The Storm King

by Brendan Duffy

  He imagined Tom upstairs, spraying and wiping and drying and fretting. Every few minutes a wail sounded from upstairs, lonely like the cry of a bird that was the last of its species.

  Finally, the sounds ceased. When Owen was sure Tom had left, he took a lantern and reopened the boat launch. Nate never allowed them to take a light out on the water, but this was a special situation.

  The lake returns what it takes. If Lucy had drowned, then maybe her body had floated to the surface. If Owen found her and hid her, he might be able to keep Tom from getting into trouble. It would be a secret just between the two of them. It’d be a bond unbreakable through the summer and all the way through college. It was the kind of thing that would tie them together for the rest of their lives. If he kept Tom’s secret, Tom would help with the Thunder Runs. Nate would be gone, but Owen, Johnny, and Tom would be stronger than ever. Maybe they’d even be strong enough to get back at his mother in the way he really wanted to. Something that would hurt her for real. Something that would hurt her forever.

  As he unlocked the boat launch, Owen felt truly happy for the first time in ages. Then the skirt of his lantern’s light bounced off the lake’s dark waters and illuminated the stiletto eyes of a soaked girl clinging to one of the pilings.

  “I’m going to destroy him,” Lucy said. “I don’t care who his dad is.” Her voice was hoarse and as flat as ice.

  “Oh my God, Lucy!” Owen tried to keep the disappointment from his voice. So much for his friends. So much for the things he wanted. They slipped through his hands like water.

  The launch creaked under his feet as he descended to help her out of the water. She sat on the launch shivering with cold and rage.

  “I’m going to make him wish he was dead.”

  Owen listened to Lucy’s expletive-laced summary of events. He’d already guessed at the generalities, and the details didn’t much interest him. He nodded and gasped appropriately, but mostly he was wondering what to do next. He tried to think like Nate. He tried to imagine being the kind of person who knew exactly what he wanted and stopped at nothing to get it.

  “First we’ll call 911. The doctors will check me out and have everything on the record. The police will ask me for a statement, and I’ll tell them everything. He hates himself so much he’ll probably confess, the weak little shit.”

  Alarms sounded in Owen’s head. If they did what Lucy said, it would pull them all apart, not bring them back together. “Nate wouldn’t want us to turn on each other.”

  “Nate wouldn’t want his best friend to nearly murder his girlfriend, either.” Her clothes were soaked. The silky green thing she’d had on at the party was gone, and her white top was almost transparent.

  “It must have been an accident. A misunderstanding.”

  Her body was slight but leanly muscled. He’d seen it before in more revealing circumstances than this, but never so close.

  “Tom almost killed me. You think Nate’s going to shrug that off?”

  Owen tried to imagine a world in which Nate and Tom weren’t best friends, and he didn’t at all like the look of it.

  “He’d want us to get along, to figure it out together.”

  She squinted at him. “He’d want revenge. That’s why he burned down Adam Decker’s house and started this whole thing. He burned it down because of me. I made him who he is, just like he made me. We created each other, and that’s why he’ll side with me no matter what.”

  Owen’s head spun. He’d never been as quick as Nate or Lucy. They spoke in full paragraphs and recited doctrines of their own convoluted design, and it was usually all Owen could do to nod and pretend he kept up. But something Lucy said was wrong. It wedged itself into the gears of his brain until they could turn no further.

  “You fell in love with Nate for burning down Adam’s house?” Owen asked.

  “That’s what made us. All of us. Don’t you remember? That’s what made him the Storm King.”

  “But that was me,” Owen said. “I’m the one who poured gas on the Deckers’ house and lit it.”

  “I didn’t—I mean—yeah, okay, you lit it. But the reason you were there was because of Nate. He’s the reason for everything.”

  “But I’m the one who got your revenge on Adam Decker. It was me.”

  Lucy frowned at him for a moment. Her glare softened into blankness, and then she burst into laughter.

  “Oh, Owen! You think I should have been with you this whole time? Instead of Nate?”

