The courtyard’s stone block ground was flat and covered with so many big puddles that it was nearly one shallow lake. The surface of the puddles were pocked and pecked by more falling rain. Shifting snaps of wind whistled around the courtyard, chilling the boys and blowing Jonathan’s hair into and out of his eyes.
The door to their left swung open, and the whole group of men from breakfast slumped out with the Admiral at the front. The ridiculous wide hat, roughly triangular, sat on his head, and the sword still swung at his side. The last two men in line came out sideways, grunting and holding the Sinner’s Sorrow between them. They plocked it down with a wet thud on the stones before the boys. Jonathan looked at the kneeler’s sharp, hard edge and winced.
The men formed a line facing the boys. They stood in an oily black puddle with their boots and shoulders touching. Jonathan counted them—eight adults. The Admiral stood in the center of the line, his arms at his sides and his chin held regally high.
Mr. Warwick, standing on one end of the line, held the wooden handle of a big brass bell in his hand. When the two men who’d carried the Sinner’s Sorrow joined the line, he rang the bell. The dull metal clanging bounced around the grim gray walls and up to the storm-choked sky.
“Morning Muster, November the fifth!” Mr. Warwick hollered. The man on the other end of the line pulled some papers out of his coat pocket and held them with both hands in the wet wind.
“James Amherst!” he shouted.
“Here, sir. Content and well cared for, sir!” a boy Jonathan hadn’t met yet shouted back.
“David Okada!”
“Here, sir. Content and well cared for, sir!”
“Benedict Fellows!”
“Here, sir,” the kid called Benny answered. His voice sounded greasy even when he was shouting through a rainstorm. “Content and well cared for, sir!”
“Jonathan Grisby!”
Jonathan gulped and looked around. He almost stumbled off the block but caught himself.
“Here, sir,” he called. His voice sounded thin and meek and was nearly lost in the windblown rain. “Content and well cared for, sir!”
The Admiral smirked.
“Colin Kerrigan!”
“Here, thir.” Colin didn’t shout—Jonathan wasn’t sure he even could shout—but he did speak at more than a shy whisper. “Content and well cared for, thir.”
All the boys were called, sixteen in all, and each gave the same answer. When they were done, the man folded the papers and slipped them back into his coat. “Sixteen charges, sir, all present and all report being content and well cared for, sir.”
The Admiral grimaced and wrinkled his nose.
“Thank you, Mr. Washburn. Put it in your report.”
The Admiral stepped forward. He took a few soggy steps toward the line of boys, his eyes sliding like a snake from boy to boy. He poked at something between his teeth with his tongue.
He had just opened his foul mouth to speak when the boy to Jonathan’s right wobbled. The boy pinwheeled his arms to catch his balance, but it was too late and he dropped a foot off his block to the ground.
The Admiral’s mouth snapped shut and he raised one of his cockroach eyebrows. He shook his head and clucked his tongue.
“To the Sorrow, Miguel Vargas.”
The boy’s head dropped.
“Yes, sir,” he mumbled and slouched to the Sinner’s Sorrow, its black wood dotted now with raindrops. He knelt on the horrible device and squinched his eyes shut. Jonathan remembered well the bite of that sharp rail. He bit his lip and looked away from Miguel.
The Admiral watched him for a moment and then looked back to the boys still on the blocks.
“Boys, we have a new student among us. As I’m sure you know. A young Jonathan Grisby, twelve years old.” As he talked, the Admiral strode slowly down the line of balancing boys. He stopped before Jonathan. “Ten weeks we are supposed to have him. But for a crime of his magnitude, I think we may need him longer.” Jonathan met the Admiral’s sinisterly gloating eyes for a second, then looked quickly away.
The Admiral resumed walking down the line. “I thought it a good idea this morning,” he said, his voice booming so as to be heard over the rising wind and growing thunder, “to remind you all what you are and why you are here. For Jonathan Grisby’s benefit.”
