Scar Island

by Dan Gemeinhart

  Praise for The Honest Truth:

  A New York Times Editors’ Choice selection

  An Amazon.com Best Book of the Month

  An Indie Next List selection

  *“An emotionally hard-hitting survival story… A gripping page-turner.” -- Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “An impressive combination of suspenseful adventure thriller and cancer narrative… Touching but unsentimental, this is a deeply moving adventure.” -- Booklist

  “Gemeinhart presents a rousingly riveting two-hanky read.” -- Kirkus Reviews

  Praise for Some Kind of Courage:

  *“This is true adventure with strong underpinnings of moral courage and love… Poignant and real.” -- Kirkus Reviews, starred review

  *“Exhilarating and enthralling, Courage promises even the most reluctant readers a breakneck adventure that will keep them turning the pages with utter devotion.” -- Booklist, starred review

  “This is a terrific book, morally thoughtful and wonderfully well told, that 9- to 14-year-olds are likely to cover at a gallop.” -- The Wall Street Journal

  For all the librarians, teachers, and parents who dedicate themselves to getting books into the hands and hearts of our children. Heroes, one and all.

  —Dan

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  PRAISE

  CHAPTER ONE: A DARK PLACE INDEED

  CHAPTER TWO: THE SINNER’S SORROW

  CHAPTER THREE: THE HATCH

  CHAPTER FOUR: A DARK TALE, TO BE SURE

  CHAPTER FIVE: MORNING MUSTER

  CHAPTER SIX: A DARK AND DASTARDLY SCHEME

  CHAPTER SEVEN: DEAD MAN’S COAT

  CHAPTER EIGHT: DRAGGING THE DEAD

  CHAPTER NINE: SCAR ISLAND

  CHAPTER TEN: A VOICE IN THE DARK

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: A BEAUTIFUL RAT

  CHAPTER TWELVE: “I KNOW WHAT YOU DID”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE THECRET

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: CRIMES MUST BE PUNISHED

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: A DROWNED DUNGEON

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: SORROW’S SINNER

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: THE SINNER’S REVENGE

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: MOTHER’S DAY

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: A HOME

  CHAPTER TWENTY: THE FREAK AND THE RAT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: FIRES AND FLOWERS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: CAUGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: AN INTRUDER

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: ALL THE GROWN-UPS ARE DEAD AND GONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: A CRASH AND A BANG

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: GOING ALONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: DARKNESS AND DROWNING

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: SAVED

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: A LUNATIC (NOT AN IDIOT)

  CHAPTER THIRTY: HOME

  SOME KIND OF COURAGE TEASER

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  COPYRIGHT

  It’s no fun shivering when you’re wearing handcuffs.

  It doesn’t help to be seasick, either.

  Jonathan Grisby sat hunched over in the wildly rocking boat and tried not to throw up. And he tried not to let his teeth chatter together so hard that they shattered. And he tried, at the same time, to look like he didn’t care.

  It wasn’t easy.

  The little boat rocketed off of each wave and crashed into the next with a jolt that sent shots of pain into his rear from the metal bench. His clothes were wet from the salty spray. The wind kept blowing his straight black hair into his eyes, and with his hands cuffed he couldn’t brush it away. The sun was already down and every second brought more darkness.

  He noticed the boat’s pilot grinning at him. It wasn’t a nice grin. He was missing most of his teeth, and the few that he still had were brown and crooked. Tobacco juice dribbled out from his bottom lip into his scraggly gray beard.

  “Ya look scared!” the pilot shouted over the whine of the outboard motor that he steered with one hand. Jonathan just blinked and looked away.

  “ ’Tis all right to be scared, boy.” The pilot eased back on the motor, slowing the boat so that he didn’t have to yell. He was still smiling, and his eyes twinkled with a mean hunger. “I’d be scared, too, if I was goin’ where you be goin’.” The pilot’s smile widened, showing off even more stained teeth.

  Jonathan threw back his head to clear the hair from his eyes and looked out over the white-capped ocean, ignoring the leering pilot. He was sitting with his back toward the front of the boat, facing the pilot and the dock they had left minutes before. Next to the pilot sat his partner. He was young, maybe seventeen or eighteen, with a kinder face. Not much more than a kid, really.

