The Storm King: A Novel

by Brendan Duffy

  Rain streamed from the daggers of glass that marked the Liffeys’ broken window. There was certain to be water damage, and with Owen away it would only get worse. Nate assumed that a caregiver stayed with Mrs. Liffey while Owen was out, but perhaps Medea had tossed all normalcy to the wind and the incapacitated woman was temporarily alone.

  If Nate had never done any good in this town, he could at least help in this tiny way.

  The lawn was sopping. Water crested his shoes with each step.

  Though he and the others had trashed the Liffeys’ landscaping during Thunder Runs on more than one occasion, Nate had never been beyond their home’s threshold. Mrs. Liffey had cherished her flowers, so Nate had come up with the idea of salting the gardens and lawns. They’d doused them with enough rock salt to poison the soil several inches deep. Even now, the grass was patchy, the shrubs bare and stunted.

  If every decree of the Storm King rippled with ill consequences, he wondered what unexpected catastrophes that act of destruction had caused. Nate was in a mood where anything seemed plausible.

  While the yard and flower beds were pitiable, the home itself was well cared for. It was a pretty Victorian with gray paint, black shutters, and white trim. Nate ascended the steps to the porch. The doorbell was useless without power, so he used the knocker.

  No response.

  He picked his way along the edge of the house. When he reached the broken window, he called into the dark interior. While he waited for an answer, it occurred to him that it wasn’t clear how the window had broken. No tree had collapsed against it, and there was no trace of debris that might have struck it. A Klaxon sounded in his mind when he peered into the dim interior. A trail of muddy footsteps was smeared among the wet shards of glass.

  Someone had broken into the house.

  The legions of regrets fled his mind. He parsed the thousand sounds and smells of the hurricane and scanned every shadow of the room in front of him. There was danger here, and it required all of his focus.

  Owen had said that the vandals hadn’t hit him the night before, but maybe they’d been waiting for today. It seemed audacious to attack the place in daylight, but perhaps Medea had made them bold. Or maybe Nate’s appearance and quick departure from the Night Ship had enraged them enough do something reckless. Even now, they could be trashing Grams’s house, but Nate subdued the reflex to run to Bonaparte Street. A house was just a house, and the one on Bonaparte Street was empty. But if Mrs. Liffey was alone here, she’d need him.

  He climbed through the window and added his tracks to the ones that had been laid before him.

  It was a tidy room with a fireplace, a corner of couches, wingback chairs, and a large coffee table. Dentil molding lined the ceiling and floor, and expensive-looking wallpaper and bland art filled the space between. It was a room designed to be admired and not inhabited. This fit with what Nate knew about Mrs. Liffey. With her yoga-trim body, designer clothes, and pretty house, she was a woman who prized appearance above everything else. There was a collection of portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Liffey on the mantel, a handsome couple who looked plucked right from a J.Crew catalog. These were normal enough decorations, except that Owen wasn’t in a single one of the photos. Nate wondered if in her ill health Mrs. Liffey could finally be proud of the man Owen had become.

  The rug was soaked, and the slap of water followed him everywhere he walked. The wooden floor was sure to be ruined, but storm damage was no longer his primary concern.

  He crossed the glass-strewn floor as quietly as he could. Hammering away at the door and calling into the house would have alerted the vandals to his presence. If they were still here, then they already knew he was coming.

  The mud tracks led to the dining room and then to the kitchen. He scanned the walls and counters for a landline to try, but the room’s shadows were deep. He felt grit through the soles of his shoes and a suggestion of dirt spanned the kitchen tiles, but the dim light from the windows made it difficult to see anything in detail.

  After probing drawers of cutlery, measuring cups, and napkins, his fingers finally grazed the grip of a small metal flashlight. He started to pan its light around the room when the spill of its beam caught a flash of color on the floor.

  As he’d guessed, the tiles here had a coating of mud, but there was another color mingled in its brown: the unmistakable ocher of dried blood.

