He was almost jogging when he turned the last corner and stumbled, blinking, into the light of the dining room, so bright after the blackness of twisting stone and shadow.
“There he is!” he heard Sebastian’s voice bark. He squinted and saw the older boy standing on a chair with the sword pointed right at him. “Grab him!”
Rough hands grabbed him by both arms and dragged him over to a chair in the middle of the dining room. Sebastian stood before him, his face white with anger. His eyes glittered like twin flames.
“Where were you, Johnny? His hideout?”
“What are you talking about?”
“What were you two doing? Giggling and shoving them in your mouth as fast as you could?”
Jonathan looked desperately around at the other faces. They all looked nervous. Walter held his hands up in a little shrug and crinkled his eyebrows sympathetically.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Sebastian, really—”
“Oh, cut the crap, Johnny. I know you were with him. Tell us where he is. Or it’s gonna get ugly.”
Jonathan opened his mouth to argue. Then closed it. He looked steadily into Sebastian’s eyes. “What happened?”
“Like you don’t know!”
Jonathan kept his voice calm. “What happened?”
“Fine. Let’s all play a little game of pretend with Johnny.” A rotten, ugly half smile rose to Sebastian’s face. “We’re all eating lunch. You, too. And somehow, while we’re all down here, all the chocolates just—disappear! All my chocolates. And I find this in the basket.” Sebastian fished in his pocket and pulled something out and threw it on the ground at Jonathan’s feet.
It was a little paper crane. Carefully folded. And all crumpled up.
“And I come back down here and, surprise, Johnny’s gone! And what do we find under his pillow?” Sebastian rummaged through his other pocket and threw something else to the floor. Without looking, Jonathan knew it was his parents’ letter, folded neatly into a perfect bird.
“So, Johnny, you tell me … how stupid do you think I am?”
Jonathan looked back and forth between the two paper cranes, then back up at Sebastian.
“I don’t think you’re stupid. I think you’re mad. And I think you’re right. Colin took your chocolates. I know you’re right. But I don’t know where he is. That’s the truth.”
“You already told me that if you did know, you wouldn’t tell me.”
Jonathan nodded and pinched his top lip between his teeth. He looked away, out the window at the storm clouds piled atop one another above Slabhenge’s crumbling walls.
“Yeah. And I wouldn’t.” Then he looked at Sebastian. “I won’t. But I haven’t seen him. I promise.”
Sebastian licked the angry spittle from his lips. He blinked and blew out a breath and looked away. He opened his mouth to say something, but Benny butted in first.
“You can’t trust him, Sebastian.”
Jonathan’s hands balled into anxious fists. He didn’t like the eager edge to Benny’s voice. The way his eyes were shining and his mouth opened and closed. Like a snake coiled and about to strike.
“Shut up, Benny, I—” Sebastian started to say.
“You can’t trust him,” Benny said again. “I know why he’s here.”
Sebastian’s head turned slowly to look at Benny. His eyebrows scrunched together.
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t,” Jonathan said quietly, his eyes locked on Benny’s.
“I peeked at his papers. In the Admiral’s office, when he first got here,” Benny said. His eyes stayed with Jonathan. The corners of his pudgy mouth teased toward a smile. “You can’t trust him, Sebastian. Do you know what he did?”
“Don’t,” Jonathan pleaded again. He rubbed at his arms with his hands.
“What?” Sebastian asked. The whole room hung in waiting silence. Only the windows shook and spoke, straining to hold back the storm that fought to rush inside.
“I know why he doesn’t like fire,” Benny said, his smile ripening into a sickening sneer.
Jonathan shook his head.
“Little Johnny here,” Benny said, savoring every bloody word like a vampire, “is a murderer.”
Jonathan’s jaw clenched down to steel.
“No,” he said through his teeth.
“Oh, yes. A murderer. And do you know who he killed?”
Jonathan tried to stand up, but hard hands on his shoulders held him down.
“You shut up,” he said, his voice cracking. Already, Benny was blurred, standing before him.
