The Storm King(19)

“How?” Tom asked, though he surely knew the answer.

“It might be haunted, but at least it’s dry,” Johnny said.

Nate started toward the Night Ship.

As he neared the structure, his eyes began to pull apart the layers of darkness. The immense building ahead was a slick of black struck between the silken water and the bleak sky. He was amazed at how large the deserted structure really was. The pier it sat on extended so far into the lake that you couldn’t appreciate its dimensions from the shore. It was a world in itself.



The boardwalk that ringed the enormous place was there for everyone to see, but all that Nate knew of the Night Ship’s interior came from black-and-white photographs and the stories that were traded like contraband among the town’s children. At the height of its popularity, dozens of shops and eateries had populated the pier. He knew that a central promenade lanced the interior of the building like a spine. Many of the establishments that flanked this airy corridor also opened outside onto the boardwalk, so that their patrons could enjoy the fresh air and unparalleled views of the water and mountains.

Nate put both his hands on the wooden doors to the Night Ship. They were battered, warped, and weather scarred, but they were also unlocked. They screamed when Nate pushed them open. Once inside, his eyes adjusted to the dark well enough to see the storm heaving through the ribs of the pier’s ancient steelwork roof. Rain pounded what remained of the glass-paneled ceiling, and the air brimmed with the reek of stagnant water. As he took his first steps down the promenade, he imagined how it might have looked on a summer day eighty years ago. Light streaming onto polished wooden floors, men in linen suits and straw hats arm in arm with women draped in silk and lace.

The ruined pier was a gravestone for a dead world. A faded history filled with grace and style. But elegance wasn’t the same as innocence.

During the day, the Night Ship had been a favorite spot for weekenders and the summer people, but things had been different after sundown. Just June and Morton Strong could have told you that, and their victims would have had a few things to say on the subject as well. Confections far stronger than sodas and ice cream had marked the last days of the Century Room.



“Well, I guess it’s drier,” Tom said. Though water dripped all around them, a surprising number of the glass ceiling panels were intact.

“Just as dark, though,” Johnny said. He hugged his shoulders and began to shiver. His mental patient hadn’t dressed for an all-weather escape.

“I have something,” Owen said. Nate heard the rustling of foil, and a moment later there was a pop as a viridescent light kindled in Owen’s hands. “I was going to leave it at the barricade.” He handed the glow stick to Nate.

Owen was about five years too old for such nonsense, but Nate appreciated the light. He used it to lead them. The wide promenade stretched under riveted arches of steel supports. Creeping through it was like descending the throat of a leviathan. The drumming of water sounded from unseen corners, and the wash of the lake against the pilings below them ebbed and surged like shuddering breath. They passed entrances to shops and restaurants as they made their way down the warped hall. Their distressed signage was barely legible in the scant light. Café des Amis, Burton’s Sodas, Bit o’ Sweet Shop.

Then it appeared in front of them. The promenade ended at its doorstep. Nate could just make out its name and the image of a galleon with its sail full with wind, cutting for the horizon and a huge full moon. The Night Ship.

Every bad thing that had happened on this pier had taken place in there. If the building were a body, this nightclub was its heart.

Nate sensed his friends’ unease as the light skirted the infamous bar’s sign. He felt something himself, but it wasn’t fear. His damaged arm had also begun to hurt, as it sometimes did during storms.

“Let’s go in,” he said.

“Uh-uh,” Tom said. “No way.”

“Nothing else has been mega-creepy yet, I guess,” Johnny said.

“This is where all the people died?” Owen asked. He peered through the stained glass doors.



Nate tried one of the handles, then forced the door with his shoulder. Even then he was able to work it open little more than a foot before it caught on the warped flooring. Nate, Tom, and Johnny slipped through, and with some effort Owen joined them.

Shadows of tables and chairs littered the dark space in front of them. Nate could make out the hulk of a massive bar on the left side of the room. The rear of the nightclub was two stories of windows. Nate couldn’t see the rain hitting the glass, but he could hear it.

“Just June used to live right here,” Tom whispered as if they were in a church. “She and her sister May were twins. They called them the Night Ship Girls. Their mother was one of the prostitutes upstairs in the Century Room. When they were young, before everything happened, they lived in a little room under the dance floor, and at night they’d crawl through the walls, spying on the customers through peepholes.”

It was easy to imagine hidden eyes peering at them through the cavernous dark.

“Just June made all the boys swoon, cost ya just a dollar to bring her to your room,” Johnny sang.

A large cylinder shrouded in disintegrating velvet stood to the right of the nightclub’s entrance. Its color was impossible to determine in the sickly light from the glow stick. When Nate examined it, he saw that it concealed a spiral staircase that led both upstairs and downstairs. Nate knew from the stories that the legendary Century Room, the club’s VIP section, was above.