The Storm King Read online

  She’d assaulted his own bedroom window the week before. The third of her cursed baseballs had left slivers of glass sparkling from his bed to his desk. The worst violation yet. The toothpaste, the shaving cream, and the eggs smeared, sprayed, and thrown across her property under the cover of this sopping Halloween night was his turn in an ongoing conversation in which words would never suffice.

  Could eggs shatter glass? He wanted to string their viscous whites from every wall in her room. He wanted their stench to taint every thread of clothing she owned and infuse every dream she had with specters of sulfur and hellfire.

  He pitched the eggs at her bedroom, and each one failed. Johnny moved to other rooms and Tom filled the mailbox with Barbasol, but Nate remained fixated on that single window. The shrapnel of shells and their evicted contents became a slick that ran from gable to gutter, but in the steady light the glass was uncracked. Magical thinking had shadowed Nate since April. As the cartons emptied, each impact’s wet thump stung more than the last. If he broke this window, he’d feel better. If he broke this window, it would have all been a dream. If he broke this window, his family would be alive. Halfway through the last dozen eggs, a wave of emotion crested and threatened to pull him into grief, but he nursed this into a seed of incandescent rage. When Nate stared at the house, he expected to set it aflame with his anger.

  Maybe this was how he’d missed the black Mustang creeping toward him down the empty street.

  Someone tugged at his sleeve. The distraction sent one of his eggs wide and skittering across the eaves.

  “Time to go, dude,” Johnny said. Both he and Tom were next to him. Nate got the sense they’d been there for a while, trying to catch his attention. Time had become an inconstant variable in his universe. Sometimes entire days dissolved to night without him noticing. Then there were eras of glacial ponderousness when every week of junior year became its own lifetime.

  Nate finally saw the car. Even if he hadn’t recognized it as belonging to Adam Decker, Lucy’s boyfriend, that its headlights were unlit was reason enough to be suspicious. Now he understood the house’s blazing lights and empty windows. It’d been made to look like a target impossible to resist. An enticement.

  A trap.

  His friends were right. It was time to go. But as he dropped the last of the eggs, something else caught his attention.

  An ember brightened on the far end of the shadowed driveway. A cigarette attached to a hand attached to an arm attached to a girl. She moved closer, and as she did her features took shape between the brightness of the house and the darkness of the street. Her hair hung in soaked mats around her jacket. It looked black in the shadows, but there was a gleam of auburn where the light struck her.

  “Come on, Nate,” Tom said. “We’ve got to run.”

  But Nate didn’t run. Lucy must have been hidden in wait for him even longer than he’d watched the house for her. She now moved toward him. Her cigarette disappeared in a dance of sparks across the wet asphalt.

  Wheels screamed, cutting through the susurrus of the rain as the Mustang came to life. Color blazed back into the world by way of its headlights.

  Johnny’s emphatic swearing drew Nate’s gaze to two other figures approaching from the direction opposite the Mustang. Adam Decker’s neolithic friends, Nate assumed. They gunned the engines of their absurd mopeds.

  “Street’s blocked!” Johnny said.

  Nate returned his attention to Lucy. She’d halted her approach. He took a step toward her, just to see what she’d do. She didn’t budge.

  “Guys, we’re dead,” Tom said.

  Lately, Nate wondered about this world of the Lake. How he could be in a place, of a place, and yet remain so distinct from it. At parties, his friends could chatter and bob their heads to music, but Nate was sure that his ears heard a different song than everyone else. He might stand in a circle or sit on a ragged basement couch, but he was not there. He was in the lake, far below the frigid waterline where only the fish could breathe.

  “Cut through the Cohens’ backyard,” he said. “Head to the Strand. We’ll meet at Johnny’s.”

  “What about you?” Tom asked.

  Nate had his share of unhealthy habits, but worry was not among them. A boy with nothing to lose had nothing to fear.

  “Be right behind you.”

  “Dude, I mean—”

  “Go,” Nate said, walking toward the girl in the driveway.