“He murdered his little sister. Sophia. Set a fire and burned their house down, with her trapped inside.”
“Shut up!” Jonathan screamed, fighting at the hands that held him down.
“It’s true!” Benny shouted back, stepping toward him. “Show them your arms!”
“No!” Jonathan howled. “Don’t!”
“Pull back his sleeves! Look at his arms!” Benny crowed.
Jonathan, totally blinded now by his tears, felt his sleeves yanked back to his elbows. The room gasped, then hushed. The hands let him go. He closed his eyes, his body racked by sobs.
“God,” Sebastian said. His voice was hollow, shocked.
“No,” Jonathan tried to say, but he wasn’t sure his voice made it through his choked throat.
He rubbed at his sightless eyes with his arms, forgetting that his sleeves were pulled up. The scarred and hardened tissue of his burns and scars scraped roughly on his face.
“Leave me alone,” he managed to gasp, his voice echoing in the still chamber. “You don’t know how much I loved her. How much I love her.” But he couldn’t tell anymore what he was saying from what he was merely feeling. It could have been that the words he meant to say only echoed, unheard, in the dank dungeon of his harrowed heart.
“I saw,” Benny said, his voice low and stained with a stinking smile. “I saw the psychiatrist’s report about your therapy. About your guilt over the burning death of your sister. I saw the doctor’s report about your burns. And I saw your sentencing papers. For arson.”
Jonathan just shook his head and kept his eyes closed.
“God,” Sebastian said again, his voice dripping with disgust. “You’re a freak. No wonder you want to stay here.”
The windows shivered in their panes. The cold and endless dripping of water filled the edges of the silence.
“You better tell us,” Sebastian said. “I want him back. He’s a rat.”
“I don’t know where he is,” Jonathan sniffed.
“Fine. Whatever. But you’ll find out. He’ll try to talk to you. And then you’ll hand him over.”
Sebastian turned and walked back toward the stairs that led to his room. His feet sloshed slowly from one puddle to the next. The tip of the sword dragged with a jagged scrape along the stone floor. He stopped at the bottom stair.
“You have until tomorrow night. If you don’t give him to us by then, you have to go after him. And you can’t come back without him. You can starve out there with him and the other rats.” Sebastian coughed out a nasty little laugh. “The freak and the rat. Best friends in the nuthouse.”
His steps receded up the staircase.
Everyone else stood in damp quiet.
Then, one by one, they turned and walked away. Walter was the last to go. He took a small step toward Jonathan, his eyes wide, and then stopped. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something. But then he shook his head and turned away, leaving Jonathan sitting alone in the hard chair, tears running unwiped down his face like the rain on the dark windows, his horrible scars exposed.
Jonathan didn’t take the turn that would bring him down past the Hatch and up to the library. He walked right by it, moving slow to protect his candle’s fragile flame. He didn’t have any matches. There hadn’t been a chance to grab a lantern. The thin white candle was the only light he had.
He pressed forward through the darkn
ess, stopping from time to time to listen. All he ever heard, besides his breathing and the ever-present dripping, was the papery scrape of tiny claws on wet stone.
“Colin?” he whisper-shouted. His voice came back to him in damp echoes. There was no answer.
He climbed a short staircase, then descended a longer, spiral one. He passed a narrow window set high in the wall. There was no glass—just a narrow, tombstone-shaped opening in the wall, a couple of feet tall. The wind blew spatters of icy rain into the passageway. Jonathan had to stand on the tips of his toes to peer out at the ocean that surrounded them. Dark clouds were stacked and heaped to the horizon, just as they had been since he arrived. They looked grimmer now, though, more threatening. Like they were coming for him. The waves jostled and crowded one another like an angry mob storming Slabhenge Castle.
He kept going, leaving the gray light of the window behind, returning to the world of claw scrapes and candlelight.
“Colin?”
