The Storm King(83)

The Tatum house, the site of their high school graduation party, was located deep along this landward stretch of the Strand. At first, that’s where Nate thought the swimmer was going, to that place of so many last moments. But she struck out north long before the turnoff for the Tatums’.

He trailed the woman by a few hundred feet. It seemed like she was leading him into the wild, then he noticed the ghost of a gravel driveway pocked with puddles and broken with thickets of weeds. When he lost sight of her among the trees, he followed the curve of this faded path to reach a decrepit hovel of a place.

This forest abode made Tom’s unkempt ranch house look like the Empire Hotel. It was a half step up from a shack: a single-floor construction more like that of a detached garage than a home. Bare patches marred the roof where shingles had migrated elsewhere. Its walls might have once been painted, though Nate could not guess at the color. The browns of rot and greens of growth shaded the house into the palette of the forest as smoothly as a bird’s nest. Look at it from the corner of your eye and you could imagine it wasn’t there.

He watched it for some minutes before understanding what he’d come here to do.

Nate’s feet crunched against bristling undergrowth as he circled the house, but Medea’s winds and rains drowned what noise he made. Borders of light glowed from the edges of the rags that covered the windows. There was a battered storm cellar entrance on the rear side of the structure. The handles of its hatch were bound with a rusted length of chain. This place was more than it appeared.

A house like this wasn’t supposed to be in a tidy town like Greystone Lake. A swimmer like the one who rattled inside it had no place here. Not even a Daybreaker would be so committed an acolyte to those colorless waters. Who was she?

The question sent a shiver of hope up his spine.

He’d left Lucy’s funeral little more than an hour ago, but was there a chance there’d been a mistake? Could the tests they’d used to identify the body have somehow been wrong? The odds of this were infinitesimal. But maybe it wasn’t impossible. So little was impossible. Greystone Lake itself had taught Nate that.



The storm cellar’s door was warped and splintered. Nate braced his foot against the hatch, then pulled and twisted one of its handles until it tore from the rotted wood. He tossed it aside and threw open the door. Medea devoured his every sound. The air that billowed from the entry smelled of incense and extinguished candles: church and street fairs, holidays and mysteries.

He descended into the cellar with only the wild sky’s meager light to find his way. A short flight of steps brought him to what felt like an uneven floor of packed earth.

Nate stumbled against something and sensed objects stacked like columns in the dark. Medea’s winds followed him through the hatch, bumping him from behind. A flock of papers danced around his feet, and the room’s contents swayed in the gale.

He didn’t get more than a few yards deeper into the basement when one of its many piles crashed across his path and sent another one tottering. Unless he wanted the room reduced to utter wreckage, Nate had to close the hatch.

As he backtracked to reseal the entrance, he glanced down at the steps. What he saw froze his hand in the searing air. One of the papers skirting his feet had wrapped itself around his shin—an envelope dyed a shade of red so dark it could be mistaken for black.

Somewhere deeper within the cellar came the rattle and creak of a warped door being opened. Light blazed into the claustrophobic space.

In a story worthy of the Lake, the burst of illumination would have been that of a lantern, as if they were in the seventeenth century and not the twenty-first. The woman holding that light would be none other than his lost Lucy.

But the shock of light came from a set of bare bulbs that studded the ceiling. And the person who’d flicked their switch was a woman as old as the mountains. She had a wiry plume of gray hair that stuck from her head like the tail of a diving whale. He hadn’t recognized her under the cap of the dry suit, but that mess of hair was unmistakable. She was the same woman who’d accosted him on the street outside the Empire the night before. She was dressed in a garment that might once have been a bathrobe.



Nate wondered how much of his idiotic fantasy that Lucy was still alive could be blamed on the head trauma. Or was it just this place? This town and how its every street and structure was poisoned with futures that would never happen.

“You.” The woman’s voice was a rustle compared to the roar she’d leveled at him during their earlier encounter. Bewilderment stood where anger had been.

Now that the space was lit, Nate saw black-red envelopes scattered across the dirt floor. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Piles of clothes and books and papers and boxes clotted the tight cellar, and the black-red envelopes stood out like crime scene splatter.

“Where did you get this?” Nate waved the black-red envelope at her. As if he wasn’t the one who’d just broken into her home. He still had his grandparents’ invitation to the Night Ship’s 1964 Independence Day party in his jacket pocket, and he pulled it out to compare the two. The envelopes were identical, their color was inimitable. Blood when it’s starved for oxygen.

“It’s mine!” She snatched the empty one from him and pawed at the others strewn across the floor.

“Who are you?” Nate asked.

“You’re in my house.” The woman looked up from the ground to squint at him. “Get out of here. Go back to where you came from.”