Darlington had found a group of boys around his age, or they’d found him, and they spent the afternoon running races and competing in carnival games, then inventing their own games when those got boring. A tall boy named Mason, with buzzed hair and buck
teeth, had somehow become the day’s decision maker—when to eat, when to swim, when
a game got dull—and Darlington was happy to follow in his wake. When they tired of
riding the old carousel, they walked down to the edge of the park that looked out over the Long Island Sound and the New Haven Harbor in the distance.
“They should have boats,” said Mason.
“Like a speedboat. Or a Jet Ski,” said a boy named Liam. “That would be cool.”
“Yeah,” said another kid. “We could go across to the roller coaster.” He’d been tagging
along with them all afternoon. He was small, his face dense with sand-colored freckles and now sunburned across the nose.
“What roller coaster?” Mason asked.
The freckled kid had pointed across the sound. “With all the lights on it. Next to the pier.”
Darlington had looked into the distance but seen nothing there, just the fading day and
a flat spit of land.
Mason stared, then said, “What the fuck are you talking about?”
Even in the growing twilight, Darlington had seen red spreading hot across the freckled
kid’s face. The kid laughed. “Nothing. I was just fucking with you.”
“Tool.”
They’d walked down to the thin sliver of beach to run back and forth in the waves, and
the moment had been forgotten. Until months later, when Darlington’s grandfather opened
his paper at the breakfast table and Darlington saw the headline: REMEMBERING SAVIN ROCK.
Beneath it was a picture of a big wooden roller coaster jutting into the waters of the Long
Island Sound. The caption read: The legendary Thunderbolt, a favorite at Savin Rock amusement park, destroyed by a hurricane in 1938.
Darlington had cut the picture from the paper and taped it above his desk. That day at
Lighthouse Point, that sunburned, freckled boy had seen the old roller coaster. He’d believed they could all see it. He hadn’t been pretending or joking around. He’d been surprised and embarrassed, and then he’d shut up quick. As if he’d had something like that
happen before. Darlington had tried to remember his name. He’d asked Bernadette if they
could go to the Knights of Columbus for bingo, potluck dinners, anything that might put
him back in that kid’s path. Eventually his grandfather had put a stop to it with a growled
“Stop trying to turn him into a goddamn Catholic.”
Darlington had grown older. The memory of Lighthouse Point had grown dimmer. But
he never took the picture of the Thunderbolt from his wall. He would forget about it for
weeks, sometimes months at a time, but he could never shake the thought that he was seeing only one world when there might be many, that there were lost places, maybe even
lost people who might come to life for him if he just squinted hard enough or found the
right magic words. Books, with their promises of enchanted doorways and secret places,
only made it worse.
The feeling should have ebbed away with time, worn down by the constant, gentle
disappointments of growing up. But at sixteen, with his brand-new provisional driver’s
license tucked into his wallet, the first place Darlington had taken his grandfather’s old Mercedes was Lighthouse Point. He’d stood at the edge of the water and waited for the world to reveal itself. Years later, when he met Alex Stern, he had to resist the urge to bring her there too, to see if the Thunderbolt might appear to her like any other Gray, a rumbling ghost of joy and giddy terror.
When full dark fell and the stream of children in their goblin masks slowed to a trickle,
Darlington put on his own costume, the same one he wore every year—a black coat and a
pair of cheap plastic fangs that made him look like he’d just had dental surgery.
He parked in the alley behind the Hutch, where Alex was waiting, shivering in a long
black coat that he’d never seen before.