The Storm King(95)

“Nate?” Owen asked. “What are you doing here?”

“Jesus. I almost clocked you.” Nate had never been so happy to see the big guy. “Someone broke into the house through the living room window.”

“The window’s broken? I didn’t see—”

“There are tracks all over the place.” Nate twisted the flashlight on and illuminated the filthy floor.

“God, is that—is that blood?” Owen asked.

“I think so. But keep it down because—”

“Oh, Christ, you think they’re still here?” Owen dropped his voice to a whisper. “Like, right now?”

“I don’t know. I just got here.”

“Did you call the police? What about my mom! Do you think they have her?”

“I haven’t seen her. My phone’s dead. I was just looking for your landline.”



“It’s cordless, so it won’t work without power. But I’ll call from my cell.” Owen put his satchel on the counter and began to rifle through it. “Christ. I can’t believe this. I mean, seriously, what’s next?”

The blood and mud stopped at the door, though there was something like a handprint on the frame, close to the knob. Nate painted the beam of light up the rest of the door and noticed a series of deadbolts and chains just below his eye level.

Sweat broke out at his temples, his body sensing something before his mind had time to catch up.

Why so many locks on a basement door?

One of Owen’s huge arms closed around his neck.

Nate had time only to throw an elbow backward before he felt cloth over his face. An involuntary inhalation filled his mouth and nose with a sweet, faintly acetone smell that recalled his med school days.

Owen clutched him tight against his massive chest. Nate was enveloped, his arms pinned to his sides as if by steel. He stomped clumsily at his shins, but Owen’s strength was absolute. A scream built in his head with each gasp into the chemical-soaked rag.

He heard a choking sound as his knees buckled. His vision spun down into stars, and the shadows of the room coalesced into black.





Twenty

Sleep was velvet, smooth and impenetrable. Like the Night Ship, it was a shade of red so dark it was only a step from black.

Bands of light resolved into overhead fluorescents. Nate’s senses and self limped back to him, his thoughts numb and slow as if wading through icy water.

He was seated on a cold floor, his head propped against a post or column, the buzz of the lights interrupted only by a whisper like that of an oar cutting through the lake. He tried to move his legs, but his stomach mutinied at the idea. A foul, sweet taste coated his mouth. He was deeply aware of each breath he took.

The sensation of Owen’s grip lingered around his neck and chest. He remembered the chemical-laden cloth and the trail of mud and blood, the high-security basement door.

Why so many locks on a basement door?

With exquisite care, Nate straightened his head. It felt like a planet perched on a twig. He noticed the walls first. They were covered with small black pyramidal shapes like the inside of an alien spaceship or the interior of a golf ball. Light disappeared into the strange material. His raincoat was gone, and he was dressed only in his sodden suit.



The basement felt impossibly vast, but Nate could tell that his vision wasn’t right. There was a brightness to the far side of the room that seemed to rebound into infinity. Its glare hurt, as if his pupils were dilated. He wondered what Owen had drugged him with. Its burn in his throat made him think of a frog being prepared for a scalpel.

Shapes moved beyond the clarity of his sight—shifting blurs that struck him as both organic and mechanical. Something about them was very wrong. He could feel this in his arm and smell it in the air. There was a clotted animal stench so thick that it would take more than water and soap to purge. The strange whispering surged and ebbed from the bright end of the basement.

Nate’s hands were bound behind what he was propped against. Whatever they were tied with felt narrow and had the slickness of plastic. He could twist his wrists within the ties, but couldn’t begin to contemplate summoning the strength to break them. He didn’t even know if he could stand.

A hiss hardly louder than the ring of the overhead lights came from his right. He moved his head toward it slowly. Flowers tracked the sun more quickly. His brain threatened to shatter against his skull as if its lobes were sculpted of blown glass only a molecule thick.

Another form was collapsed to his right. Long limbs splayed across the floor like a discarded plaything. A man. Nate squinted, trying to force his eyes to focus. A boy. Shaggy brown hair, wide dark eyes, a thin face crusted with blood and taut with terror. He was clothed in the same long raincoat he’d been wearing when Nate tackled him on Grams’s lawn the night before.

Pete Corso. Alive after all.

Alive for now.



“Pete?” Nate spoke louder than he’d intended, and the whisper at the other end of the basement tapered to a hush.

“Thought you’d be out longer.”

The bound boy’s eyes snapped shut at the sound of Owen’s voice.

Nate turned his head and watched one of the blurs solidify into Owen as the huge man approached. He’d changed clothes from what he’d been wearing before. Now he was shirtless and dressed in loose-fitting scrub pants.