The Storm King

by Brendan Duffy

  “A bad boy, a bad friend, the worse friend, poison, poison, poison—”

  The last time Nate saw Mrs. Liffey she’d been lean and impeccably styled. Now, he couldn’t even recognize her eyes, which were pocked like buttons from the pillow of her face. They were wet and drenched with animal panic.

  “Owen.” Nate’s mouth had gone dry. He turned away from the woman. Looking at her felt like trampling whatever dignity she had left. Still, she whispered at him, hissing indictments and curses. He didn’t know why her voice never seemed to rise above a scoured hush.

  Owen crouched beside him and turned Nate’s face so that it was again directed at Mrs. Liffey. “She loves being seen. Always checking her makeup in the car mirror, admiring her reflection in store windows. She could never get enough of herself. Now there’s so much more to look at.”

  “What did you do?” A stroke could have left her wheelchair-bound, but that didn’t explain the size of her.

  “Let’s show him, Mom.” Owen padded back across the room.

  To his right, Pete’s eyes were wide and bright with horror at the sight of Mrs. Liffey. Nate shook his head at the boy. The kid’s instincts were good: Playing dead might be the best way to stay alive. Pete closed his eyes but his shoulders quaked.

  Owen padded back, with a brown grocery bag filled with something that crinkled as it shifted. “I know we just fed you, but you always have room for more, don’t you? Greedy beast.” He plucked a snack cake from the bag. An oblong tube of joyous yellow sponge filled with a core of impossibly white cream.

  “Love them, yes, thank you, more, so hungry—” Mrs. Liffey said, but as she spoke, her voice faded to a whimper, and the rate of her shaking accelerated. For the first time, Nate noticed that the cellar’s floor was laid with clear plastic drop cloths like those used by painters.

  “Remember how she used to call me the Porker?” Owen asked. “A pig still lives here, but it’s not me.” He unwrapped the cake and dangled it above her mouth. “Open wide, now. You know how.”

  She opened her mouth, and groaned with pantomimed pleasure as he forced the cake into her. He did this with another cake, and then a third and a fourth.

  “All those years of starving yourself to look good, but this was all you wanted, wasn’t it? Isn’t it a relief to not care about what other people think?”

  The woman said something, but her mouth was full and she began to gag. The mounds and rolls of her shook like a landscape caught in an earthquake.

  A spray of mottled cream exploded from her mouth. Specks of it splattered over herself, the floor, and Owen. Nate now understood the viscous globs on Owen’s chest.

  “You know better than to fight it. Remember, you like the cheese puffs and the French fries and gallons of cola, but these are your favorite.”

  Owen grabbed a handful of Mrs. Liffey’s forearm, and squeezed. Vibrations of agony resonated from the woman. Nate now saw how her skin was dented and swollen with bruises that ran the spectrum from black to yellow. Owen clamped his hand over his mother’s nose to give her a choice between swallowing or suffocating.

  “I’ll tell you what I know,” Nate said. He couldn’t watch any more.

  “I also give her pork rinds by the pound. You like that touch? You are what you eat, right?” Owen gave a sharp porcine squeal that made Nate jump.

  “Stop it.”

  “But can’t you see she likes it? Got to go all the way to the Walmart in Bright Mill to stock up on this garbage. Too many people around here know me, and they’d never believe I eat it myself. My body is a temple, isn’t it, Mom?”

  “So healthy, yes, perfect body, a perfect son, so lucky,” Mrs. Liffey choked out, her eyes streaming.

  “I’ll tell you everything I know about the kids,” Nate said.

  “Maybe just a couple more.”

  “When the chief brought me to the station he started off by asking me about Lucy, then about Maura. He showed me Maura’s picture. That’s how I knew she was the one I tackled on Grams’s lawn.”

  “What about James Bennett? How do you know he’s their leader?” Owen withdrew the snack cake he was holding from Mrs. Liffey’s mouth, but his other hand still pinched her nose.

  “I talked to him in the Night Ship. He and his friends wanted a piece of me.”