  It was a small house. The Bennetts’ former home on the Strand had a three-car carriage house of roughly the same dimensions. It took Nate only a few steps until he was face-to-face with Lucy.

  Same school, same grade, but Nate couldn’t remember if he’d been this close to her since April. He felt sure that if they’d exchanged a single word since then he’d remember its every inflection. For months they’d orbited each other like binary stars. All motion was dictated by the other without them once coming into direct contact.

  But that was ending now. A collision was ahead. A supernova.

  Tom’s and Johnny’s footsteps cut across the road for the Cohens’ lawn. They would have debated before fleeing, Nate knew. They were good friends, and good friends didn’t abandon one another lightly. But there was a clock on this action, and its metronome was the roaring of engines.

  Nate thought his friends would be safe. The teens on the mopeds and in the car weren’t here for them. Events had escalated between him and Lucy since she’d left the first baseball for him back in August. Each felt they’d been wronged by the other, but Nate knew he had the stronger grievance. When you got down to it, what was his crime? All he’d done was live.

  “Are you happy?” Lucy asked. It was shocking to hear her address him directly. Her voice was deeper than he remembered. It rasped like dried leaves caught underfoot.

  She must have been hoping to ask him this. Maybe this question had been on her tongue since April. He could conclude only that it was rhetorical.

  He wasn’t given time to answer.

  A hand gripped Nate’s collarbone and spun him around. He was shoved over the rim of the driveway’s masonry, and he tumbled onto the black slick of its surface. Three seniors loomed over him, but Adam Decker was the only one who mattered. He was a blond giant and a standout on the varsity football and lacrosse teams. A schoolyard legend for the worst reasons.

  “Why’re you down there, man?” Adam asked him. “You’ll get all wet.”

  Nate tried to get to his feet, but the stockiest of the bunch pushed him back.

  “The Boy Who Fell keeps on falling,” Adam said.

  A group of snakes was a pit, and a gang of rats was a plague, but what was the collective noun for bullies? A clod? A rash? Perhaps a remedial? Nate liked it, but the Latin root was problematic. Remedialis, as in “remedy.”

  “Doesn’t the miracle boy speak? Or did he lose his voice in the crash, too?” the stocky one asked.

  They were a disease, not a cure.

  “You must like Halloween, huh, McHale?” Adam said. “Ghosts and zombies all over town?” The massive teen’s eyes were gray-blue, like the lake on a winter day. “Maybe tonight you think your mommy, daddy, and baby brother will come back from the dead.” He smiled, but his lake-water eyes did not waver.

  Nate carefully got to his feet. Adam, Stocky, and the third guy, with skin like a plate of baked beans, boxed him against the garage door. Nate couldn’t read the expression on Lucy’s face. He wanted to throw her own question back at her. Wanted an honest answer in return.

  “Whaddaya think, Luce?” Adam turned to Lucy. “Guys? You ever see someone fall off a cliff and still look so pretty?”

  Nate was tall and lean, not yet entirely filled out, but he was on his feet.

  He shifted his eyes to Lucy and grinned.

  Her emerald irises widened. At first, Nate thought she was excited for the coming carnage. But then she bit her lower lip. And what did that crease between her eyes mean?

  Adam stepped between them.
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  The blond boy moved like a train, but Nate was ready. He adjusted his stance, clenched his fists, and raised them. Then Adam’s face twitched and blinked and then he dropped to the pavement with all the unraveling grace of a collapsing tree. When the bully fell, he revealed Johnny behind him. Nate’s friend’s teeth were bared and he had the thick limb of a fallen branch raised above his head like a club.

  Beans stooped to help Adam while Stocky jolted Nate hard against the garage door. But then Tom surprised Stocky by shoving him, sending the older boy off-balance and stumbling over his feet.

  Tom and Johnny. They’d come back for him.

  Of course they had. They’d never leave him. Since April, Nate had given them more than enough chances and reasons to. If they were still side by side with him now, they would surely be with him forever.

