Pete pulled Nate’s hand away. “Just save them, okay?” He wasn’t whispering anymore. “Save my friends.”
Rivers of torn leaves lit by the flaring sky guided Nate’s descent to the shore. He abandoned the streets as soon as he could, cutting through lawns and climbing fences to speed his way. His left hand felt like it was the size of a catcher’s mitt. It throbbed with his pulse and screamed with each clench of his loose thumb.
Tom answered the door already dressed in his outdoor gear. His friend’s ramshackle house was in between Owen’s place and the Night Ship. Nate hadn’t been sure if Tom would be home, but he was so glad that he was.
“The hell happened to you?” Tom asked. He didn’t look so great himself.
“We have to go to the Night Ship.” Nate was out of breath and shaking from cold. How far and how long had he run through the storm? How much farther must he go? Would he ever reach home? “Owen, he’s been—he’s the one who—” How to even begin.
“I’ve been on Wharf duty since you left. I came back for a dry uniform, but dispatch just called. They’re sending me to Owen’s. Pete Corso turned up and he’s been saying some crazy—”
“It’s all true. But you can’t go to the Liffeys’. We have to go to the Night Ship.”
“The—but why?”
“He’s going to kill the kids. He’s going to trap them in the Night Ship and then burn it all down.”
“You gotta get out of the rain. You’re shaking. Come on.” He beckoned Nate into the house. “I’ll get you some dry clothes and—holy Christ, what happened to your hand?”
“Please, Tommy. Please. He killed Lucy. He killed her while he raped her and hid her body in the headlands.”
This seemed to get through to Tom. He threw his hood over his head and pushed past Nate, through the front door, and into the storm. Nate followed him to the treeless backyard where a sliver of the old pier could be spied through the dark silhouettes of neighboring homes and countless veils of rain.
An unmistakable orange glow wavered by the landward windows of the promenade.
They were already too late.
Twenty-four
The ragged shape of another downed oak blazed in the headlights.
Next to Nate, Tom swore as he stomped on the brakes. The tree was so massive that not even driving across adjacent lawns would have let them clear it. All routes to the Strand were blocked.
With the promenade already in flames, the only way to the Night Ship was through the old pier’s boat launch, and they’d need one of Johnny’s boats to get there. The Vanhouten mansion was no more than two blocks away, but every moment mattered.
They abandoned the car and scaled the tree’s slick bark. Medea fought them through every step.
Tom had called the station from the cruiser as they tried to find a clear path to the shore. Another unit was already on its way to the Liffeys’ house, and Tom alerted them to the blaze at the Night Ship. The dispatcher would summon the fire boat docked at the Wharf, but with the streets in the state they were in, there was no way to know when the Lake’s volunteers would be able to scramble a crew.
Two fences and five lawns later, they reached the Strand within sight of the chimney pot arrays of the Vanhouten mansion.
They cut through the hedges and onto the slate walkway that flanked the veranda. Johnny would still be at the hospital, and the place looked as lifeless as the rest of the town.
Either Johnny or his father had commissioned the construction of a floating boat shed along one end of their dock. Two motored watercraft were moored there with an assembly of kayaks mounted at the shed’s far end. The boats shuddered among their bumpers in the lake’s onslaught. The structure’s roof shielded them from the rain, but the waves surged over and between the planks at their feet.
“Owen must have taken the Scarab,” Tom said. The shed had three berths and the center slip was empty. “I don’t have a key to the Sundowners. We’ll have to paddle.”
Nate felt his friend’s gaze on him as he turned to where the kayaks were stowed. They were sleek and shallow and as dark as the sky.
He gripped one end of the two-seater craft and tried not to think about the rolling topography of the lake. In the pantheon of such things, the lake wasn’t a significant body of water, but Medea had whipped it into a frenzy of crested peaks. In more placid moods, these waters had twice swallowed Nate’s life.
The craft bucked as they lowered it into the lake, as if the water itself grasped for it. Waves crested its sides to lick the cockpits’ coaming, but its compartments were tight and designed for buoyancy. Nate forced himself to get in first.
“You don’t have to go,” he told Tom. The fiberglass sheath of the kayak grasped him like a shroud or a womb. He didn’t know what they’d find at the Night Ship. The past was closed and only their futures could be unmade. Tom had to make his own choice.
Across the water, flames at the foot of the pier began to lash at the rain, but fire wasn’t the only menace. A monster hunted children through its burning halls. The fairyland towers glistened in the growing light.
Something was ending.
Nate was ambushed by the thought of Meg and Livvy and how he might not see them again. He could hardly make sense of how they existed within the same reality as the Night Ship and this unceasing storm. But everything was connected. Good and bad. Past and future. Hurricanes and clear blue days. Stories and truth. Victims and villains. Every single thing was also something else. This was the universe’s golden design. This was life itself.
When Nate looked up at Tom from the depths of the boat, he imagined that he could again be new and unblemished and unknowing. He could once more be the ten-year-old who’d fallen from a tree and had his two best friends reach in wordless unison to lift him back to his feet. The little boy who’d sat crooked between his mother’s lap and a book, astonished to find an undiscovered world on every page.