  “They made the Night Ship their place, too?” Owen asked. He looked over his shoulder as if he could see the old pier through the basement’s wall. “Haven’t been there in ages.”

  “Lucy’s journals were like an instruction manual for them. They changed up some things, but not that.” The Night Ship was at the center of all their stories: Nate, Tom, Lucy, Owen, James. Even Just June. From a certain vantage, the Night Ship was the origin of every ripple—every red string that lashed across Just June’s cellar wall. Would Nate carry so many regrets if the pier had never been built? Would he still be alive in the first place?

  Despite the horror of his circumstances, Nate drifted while he considered this. He’d once stood on the Night Ship’s dock bare-chested and entwined with a girl he loved. That dawn he’d looked upon the endless country of the future and found a golden design around which everything was connected. Around which nothing was ever lost.

  Remembering this made his eyes swim. Through their liquid lens he saw Owen’s face blank with concentration.

  “Does the chief know that the girl, Maura, was one of the vandals?”

  “He knows the only reason I could ID her in the first place was because I caught her and this guy”—Nate nodded toward Pete—“in the act. I told you, they’re going to put it all together. There’s no point in making it worse.”

  Owen smiled, and Nate wished he hadn’t seen it. The man’s smile was an abyss.

  “Thanks, Nate. I know you like your secrets, but that sounded like the truth.” He pulled away from his mother, and Nate got the feeling that he’d just made a fatal mistake. If he’d told Owen everything that he wanted to know, then Nate had just rendered himself useless. The huge man flexed his neck, then walked toward a nook of the basement that Nate couldn’t see. As he receded, the thick welts of his scars ticked across his back like fleeting seconds.

  “Owen, hold on. Where are you going?” But Owen’s attention already appeared to be elsewhere. Nate backtracked through their conversation, trying to figure out what he’d missed. What had he told Owen that he shouldn’t have?

  Whatever was left of Mrs. Liffey shook and stared at Nate through glass eyes.

  “So lucky, so lucky, so lucky—”

  Owen was back a few moments later to thud two large red jugs in front of Nate.

  “Memories, huh?” he said. He patted one of the gasoline containers. They looked like ten-gallon jugs: if filled, an absurd amount of weight for anyone not built like a minotaur. He toweled the cream and crumbs from his chest. “Let me ask you something.”

  “Okay.”

  “Did you ever wonder if you were the one who killed Lucy?”

  “Of course not.” But this was a lie. This was the secret Nate had long feared waited for him within the eye of the maelstrom that thundered inside him. Of the many dangers in stepping back into the forest of his past, none loomed larger than this. It was the cornerstone around which everything about him would rise or fall.

  “But why? Before that note was found, you know that’s what everyone was saying. They’re saying it again now.”

  “I didn’t think I killed her because I didn’t.” He didn’t kill Lucy. Nate let himself feel this. He wasn’t a murderer. No matter what, this was something he could hold on to.

  “But could you have? That night Lucy let Adam Decker flirt with her, she was afraid enough of what you’d do that she ran out of the glade. Everyone saw it. And you were so messed up after all that partying. Don’t tell me you remember every single thing that happened after you knocked Adam’s teeth in.”

  “Everyone was messed up.”

  “But you’re not like everyone else, are you? The Storm King thought
rules were for other people. He thought he was better than everyone else. He thought he could get away with murder.

  “Fourteen years later this guy comes back to town,” Owen continued. “The day after he does, another girl washes up on the shore. Coincidence? Especially when he even admits to assaulting her earlier the night before? Then his grandmother’s pub explodes with her in it. Whoever this guy thinks he is, whoever he’s been pretending to be, goes out the window. He might say he’s a doctor or a dad, but he’s a monster.”

  “Come on, O.”

  “All those kids,” Owen went on. He shook his head and bit his lips like he was talking via satellite to a morning show host. “All those poor, dead kids.”

  A knot tightened inside Nate. Three loops of fear tied with a through-strand of doubt.

  “They never had a chance, really,” Owen continued. “Once you set the Night Ship on fire there was nowhere for them to go.” He tapped one of the red jugs with his feet. “Those poor innocents you had to make pay the price for your suffering. Because the pain doesn’t disappear on its own, does it, Nate? It’s got to be burned away.”