  “Aw, leave ’im alone, Cyrus,” the younger man said. “There’s no need to tease ’im.”

  “I ain’t teasin’, Patrick. I’m warnin’.” The grizzled pilot narrowed his eyes and nodded at Jonathan as he spoke. “Wouldn’t be fair to toss him to the wolves with him thinkin’ he’s goin’ on some seaside vacation! ’Tis a dark place yer goin’, boy. A dark place indeed.”

  Jonathan, trying to ignore the old pilot, looked at the younger man, Patrick. Patrick’s eyes slid away from his own. Like he felt bad. Like maybe the old man was telling the truth.

  “ ’Course, ye probably knew ’twas a dark place, though, didn’t ya?” Cyrus continued. “That’s why yer goin’ there, after all. A dark place for dark youths such as yourself. Troublemakers. Delinquents. Criminals.” He savored each word in his mouth like a salty piece of bacon.

  “How old are ye, boy? Twelve? Thirteen?”

  Jonathan bit his lip. He didn’t want to talk to Cyrus. But he was feeling awfully lonely, handcuffed in a boat on the way to prison.

  “Something like that,” he said at last, with a shrug.

  Cyrus’s mouth widened into a wolf’s grin. “Ah, yer right in the middle, then. Criminal boys, aged ten to fourteen. That’s what Slabhenge is for, idn’t it? Can’t imagine what dark crime ya committed to get yourself sent here, boy. They’ll have ya meek as a lamb in no time, I’d wager, beggin’ to run back to yer mama’s lap.”

  “Leave him alone, Cyrus.” Patrick spoke again. “There’s no point in taunting him so.”

  Cyrus’s eyes widened innocently. “I ain’t trying to taunt him, Patrick! I just feel the boy should know what he’s gettin’ into, is all.”

  Patrick frowned and looked out over the water.

  “Ah, and there she is!” Cyrus crowed. “Go ahead, boy, turn around and take a look at yer new home!”

  Jonathan twisted in his seat and craned his neck to get his first view of the Slabhenge Reformatory School for Troubled Boys over the rusted bow of the boat.

  It was a hulking, jagged building of gray stone, surrounded on all sides by the foaming sea. The walls were high, rising up two or three stories from the crashing waves. Several towers stabbed up even higher into the gathering black clouds from each corner of the building. Each was flat-topped and crowned with a black iron railing. A few dark windows dotted the higher parts of the walls. Instead of glass, they all had thick metal bars. In a movie, it would be where the evil lord lived. Or where the good guy died.

  There was no beach, no land, not even any rocks … The waves smashed and churned right up against the great square stone blocks of the walls. Jonathan gulped. It was worse than he’d heard—and what he’d heard had been terrible. He ground his teeth together and let the stiff ocean wind dry his angry tears before they could fall from his eyes. His hands, shackled together behind his back, squeezed into fists, then went loose.

  “Pretty, ain’t it?” Cyrus chuckled. His laugh turned into a cough and finished with a thick spit over the side of the boat. “It weren’t always a school, ya know. ’Twas built first fer lunatics and madmen.” Cyrus laug
hed again. “That there, for the first hundred or so years of its miserable existence, was an asylum. A madhouse. A prison fer the criminally insane.”

  Jonathan’s eyes wandered over the moss-covered walls, the bars, the turrets and shadows. It didn’t look like the kind of place where the sun would ever shine. Thunder rumbled in the dark clouds above them. He swallowed a salty ball of fear.

  “Still is, I s’pose,” Cyrus went on. “Only now, the psychos is just younger, is all.” He finished with another throaty cackle.

  He slowed the motor even more, dragging the ride out as long as he could. They were crawling now toward the stone prison, riding up and sliding down the green-black waves instead of bouncing along their tops.

  “I wouldn’t be thinking of escape, either, boy. Never been done. That’s half a mile of ocean we be crossing, chocked with currents and undertows. Plenty of the crazies tried, of course. Threw themselves from the top of them walls there. But the sea is hungry here. It swallowed them all, without a trace. After it dashed their brains ’gainst those walls, of course. Aye, ’tis hungry water ’round here. You can feel it, can’tcha?” Cyrus was almost whispering now, his voice a hissy growl, like a bully telling a ghost story. “Why, it’s eating at Slabhenge itself! See it there, chewing on them walls! Eating away at ’em, wave after wave! Did you know there used to be rocks ’round it? There did! And a pier! And a wee little sandy beach all the way around! But the sea, she’s been nibbling away nigh on a century and a half. And she’ll have it all ’fore she’s through.”