Chances stacked upon chances had never permitted him to be a son while also a father, or a brother at the same time he was a husband, but maybe he could inhabit all these parts of himself at once.
Maybe he had to.
He didn’t know if Tom would get into the kayak, because for a moment Nate wasn’t sure he knew anything.
The craft lurched and then settled as Tom got in. They pushed off from the dock and slid their paddles among the whitecaps. The chaotic waters were nearly unnavigable. It was a constant dance to maintain their balance upon the lake’s volatile surface, but the winds sent them north to the Night Ship as if that was where Medea wanted them to go.
They had many things to discuss in these last moments: What would they find on the old pier? How would they confront Owen? How could they save those kids with nothing but this two-seat kayak?
The storm sped them to the Night Ship, and before Nate broached these questions, the structure grew to encompass his entire field of view. The fire still seemed confined to the front of the promenade, though he couldn’t guess how deeply it had chewed into the pier’s interior. The derelict place was its own world, and from the outside it was impossible to know what happened within its warren of nooks and corridors. The children might already be dead, or they might not yet even know the Night Ship was burning.
“I should’ve known there was something wrong when you never went back to NYU after Christmas.” It made Nate sick to think how little time he’d spent considering his best friend’s sudden exit from New York, and he didn’t know if he’d have another chance to apologize. Poor Tom, he might have thought in some stolen moment between performances of self-interest and acts of self-immolation, too weak to hack it in the big city. “I should’ve met up as often as I told you we would. I’m so sorry.”
Unimpeded by branches and buildings, the weather on the skin of the lake was a physical mass of force and water. The rain was a constant fusillade, and Nate let blow after blow of it hammer his face.
“Lucy was my fault, no matter what Owen did,” Tom finally said.
“I never blamed you for any of it. If I said I did, I didn’t mean it. If anything, you should blame me.”
“You two wouldn’t have even been here if it weren’t for me. Your dad said I was poison, and he was right. I set your lives on fire.” For the first time, Nate caught the scent of burning. “I was supposed to die with my family, Tom.” He thought of the million dominoes of coincidence that must have fallen in just such a way to place Just June on that rim of shore at that very moment. “If I’d drowned with them, none of this would have happened. Lucy, you, Grams, Maura, Johnny, Owen, Mrs. Liffey—” This was only the top of the list. The wall in Just June’s basement rippled all over the town along the shore.
They were nearly to the boat launch. With the double-handed push of the wind at their back, they had to use their paddles only as rudders. The launch was open, and a sleek blue vessel was tied up ahead of them: Nate guessed this was the boat Owen had appropriated from Johnny’s shed. He grabbed the free mooring post and pulled them parallel with the ramp.
“That’s not what it was like,” Tom said. He stayed low to step from the kayak. “You don’t remember the right things, Nate. You never did. It wasn’t all rage and revenge. How could it be?” He fastened the mooring line and pulled Nate flush with the dock. “We were there for Johnny whenever things got bad with his dad. We tried to help Owen, too, even if he doesn’t remember it that way. We were friends. How can you forget how much we laughed? We loved you.”
It was Nate’s turn to step onto the launch, and Tom gripped his arm to steady him.
“We still do.”
Nate was still wiping at his face when they ascended into the undercroft. He knew that what they were headed into would require all his focus. He knew that he and Tom needed a plan for how to deal with Owen.
But the young screams that tore through the crying wind announced that the time for schemes and plots was over.
Twenty-five
The undercroft was dark, but Nate’s feet remembered the way. The screams came from more than one person, and they pulled him to the spiral staircase, where he collided with a mass of something that sent him back onto his heels.
He felt a flood of warmth pour from his chin to his mouth. Tom’s flashlight revealed a blockade of dressers and tables and chairs. Someone had barricaded this entrance to the upper floor.
“The kitchen,” Tom whispered. The kitchen’s staff service entrance was the only other route from the undercroft to the main level.
Wiping away the blood, Nate ran after the bounding beam of Tom’s light. The hall here was narrow and its floors uneven. Just June and her sister, May, had once lived in one of the rooms that branched from this corridor.
Tom and his light disappeared around a corner, and Nate slowed to feel his way to the nook where he knew the service stairs were. Flecks of shedding paint cracked under his hands as he groped his way through several tight turns and caught up to his friend.
“It’s blocked, too.” Tom heaved all his weight at the door that led into the kitchen. Nate joined him in broadsiding the heavy wood with his shoulder. Every collision of his shoulder against the door rattled his brain and swelled his damaged hand to bursting. The door protested, but didn’t budge. Something massive must be propped against it.
Tom counted off, and they crushed themselves into the door. There was a skin-rippling screech as the obstruction ground a quarter inch across the kitchen tile. Tom counted off again—and then again. Once they fought themselves through a few agonizing inches, they kicked and battered the door at its hinges. Finally they dislodged it and heaved it aside.
Now that they’d stopped making noise themselves, Nate realized that the screams from the nightclub had also ceased. Their sudden absence rang in his bones.
Tom climbed over the thing that had been blocking the door. When Nate followed, he saw the obstacle was a massive mid-century industrial oven.