  Twenty-two

  Nate understood his mistake.

  He’d told Owen that the vandals used Lucy’s journals as an instruction manual and that they met at the Night Ship. In the ferocity of Medea, they’d be at the abandoned pier as surely as Nate and his own friends’ high school selves would have been there. Nate told Owen that the kids would expose him, and now the killer knew exactly where to find them.

  “How about Pete here?” Nate felt the powerful impulse to keep Owen in conversation, as if he needed to buy time for something. For anything.

  “You kill him too, obviously. Not sure exactly how yet.” Owen smiled at the shag of Pete’s hair. “In a perfect world, you’d get rid of him with the others, but you can’t lug him all the way out there. Don’t worry, though, we’ll think of something good. You’ll kill him today, right after you get back from setting fire to the Night Ship.”

  “But Pete’s been missing since last night. Where’s he been?”

  “Grams’s house, the Night Ship, somewhere in the headlands. Who can say?”

  “You haven’t thought this out.” Framing Nate for the murders seemed like an impossible dream. But was it? So few things were truly impossible. “Why would I keep Pete bound up for hours and hours before killing him?”

  “The same reason I did: You needed to find out about the other kids from him.”

  “Okay, so I kill him, then set the Night Ship on fire with the kids inside?”

  “You set the fire first. You had to make sure Pete wasn’t lying about where to find the others. Then you kill him. Then you kill yourself. You’ll drown yourself in the lake, just like your family did. People will think it’s poetic. A full-circle kind of thing.”

  “No one will buy it, Owen. Tom won’t believe a single thing about it.” Nate used to doze among the roots of an ancient tree and try to decrypt messages from the dead from the sibilation of its leaves. Now he tried to do the opposite. Through the walls of the basement and across the expanse of the steeping town, he willed the rain to tap his distress against the roof and windows of Tom’s cruiser.

  “Tom’ll see that he got off lucky. Again.” Owen slid his arms into a shirt. Nate was out of time.

  “They’re just kids, Owen. They’re angry, scared.” He’d never noticed how similar rage and fear were. More than cousins, they might be twins. Anger only looked like strength, but at least fear was honest. “Give them the mercy you didn’t get.” That’s what Nate most wished for the furious boy he’d been. That he would have learned the bravery of compassion. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”

  “They hurt Grams and Johnny, and almost killed me when they cut my brakes. They’re not innocent. If you were the guy you were in high school, you’d be begging to help me.” He finished buttoning his shirt and heaved the gas jugs from the floor. “I usually chain Mom’s chair up by the mirrors so she can admire herself. But I think I’ll leave her here with you.” He patted the stubble of the woman’s scalp. “You’ve got an audience today, Mom. What a treat!”

  The woman shuddered when Owen touched her. “Thank you, yes, such a treat, such a nice thing—”

  “See you soon, Nate.” Owen winked at him, and walked to where Nate assumed the stairs were.

  Nate called after Owen but got no answer. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Owen possessed the conviction of the anointed, just as Nate had in his youth. It was a blind certainty that cannot be surmounted.

  He listened to the man’s heavy ascent of the stairs capped by the dull thud of the basement door being closed. The stinking air of the room seemed to deaden all sounds. Nate couldn’t hear the door being locked, but he was sure Owen engaged its every deadbolt and chain.

  “You got a plan, right?” Pete asked as soon as Owen was gone. The boy’s voice was splinters and creaks. His eyes were wet with terror. With Pete looking directly at him, Nate realized how astonishingly young the kid was. His forehead far outsized his jaw, as if his adult face was only half-inflated. “I know who you are. You look older than I thought.”

  “No one’s looking their best today. Have you tried yelling for help?”

  “For real? Yes. Like, a lot. Like, for hours once I was pretty sure he wasn’t in the house anymore.” Pete bounced his head in the direction of the spongy geometric material that layered the walls. “I think it’s soundproofing. They’ve got something like it in the practice rooms at school. I guess he didn’t want anyone to, you know”—he glanced at the woman in the wheelchair—“hear her.”