At the end of the line, a boy’s foot dropped to the ground. Without a word he shook his head and walked to the Sinner’s Sorrow. Miguel jumped gratefully up from the kneeler and limped stiffly back to his stone block. The new boy scowled and took his place on his knees. The Admiral waited for them each to get into place before continuing. By now he was back at the center of the line, and he took a step back so he could throw his grisly gaze over all his charges.
“Bloody, disgusting little scabs, boys,” he said. He enunciated each word clearly and precisely. “That is what you are. The very scabs of civilized society.” He smiled an ugly, pinched smile, then let it drop from his face. “And why, you might ask, do I call you scabs?” He started walking again, his eyes up at the clouds and the occasional, quick flickers of lightning. His voice lilted and rose like a schoolteacher’s. “Scabs, as you know, are nasty little things. An otherwise healthy body gets a wound. A disfigurement. And it begins to bleed, that wound. And it forms a dirty little scab. Good for nothing. An unhealthy nastiness. An ugliness. Well, boys, it is our civilization itself that is sick. It is too tolerant. Too soft. It is … wounded. Bleeding from its rottenness. And you, lads, are the scabs. The bad little bits that nobody wants.”
He stopped and cleared his throat. Scratched at his nose. Looked at the line of boys with distaste. “And so society sends you here. Society picks you off like the little scabs that you are and flicks you out here to my island. To try and turn you into something better. And if I can’t?” The Admiral lowered his chin and looked at them from under his eyebrows. “Well, at least we keep you out of the way for a while. And we give you what you deserve.”
He raised his head again and trudged deliberately through them, between two boys. His elbow bumped one—not too gently—and the boy stumbled to the ground. He kicked at a puddle and took the second boy’s place on the kneeler.
When the Admiral’s voice bellowed again, it was moving behind them.
“So what can we do with you? Why are you all such incorrigible delinquents? It’s simple.” The Admiral paused dramatically. “Weakness. And rot. You’ve been spoiled and now you are rotten and weak and it is up to me to fix you. So, at Slabhenge, we do not do what other schools do. We do not read stories. We do not talk about your … feelings. We do not play with numbers or write tedious essays about what you did last summer. What you did last summer was get weak and rotten. What you do here is work. You work. And, yes, sometimes you suffer. That, I’m afraid, is the cost of improvement. That is where strength comes from, boys.”
The Admiral’s voice circled slowly around until he was once again standing before them. The rain had picked up and was now a bit more than sprinkling. It dripped down Jonathan’s face and off the brim of the Admiral’s hat. The puddles were growing, swallowing the few blocks left between them. It was almost as dark as night, and flashes of lightning splashed the courtyard with wild shadows.
“We will work the weakness out of you!” With a flourish the Admiral yanked his sword out of its scabbard. It flashed bright silver in the dim, stormy light. “We will cut all the rottenness out of your character, if we can. We will certainly try. Just as society cut the rottenness out of itself by sending your worthless hides to Slabhenge, Slabhenge will cut the rottenness out of you. We will bleed the infection right out of you.”
The Admiral took a step backward toward the line of men, his eyes still on the boys. The boy on the Sinner’s Sorrow whined piteously and rocked from one knee to the other. The Admiral looked at him and rolled his eyes.
“Oh, back to your block, you baby,” he muttered, and the boy jumped up and scrambled back onto his stone block.
&nb
sp; The Admiral backed up until he was again in line, shoulder to shoulder with the others in the puddle. He raised his sword and pointed it straight up at the coal-black clouds that rumbled and flashed overhead.
“Work!” he hollered, practically screaming now to be heard over the gusts and crashes and rain. There was a tingling in the air. A buzzing, a charge, a vibration. “Suffering! Discipline! You are dirty little scabs, you devils, and you’ve been sent to hell!”
As the Admiral spoke, the metal buttons on his jacket began to glow with a strange blue light. There was a crackling, like static all around. Then a great blinding flash.
A hot-white bolt of lightning shot down from the black clouds and through the upheld sword in the Admiral’s hand. Spidery lines of electricity surged and cracked through the crowd of adults, and in one blink of a bit of a second, the puddle at their feet burned to a hissing white burst and the world was split by a deafening cannon crack.
