A pirate skeleton was cool, and I kind of wondered how the gold coins had been stamped, but really I was happy we were leaving.
Most of the ship consisted of long, narrow hallways. We passed closed door after closed door, and a few that hung open but showed darkness. Up front, Maria sang to herself in I-didn’t-know-what language, and Francis hoisted Joe up onto his shoulders, which forced him to stoop every time they passed a doorway. Everyone ignored a stairwell leading down when we passed it, so I stopped and leaned over to peer around the curve.
“Don’t get left behind,” Rainbow urged, fingertips tugging at the pouf of my sleeve. “We never go down.”
“Not even if you smell more pizza down there,” Stephen quipped, reaching for my other sleeve. I yanked my arm away, and stepped past Rainbow.
“Why not?” I challenged her as I picked up the pace to catch up with Francis’ back.
“Because I want to see sunlight again,” she answered. Her voice sounded wistful, but her lips pulled tight. How long had it been?
“We have rules to help us find our way,” Patrick noted from up front, “Some were passed down by older children, some we were told, some we learned the hard way, and some just made sense. One of them is that we never go down.”
“And we never go into the dark. Patrick, this is a dead end,” Maria added, pointing down the hall. The doorway at the end did look almost black from here. I could see another lit doorway in the distance, but shadow covered most of the hallway in-between.
“There’s ceiling lamps, but they’re out,” Stephen said, leaning across the threshold without setting foot inside.
Francis groaned, and Maria asked in a weary voice, “When was the last time we passed a lit side passage?”
I got impatient. “Why not just carry a lamp with us? We’ve passed fifty.”
Patrick sounded so matter-of-fact he might have been waiting for the question. “If a room is lit, we never leave it dark. I know we’re not the only children lost in Purgatory. If we find our way out, we’ll leave a safe trail for whoever comes after.
I wasn’t going to be the person who argued we save ourselves at the expense of others. Fortunately, Rainbow made it moot by reminding us, “The dead pirate had an extra candle. We’ll go back and get it, and use it to light these lamps.”
“Not alone, you won’t,” Patrick argued.
“Then, I’ll go with her,” I snapped automatically.
“It’s a straight path, Patrick. It’ll be okay,” Maria reassured him.
His sigh was good enough for me. I started walking, back the way we came. My shoes ate up the ground now that I’d gotten used to the floor rolling underneath me. Rainbow caught up fast.
“Too many people you don’t know yet, right?” she asked under her breath as we left the others behind.
I grunted. I couldn’t lie about it, but I didn’t like feeling transparent. I knew she got it, but still.
“I figured I’d have to get you alone to ask this. Were you at a costume party when it happened?” she inquired.
“Were you?” I returned.
Rainbow smiled. “No, I wanted to dress like this. If you haven’t guessed by the name, my folks were big hippies. I always felt like they wanted me to fake being happy, so I refused.”
“I’m not wearing this by choice. I’m not the Red Riding Hood Type,” I replied vehemently.
Her smile turned amused. “It’s a little big for you.”
“You’re a little blonde for a goth.” I changed the subject.
Her grin only grew. “When I drowned myself it was black with red and purple streaks. When the color started to fade and my roots grew out I found a cabinet full of dye, but I decided not to take it. It wasn’t really something I needed. After that, there wasn’t anymore.”
I didn’t say anything, and she let me be silent until we got back to the pirate’s room. The candles stood on gold candlesticks where we’d left them. Rainbow curtseyed formally to the skeleton, and gathered up the candlestick carefully in both hands. “This room will be okay with just one. It’s not that big,” Rainbow curtseyed formally to the skeleton, and gathered up the candlestick in both hands.
“Take them both. The darkness and I deserve each other,” the voice from last time whispered.
Rainbow did hear it. “You’re generous, but we only need one. We don’t leave people in the darkness,” she answered kindly. She didn’t stop and chat, and I walked out with her.
“Not everyone still has a chance like we do,” she whispered to me. She looked pained about it, and made no effort to hide that pity.
“Is that going to happen a lot?” I asked back.