  “Don’t think they’re kidding around, man.” Johnny brandished the tree limb like a bat.

  Nate tried to remember what he’d done to earn such friends. On his bad days he wished they’d leave him alone—not for his sake, but for theirs. What better lives Tom, Johnny, and Grams would have now if Nate had never found his way out of that car.

  Lucy backed away, but caught his eye one last time. Are you happy? Nate wanted to ask her. He wanted to scream it.

  Adam staggered to his knees. He was unsteady and clutching the back of his head. When he pulled his hand away there was blood.

  Nate had prepared himself for a fight, and that was what he intended to get. Adam’s strength matched against Nate’s fury. He wanted to find out what would be left when they clashed. He wanted to see what would be wrought.

  “Please.” Tom grabbed Nate’s elbow.

  The fire inside him flickered. If there was a fight now, Tom and Johnny would bleed along with him. This was why he’d sent them away. If only they’d left him, how much easier everything would be.

  “Please.”

  Nate turned to Tom, and for a moment he had the urge to tell him about the abyss inside him. That hole at his center that he couldn’t imagine filling with anything but agony. Maybe there were words that could convey this—a sound he could utter that wasn’t a howl—but Nate didn’t know them.

  So he let himself be prodded into motion. One foot. The other. Then the three of them were running for the Cohens’ lawn.

  “I can’t believe you hit him like that,” Tom told Johnny.

  “Me either,” Johnny said. “Do you think he’s pissed?”

  The Mustang’s wheels squealed behind them.

  The deluge was made visible by the car’s headlights, casting translucent veils over the night. The wet grass gleamed like a field of jewels spliced by the shadows of trees.

  Nate glanced back to see the car gaining speed. He watched it tear across the lawn, kicking clumps of turf aloft to join the wind and rain. He wondered if Lucy was inside. He wondered if she was trying to scare them or kill them. Surely one murderer was enough for any family.

  They weaved among trees before climbing over a post-and-rail fence at the property boundary. From the sound of car doors opening, Nate knew the chase wouldn’t end there. The headlights projected the long shadows of their pursuers. Nate heard their feet slap against the wet ground.

  They ran across another lawn and onto the shimmering expanse of the Strand.

  Ahead was the barricade that cordoned the Night Ship from the rest of the town. Greystone Lake’s children had a tradition of leaving offerings of glow sticks at its base, and on Halloween this shrine burned more brightly than at any other time of the year. Green light bathed the battered wood in an otherworldly sheen, and beyond this the Night Ship’s towers stood sentinel against the purpling headlands.

  Tom called for help. It was unseemly, though not insensible. But the grand homes here were set far back from the road. And it was Halloween, the best night of the year to ignore knocks at the door and screams in the dark.

  There was only one place left to go. Nate didn’t utter its name, and neither did the others. But there it was, just ahead. Its barricade burned in a miasma of green light and its spires were etched against the boiling sky.

  Four

  The Colonnade’s lights wavered. A blast of thunder reverberated through the cushion of Nate’s seat.

  “There’ve been a bunch of pranks around town. The ones Johnny’s talking about happened during a thunderstorm that hit about a week and a half ago,” Tom said. “But there’s no evidence they’re connected.”

  Johnny snorted. “I have a seventy-five-thousand-dollar repair bill that tells me we have different definitions of ‘prank.’ ”

  Returning to the Lake, Nate knew he’d face uncomfortable alchemies of past and present. Waterlogged secrets and calcified lies risked being revealed. But he’d come here to confront these on his own terms. If what Johnny said was true, vandals once again roamed the Lake cloaked by rain and wind—a development as unexpected as it was unfathomable.

  “Tell me about the thunderstorm,” he said. The three of them leaned toward one another across the table, their words low but clear. Nate could feel the sear of gazes from around the restaurant, and he could only imagine how he and his friends looked to them now. Still plotting, these boys. Still secretive and strange and up to no good.

  “It brought some gray days, but there was hardly any punch to it,” Tom said. “Bit of wind, a little rain. Anyway, the vandals used chainsaws and bricks and tools. It’s not like they cared if anyone blamed the weather for the damages.”