The boys screamed and jumped and covered their faces, and Jonathan felt himself thrown off his block and onto his rear on the ground.
Then, all was still. Jonathan sat on the wet stone with his eyes squeezed shut and heard nothing.
Bit by bit, sounds came back. A fading rumble of thunder. The rain dripping on the walls and puddles of the prison. Gusts of wind whistling between the towers. Jonathan lowered his arms and blinked open his eyes.
Two boys still stood on their blocks. The rest were on the ground, like him. They were all looking at where the Admiral and his men had been standing a moment before.
The men were still there. But they all lay in a heap on the ground. Perfectly still. Rain pattered softly on their coats, their boots, their bare hands. The air reeked of steam and burning and electricity and lightning. No one moved.
Slowly—first one, then two, then all of them—the boys crept closer. Step by step they formed a cautious half circle around the pile of grown-ups. No one got too close. There was the Admiral, facedown, his hat on the ground and the sword still in his hand. There was Mr. Warwick, on his back, his one eye open and gaping up at the storm.
“Is he …” one of the boys started to say.
“Are they …” another began.
There was a crack of thunder and they all jumped, but no one stepped away. They hardly noticed the rain pouring down around them.
“Oh, man. Are they … dead?” It was Walter who finally managed to ask the question they were all wondering.
“We need to check,” the big kid named Tony said.
“How?” Sebastian asked breathlessly.
Colin took one step closer to the steaming bodies.
“Thomeone needth to check for a pulth.”
Sebastian nodded.
“Right. Do it, Colin.”
“Me? I don’t want—”
“Just do it, Colin. You’re closest.”
Colin stepped forward. He tiptoed between the bodies like he was afraid they’d wake up. He shied away from Mr. Warwick’s staring eye and reached down toward the Admiral. His hand stopped inches from the Admiral’s neck and he looked up at Sebastian with wide eyes.
“Do it,” Sebastian snapped.
Colin tucked the corners of his mouth into a frown and stretched down the last bit. He felt with his fingers past the Admiral’s collar, trying to find the neck. Jonathan cringed and braced himself, expecting the Admiral to leap up at any moment with a furious roar.
But there was no leaping. No fury. No roar.
Colin stood motionless for a moment, his eyes on the ground and his mouth still frowning and the fingers of one hand held to the soggy neck of the Admiral of Slabhenge. Then he blinked and looked up at the boys gathered at a fearful distance around him.
“He’th dead,” Colin whispered. “Dead ath a doornail.”
There was a moment of silence. Jonathan heard someone gulp. Colin realized he was still touching the dead Admiral and yanked his hand back and stood up straight.
“Are they all dead?” Tony asked.
“Check ’em, Colin,” Sebastian demanded.
“No way, Thebathtian. I did mine. Thomebody elth’th turn.” Colin hopped out from between the bodies and rejoined the group.
Sebastian grunted in frustration.
“Fine. Tony, you check those two,” he said, pointing at Mr. Warwick and another body. “Benny, those two. And … you, Johnny or whatever, you do those ones.” He pointed at Jonathan and then at Mr. Mongley and the man who’d bellowed out their names during Muster.
“It’s Jonathan, and I—”
“Whatever. Just do it. Now.”
Jonathan could tell that arguing wasn’t going to work. He wiped his hands on his pant legs and stepped forward.
He checked the roll caller first. The man’s eyes were closed, but his mouth was open. Steam was rising off his jacket. Jonathan pressed two fingers against the man’s neck. His fingers were half-numb from the cold. He pressed them in harder. It felt like touching a warm steak.
He felt nothing. He waited, quietly. Nothing.
He looked up. “Dead,” he said, and stepped over to Mr. Mongley. He heard Tony and Benny reporting the same thing from their dead grown-ups.
Without thinking or pausing, he shoved his fingers into Mr. Mongley’s throat. He remembered the man’s raspy, haunting breath. Raindrops were running down the old man’s bald, flaky scalp. His head was to the side, his eyes both open, staring at the distant gray wall. They were actually kind of a beautiful shade of blue. Jonathan gritted his teeth and tried not to throw up.