  His pulse quickened, and the ache in his bad arm seemed to amplify. With the beam, he traced the mud and the blood to a closed door. The basement, he assumed. The blood across the floor was more than incidental: Someone had been seriously hurt.

  A bang shook the house. Not thunder, a slammed door. Floorboards creaked and footsteps sounded.

  They’re still here. Nate grabbed an electric kettle off the counter, switched off the flashlight, and tried to sink into the kitchen’s shadows.

  The footsteps were even, unhurried, and getting closer.

  A large figure appeared silhouetted against the dim light from the doorway.

  “Nate?” Owen asked. “What are you doing here?”

  “Jesus. I almost clocked you.” Nate had never been so happy to see the big guy. “Someone broke into the house through the living room window.”

  “The window’s broken? I didn’t see—”

  “There are tracks all over the place.” Nate twisted the flashlight on and illuminated the filthy floor.

  “God, is that—is that blood?” Owen asked.

  “I think so. But keep it down because—”

  “Oh, Christ, you think they’re still here?” Owen dropped his voice to a whisper. “Like, right now?”

  “I don’t know. I just got here.”

  “Did you call the police? What about my mom! Do you think they have her?”

  “I haven’t seen her. My phone’s dead. I was just looking for your landline.”

  “It’s cordless, so it won’t work without power. But I’ll call from my cell.” Owen put his satchel on the counter and began to rifle through it. “Christ. I can’t believe this. I mean, seriously, what’s next?”

  The blood and mud stopped at the door, though there was something like a handprint on the frame, close to the knob. Nate painted the beam of light up the rest of the door and noticed a series of deadbolts and chains just below his eye level.

  Sweat broke out at his temples, his body sensing something before his mind had time to catch up.

  Why so many locks on a basement door?

  One of Owen’s huge arms closed around his neck.

  Nate had time only to throw an elbow backward before he felt cloth over his face. An involuntary inhalation filled his mouth and nose with a sweet, faintly acetone smell that recalled his med school days.

  Owen clutched him tight against his massive chest. Nate was enveloped, his arms pinned to his sides as if by steel. He stomped clumsily at his shins, but Owen’s strength was absolute. A scream built in his head with each gasp into the chemical-soaked rag.

  He heard a choking sound as his knees buckled. His vision spun down into stars, and the shadows of the room coalesced into black.

  Twenty

  Sleep was velvet, smooth and impenetrable. Like the Night Ship, it was a shade of red so dark it was only a step from black.

  Bands of light resolved into overhead fluorescents. Nate’s senses and self limped back to him, his thoughts numb and slow as if wading through icy water.

  He was seated on a cold floor, his head propped against a post or column, the buzz of the lights interrupted only by a whisper like that of an oar cutting through the lake. He tried to move his legs, but his stomach mutinied at the idea. A foul, sweet taste coated his mouth. He was deeply aware of each breath he took.

  The sensation of Owen’s grip lingered around his neck and chest. He remembered the chemical-laden cloth and the trail of mud and blood, the high-security basement door.

  Why so many locks on a basement door?

  With exquisite care, Nate straightened his head. It fe
lt like a planet perched on a twig. He noticed the walls first. They were covered with small black pyramidal shapes like the inside of an alien spaceship or the interior of a golf ball. Light disappeared into the strange material. His raincoat was gone, and he was dressed only in his sodden suit.

  The basement felt impossibly vast, but Nate could tell that his vision wasn’t right. There was a brightness to the far side of the room that seemed to rebound into infinity. Its glare hurt, as if his pupils were dilated. He wondered what Owen had drugged him with. Its burn in his throat made him think of a frog being prepared for a scalpel.

  Shapes moved beyond the clarity of his sight—shifting blurs that struck him as both organic and mechanical. Something about them was very wrong. He could feel this in his arm and smell it in the air. There was a clotted animal stench so thick that it would take more than water and soap to purge. The strange whispering surged and ebbed from the bright end of the basement.

