“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 room 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.”
“Take him down to the launch,” Tom said. He spoke in his official, deputy tone.
“Where?” Nate used as guileless a voice as he had in his repertoire. You’re the boss is the sentiment he wanted to convey. Whatever you say, Tommy.
“Put him in the Scarab. Even without the keys, going adrift is better than trying to swim for it with the current and the storm,” Tom said. “I’ll get the rest. There should be four of them, right? Tara, James, and the two others. That’s everyone from the funeral accounted for. They’ve gotta be upstairs. Be ready to cut the line if Owen beats me back down.”
“Then what’ll you do?” Nate imagined his face as open as a child’s. He’d scripted every possible twist in this conversation the moment he laid eyes on the injured boy. Now he just had to wait for his cues and remember his lines.
“The patrol boats and fire ship will be here eventually. The lake’s dangerous, but some of this stuff will float.”
“But what about the pilings? It’s not the Atlantic, but one bad hit and—”
“There’s no other way to do it.” Tom said this in a way that told Nate that his thoughts had already moved on, up the spiral stairs to the Century Room to meet whatever awaited him there.
Nate nodded and turned back to the boy. He inspected the bandage to make sure it would hold. He handled the teen’s skull as delicately as if it were a cracked egg.
“I bet you’re a good doctor.” Tom’s voice was thick and just a whisper above the lashes of rain whipping the windows. “I bet you’re a good dad.”
When he was finished, Nate shoved his hands under the boy’s frail body. He grunted with exertion as he hefted the skinny form. The kid couldn’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds, but Nate knew he had to make it look good.
He started to favor his right hand, and let his right knee buckle under the new imbalance. All the while cradling the boy’s head and keeping his cervical spine as straight as possible.
“He must only weigh, like—” Tom dove to catch Nate from toppling.
“My hand,” Nate said. He made his thumb tremble as he raised it to the light. Even without the tr
emor it looked convincing. The base of the digit was a swell of flesh the color of roast beef and the size of a baseball. “Wait, maybe I can—” He tried to rearrange the boy over his right shoulder while trying to stabilize his head. It was impossible, of course, but he needed Tom to see that for himself.
It took Tom a moment, but he got there eventually. He swore under his breath. “Goddamnit.” He pulled the boy out of Nate’s grasp. “I’ll be back in a minute. Stay here. Don’t go upstairs without me.”
Nate made sure the boy’s head was as supported as it could be, then he pulled the flashlight from Tom’s hand. “I’m just going to take a quick look at that hatchway.”
“Hold up,” Tom said. “Nate!”
But Nate didn’t hesitate as he hurried back toward the kitchen and jammed his head into the strange space in the wall. He flicked the light up and down. It was a shaft of raw wood, ribbed with supports that could serve as a ladder. The base of the chute terminated in the undercroft, but the top of it appeared to go above the Century Room, perhaps all the way up to one of the Night Ship’s decorative spires. Generations of cobwebs clotted with dust tensed and relaxed as if caught in a giant’s breath. Had that been a leg? Nate adjusted the light to see straight up the shaft. Impossible to tell.
“Must’ve been a tight fit. He’s built like a sasquatch.” Tom was behind Nate, squatting on the floor and peering over his shoulder. In his arms, the boy was dramatically motionless. “I don’t think we should split up.”
“We’ve got to get this kid out of here, and you’re the only one who can carry him. I’ll wait for you and keep my eyes and ears open.”
“I don’t believe you’ll stay put.”
“Then you’d better hurry.” He shoved the flashlight back into Tom’s hand.
The Storm King Page 33