  “Be good boys now, don’t make him mad—”

  “Yeah, probably.” Nate didn’t know why Mrs. Liffey’s voice seemed fixed at a whisper. The soundproofing suggested that it hadn’t always been this way. “Mrs. Liffey?” Nate addressed the woman directly for the first time. Her eyes blinked wildly, her lips tasting the air as if nibbling a fruit. The smell that rolled off her made Nate’s eyes water: rot layered with strata of sweat and waste. “Ma’am? How do we get out of here?”

  “You don’t want to make him mad—”

  “Mrs. Liffey’s left the building, bro.”

  Nate didn’t know when the woman was supposed to have suffered her stroke. She’d probably never had a stroke in the first place. Owen might have been keeping her down here for years, trapped in a chair, doing God knows what to her. She was too heavy to move around on her own, and her mind didn’t seem to be in any better shape than her body.

  “No luck with the cuffs, I guess?” Nate asked Pete.

  “They don’t feel like much, but they’re real strong. I thought if I got some sweat in there they’d loosen up, but nothing.”

  Nate yanked and hammered and pulled at the flex-cuffs but only tenderized the skin of his wrists. He tried to picture the ties. It was a single loop of plastic tucked into a locking mechanism to ensure a tight fit. He thought that if he could mess up the fastener, the band might loosen, but he couldn’t get the angles to work. He ran his hands up and down the cylindrical post searching for some edge to worry against the plastic.

  “He’s going to kill us,” Pete said.

  “No, he isn’t.” But the kid was right. If they were still here when Owen returned, they were as good as dead.

  “You think he’ll burn us? Like the others?”

  “No.” Nate thought of the silver annihilation of the lake and shivered. “Do you have anything in your pockets?”

  “I’m worried about them,” Pete said. “My friends.”

  “That’s why we’ve got to get out of here. Anything in your pockets? Keys, coins? Wouldn’t turn down a box cutter.” If Pete had something, Nate might be able to use his feet to drag it to himself by pulling at the plastic drop cloth beneath them.

  “Keys are in my pocket, but I can’t get them.”

  Nate watched the boy struggle and contort against the pipe he was tied to. Meanwhile, he continued working a
t his own cuffs. Pulling and releasing. Tensing then relaxing. Seconds or minutes ticked by. In their windowless basement, it was impossible to tell.

  “I can’t get them.” Pete was out of breath. “You think he could really burn down the Night Ship? It’s such a big place. And it’s gotta be soaking out there, with the hurricane and everything?”

  “Gas will make anything burn, and Owen knows the pier. He’ll probably set it inside.”

  Nate thought that Owen would set the fire on the landward end of the pier, where the shops and cafés used to be, in order to block the kids’ escape down the boardwalk to shore.

  “They could swim for it,” Pete said, uncertainly.

  “Yeah, they could,” Nate said. But that was easier said than done. Out that far, the lake was treacherous, and Medea had it hammering against the pier’s pilings with more ferocity than usual. Just June, an expert Daybreaker, had braved the waters in a dry suit during a lull in the storm, but how would the uninitiated fare?

  Nate was afraid it wouldn’t matter, anyway. Owen was massive and powerful. He didn’t need to rely on stealth and patience if he didn’t want to. If he wanted, he could fall among the children like a wolf among poultry. He could be as brutal as he chose to be in order to prevent their escape, then make his exit and wait for the fire to scorch away the evidence.

  Perhaps the old place had already gone down with all hands, the vicious waters alight with its reflected flames. Within the basement’s soundproofed walls, they wouldn’t hear town sirens going off or fire trucks wailing through the streets. Pete’s friends might already be dead, and Owen could be on his way back here right now.

  Nate slammed his cuffed hands against the pipe in a spasm of frustration. His fingers were tacky where they touched each other. A band of pain was seared around his left wrist. Struggling against his bindings must have torn his skin. The slickness of his blood gave his wrist more give within the plastic cuff, but not as much as he needed.