“No one knows, man,” Walter whispered. “They’d never tell us. Some big, dark secret, I guess.” From the stairs rose the same thumping and slurping Jonathan had heard the night before. He swallowed, then stepped forward and lifted the rope. He ducked his head beneath it and stepped down onto the top stair.
“What are you doing?” Colin hissed.
“I wanna see it,” Jonathan answered.
He took another step down, then another, holding his lantern out before him. When he didn’t hear any footsteps behind him, he looked back. Colin and Walter were still standing on the other side of the rope in the corridor.
“Come on,” he whispered. His voice echoed eerily in the tight staircase. “Don’t make me go alone. Things are always bigger and darker when they’re secret. Let’s find out how bad it really is.”
Walter gulped. Then he ducked under the rope and followed Jonathan.
“No way,” Colin said. “I’m thtaying here.”
“Suit yourself,” Jonathan said. “But we’ve got both lanterns.”
Colin scooted under the rope and joined Walter. “Jerkth.”
Jonathan reached back to pat Colin on the shoulder.
“Relax,” he said. “Whatever’s down here can’t be worse than the dead Admiral, and we spent plenty of time with him today.”
“Thut up and go.”
The stairs were steep, and the boys held one hand against the slippery wall to steady themselves. The steps curved down around a corner and then stopped at a small, dark landing. The landing was a little bigger than a bed, and on the other side, another staircase climbed up and away from them, in the opposite direction of the one they’d come down. On one wall of the landing was another doorway, smaller and rounded on top.
The scraping, slurping, knocking sounds were coming from the smaller doorway. They were louder here, closer. Goose bumps popped out on Jonathan’s arms. He held his lantern as far out in front of himself as he could toward the doorway.
Through the doorway was another staircase. It dropped down into even deeper darkness. The lantern’s light couldn’t reach the end of it.
He felt Colin breathing in one of his ears, and Walter in the other, looking over his shoulder.
“I ain’t going any farther,” Walter whispered. The darkness down the doorway sloshed and chunked.
“Me neither,” Colin breathed.
“Fine,” Jonathan said. “I’ll go by myself.”
“Why?” Colin asked. “Why don’t we jutht go back, Jonathan?”
Jonathan stared down into the blackness. He answered without turning his head. His voice echoed back at him from the dark downward passageway, like he was talking to himself.
“It’s this big, awful secret, right? The Hatch, down here in the dark? Well, maybe, once you know it, it’s not all that terrible after all.”
He looked back over his shoulder and locked eyes with Walter.
“Maybe it’s the hiding that makes it horrible, you know?”
Walter furrowed his brow.
“Uhh … not really, man. I think we should get outta here. Like, fast.”
Jonathan turned back toward the rattling, grinding blackness. “Big, dark secrets can’t stay that way forever,” he murmured. His free hand rubbed absently at the wrist that was holding the lantern.
A dull, heavy thud echoed up the stairway toward them.
“Jonathan?” Walter’s whisper was right in his ear. “I am really, really, really”—he paused—“hungry. When you’re done playing with the monsters, you can find me in the kitchen, eating sausage.”
“I’ll be with him,” Colin added.
“Thanks, guys,” Jonathan said, and his only answer was the sound of their footsteps retreating back up the spiral staircase.
He held the lantern in a shaking hand and shuffled to the end of the landing, to the very edge of the final staircase. This one was narrower than the other corridors; the walls weren’t much farther apart than Jonathan’s shoulders.
Jonathan took a deep breath. Before him, there was another loud clunk, and a snuffling sound like a huge hissing nose. When he blew his breath out, it came out shaky.
He took the first step down. The steps were bigger drops down than the other staircase. He had to fall the last couple of inches. He took the next step down. He almost turned and ran when an especially loud metal rattling rang up from the darkness below. But he licked his lips and took a breath and dropped down another step. And another.
The darkness before him growled and crunched. The walls seemed to close in around him. He felt with his foot for the next step and realized that he was at the bottom. And that somewhere along the line, he had squeezed his eyes shut.