  Nate’s hands were bound behind what he was propped against. Whatever they were tied with felt narrow and had the slickness of plastic. He could twist his wrists within the ties, but couldn’t begin to contemplate summoning the strength to break them. He didn’t even know if he could stand.

  A hiss hardly louder than the ring of the overhead lights came from his right. He moved his head toward it slowly. Flowers tracked the sun more quickly. His brain threatened to shatter against his skull as if its lobes were sculpted of blown glass only a molecule thick.

  Another form was collapsed to his right. Long limbs splayed across the floor like a discarded plaything. A man. Nate squinted, trying to force his eyes to focus. A boy. Shaggy brown hair, wide dark eyes, a thin face crusted with blood and taut with terror. He was clothed in the same long raincoat he’d been wearing when Nate tackled him on Grams’s lawn the night before.

  Pete Corso. Alive after all.

  Alive for now.

  “Pete?” Nate spoke louder than he’d intended, and the whisper at the other end of the basement tapered to a hush.

  “Thought you’d be out longer.”

  The bound boy’s eyes snapped shut at the sound of Owen’s voice.

  Nate turned his head and watched one of the blurs solidify into Owen as the huge man approached. He’d changed clothes from what he’d been wearing before. Now he was shirtless and dressed in loose-fitting scrub pants.

  “What’d you use?” Nate asked. His tongue felt three times its normal width, and he had to speak slowly. “Kind of rough around the edges.”

  “A little bleach, a dash of nail polish remover, and you’ve got yourself the makings of some halfway decent chloroform. Vet school wasn’t a total waste of time, huh? I think I gave you enough to knock out an elephant. You’re lucky you’re not in a coma.”

  Nate didn’t feel lucky. He was sure there was a reason why, across from him, Pete pretended to be unconscious. The lights flickered.

  “I turned on the generator,” Owen said. “Thing’s worth its weight in gold.”

  “How’s Johnny?” Nate didn’t know what Owen had planned for him, but he suspected it was something worth delaying.

  “Should be fine. The hospital says he’s in surgery. Rehab’s going to be a bitch, but what can you do? The Empire’s a mess. You ever been in a room with two hundred annoyed tourists? How was the funeral?”

  Heartbreaking, unmooring, devastating by every conceivable metric.

  “Pretty much what you’d expect.”

  “Hmm,” Owen said. He stretched his arm absentmindedly. Muscles from his abs to trapezius to forearm all flexed impressively. He was built more formidably than even Adam Decker had been in his prime. “Should’ve gone. I feel bad about that.” He glanced briefly at Pete before turning back to Nate. “I’m sorry about all this. For what it’s worth, I didn’t see it coming, either. Though, I gotta say, I was surprised how easy it was.” Something was specked across Owen’s chest. White clumps clung to his skin like wet snow. “The Storm King himself. Taken down with a little kitchen sink knockout juice. Only human after all.”

  “You’re not going to make me ask, are you?” Nate tilted his head to Pete Corso.

  “Oh, jeez.” Owen sat crossed-legged on the floor across from him. Close, but out of range from kicks and head butts. Owen wasn’t taking any chances with Nate, only human or not. “These kids. We were never this bad. First they almost kill me by slicing my brake lines, then last night two of them break in. Caught them right here in the basement. I clocked this guy.” He pointed to Pete. “The girl made it back to the kitchen, but it’s not like I could let her leave.”

  “Maura Jeffers.”

  “That her name? I’d have asked the kid, but he’s been out cold. Dosed him with the chloroform before I went out to help Johnny. Maybe I gave him too much.”

  “You killed her.”

  “Well, I didn’t mean to. You know what it’s like when it takes over. The anger. I was so goddamn angry. She was in my house. My own basement! Once she saw everything, she had to go no matter what.”

  “Why are you keeping Pete alive?”

  “You know his name, too? How’ve you been in town for like, a day, and already know more than me? You’re something else, Nate, I swear.”