  An image, unbidden but well-treasured, came to Owen of Lucy writhing in the dawn light of the dance floor. He felt himself flush. He spoke slowly, trying not to stutter. “I’m just saying that everyone thinks Nate has to be at the center of everything, but he doesn’t.”

  “Jesus. Me and the Porker.” Lucy’s laugh glittered like a blade. “I mean, seriously?”

  Owen shot a hand out to grab her wrist. It was a reflex, like a reptile’s tongue plucking an insect out of the air.

  “Don’t call me that.”

  Her hand was a spindle in the meat of his palm.

  “Watch yourself.” Anger boiled across Lucy’s face. She was a terrifying creature, but Owen saw the appeal. He witnessed it firsthand at least twice a week, bucking across the dance floor planks. She was like a challenge. A crucible. If you could have her, you could get anything.

  Lucy tried to pull herself free of Owen, but she couldn’t budge him.

  “I’m not screwing around, Owen. Let me go. Let me go, or you’ll be just as sorry as Tom will be.” It was a threat, but fear was carved across her face.

  Tom already thought he’d killed Lucy, and not a soul knew she was here. If she reported Tom to the police, Owen and his friends would be torn apart forever.

  Instead of loosening his grip, he tightened it.

  There was a snap and Lucy shrieked in pain. She came at him with her free hand. He caught it as if it had no more heft than paper. When she kicked at him, he pinned her underneath his bulk.

  He held Lucy’s arms against the warped dock and wedged her legs open with a knee. He could hold her entire upper body down with a single forearm. He choked off her scream with a fist gripped around her neck.

  After so many years, Owen finally discovered where he fit. The others had brains or looks or money or loyalty, but Owen’s potency was strength itself. He tore Lucy’s clothes like they were tissue. He marveled at his power.

  Lucy’s face purpled in his grasp. The tendons of her neck stood out like ropes, just as they did when Nate was on top of her.

  Owen held her down and squeezed. The lake surrounded them. He yanked down his shorts, and lake-chilled air kissed his bare skin. Lucy struggled like a flame caught in wind. Furious and desperate.

  After a time she stilled.

  That’s when Owen knew that neither of them needed the Storm King anymore.

  Twenty-one

  “And I really didn’t need you anymore,” Owen said. “Didn’t need the others, either. For once they needed me.”

  Nate felt as if he’d fallen from a great height.

  He imagined Lucy in the panic of her last breath: terrified and violated and disbelieving as her throat was crushed. Five fingers around one porcelain neck. It took a meager amount of pressure on the carotid artery to bring unconsciousness, and a bit more force to crush the trachea and fracture the hyoid. Even after so many lessons, Nate still found it astonishing how entire futures disintegrated because of such small things. A single hand and casual strength could destroy worlds.

  “Tom didn’t know I was keeping his secret for him, but I was. And Johnny doesn’t know it, but I’m the one who finally got rid of his dad for him. That way, he’d get the Empire and everything else. He’d finally be his own man. And to be honest, I always thought me and Tom did you a favor with Lucy. She was insanely hot, but can you imagine being married to her? You’ve done so well, with your career and your family and everything. Things really worked out for you in the end, don’t you think?”
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br />   That might have seemed true even as recently as yesterday, before Nate had stepped back onto this haunted shore. A wife he loved, a daughter he adored. He enjoyed an everyday happiness that anyone might envy. So, had things worked out for him?

  “Yeah.” It was true, but it was also terrible. He’d arrived at a fortunate destination, but reached it by a most treacherous route. Look at the ruin he’d left in his wake.

  Owen grinned. Something about his face wasn’t right. Before Nate could figure out what, the massive man lunged at him. One moment, Nate was watching his captor sitting cross-legged in front of him, and the next moment his face was knocked to an entirely new direction, his jaw blaring with pain from a backhanded slap. If he hadn’t been tied into place, the blow would have sent him tumbling across the floor.

  “Don’t lie to me,” Owen said. The joviality he’d kept up until now fell away. What remained was cold and razor-edged. “I know you, Nate. I killed your girlfriend. No one can forgive something like that. Especially not the Storm King.”