He opened his eyes.
He was in a tiny square room with a stone ceiling so low he could’ve reached up and touched it. It was freezing, and the walls were covered in dripping moisture as if they were sweating.
In front of him was a huge, round, metal door. Heavy iron bolts circled its outer edge. It was rusty and grimy and covered in shiny, green slime. It looked ancient. The door was big enough that, if it had been open (and he was extremely thankful that it wasn’t), he could have stepped through it without ducking. It was a door like a submarine would have, with the large iron handle in the middle that Jonathan knew would open the door if he spun it around.
The door seemed to rattle rhythmically, like it was breathing.
“The Hatch,” Jonathan whispered. He stepped toward it. He reached out with his empty hand. He could see the trembling in his fingers. They closed around the iron handle in the center of the door.
As his fingers touched the metal, his eyes dropped down to a round shadow at the foot of the door. The wavering light from his lantern flashed across it.
A human skull, white bone spotted with green slime, propped against the grimy stone doorway, black eye sockets gaping right at him, toothy mouth frozen in a silent scream.
The door suddenly rocked and banged against his shaking hand. There was a tremendous crack and a wet, sloshing thud, and a freezing mist sprayed Jonathan in the face.
He screamed and fell back, slipping on the wet stone. The lantern dropped from his hand and landed on the hard floor with a shattering crash.
The light went out, plunging Jonathan into absolute, eye-choking darkness.
Jonathan crouched on his hands and knees, panting in the blackness. He’d never seen such darkness before, so total and suffocating. Down in the deepest dungeon, pinned beneath a prison of dark stone, there was hardly even the memory of light. His eyes gasped like the mouth of a fish yanked out of the water. They found no light to breathe.
He waited for arms to wrap around his waist, long scaly fingers to close around his throat, teeth to pierce his shaking flesh. But one panicked breath passed. Then another.
All there was was complete darkness and the sound of his fear-gasping lungs and the same rhythmic watery thuds and sloshes of the Hatch. The stone under his hands was moist and clammy. The frigid, hard floor began to hurt his knees. His racing heart began to slow down, just enough for him to start to think. He tried to slow his lungs down.
He felt with his hands and found the lantern. The glass was broken and he shook and tapped it, but he knew that restarting it in the dark was impossible.
He was lost. In the dungeon of an asylum. In total darkness. With a skull. He couldn’t help but wonder where the rest of the body was.
“Crap,” he whispered, and tried not to freak out. Still on his hands and knees, he turned around and started crawling up the stairs, away from the Hatch, his hands feeling through the inky black mystery in front of him.
He found the steep stairs and tumbled up them, bumping his knees and knocking his elbow on the stone wall. Behind him, the Hatch rumbled and chomped. He scrambled faster, climbing up the staircase to the landing. He tripped on the last step and fell, twisting onto his back. Something scrabbled away from him in the darkness on sharp claws. It sounded big.
&n
bsp; Gasping, he jumped to his feet and felt around for the walls. His breaths came fast and shallow. His heartbeat drummed in his head. He staggered with his hands reaching out in front of him like a blind man, until his foot hit a stair and he fell again onto brutal stone. With the Hatch behind him thumping as loudly as his heart in his ears, he raced up them in a stumbling crawl. He got to the top and felt a corner, a turn, and he shuffled with feeling fingers around it. The noise of the Hatch got quieter. He kept one hand on the wall to his right and fumbled down a long corridor until he could no longer hear the Hatch at all. He was still in absolute blackness, his eyes blinking and rolling and seeing nothing.
He stopped for a moment to catch his breath and calm down, leaning against the wet stone wall. He dropped his head against the wall and sucked in great gasps of the musty air and blew it out through round lips until his lungs weren’t heaving and his heart was merely pumping and not pounding.