“More than you’ll like. Whatever they tell you to do, don’t do it,” she warned me.
“I won’t, trust me,” I assured her. That would be an easy promise for me to keep.
When we got back to the others, Francis said, “I’ll do it,” but Rainbow shook her head, told him, “I’m fine,” and kept walking.
She walked down the dark, narrow hallway with candlelight stretching in front of her and behind. The difference from the deep shadows that had covered the space before surprised me. Near the far end, she reached up above her head and fiddled with a hanging lamp, which glowed as she lit the wick inside. On her way back back, she did the same with the lamp near us, but it didn’t light.
“It’s empty,” she said.
“I’m not surprised,” Patrick replied.
Apparently, Rainbow didn’t have to be told what to do. She screwed the candle into the lamp instead of a wick, and left it as she walked back to us.
“Still pretty dark,” Patrick worried, but Maria shook her head.
“It’s light enough to be safe, and we’re not trying to break the rules,” she said.
That seemed to be good enough, because everyone started moving. The hall got pretty dim in the middle, but as the weak light faded behind us it grew again in front of us, until we passed the lamp and walked out the next doorway into a new hallway made of metal.
I looked back over my shoulder. In the middle of the door frame, wood changed to metal. These walls had the buttresses and rivets that made me think of a naval boat, and a closed doorway looked more like a hatch with a wheel instead of a handle. I tested the wheel as we passed, but it was no good.
“I know we’re getting closer to the sun,” Maria remarked as she watched me. “When I was smaller, there were sections where the walls were made of bone.”
“I remember,” Patrick’s voice and face went as quiet as Maria’s.
“I will sic Joe on you,” Stephen warned them. Joe took that as a signal and charged Patrick, who swept her up and laid her over his shoulder like a sack of flour. Joe giggled, and Patrick grinned, and we cut down a side passage with an open hatch.
This tunnel had pipes running along the walls near the ceiling. I slid my fingertips over the metal, wondering if I’d see a label anywhere to tell me what ship had lost this one cramped hallway. At the end, it opened up into a large metal room.
We’d found a gymnasium. A modern gymnasium, if a Spartan one. Exercise bicycles, weight lifting benches with complicated pulley systems, that kind of thing. Joe let out a squeal of glee, thrashing until Patrick had to put her down. She bolted over to a rack against the wall and pulled out a fat rubber dodge ball. “Break time!” she declared, and threw it with admirable precision at Stephen’s head. Stephen caught it, but stopped still and looked at Patrick questioningly.
“As long as we put it back, I’m sure it’s fine,” Patrick told him. Permission granted, Stephen threw himself back theatrically onto his butt, clutching the ball to his chest. As Joe laughed, Stephen spiked the ball against the floor and sent the little girl chasing after it when it sailed over her head.
They dragged Francis into the game, then Patrick, and finally Rainbow. Maria poked through lockers and cabinets until she came across some refrigerated meat sandwiches and a plastic gallon bottle of apple juice. It was bland. Really,
really, bland. No wonder they’d been desperate for pizza.
The room had two other open hatches, but one of them led into darkness. The fluorescent lights high above us didn’t carry very far. I wandered up to peer inside as Stephen looked through the other door.
“I guess we’re headed this way,” he mused.
“No, we’re going this way,” I corrected him.
“Oh, man, a ladder up. That’s mean,” Rainbow sighed as she walked up to stare down the dark room at the patch of light at the end, “There’s no way we can cross to it.”
“Find a way. That’s not just a ladder, it’s daylight,” I told her emphatically. Told all of them. “It’s been years for you, but I saw daylight yesterday. I know what it looks like.”
Everyone shut up.
“We’ll check the side rooms in the next few halls. We might find lamps,” Francis suggested.
“That’s a hallway running past the ladder. We’ll circle around,” Patrick assured him.
I snarled in frustration, grabbed Rainbow’s wrist, and pulled. I got two steps into the dark room before she managed to twist free and stumble back out. Fine. I stormed further in. This room was bigger than the gym, and I could barely make out the floor in the middle. The walls were so dark I was surprised that a deeper black marked tunnels branching off the sides. I couldn’t see anything in those shadows until one of them moved.
