The Storm King(109)

“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.