Then he remembered: the rope! He’d never ducked under or run into the rope stretched across the top of the stairwell. Which could mean only one thing: He’d gone the wrong way. After his spinning fall on the landing, he must have stumbled up the wrong staircase, the one that had led in the opposite direction of the one he and Walter and Colin had come down.
He gulped and his breath started speeding up again. He’d have to backtrack, back down past the seething Hatch.
Or go forward. Into darkness and mystery and unexplored passages.
Behind him, dimly, he heard a sharp bang and grumble. The Hatch. It was just a door. A rusty, wet door of ancient iron that held something back. But for some reason, Jonathan felt like it was waiting for him. Hungry, in the dark.
He clenched his teeth and took a step forward.
The corridor was straight for a while, ten or fifteen steps. His fingers found one doorway, closed with a wooden door so rotten it crumbled under his fingertips, but he continued past it. At the end of the straightaway, the hall turned in a sharp L to the right, and Jonathan scooted around the corner. He stopped and listened, hoping to hear the voices of the other boys or even the sound of the ocean, which would mean a window or a door to the outside. But there was only the always-and-everywhere sound of water dripping, and his own echoey breaths, and the occasional distant scratching of claws in the dark.
He took a step forward and the world was gone. His foot found only air beneath it and he tried to catch himself on the wall, but there was no grip on the slimy surface and he fell forward with a scream.
Dank air whistled past his face. He thrust his arms desperately out in front of him and then he slammed with horrible force onto a down staircase, the edges of the stairs like sharpened fists hammering his body. He slid and rolled and bounced down the stairs, each stair yanking a grunt or a groan from him.
At the bottom, gasping in blackness, he lay with his cheek in a cold puddle and felt each pain and pulse in his body. He flexed his fingers. Wiggled his toes. Bent his knees and elbows.
“Nothing’s broken,” he said out loud. His voice sounded small and alone in all that empty darkness. There was the rusty taste of blood in his mouth.
He was just pushing himself up to his hands and knees when he saw it. He froze in mid-crouch and tried to blink it away—but it was still there.
Light.
A thin line of light, glowing somewhere off ahead of him. With nothing else in the blackness for his eyes to compare it to, he couldn’t tell if it was just out of reach of his fingers or fifty feet away. But it was there, shining in the darkness.
He started crawling toward it, his knees and palms splashing through grimy puddles. The light got clearer, more solid around the edges.
The line of light was coming from under a door.
As he watched, a shadow moved across it, then was gone. Someone or something was moving on the other side of the door. Jonathan strained his ears for a sound, a voice, a laugh. Was it the other boys, the Scars … Had he circled around in the darkness back to where he had started?
He couldn’t hear anything. Except, maybe, a low humming. He rose to his feet and took a step closer, then two more. Water leaked into his shoes.
There it was again, a deep humming song. He didn’t know the tune. But it definitely wasn’t one of the Scars.
It was the voice of a grown-up.
He took one final step up to the door.
His foot came down on a teetering pile of something stacked just outside the door. They clattered and crashed to the floor, shattering and skittering on the stones.
The humming stopped. There was a grunt and a growl from behind the door.
Jonathan took one step back but then froze.
The door jerked inward, flooding the corridor with yellow light.
Jonathan’s eyes burned and he threw his arm over his face.
A deep, rumbling voice like wet boulders scraping together rasped out of the blinding light.
“What are you doing here?”
Jonathan stood pinned in the light. He blinked his eyes and squinted up at the looming shadow before him.
“I’m—I’m just—” He took another step back, but a hand reached out and grabbed hold of his sleeve.
“Get in here,” the voice rumbled. “Otherwise they will.”
Jonathan was pulled by his arm through the door. It slammed shut behind him and the hand released him. He shrank back against the closed door.
The light in the room wasn’t as bright as it had first seemed, after his stumbling nightmare in the total darkness. It was just candles, eight or nine of them, and one sputtering lantern.