Like an idiot, I stared until it made sense. At first, I thought it was two kids tied together, lurching and groping for me. As it got closer to the merely terrible light between the two lit doors the shape became clearer. Clear enough that I could tell why they were clumsy. Two bodies fused with each other at an angle. Four arms stuck out from the wrong places. Three legs carried it, but I saw it fall over twice and have to claw its way back up before I was smart enough to run.
That was nearly too late. I turned back towards the door I’d come in, and between me and the horrified faces of the other kids stood something else. Silhouetted by the light, I was only sure that its arms weren’t the same length and one had too many joints. I bolted forward. I had to run past it and hope. This one was as clumsy as the other, and I’d had a bunch of people try to hit me before. I ducked under the swinging arm, heard metal clank as it hit the floor instead of me, and I tried hard to shut out the wrinkled, mouthless face from my memory.
My feet pumped. I leapt through the hatch, and as Maria and Rainbow caught me, Patrick and Francis slammed the door closed and turned the wheel to seal it.
“It’s okay,” Maria whispered to me as she and Rainbow held me tight, “You’re back in the light and obeying the rules again. They won’t follow.”
“I’m so sorry. The way out was right there. Right there, and I messed it up for you,” I panted miserably.
“Either we can still circle around, or we couldn’t get there anyway. You’re alive, which is what matters,” Patrick assured me. “It’s me that should apologize. I didn’t warn you how important the rules are. But you broke them, and you’re still alive, and you have another chance.”
“Don’t go into the dark. That’s the first rule. Breaking the others is punished, but the darkness kills,” Maria recited softly.
“Don’t make any lit room dark,” Patrick went on, sitting down wearily on the seat of an exercise bike. “Repair what you can, seal off what you can’t. Breaking those is bad luck, but not disaster. We do it because it’s right.”
“Don’t take anything you don’t need. Treat the dead with respect. Sanctify their bodies. When they speak, listen, but don’t obey. Do not break the ship. Not a wall, not the ceiling or floor, not even a door,” Maria took over, “This is Purgatory. We don’t just have to find the way out, we have to earn it. Breaking those rules brings punishment.”
“Don’t go off on your own,” Francis supplied grimly, “Anyone we can’t see or hear who’s by themselves is gone. We never see them again.” That rule made them all look unhappy. They’d lost people before.
“Always go up,” Rainbow finished, with the tone of someone trying to end on a high note. “That’s a rule too, but it doesn’t have to be. We don’t want to go down.”
“Sit. Get your breath back,” Patrick urged us all. “We’ll see if we can’t find a way back to that ladder through the side passages. If not, we’ll find another exit another day. We’re all going to see the sun again, together. You too, Mary.”
figured they were out of luck. The next available turn went the wrong way. I stomped along in back, feeling itchy. I hadn’t paid attention to how much stuff was lying around until I’d been told not to take it. Even something like a fire axe in an emergency box called to me.
Maybe what bothered me was that no one was mad. We got to a room with lighted passages going off in all directions, and Patrick asked me, Maria, and Rainbow to walk down the hallways and look into the side passages while he watched to make sure we were safe.
When I came back, Francis pointed in one direction and told Patrick, “That way.”
“This might even work,” Patrick told us cheerfully. “We aren’t far out of the way, and now we’re headed back in the right direction. Or we will be, if we take that door over there.”
So we did. It hadn’t been a big loop around after all. I glanced around at the other doors as everyone trooped into the new hallway. I couldn’t get them killed if I got lost. If I got lost enough, maybe I’d end up somewhere else.
Rainbow dropped behind the others, waiting for me. Not too close. She was giving me space, for pity’s sake. Like I was the victim here.
“What happened to Maria?” I asked Rainbow under my breath, to change the subject with myself.
“Just about everything, I’m guessing,” Rainbow answered, her voice just as low, head tilted towards me. It wasn’t a bad deception. We looked like we were exchanging confidences, but not gossiping. “She doesn’t want to talk about it, and who’s going to push? It doesn’t matter anyway. It’s all over and in the past.”