  “I bet you know lots of things I don’t know, Owen.”

  “Anyway, our boy—Pete?—he and his buddies are obviously the ones setting fires and destroying cars and breaking windows all over town. Since I’ve got him here, I want to know everything he knows. What are they after? What do they know? They’re dangerous to us, Nate. All of us. They know what we did back then. And think of all the pain they’re causing. Someone’s got to put a stop to it. You remember the equations of pain?”

  No matter how much he wanted to, Nate could never forget that. If that wall in the woman’s basement ensured anything, it was this.

  “Somebody’s got to keep them balanced. Just like you always said.”

  “We were kids, O. Stupid, selfish kids. We caused more pain than we avenged. We made things worse, not better.”

  “You don’t mean that.” Owen frowned at him.

  “We should have stuck to video games and girls and keggers in the woods.”

  “No.” Owen shook his head. He grabbed a fist of his own hair. “That’s not what you’re supposed to say.” He stood and started pacing back and forth. The ferocious light from the fluorescents exiled every shadow from the room, and in their brightness, Nate noticed something on Owen’s back. His vision was improving, but he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. Smooth shapes rose from the man’s skin as if it were embossed.

  “Your back.”

  “Huh? Oh. Yeah.” Owen ran a hand over the ridges that bubbled from his flank. He turned so that Nate could see the extent of the scarring. There were dozens of marks carved from his shoulders to his iliac crest. Twin tracks of close two-inch stripes like the gills of a strange fish. “Mom did that. One cut for every week I weighed over three hundred. She was always the worst, but at first even I didn’t think she’d do it. But you always said there’s no way to tell what people are capable of. Dad did nothing, of course. Actually, that’s not true. He helped hold me down. But he paid for it. Mom pays a little more every day.”

  “You never told us.”

  “Did I have to? We were supposed to be friends. You should have known. You always knew when something happened to Johnny. You’d say, ‘What happened, buddy? And who do we have to punish?’ It was the same with Tom and Lucy. It was like they were a part of you. You knew whenever Tom got a hangnail or Lucy had some girl roll her eyes at her in the locker room. But you never knew with me. You never even asked.”

  “We did Thunder Runs against your mom. We salted the lawn, we—”

  “That was nothing, and you know it. You think some dead grass makes up for this?” He indicated his back.

  “You should have called the police.”

  “Would that have made me feel better? Did all that hurt go away when they locked up Mr. Bennett for killi
ng your family? Laws and prison sentences don’t balance the equations, Nate. The pain, it has to be burned away. You know that.”

  Nate realized that the man in front of him was a monster of his own making. He’d had most of the pieces of the story, but hadn’t seen how they fit together until now.

  “Why’d you do it, Owen?”

  “Dad had it coming. He never took my side. He let her get away with it, which makes him almost as bad. He had to go. I knew that’d be the only way I’d be able to deal with Mom.”

  “I’m not talking about your parents.” Heat built in Nate’s chest. It seared away the clouds in his vision and the lethargy of his limbs. “I’m talking about my girlfriend. I’m asking you why you murdered Lucy.”

  SOUND WAS STRANGE in the undercroft.

  Owen listened, silent and still in the nook of one of its rooms. Some nights this was the only place he could sleep. The lake’s sighs were like cradlesong. When he was here by himself, he could pretend he was not only safe, but powerful. Walking the dark and abandoned halls of the Night Ship he could imagine that this was his palace, and he was its Storm King.

  He didn’t spend every night here, but he spent many. It was the best way to avoid home. Nate and Lucy were often here in the small hours of the morning. He’d listen to them up on the dance floor. Peals of Lucy’s laughter ricocheted around the warped halls. Owen was massive by any standard: many times larger than Just June had probably been, yet he was able to move within the hidden chutes and spaces of the walls to watch the lovers from the peepholes in the wood. He never told the others that he’d found the nightclub’s legendary secret passages, and for this he was glad.