Jonathan blinked and looked around. The room was full of—books. Shelves lined the stone walls, each covered end to end with large, leather-bound books. Low bookshelves divided the middle of the room, also full of neatly lined volumes, with more books standing up on top between heavy iron bookends. Along one long wall were evenly spaced window wells, deep and arched, but their views were blocked by leaning rows of books standing on their sills.
Jonathan knew in an instant that he’d stumbled into Slabhenge’s library. And it had a librarian.
He eyed the flickering candles nervously. A bunch of candles in a room full of books didn’t seem like a great idea, even in a prison made entirely of stone. He resisted the urge to jump and blow them out.
“Come for a book, did ye? Come to see? What we have?”
Jonathan looked to the source of the voice. The man was old. Incredibly old. Impossibly old. His face was deeply lined with wrinkles and creases. He was thin, and must have once been very tall, before he’d gotten so stooped over. He peered at Jonathan from behind thick, smudged glasses that magnified his eyes to silver dollars, shiny blue. His hair was thin and pure white and long, draping over his shoulders and far down his back.
He held his head to the side and tilted down, so his eyes had to look up into Jonathan’s. A shy smile snuck onto his lips, revealing small, crooked, yellow teeth, but the smile scurried quickly away into the shadows.
“Or else who will get in?” Jonathan finally managed to croak.
The man’s eyebrows crinkled and he frowned.
“I’m sorry?”
“When you—pulled me in. You said to get in or else they would. Who?”
The man’s smile returned and stayed. He leaned a little closer to Jonathan.
“Why, the rats. Of course. They will. Come in. And we don’t like them to.”
Jonathan licked his lips and looked away from the man’s eerie smile and shining eyes.
“No. I guess not.”
“It’s been a long time,” the man said. “A very long time. Since we’ve had a visitor. That wasn’t a rat.”
Jonathan just stood there, blinking stupidly. His mind was still wandering in the dark in a world where all the grown-ups were dead.
“Go ahead. Take a look. Around. Pick one out. Or two.” The man’s little smile came and went as he spoke, like a bobbing lantern on a boat lost in the fog. He took a step back and spread his arms.
“Any book you like.”
Jonathan took a breath, then stepped past him and into the shelves of Slabhenge’s library.
The books were all old. Their spines were cracked and painted with the gold words of their titles. Some of them Jonathan recognized. Most he did not. Their pages were yellowed and worn. The smell of leather and ink and old paper mixed and mingled with the candlelight and filled the room. All the books, despite their age, shone with a well-cared-for light—there were no cobwebs in this forgotten library, no dust on these ancient books.
“What do ye like? To read?” The librarian’s voice trailed along behind him as he scanned the shelves. “Adventure, is it? Jonathan Swift? Mysteries, perhaps? Sherlock Holmes?”
“I used to read a lot,” Jonathan answered softly, his eyes exploring the titles of the books as his finger slid over their spines.
“Before? Coming here?”
“Not exactly. Just … before.”
Jonathan’s finger stopped on a dark, well-worn spine. The librarian leaned in to see where Jonathan was looking. He stayed there, his face close to Jonathan’s.
“Ah. Hamlet. A play, that is. By Shakespeare, of course. A good one. Dark. A prince. A ghost. A murder in a castle. And poor Ophelia. Hamlet loved her. But he thought it was his fault. Her dying.” The librarian sighed. “To be. Or not. To be.”
Jonathan pursed his lips and kept walking. He suddenly didn’t feel like any book at all. He felt like being back where all the grown-ups were dead.
“I’ve gotta go. Thanks.”
“But ye’ve got no book!”
“It’s all right. I don’t need one.”
The librarian gave him a long, steady look. “We want you to. Take a book. Don’t worry about the Admiral. And his rules. These books are for reading.”
Jonathan’s mind raced. The old librarian didn’t know about the Admiral. About the lightning.
“Are you always here, just — by yourself?”
The librarian smiled his fleeting smile again. “Oh, yes. Yes. We are always alone. We don’t like them. The Admiral. The others. And they don’t like us.”
Scar Island Page 7