The Storm King(110)

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—”