The Storm King(13)

But now Nate had to know. Even if he didn’t want to.

“Okay. You’re saying the damage wasn’t caused by a storm.”

“Sound familiar?”

Storms not as the cause of damage, but an occasion for it. This was a phantom pulled directly from their own tumultuous youths.

“A window in my old bedroom at Grams’s house was broken, too,” Nate said. “A baseball.”

Johnny’s face glistened. “A baseball. Fantastic. And what, you thought that was a coincidence?”

Nate didn’t think that, even if for a moment he’d pretended to. The rum churned in his stomach. He’d considered many contingencies for this difficult return home, but he hadn’t prepared for this. He didn’t know what it meant. It seemed impossible, this reprise of their adolescence. A prank in astonishingly poor taste, but he could tell his friends were serious.

“What’s going on?” he asked them. “Talk to me, guys. What do I need to know?”

Johnny’s mouth was pursed and tension was coiled across his forehead. Tom’s jaw was clenched, but his eyes were vulnerable, haunted.

These were the faces of men with secrets. Nate knew because some early mornings, before he remembered who he was supposed to be, he saw the same signs in his own reflection. He’d journeyed here to the cursed territories of his childhood to settle the debts of those years. He’d come here to balance the equations of pain. But the past was a place Nate could only peer at from a distance. Because it frightened him, what he’d find. There were monsters there he couldn’t face.

“Please.”

He searched his friends’ faces, and for a terrible moment he wasn’t sure if he knew the people he found there.

It hadn’t always been like this.





NATE WATCHED FROM the shadows as the streets ran with clowns, witches, and pop stars.

On his left was Tom, his hockey mask dripping with gore. To his right, Johnny, in the blood-spattered scrubs of an escaped mental patient. But costumes were for kids, and Nate’s childhood had ended back in April with a precipitous drop and a fatal stop. This Halloween, Nate trod the Lake disguised as nothing more than the boy he used to be.

“Do you hear the thunder?” Tom whispered.

“God, relax already,” Johnny said. “They’re almost gone.”

A costumed pair trudged away from them. One seemed to be a very large boy in an outfit that looked like a pile of liquor boxes. He was dogged by a petite woman dressed in a tight jumpsuit and cat ears—the boy’s mother, Nate assumed. The distance was too great for Nate to hear the details of the woman’s tirade, but she was furious about something. She had to get on her tiptoes to hit the boy on the back of his head, and the sound of impact was dull in the clear, wet night.



Nate returned his gaze to the small brick house across the street, where there was still no sign of movement. Alone among its neighbors, this home had no pumpkin or cemetery, no cobweb-netted bushes or backlit ghouls. With every light burning and each curtain agape, the house was open to the world. Exposed.

The burly boy and his mother faded around a corner, though Nate still heard the woman’s complaint over the murmuring of the trees.

“I don’t see anybody else,” Johnny said.

As the rain had thickened, the crowds of trick-or-treaters had thinned. The street was finally empty.

“All right,” Nate said. “You know what to do.” They had toothpaste, shaving cream, and eggs. “Go,” he told them, and they went.

Johnny scampered across the lawn. From the movement of his arms, Nate could tell that he was already emptying a tube of toothpaste into his palm. Tom’s motions with the shaving cream were less committed. He squirted a jet of it at the base of the Bennetts’ driveway, then glanced to where Nate still stood in the bushes. Nate neither uttered a syllable nor moved his face a millimeter, but Tom got the message. He began emptying the can in methodical zigzags down the length of the drive.

Nate picked up three cartons of eggs and then stared again at the scene in front of him.

They’d hidden in the bushes for a long time, because something about the house bothered him. He didn’t like the way it was both well lit and empty. He’d done his homework and knew that Mrs. Bennett and her younger children were out of town. That just left Lucy. Maybe she’d gone out with her new crowd. Maybe she’d left the lights ablaze to dissuade the very vandalism under way.

Johnny slopped tartar control gel across the window closest to the door.



Would she be sad when she saw her defaced home?

Would she be angry or disappointed or afraid?

Nate was soaked, but his fury kept him warm.

He launched the first egg from the street. It exploded against her bedroom window.

“Nice one,” he saw Johnny mouth across the distance between them.

Nate had planned to peg each of the second-floor windows with eggs, then shatter the rest against the roof. He wanted the house to be sullied. He wanted its every surface and feature desecrated. Instead, he found himself launching volley after volley at Lucy’s window. He still had one good arm, and his aim was dead-eyed.

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.