  The tang of his own blood seeped across Nate’s tongue. He didn’t know how he was going to get out of this basement alive.

  “You know about these kids.” Owen stooped next to Pete, and he used the dowels of his fingers to push open the boy’s eyelids. Pete’s irises were blank, but Nate saw what Owen didn’t notice: The boy’s right hand tightened into a fist. The kid was still feigning unconsciousness, and doing a remarkable job of it. Owen let the boy’s head roll back against the post he was tied to. “What do they want?”

  “They want you,” Nate said.

  “Me?”

  “James Bennett’s their leader. Lucy’s brother. He has Lucy’s journals. He used them to put together a list of people from the old days who might have killed her. That’s how the vandals choose their targets.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re angry. Just like we were.” The equations of pain. Agents of karmic justice. Whatever they told themselves, the Lake was a place where one bad thing grows upon another. And it’s an action’s ripples that matter, not its rationalization. Nate understood that now, too late for it to do any good.

  “That’s it? They don’t have a plan?”

  “I didn’t think so at first. Now I’m not sure.” Nate had to reconsider James’s strategy. After fourteen years of silence, there had—finally—been developments in the mystery of Lucy’s disappearance. This was due to the revelation of her remains, but also thanks to the chaos James and his friends had unleashed on the Lake in the wake of its discovery. Shake a tree hard enough, and something is bound to fall from its branches.

  Owen snapped his fingers in front of Nate’s face. “Care to share with the group?”

  “They’ll know it’s you,” Nate said. “The vandals have been able to hit so many places at once because they split into groups. James divvied up last night’s targets among his crew, and Maura and Pete were paired up. James knows where they were supposed to go. They were supposed to spray-paint Grams’s house, but I scared them off. James thought I’d killed Maura because Grams’s house wasn’t damaged. He assumed they never made it any further down their list. But Grams’s wasn’t the last place those two went. This was. Sooner or later, James and the others will come by and see that broken window, just like I did. They’ll figure it out. I’d get out of here while you still can.”

  The whisper Nate had heard earlier from the bright end of the basement surfaced again, this time cresting into the threshold of intelligibility. “No, you can’t go, you’d never go, you’d never leave—”

  Nate squinted, and the dimensions of the room became clearer. It didn’t expand into forever, as it had seemed when he first woke. That was just how his hazy brain had interpreted a large alcove with walls lined with floor-to-ceiling mirrors. With the unblinking ceiling fluorescents reflected endlessly against these mirrors, that section of the basement blazed. But something large and dark twitched near the center of this kaleidoscopic pocket. Nate’s vision still wasn’t perfect, but he saw this bulk reflected across the facets of the walls and echo into infinity.

  Like the mirrored alcove it originated from, the wispy stream of words never seemed to end.

  “He’s a liar, always was, always will be—”

  “What is that?” Nate found his own voice pared to a sliver of itself.

  Owen slapped him again, this time with the porterhouse of his open palm.

  When the pain arrived, it crashed like a breaking wave. The inside of his cheek felt shredded against his molars. Blood pooled behind his teeth. All he could think was that this was the hand that had squeezed the life from Lucy.

  “You are a liar. You’ll say anything to get out of here.”

  Nate spat a gob of blood onto the floor. One of his incisors felt loose. The man was as strong as he looked. He forced himself to focus on Owen and not the voice from the far end of the basement. “I can tell you what you want to hear, or I can tell you the truth.”

  “All right, Nate. Lay it on me.” Including Mr. Liffey and Mr. Vanhouten, Owen was a murderer at least four times over, with two more victims bound in his basement. Any sane person would be unraveling in panic, but not Owen. Something burned in his eyes, but it wasn’t fear.

  “The truth is that you’re screwed. Getting away with killing Lucy was pure luck. You’ve got no clue how much luck. The chief buried evidence because he’d been protecting Tom. Now there’s another dead girl. They have Maura’s body, and they’ll find something that ties her to you.”