Their single flashlight wasn’t enough to illuminate the enormous kitchen. Dust and cobwebs shrouded rows of filthy counters. Shadows realigned with each twitch of the light and tendrils of smoke curled along the ceiling. The room smelled of both mold and campfires.
Nate hurried to the swinging door that opened into the cavern of the nightclub. “Ready?” he asked Tom. In the strange light, his friend’s face was only half rendered. Beyond the door, the nightclub was alive with the moans of Medea and the pummeling of the lake. There was no way to know what was on the other side.
Tom nodded, then led the way with his flashlight. The swinging door was mercifully quiet as it opened into the vast, dark place. Rain thundered against the lofty windows as lightning flashed blue and gray through the trembling architecture of the sky. Smoke began to sting Nate’s eyes.
The flashlight was a thimble of light in an ocean of black, but Nate took in every detail the beam illuminated. The room had seemed orderly when he’d been here only hours ago, but chaos had since swept through. The space flashed with broken glass. Foodstuffs were scattered across the dance floor. Tables and chairs had been upended. The doors to the promenade were obstructed with a pile of furniture, just as the spiral stairs had been.
A cataclysm of electricity erupted above the foothills, capturing the lake and mountains in a daguerreotype of Medea’s fury. When Nate blinked, a blue negative of the jagged bolts remained seared onto his eyes. An immense tree of light with a life span of only an instant. The thunder reached them two seconds later. The pier shuddered in its shock wave: an avalanche that obliterated everything else beneath it.
Nate walked into a displaced propane tank, sending it rolling before it came to rest against the husk of a broken lantern. Tom traced its passage with the light.
“He broke all the lanterns,” Tom whispered.
Fear blossomed in the dark, and terror was every monster’s ally. Where was Owen, Nate wondered. Where were the children? Why was it so quiet?
“There,” Tom said. His flashlight illuminated a tangle of bright sleeping bags. They were twisted and abandoned in knots of blue and red. All except one. A boy was on his side in a puff of quilted down. A splash of scarlet doused his neck and shirt. His white-blond hair gleamed like a halo except where it was dark and clotted.
Nate pushed his way past Tom. He kneeled next to the boy and bent close enough to smell the peanut butter on his breath.
“He’s breathing. Pulse steady.” His airways were clear. “The blood’s still coming.” The wound looked as if it had been made by a blunt weapon. Nate hesitated to investigate too deeply, but it was possible the skull had been fractured. “Can you hand me the—”
The boy gasped, and the unexpected sound caused Tom to swear and leap backward.
“You’re okay, buddy,” Nate told the boy. Clothing was crumpled around the sleeping bags, and Nate folded a T-shirt and pressed it against the boy’s head wound. “Glad you’re awake. Can you tell me your name?”
“He hit me,” the boy whispered. His enormous brown eyes glistened with terror. “He came from the walls. He came from—” Then he shuddered slightly, closed his eyes, and slumped his head onto his shoulder.
“Is he?” Tom asked. He panted like he was out of breath. “Is he—?”
“Still breathing, just unconscious,” Nate said. “Can you shine that light here?” He had to stanch the bleeding.
“ ‘He came from the walls’?” Tom said. “The hell does that mean?”
“You know the stories.” Nate began tearing the shirt into strips. “They say Morton Strong had peepholes in the walls of the Century Room to spy on his customers. In the stories, there were ways for people to climb from the undercroft to the upper levels without ever being seen.”
This morning, Just June had been little more than a story. Before her remains were found, Lucy herself had faded into the gauzy treatment of myth. In a decade, who could say what tales the town along the shore would trade about the Storm King and the day the Night Ship burned to its pilings in the rage of a hurricane?
Tom swept the ro
om with the light as if it were the rotating pulse of a radar. “They must have been asleep when Owen got here,” he said. “After he set the fire he comes back here and clocks this kid. The others run. Owen chases them, and with the exits blocked he knows there’s nowhere else for them to go. We must have gotten here right when it kicked off. They probably all…” Tom trailed off and Nate became aware that his friend had stopped swiveling and fixed his light on a single spot.
“Jesus.”
“What?” Nate had begun wrapping the strips of fabric around the boy’s head, fixing a wedge of cloth into place as a makeshift compressive bandage.
“By the kitchen,” Tom said.
Nate finished dressing the wound and followed the beam of Tom’s flashlight. It revealed a place near the entrance to the kitchen. But instead of the wall that should have been there, the beam lit an open hatch, a square door about three feet wide. Its borders were aligned with the natural contours of the room’s wood paneling and a horizontal rail of molding that struck across that wall. They’d walked past it on their way from the kitchen without noticing it. Back in high school, he’d passed by that wall hundreds of times without imagining it was anything but what it appeared to be. The same could be said about Owen Liffey.
“ ‘He came from the walls,’ ” Tom said. He flashed the light back to the stricken child. “Is it okay to move him?”
“Safer than it is to leave him here.” Furniture had been heavily stacked against the Night Ship’s broad glass doors to the promenade, but a glow already dawned around its edges. The smell of burning was intensifying. “It’d be better to stabilize his neck, but we’ll have to wing it.”
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