  Cyrus punctuated his words with a good-riddance spit into the ocean. Then he cocked a smirking eyebrow at Jonathan. “You got yerself a cozy new home indeed, boy. A nuthouse full of delinquents, being swallowed by the sea. Ha! But don’t you worry … if you get homesick, there’s always the rats to keep you company!” Cyrus threw back his head and hollered out a laugh.

  Jonathan looked to Patrick, who shrugged apologetically. “Yeah,” he said. “There be plenty of rats.”

  They were right in the shadow of the massive walls now. The waves splashing against them were loud. He looked up to the top. There were stones missing, tumbled down into the ocean. The place was falling apart. They passed a window, two stories up. It was black and barred and shaped like a tombstone. For a moment, Jonathan was sure he saw a pale face looking out at him. He had to catch himself when the boat was rocked by a wave, and when he looked back, the face was gone. He shivered again, only partly because of the cold.

  “And here we be,” Cyrus said. He steered the boat up toward a darkened doorway in the wall, the same tombstone shape as the window. A heavy metal gate blocked the entry and, behind it, a huge wooden door. Stone stairs led down from the gate and disappeared into the black water.

  The boat nudged up against the submerged stairs and Patrick leapt out onto the steps, a rope in his hands. He tied the boat off to a rusty metal ring jutting out from the prison wall.

  “Enjoy yer stay!” Cyrus hollered as Patrick helped Jonathan step out of the boat.

  “Don’t let Cyrus scare ya,” Patrick whispered as they climbed the steps toward the door. “Just stay quiet and keep on the Admiral’s good side. Ya’ll be fine.”

  “What makes you think I’m scared?”

  Patrick looked at Jonathan with raised eyebrows, then up at the dark prison they were entering. “Well, good lord, ain’t ya?”

  Jonathan almost smiled. Almost. He looked up at the grim, crumbling walls of his new home. It looked bad. Just as bad as he deserved.

  The wooden door creaked open. A giant stood in the doorway, wearing a dark blue uniform with shiny silver buttons. He was skinny as a skeleton but taller than any man Jonathan had seen in real life. His skin was pale, his black hair short, and he had great dark circles under his eyes. Other than one slow blink, nothing on the man’s face moved.

  “Is this the Jonathan Grisby?” the man asked in a deep, scratchy voice.

  “Aye,” Patrick answered. “ ’Tis.” He pulled some papers out of his jacket pocket and handed them through the bars.

  “How are you, Mr. Vander?” Patrick asked. His voice cracked nervously.

  The man only looked at Patrick from under his dark eyebrows, then jangled a huge ring of keys and unlocked the gate. He swung it open just far enough for Jonathan to slip through. Patrick gave his elbow one last squeeze before letting go. The gate clanged shut.

  Jonathan felt himself pulled a few steps forward into darkness. The door began closing behind him with a loud creak.

  “Good-b—” Patrick started to say, before his voice was cut off by the slamming of the massive door.

  A huge hand, hard and strong as iron, closed on Jonathan’s shoulder just as the world turned black.

  The pain was burning up from Jonathan’s knees like hot-white fire. Sweat crawled down his back and he bit his tongue to keep from crying out.

  He was kneeling on a dark wood contraption in the Admiral’s office, facing the Admiral’s desk. He’d been ordered to kneel there as soon as he was ushered in, and the Admiral hadn’t looked up from the papers on his desk since.

  The Admiral’s office smelled of waxy candles, sweat, chocolate, and a vague whiff of alcohol. It wasn’t a pleasant mix, and combined with the heat of the room and the sharp ache in his knees, it was enough to make Jonathan want to throw up. His shoulders were burning from being twisted back into the handcuffs after he’d changed into a drab uniform, and his stomach clenched with hunger. He’d gone from shivering in the boat to sweating in the stuffy heat of the Admiral’s office. The one-piece gray garment he’d been given was stained and threadbare, and it stretched from his neck to his ankles like a prison uniform. He blew his hair out of his eyes and tried to keep his arms from going numb.