  Nate and his friends had started in much the same way. They’d singled out people who they felt had to be punished. Lucy had been the first of their victims, but not remotely the last.

  “So they hit the Empire, and Owen, and—”

  “Emma, Adam Decker, and Grams,” Johnny finished.

  Grams had told Nate that the window at the Union broke during the last storm. Not a lie, but a deliberate omission. He understood why. Even the thought of someone hurting her made something dangerous stir inside him.

  “All people from the old days.” A replay of their high school history, except this time Nate and his friends weren’t the perpetrators but the victims. “And whoever they are, they only started causing trouble after her body was found?”

  Tom went back to studying the umber gradations of his drink, but Johnny smiled.

  “See, Tom. Our Storm King was always smart. That’s what I’ve been saying. We’re being targeted.”

  Johnny’s use of his old nickname grated Nate to the bone.

  “You’re jumping to conclusions,” Tom told Johnny. “The Lake’s always had more than its share of property damage. This time you’re on the receiving end of it, and you’re taking it personally.”

  “Isn’t connecting the dots in your job description, Deputy?”

  “You can’t believe it’s coincidence, Tom.” Nate couldn’t afford the luxury of denial. “Someone’s using the storms as cover. Five thousand people live in the Lake, but Johnny, Owen, Emma, Adam, and Grams are the ones they hit? What about the baseball through my bedroom window? How many people these days could know what that would mean to me?”

  “Well, that circles around to the elephant in the room, doesn’t it?” Johnny pointed to Nate. “All of this started because of you. You might as well have taken a wrecking ball to my ceiling and cut Owen’s brake line yourself.”

  The accusation was reductive, but for Nate it triggered a line of thought. The Thunder Runs, as they’d called their youthful hijinks, hadn’t been havoc for its own sake. Nate and his friends didn’t attack the innocent: Their targets deserved their punishment. So if the current vandals were truly retracing their old paths, it made Nate wonder what they believed him guilty of. He had so many sins. But if they only began destroying things after the discovery of the body in the headlands—

  “You can’t blame Nate,” Tom said. “He hasn’t been back for years. He didn’t do anything.”

  “We all did things,” Johnny said. “A lot of things, to a lo
t of people. But it started with him, and we all know it.”

  Johnny was angry. That was something Nate understood.

  “I’m sorry about the Greenhouse,” he said. “Really. But I’m more worried about what these vandals know. They’re obviously onto some of the shit we pulled, because how else could they be reenacting what we did back then? But if they know that much, they could know all kinds of things. The timing can’t be a coincidence. Her body is found and then—”

  Nate stopped in midsentence because it wasn’t just anyone’s body they were talking about. It was Lucy’s. None of them had yet uttered her name, and Nate was suddenly aware of what a betrayal this was. Everything else had already been taken from her. Her name was the last thing she had left.

  He was about to amend what he’d said when a tall blond man arrived at the table with a bottle of Hudson Valley bourbon and three tumblers.

  “Looks like you’re starting to run dry,” the man said.

  Owen Liffey had been a pudgy boy and even heavier teen, but he’d grown into a broad razor of a man. A tailored gray suit showed off this build as a pair of square silver glasses brought out his bone structure. The lank blond hair Nate remembered from their youth had been trimmed and artfully styled.

  The transformation was stunning. It was marred only by a bandage over his right eyebrow.

  “Wow. I can’t believe it.” Nate shook his head. “Sorry, that sounded really patronizing, didn’t it? But you look great, you really do, O. Good for you. Dammit, that’s an even worse thing to say, isn’t it?”

  Owen laughed and clasped Nate on the shoulder. “It’s okay. I’m used to it.”

  “O’s just being polite,” Tom said. “He lost the weight years ago.”

  “The Empire has a certain rep to uphold.” Johnny grabbed the bottle with one hand and patted his swollen belly with the other. “Can’t have a bunch of fat asses running the place.”