He turned a sharp corner into a hallway that was narrower, tight. He passed one door, closed and silent. Then another. Then one that hung open, the door dangling from a single broken hinge; the room behind it was small and dark and empty. Inside was only a broken chair and some empty bottles littered on the floor.
The fourth door was closed and Jonathan was just past it when something caught his eye. Something small and white on the floor, barely within the reach of his candle’s wavering light. He stopped and bent down.
It was a paper crane. Tiny. Not much bigger than a marble.
Jonathan smiled and stood up. He pushed the door open with an echoing creak.
Beyond was a steep, skinny staircase that circled up into shadows. Jonathan walked up it, letting the door swing closed behind him.
It was a long staircase, rising in a tight spiral. Up and up and up until Jonathan knew that he wasn’t just climbing a staircase; he was climbing one of Slabhenge’s towers.
At the top was another door, open just an inch. He pressed his hand against the knotty wood and pushed the door open.
The room was perfectly round, with a high, coned ceiling. In the middle was a thin mattress covered in a rumpled pile of blankets. On the far side of the room, Colin sat in a straight-backed chair, looking out a round window.
He turned and gave Jonathan one of his short-lived smiles.
“You found my little bird,” he said.
“Yeah.” Jonathan stepped into the room. It had four circular windows, one looking in each direction. The glass was broken out of one of them. There was a puddle of rainwater on the floor beneath it. A chilled wet breeze spun through the room.
Colin shivered.
“There’th a thtorm coming.”
“Probably.”
“Definitely.”
Jonathan crossed over to one of the windows. It looked inward to Slabhenge, down onto the courtyard. He could see Tony and Miguel halfheartedly kicking the ball back and forth. They looked small and far away. They looked like little kids.
“Do you want a chocolate?” Colin asked.
Jonathan looked at him and smiled. Colin smiled back.
“No, thanks. He’ll probably check my breath when I get back.”
Colin’s smile widened.
“He’th pretty mad, huh?”
Jonathan’s smile dropped away.
“More than pretty mad, Colin. You need to be careful. You shouldn’t sneak down anymore. I—don’t know what he’ll do to you.”
Colin shrugged.
“I’m careful. Everyone is athleep when I come down. Or eating. And I know all the wayth to ethcape now.”
“What do you mean?”
Colin’s eyes widened and an excited smile spread across his face.
“Thith plathe ith really amathing. All the hallth and stairth and roomth are connected. There are almotht no dead endth. It’th like an anthill. All turnth and loopth and thircleth. And I know it. Or motht of it. He’d never catch me.”
Jonathan shook his head.
“Don’t risk it, Colin. You can’t let him catch you. He’s kind of … losing it, I think. And I can’t …” Jonathan’s voice broke off. He frowned and bit his lip. “I can’t protect you anymore. He won’t listen to me now.”
Colin tilted his head and blinked.
“What happened?” he asked. Jonathan looked away, out the window, then back to Colin.
“They think I know where you are. Well, they thought I knew where you were. And Benny … Benny told them some stuff.”
“What? What did he thay?”
Jonathan swallowed and took a deep breath.
“He said that he’d looked through my paperwork. He showed them my—my scars.” Jonathan rubbed at his arms. “He told them I was sent here for … for … murdering my little sister. Sophia.” Jonathan’s voice caught when he said the name. His breaths were fast and shallow and they burned in his throat. His voice scratched down into a whisper. “He told them I started a fire. And that she died. He told them I killed my little sister.” Tears, as hot as the rain was cold, dropped from his eyes and down his cheeks.
Colin frowned. His eyes squinted into Jonathan’s face.
“It ithn’t true, though,” he said.
Jonathan’s throat tightened like a punch-ready fist. His eyes burned like deadly fire. He ripped a ragged breath from his lungs and looked away.
“Oh,” Colin said, his voice a breathless whisper. “It ith true.”
Jonathan rubbed at his tears with his wrist. He looked away, through his tears, out the window at the storm.
“Tell me, Jonathan,” Colin said softly. “Tell me what happened.”
