The Storm King(108)

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.”