“I meant how does she think she died?” I pressed.
“She crawled into a haystack to hide when the barn caught fire,” Rainbow really was good at keeping a poker face. If I couldn’t hear the tone of her voice, I’d have thought she was discussing something pleasant.
“Odds the fire was an accident?” I didn’t hide bitterness that well.
“I’ve heard Patrick say she was a wreck when he found her. Didn’t want to make friends. She’d either pray nonstop or break rules deliberately, then feel guilty about it. She’s one of the people I look at and realize I didn’t have it that bad after all.”
I nodded. “Yeah. Oh, man. Is this a crypt?”
“Get used to them,” Rainbow muttered back.
We were still in naval style rooms of blue gray metal, but this one was much bigger than the cramped hallways we’d used to get here. Stone coffins with crosses on them lay spaced all the way up. They were creepy enough, but niches like bunk beds lined the walls, each with its still-dressed skeleton tucked away. I had to admit, I liked it.
Everyone scattered. Stephen wandered up and down the rows, examining the coffins. Francis held Joe cradled in his arms as he and Patrick walked over to the one hatch that hung open. Rainbow left me to go help Stephen push a stone lid properly into place.
Maria walked up to one of the bunks along the walls and pulled the skeleton’s hands off its skull face, crossing them over its chest instead.
“Leave me to suffer,” a girl’s voice sulked in the distance.
“It’s over. You don’t have to cry anymore,” Maria told the skeleton placidly.
“I wanted her to cry,” announced a boy’s voice. He sounded like he was speaking loudly from far away. “I loved her. I asked her out, and she acted like I was making a joke, then slept with a boy who only wanted her for that.”
“That’s all you wanted,” the girl snapped back, “You didn’t know me, not really.”
“You wouldn’t let me. You were beautiful, but there was much more t
o you, things you kept hidden. I wanted to be the one who really knew you, and you pushed me away,” he argued.
“And I paid for it. I was so stupid,” the girl’s voice sighed.
“Not as stupid as I was,” the boy answered.
“I’m sorry it turned out that way. We all have things we’re hiding,” Maria told the voices solemnly.
“Yes. She didn’t owe me anything. I had things to hide. So do you,” the boy’s voice said. I felt a faint tug on my sleeve. Rainbow jerked her head towards the door. Stephen already stood there beside Patrick and Francis, and Maria was on her way, walking slowly and watching the skeleton. Rainbow and I started moving, too.
The girl voice turned wistful. “No one respects anyone’s secrets. The others were talking about you behind your back.”
My shoulders seized up, and my spine straightened. Nobody told me that the dead were jerks. I stomped more forcefully as I joined the others.
“The sad thing is, the truth is worse than anything they suspect.” The boy was trying to pick a fight. The sharp, sarcastic tone suggested he’d be happy to tell us whatever Maria didn’t want us to hear. It made me boil. She’d tried to help them, and they were both turning on her like this? If they acted like this when they were alive, did they think they deserved to be loved by anyone? I tried to let it go. We’d be through that door in a few seconds. Beyond stretched another long tunnel. It ended in darkness, but it had a side branch. That darkness … that was the big, dark room with my monsters, wasn’t it?
“I don’t mind if they wonder. My secrets can’t hurt me anymore,” Maria assured the voices.
“That’s true,” said the boy.
“It’s Red Riding Hood who has the dangerous secret.” The girl voice sounded snippy and smug now.
“Her secret is catching up with all of you,” the boy’s voice warned.
“SHUT UP!” I yelled at the top of my lungs.
The echoes of my voice bounced around the metal room, deafening me. The screech of metal cut over my echo, and the gentle rocking of the floor became a sudden, violent tilt, throwing all of us off our feet. The hatch we’d been about to exit through slammed shut, and with a clang, another door on the opposite wall snapped open. A door leading away from where we wanted to go. I tried to push myself to my feet, but the floor swayed too badly. The screeching changed. Now it came from a coffin that had come loose from its resting place, grinding down to lodge itself in front of the now shut hatch.
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