Jonathan wiped at his face with a sleeve. “It doesn’t matter.”
Colin stood up and walked over to where Jonathan stood.
“It doth. It doth matter. Tell me.”
Jonathan took a shuddering lungful of air. His teeth chattered when he exhaled.
“I … I … used to start fires. I don’t know why. I don’t even remember how it started. I liked to … watch the flames. Watch them grow. See something that I’d built get hot and bright and alive. I don’t know.” He looked up, for just a second, into Colin’s eyes, then away again quickly.
“Little ones at first, then bigger. Then I set one at school. In the bathroom. But I got caught running away. I got in big trouble. Parents called in, kicked out of school, the whole thing. It was awful. I didn’t start a fire for a while. And then … and then …” He stopped, the words stuck in his throat like ash. His teeth clenched hard and with one deep breath through his nose, he plunged forward.
“And then I started again. Small ones. In wastebaskets. At night, when everyone was sleeping. Sophia caught me. She was so mad. She was afraid I was gonna get in trouble again. She made me promise not to do it ever again. She … she even took the matches I had.” Jonathan’s voice got smaller and smaller as he spoke. He wanted to walk away, to slam the door, to retreat to the shadows with his raging. But Colin still stood there with his listening eyes before the storm-darkened window, and Jonathan’s words stumbled on.
“And then. That night. It was … like a nightmare. The smoke. The flames climbing up the walls. So much smoke. I wanted to run. And then I heard her. Downstairs. Screaming my name. And the fire was just so hot. Growing so fast.” He looked up through burning, blurry eyes. “It was like a monster, Colin. It was roaring.” His voice was cut off by a choking sob. “I could hear her. But I couldn’t save her. And she died in the fire. Screaming for me to save her.”
Colin swallowed, his own eyes full, his fingers tugging at the skin of his neck.
“That’th why. Why you were on the Thinner’th Thorrow. You think it’th your fault.”
“It is my fault!” Jonathan shouted, his voice hoarse and raw. “I killed my sister! I let her die!”
Colin took a step closer.
“Jonathan,” he said. “It wath an acthident. Jutht a terrible acthident.”
Jonathan shook his head angrily an
d wiped the tears out of his eyes with his wrist.
“My parents say the same thing. That it was an accident. That it wasn’t my fault. How much they love me.” He looked up into Colin’s eyes. “But I can still hear her screaming, Colin. Screaming for me. It shouldn’t be me at home with them. It should be Sophia.” He took a shaky, broken breath. “I’m probably the only one of all of us that actually deserves to be here.”
There was a moment of nothing but wind and the smell of rain and, somewhere out on the darkness of the sea, a low rumble of thunder.
Then Colin’s thoughtful eyes narrowed.
“But … how did you get the thcars?” he asked.
Jonathan sniffed and cleared his throat and took a step away.
“I better go. Sebastian’ll be getting suspicious. And you need to stay out of the way, Colin. Don’t let him catch you.”
Colin squinted and bit his lip. He seemed about to say something, then stopped. He nodded, once. Then he asked, “Are you going to be okay?”
“I’ll be fine.”
Jonathan opened the door and put his foot on the top step.
“Don’t you think they mith you?”
Jonathan stopped. He didn’t have to ask who Colin was talking about.
“You’re the only one who geth a letter every thingle day. Don’t you think they mith you? Don’t you think lothing one of their children wath enough?”
Jonathan’s eyebrows frowned. He chewed on his lip.
“Don’t you mith them? Don’t you mith home?”
Jonathan didn’t turn around. When he answered, his voice echoed down the winding staircase.
“I do,” he said, incredibly softly. Like a secret he was keeping from himself. “I do.” He focused his eyes on the flame clutched in his hand.
“I went every day to Sophia’s grave and put a flower on it. Every single day. She loved flowers. My parents promised that they’d do it for me while I was gone.”
He closed his eyes, then opened them and looked back at Colin. His eyes took in the stone floor, the stone walls, the puddle and the shadows.
Scar Island Page 13