  The Admiral sat behind a huge desk made of dark, shiny wood. His thin hair was mostly gray and was slicked down across his head with some kind of oily grease. His nose was the size and shape of an eagle’s beak, and above were two shiny eyes, black as olives, that looked too small for the rest of his face. His eyebrows looked like two monstrous, bushy cockroaches crouched on his forehead. A patchy shadow of stubbly whiskers grew on his cheeks and chin. He was wearing a dark blue uniform jacket with fancy brass buttons, like they wore in the navy. It might have fit him when he was younger, but now his neck fat squeezed over the top button of the collar, and his belly bulged out from under the bottom three buttons, which were undone. He sat shuffling through some papers, sipping from a glass of brown liquid, and stuffing chocolates into his mouth. A crinkly pile of shiny gold wrappers grew by his elbow with each chocolate he devoured.

  A blond-haired boy, a little older than Jonathan and kind of chubby, stood in the corner with his hands crossed in front of him. He was watching the Admiral with eager eyes, and from time to time shot a smug smirk Jonathan’s way. He looked like a teacher’s pet, but the kind that bites.

  The only light came from ten or eleven tall white candles, flickering here and there from brass holders around the room.

  “Brandy,” the Admiral said at last. His voice was deep and breathy. Like a dragon’s.

  The boy in the corner sprang forward. He pulled a bottle from a shelf and poured another splash of brown liquid into the Admiral’s glass. The Admiral didn’t move except to exhale and raise one of his cockroach eyebrows. The kid frantically reopened the bottle and sloshed more brandy into the glass. The Admiral scowled and smacked his lips but picked up the glass and took a loud, slurping sip. The kid returned the bottle to the shelf and scurried back to his corner.

  “Jonathan Grisby,” the Admiral finally said. He said Jonathan’s name the way most people might say the word diarrhea.

  Jonathan swallowed.

  “Yeah.”

  The Admiral’s glass froze halfway to his mouth. His eyes slid to the kid in the corner, then back to Jonathan. The kid practically ran over to Jonathan, then leaned down to hiss into his ear.

  “You gotta call him sir or Admiral, dummy!”

 
“What?”

  “Sir! Call him sir!”

  The kid retreated back to his corner, and the Admiral set down his glass.

  “Jonathan Grisby,” he said again. The whole room seemed to wait.

  “Yes,” Jonathan replied. Then, “Sir.”

  The Admiral smiled with half his mouth. He tapped the papers with his finger.

  “This is a terrible crime you’ve committed, Jonathan Grisby.”

  Jonathan didn’t answer.

  “I suppose you, like most criminals, insist you are innocent?”

  “No,” Jonathan replied quietly, his eyes downcast. “I did it. Sir.”

  “Hmmm. I see. Unapologetic. Unashamed. No lesson learned yet, then?” The Admiral’s face twisted into another half smile. “It will be learned, though. It will. We have wonderful ways of teaching you lessons.” He took another wet sip of his brandy and swished the alcohol around in his mouth.

  Jonathan swallowed a dry breath. He felt a warm bead of sweat start down his forehead.

  With a grunting sigh, the Admiral rose to his feet and slumped around the desk to where Jonathan knelt in misery.

  “Take, for example, the ingenious piece of furniture you’re currently enjoying. Are you comfortable?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Of course you’re not,” the Admiral spat. “And nor do you deserve to be.” He caressed the age-polished wood with chocolate-stained fingers. “This device is known as the Sinner’s Sorrow. She was here even before myself, a lovely leftover from one of Slabhenge’s former lives.” The Sinner’s Sorrow was made all of wood, and rose as high as the Admiral’s bulging belly. At its base was a rail where Jonathan’s knees rested, a long piece of stained wood that was sharpened to a vicious edge that was biting at his flesh like a dull saw blade. At its top was a slanted, flat desktop and an old inkwell. “Who knows how many lunatics and criminals have knelt here, paying the price for their evil.” The Admiral’s eyes, blurry from liquor, lapped hungrily at the wretched wood of the Sinner’s Sorrow. His gray tongue licked at his dry lips. “How does that rail feel on your young knees? It burns, doesn’t it?”