver’s door is also smashed. She tries to open it, but it’s impossible. The explosions of air bubbles that had pocked the water have thinned to tendrils that streak like spider’s silk. A child’s hand bobs, delicate and still, through the glass of the rear door. The horror of the sight sends her back to the surface.

  She takes gasping bites out of the spring day. She’s afraid again, but this time it isn’t for herself.

  When she plunges back under the surface, she makes for the rear door, but finds its handle locked or jammed. She pounds her fist against the glass, to no result but dull thuds sound
ing through the deep like the beat of a weak heart. Flesh and bone will not be enough.

  She feels around the lake bed for a rock. By the time she finds one, her lungs are already aflame, but every second she takes for herself is one stolen from the child trapped in the car. Through the glass, thin limbs float blue in the dim light. A burst of short dark hair sways weightless in the cold water.

  A boy.

  It takes her four tries to break the window. There’s a moment of pure relief when the glass shatters into opacity like rimes of ice. But the window doesn’t dislodge. No matter how hard she batters it, it doesn’t budge.

  The pain in her chest is insurmountable and she has no choice but to return to the surface. She pants into the bright sunshine. The day is perfect but corpses wait just below the lake’s calm surface. Only the long shadow of the Night Ship tempers the flawless day.

  June would accept that the boy in the car below is dead, but she isn’t supposed to be June anymore. It would take every goon who ever worked the Century Room to drag May from this wreck.

  One deep breath and she’s back underwater. She grabs the luggage rack to anchor herself, and stomps against the cracked glass with the heels of both feet and all the strength she has. Again and again and again.

  Finally, something gives way. She swims down to probe the window with her fingers. There’s a small hole, a place where the glass has buckled. Using the rock, she resumes her assault on the weak point. The boy is out of time, but she isn’t going fail him. She’ll give him everything she has.

  More hammering, until there’s a hole big enough for her bony hand to fit through. She reaches into the car and unlocks the door.

  June didn’t believe in deities or prayers, but May had faith in a benevolent universe. She can feel May with her now, more than ever before. It’s May who tries the handle.

  The door opens as smooth as the lake on a windless day. She grabs for the boy, forgetting about his seatbelt. His head bobs indifferently against hers as she reaches across him, the strands of his thick young hair tickling her neck. When she unfastens the belt, she gathers him into her arms like he’s her own son. Euphoria. Tears of unbounded joy.