  “Doubt it. She was a mess, but I stripped her down, washed her up, first with soap and water, then with bleach. Trimmed her fingernails, scrubbed real well under them, burned her clothes.” He brought his face closer to Nate’s. “How do you know so much about the girl and the other kids?”

  “People tell me all kinds of things. I’ve got one of those faces.” Nate wasn’t strong enough to break free of the ties that bound him, but if he positioned himself just right, and if he could get Owen to hit him again—

  “You must have talked to them. At the funeral?”

  “Look at the Porker, trying to use his little piggy brain.” As insults went, it was a softball, but that didn’t mean it didn’t connect. Owen’s upper chest and neck darkened into red splotches.

  “You’re trying to make me angry. Maybe you think I’m going to slip up and tell you something I shouldn’t, but if you have a question all you gotta do is ask. Today, to you, I’m an open book.” He smiled. Because soon, what you know won’t matter is what his smile told Nate. Soon all the things that you want and fear and love won’t matter to anyone.

  “Did you have a thing for Lucy from the beginning?”

  “Everyone did.” He grinned at Nate.

  “And then you told her how you felt.” Nate shook his head. “That was brave of you, O. You must have known she’d turn you down. I mean, just imagine her with you.” He chuckled as if holding this image in his mind evoked even a crumb of mirth. “The Princess and the Porker. There’s a fairy tale to scare the kids away from refined sugar.”

  The flush on Owen’s neck climbed to his face. Just for a moment Nate saw the boy Owen had been at the time of their graduation: a young man whose large size had made him an unmissable target during the most vulnerable years of his life, a shy boy who’d just sung the hottest girl in town the paean of his soul, only to have her laugh in his face.

  The whisper sounded again from the other end of the basement.

  “She didn’t deserve you, that whore, that filthy girl, you are so much better, you are the most handsome—”

  By now, Nate knew where the voice came from. A part of him had known since the first time he’d heard it. But that didn’t mean he was ready to face it and all that it implied.

  “Shut up!” Owen screamed, whirling to address the voice. His fury flared with terrifying suddenness. When he turned back to Nate, his teeth were bared like a wild animal’s. But after a moment, this grimace twisted into a smile.


  “I just remembered something about you, Nate. Pain’s your kink, isn’t it? So how do you hurt someone who likes it?”

  Adam Decker had said essentially the same thing back in the lab junior year, right before battering Tom with a lacrosse stick.

  Owen stood and walked to the bright end of the basement.

  As Owen receded, Nate took in what he could of his surroundings. The room had no windows. From where he was bound he couldn’t even see the stairs to the main floor. His dexterity had improved enough that he thought he could stand and maneuver around the post he was tied to, but that wouldn’t do him any good as long as he remained flex-cuffed.

  He wondered how long it would take people to figure out he was missing and how long from then it’d take for them to begin looking for him. Too long.

  Owen returned behind a mass of something. As it rolled toward him, the edges of it quivered like the waterline.

  “You remember Mom.”

  Nate had prepared himself for something terrible, but it still took him a moment to reconcile the silhouette in front of him with what he knew of the human form. As he’d guessed, the poor woman was the origin of the basement’s whisper as well as its terrible smell.

  You could call a person wizened in the grip of an illness a husk. Nate saw them in the hospital: ravaged patients reduced by their maladies to skin-cloaked skeletons. The woman being wheeled across the floor to him was the opposite of this. Bloated, swollen, obese: The images these words conjured weren’t in the same hemisphere as the territory where Mrs. Liffey now resided. The bands of her desiccated lips twitched and puckered as they droned endless words.

  Nate gauged her weight at somewhere between four and five hundred pounds. Piled onto a frame just over five feet tall, the effect was monstrous. Saddlebags of flesh slipped around the arms of her wheelchair and dangled past her knees. Her face was lost amid her billowing cheeks, her shorn head nearly submerged in the mountains that erupted from her scabbed neck. An assortment of stained blankets were clipped together to cover her, but the woman shivered as if she was freezing.