The Storm King(70)

One of the camp lanterns shined in a corner, blazing the wall’s rippling crimson paint and bristling the shadows of chairs and tables across the dance floor. Whatever intuition had led Nate to the Night Ship was on target. Someone had been here and not long ago.



“Lucy!” His voice reverberated from the walls and echoed down the hall of the Century Room above. See, see, see, see…

The sleeping bags and foam pads were where he’d left them the morning before. The only thing out of place was a tumbler of clear liquid on the scarred bar. He took a tentative sip and spat it out when his stomach rebelled at the taste of it. Vodka. Lucy’s drink. He called for her again.

Behind him, Tom wandered in a circle around the dance floor.

“Are you going to help, or what?” Nate asked him.

“I’ll check the Century Room.”

Nate gave Tom the flashlight and took the lantern for himself. Sunlight stained the eastern clouds, but the interior of the old nightclub remained stubbornly unlit.

This floor had a limited number of places to look, but Nate checked them all. Though they’d spent many a cloudy afternoon searching, they’d never found the hidden passages the old stories spoke of. They rarely went into the sprawling, filthy kitchen, but he inspected its cupboards and empty freezers. He told himself that in a haze of alcohol, Lucy might have passed out anywhere, but this didn’t explain where he was searching for her. An exhausted girl doesn’t climb onto a counter to wedge herself into a cabinet.

A sensation wormed through his gut. It was a feeling but it was also a memory. Something is wrong.

“Tom!” he called into the chasm of the pier.

His friend’s response was muffled by distance and the vagaries of the Night Ship. The sound arrived as if filtered through time or a membrane of pure cold water.

Nate noticed that a door to the boardwalk was open. He followed a sliver of light into the morning. Low clouds blurred into gold against the forested mountains.

The weathered wood of the old pier looked like ancient skin, its planks bulging and puckered with a century of wear. Whole sections of the boardwalk railing had fallen away, leaving nothing but a single step between these planks and a drop into the lake’s insatiable gorge.



The plain of water was empty and dark. Skeins of mist caught the blue dawn. Its surface was usually like that of a mirror, reflecting without revealing. But in this moment of strange light, the lake became transparent.

Nate probed its ripples with the beam of his flashlight. It sliced through the clean water as easily as if it were glass. The light caught a whirl of jade encased in the crystal of the water.

When he saw it, Nate’s absent neurons were recalled from the outer planets with a speed that broke all natural laws. His attention coalesced into a single unwavering focus.

A knot of sublime green was wrapped around the pier’s pilings just below the waterline.

No was all Nate could think. No.

“Nate?” Tom’s voice and a patter of running feet.

He was dimly aware of shouting. His own shouting. The sun cracked the line of mountains and the secrets of the lake were laid bare.

Lucy’s kimono wrap.

The water’s talons raked him as he dove into the throat of the lake. The frigid water hit him like a blow to the chest. But he tore through it, swimming below the dark wedge of the Night Ship, groping where the light failed. The warble of his yell thrummed around him.

He swam and searched and struggled in the black. He ran out of breath. He ran out of everything. But this didn’t stop his wordless scream.

The lake took his cry as easily as it had taken everything else.





Thirteen

Her jade kimono wrap and an unceasing ache in his core ensured that Nate never fully accepted the goodbye note attributed to Lucy. For myriad reasons, he couldn’t believe that she’d run away.

Even after the search wound down, Nate circled the shore for weeks. He walked the headlands, paced the stony beaches, and paddled the boundaries of Blind Down Island and the unnamed outcroppings that dotted the colorless waters. The lake returns what it takes, but of Lucy there was no sign.

Each fruitless day wound him tighter. He dissected and analyzed his every memory of graduation. He played these forward and backward and in every conceivable sequence looking for something that made sense. He looped and repeated and obsessed upon every frame of that night until the memories themselves were buried under the thousand revisions and transcription errors of remembering. In the end, all he knew was that his fight with Adam had scared Lucy. Scared her enough to run from the glade to the Night Ship.

And then—



He didn’t know.

Nate tried to get the police and his friends to help, to investigate, to care, but after that note appeared they and the rest of the Lake bolted for the easy answer that it offered. Dismissing Lucy as a runaway was preferable to the alternative. They should have known better: Greystone Lake was as beautiful as any town, but the Night Ship and its history should have reminded them of how terrible the truth could be.

As that summer ripened, paranoia blossomed in Nate. It was as if everyone else in town had reached some unspoken agreement to turn the page on this chapter of the Lake’s story. He recognized that he was becoming increasingly obsessed. He saw the way people looked at him. If Lucy had indeed run away, then he surely bore some responsibility. If something worse had happened to her, then he was the most obvious culprit. His shaving and showering became erratic. Meals were forgotten and sleep became a stranger. Grams’s expressions lunged from disquiet to pure alarm in a way he hadn’t seen since the months that followed the car accident. Even Tom began to avoid him.