The man’s neck was still and pulseless.
“Mr. Mongley’s dead, too.”
He remembered the night before and his whispered conversation with Walter, before the bucket. Mongley hears everything, Walter had said. He looked up at Walter.
“Well,” Jonathan said hoarsely. “He’s not hearing anything now.”
Walter’s Adam’s apple bobbed in a dry swallow.
“Maybe he’th hearing the choirth of angelth thinging,” Colin offered.
Walter’s eyes were still on the dead man. He shook his head and frowned. “I seriously doubt that, man.”
Jonathan straightened up and stepped back into the quiet, watching circle.
“All the grown-ups are dead,” Tony said in a hollow, wondering voice.
“Is this all of them?” Jonathan asked, his voice rising. “There’s no one else inside? A janitor, or a guard, or something?”
Walter shook his head. “It was Morning Muster. This is all the grown-ups, man. The whole Slabhenge staff.”
“Why’d they all die?” Miguel asked.
“The Admiral was holding that sword,” Jonathan said.
“And they were all touching,” Sebastian added.
“Thtanding in that puddle,” Colin finished.
Tony sniffed and looked back at the stone blocks they’d been balancing on when the lightning struck.
“We were on the blocks, up out of the puddles,” he said in a trembling voice. “We’d all be dead, too, if we’d-a been standing on the ground.”
Jonathan looked at Mr. Warwick’s one glassy, dead eye staring sightlessly up at the storm clouds. “Which we weren’t, thank the devil,” he whispered.
There was a sudden, gusting blast of wind that whipped their hair and clothes around. Thunder cracked and the somber scene of wet children looking at a pile of dead bodies was lit by a long flash of lightning. The rain doubled in strength, rolling up to a real downpour. Suddenly, they each seemed to realize that they themselves were now standing together in a puddle, with the lightning still flashing. One by one, and then all at once, without anyone saying anything, they scurried over to the cover of the big gated doorway that led out to the boat landing. It was cold in the shadows of the stone archway, but it was out of the wind and rain and, most important, the bolts of lightning that darted across the sky.
They huddled together in the near-darkness, looking out at the corpses getting soggy in the courtyard. A couple of the smaller kids
were crying. Not because they were sad, Jonathan thought, just scared.
“We’re in so much trouble,” Benny said.
“What?” Sebastian’s voice was harsh and scornful. “What for? We didn’t do anything!”
“Still,” Miguel said. “Here we are. You know, us … the ‘scabs’ and all that. And all the grown-ups end up dead? I mean, my folks sent me here just for skipping school a few times, you know? I’m definitely gonna get grounded for at least a week for this when I get home.”
His last word hung in the air between them. The wind couldn’t blow it away. Home. It dawned on them at the same time.
“We get to go home,” Walter said quietly.
“We get to go home,” another kid echoed.
“We get to go home!” two or three kids cried. Someone cheered. A few kids clapped. Jonathan bit his bottom lip and frowned. Sebastian cracked his knuckles and furrowed his brow.
“When do we go?” Tony asked. “Can we call now? The police?”
“There’s no telephone, idiot,” Sebastian said under his breath. He turned his head so that everyone could hear him. “There’s no telephone, remember? No one’s going home yet.” He looked out at the bodies, his eyes narrowed, and he said it again more quietly. “No one’s going home yet.”
“Well … when can we go?” Tony asked again. “When’s the next boat coming?”
They all looked at Benny.
“You worked in his office, Benny. You know the schedule best,” a tall, skinny kid with red hair said. Jonathan remembered from Morning Muster that his name was Gerald.
Benny still had his eyes glued to his boss’s body. He shook his head.
“Uh, well, today’s Tuesday, right? There’s no food drop-off or garbage pickup ’til Thursday. No new students are registered to come that I know of. So today would just be Patrick coming on the mail run.”
“When’s that?”
“Just before lunch, usually. Like ten thirty.”
“All right,” Walter said. “A couple hours. That’s it. Then we tell that mail guy what happened and he sends a bigger boat out and then we’re all outta here.” A couple boys clapped again.
Scar Island Page 4
