The Storm King(32)

She was speechless, astonished from being tossed onto the ground and subdued. She broke his gaze, her attention seized by something to Nate’s right.

The tall one.

He turned just in time to see the top of the stepladder whipping toward his head, then there was a crash of light and he saw nothing at all.





THEY PILE BLANKETS on Nate, but these do not warm him.

He doesn’t remember when the boats pulled alongside the rocks, but they’re here. People in brown come first, then people in blue. The ones in blue have the blankets. Theirs are the hands on his back and along his arm. He doesn’t want them to touch his arm, but one of them makes noises into his ear. He knows her, he thinks. Someone’s mother.

He lets her see his arm and her eyes widen. Don’t look, she tells him. Don’t look.

They have many questions. He has only one. Where are they? he asks. The people in blue say many things, but none of these are answers.

He’s wet and he’s cold. The blankets catch the sun like the lake. Smooth stones are at his feet. He doesn’t know where his shoes are.

Two policemen stand nearby. Nate knows them but cannot think of their names. They stare up the face of rock. They whisper, but Nate can hear them.

Impossible, one of them says. Two hundred feet, he says. At least. Into shallow water. Two men in black wet suits are on one of the boats. They fall backward into the lake. It’s not a loud sound, but the splash makes Nate jump. Someone’s mother whispers to him, and he tries not to pull his arm away from her.



Another boat is coming now. More men in brown. Nate knows the one on the bow. He knows him well. The chief doesn’t wait for the boat to stop, but jumps into the water to his knees. He runs for Nate, but it’s hard to run through the lake. Its waters are hungry.

He puts his hand on Nate’s head. It hurts, but not badly. The chief starts to say something but he stops. His face goes white, and Nate knows he’s seen his arm. The woman in blue doesn’t let Nate hide it.

Nate asks his question and watches the chief’s pale face crumble. The man falls to his knees on the rocks. A new gravity takes grip of Nate. It is so powerful that he feels a breach open within him as if he has shattered under its pressure. Not another break in his ribs or in his ruined arm, but a crack at his foundation. Something is lost, and he is diminished. The sun fades. He doesn’t feel less cold, but he stops shaking. He knows that from now on he will be less than what he was.

Beyond the people in brown and blue, there’s a dark figure watching him from the shallows where the lake breaks against boulders. A smudge of black in a plane of light. He wonders if he’s the only one who can see it. The moment he thinks this, it disappears under the surface. It’s gone, but he still feels it watching him. He thinks it’s been watching him the whole time.

One of the men in wet suits breaks through the mirror of the lake. Three, he calls out. Someone asks a question. No, he says. Crushed like a can of Coke. The chief on his knees in front of Nate whirls around to shout something at the man in the water. His voice is strangled with pain.

The man in the wet suit looks across the water to Nate. He has quieted himself, but Nate can still read the word on his lips.

Impossible.





NATE SAT WITH Johnny in the back of an ambulance, stinging from disinfectants. His friend told him that the fight in the lab had been broken up by Mr. Granger, the high school’s principal, soon after Tom began using the fire extinguisher.

“How long was I out before Granger showed up?” Nate asked. An EMT cleaned a cut along his eyebrow. He’d also bruised two ribs and dislocated his thumb. The head injury had probably caused him to pass out in the lab.

“I didn’t see you go down,” Johnny said. The EMT picking glass out of Johnny’s elbow told him again to stay still. “I only saw you and Adam on the floor when Granger ran in. God, the look on his face.” He laughed and then winced, holding his side. “Bet he thought you were dead. Adam, too, probably. Bye-bye, pension.”

They faced the school, but Nate had the sense of people milling just out of sight. The high school wasn’t far from the commercial streets, and anything that required the EMS squads from three towns would be quite an event.



“How did Granger know to go to the lab?” Nate asked.

“Some janitor heard the racket and tipped him off.”

“Lucky he was here on a Sunday. Lucky someone heard us at all.”

“Yeah, lucky for them. You realize you took out two of them within, like, sixty seconds of each other?”

Nate remembered flashes of color and sound with no more specificity than a dream. Strangely, he recalled the actual bout of unconsciousness better. Sleep was a slide into the folds of self, but this was like a switch being thrown. First he was, and then he was not. Not underpinned by thought and light, the fading was one of annihilation. Nate remembered the shadow by the door and knew that it hadn’t been the school’s principal. He could trace the outline of its chasm of true dark within a field of black.

“Tom and Owen got knocked around a little, but not as bad as us,” Johnny said.

A rap came from the side of the ambulance, and a tall man peered inside. “How’re the patients?” Chief Buck asked the EMTs. They gave him a rundown as he looked Nate over from gashed forehead to splinted thumb.