Scar Island

by Dan Gemeinhart

  Jonathan followed the light of Colin’s candle through the hallways. The water was above their ankles. They arrived panting at the stairs that led down past the Hatch. The water was much higher now than it had been when Jonathan came before. It was rising and falling and swirling, lapping at the very top step. It would be a longer swim this time. And now he had a rat.

  “What do we do?”

  “We swim, Colin. That’s how I got through. Just a quick dip, down and then up again. No big deal.”

  “What about the candle?”

  “Don’t worry about it. There’s a lit lantern on the other side. Just take a deep breath.”

  Jonathan handed Ninety-Nine over before Colin could think to push it away. He dropped Moby-Dick with a splash at his feet.

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Jonathan said. He tucked his shirt into his pants tightly, then unbuttoned the top two buttons. Taking the rat back from Colin, he slid him into his shirt against his bare skin. He rebuttoned his shirt. The rat scratched and writhed against his body, squeaking and squirming.

  “Come on. Before he chews through my stomach.”

  Without thinking Jonathan dove headfirst, pushing off the top step as hard as he could to rocket himself through the water. As soon as the cold water hit them, Ninety-Nine went crazy. He tore and fought and twisted. Jonathan gritted his teeth and swam as hard as he could, pawing and kicking at the black water. He didn’t slow down when an upwelling of water pressed him against the ceiling. He didn’t slow when the rat’s teeth sank into his skin. He didn’t slow when he saw, through the salty murk, the glow of lantern light up ahead. He didn’t slow until his feet found the far stairs and his head broke into air and he stepped up out of the water.

  He climbed a few steps up. Ninety-Nine was shaking and coughing inside his shirt. He struggled weakly against the wet fabric. Jonathan unbuttoned his shirt and pulled the bedraggled rat out. Ninety-Nine coughed up some water and then slowly crawled back up to Jonathan’s shoulder, his body shaking. Jonathan gave him a reassuring scratch.

  Colin’s head popped up into the stairwell, gasping for air. Jonathan helped him up the slippery stairs, pulling the lantern from the hook.

  They stood panting, eyes on the dark water they’d emerged from.

  “Well,” Colin gasped. “That wathn’t tho—”

  His words were cut off by a wrenching, grating crack from below the water’s surface. A great rush of huge bubbles rose to the surface, and with a sickening whoosh, the water began to rise more quickly. So quickly they could see it climbing and racing up the stairs in a rapid, steady surge.

  “What happened?” Colin cried, stumbling backward up the stairs.

  “I don’t know! I think something else just broke open! We gotta go!”

  The water rose up the stairs faster than they could climb, nearly overtaking them before they reached the top. By the time they broke out into the hallway, the water was a surging wave that came nearly to their waists.

  Together they ran through the familiar hallways they both knew, winding back toward the dining room. The dark wall of water gurgled just behind them, slurping at the walls and sloshing around corners. Ninety-Nine clung to Jonathan’s shoulders with a firm grip of his claws. His tail slapped on Jonathan’s back as they ran.

  They burst into the dining room just ahead of the wave.

  They almost ran into Sebastian and the rest of the boys. They were all crowded around the door, holding lanterns and candles. Sebastian was at the front, his sword out in front of him and a coil of rope thrown over his shoulder, a dark look on his face.

  The wave of water was slowed when it hit the narrow doorway. It crested and poured into the dining room, a frothy white head of bubbles at its top. Colin and Jonathan braced themselves as it hit their backs. Some of the boys who weren’t ready were knocked off their feet and sent tumbling head over heels in the water.

  The water pouring in from the doorway leveled out as the water in the room rose, until it all stood flat, above their knees. And still slowly rising. The boys regathered themselves, coughing and rubbing the water out of their eyes.

  Sebastian had never lost his footing. He still stood with his sword, eyes on Jonathan.

  “We were just about to leave,” he said.

  “Where were you guys going?”

  Sebastian looked him in the eye.

  “We were coming to find you.”

  “Really?”

  Sebastian shrugged and nodded.

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh. Thanks.”

  Sebastian shrugged again, then squinted and looked closer at Jonathan. “Jesus! What is that thing on your shoulder?”

  “It’s a rat. Don’t worry about it. We gotta go. Quick. Or we’re all gonna die.”

  “Go where?”

  “To the lighthouse.”

  “What lighthouse?”

  “I’ll explain as we go. We’ve gotta move.”

  Jonathan started to brush past him, but Sebastian put a hand out and stopped him. Forcefully.

  “Easy, Johnny. I didn’t want to get blamed for you dying. Doesn’t mean I want you in charge. We decided to stay here, where it’s safe.”

  “It isn’t safe here, Sebastian. This whole place is going under. The water’s rising. And the island is sinking. We’ve got to go. Up.”

  “Up? It’s safer down here,” Sebastian insisted.

  “What if the tower blows over?” Gerald asked.

  “What if lightning hits it?” Francis demanded.

  “Going up is our only choice!” Jonathan insisted. “It’s the only way to save ourselves.”

  “You can’t trust him!” Benny’s voice was ugly and hissing. “You know what he’s here for!”

  Lightning flashed through the windows. The wind was a roar, swirling around them. Jonathan saw the boys’ faces harden at Benny’s words, saw the doubt flicker in their eyes.

  “You’re wrong, Benny!” Jonathan said, his voice rising with the pounding of his heart and the raging of the storm. “You can trust me! My sister … she … she did die in a fire, and … but …” Jonathan stopped, his voice choked by tears.

  “But you didn’t thtart it,” Colin finished. “Did you?”

  “Stop it, Colin,” Jonathan said.

  But Colin didn’t stop.

  “You told me, Jonathan. You told me she took your matcheth.”

  Jonathan swallowed. Took a choking breath. He looked into Colin’s face. Colin’s eyes widened.

  “Oh,” he breathed. “It wath her, wathn’t it? Your thithter thtarted the fire.”

  “Shut up, Colin.”

  “And you took the blame. You let them think it wath you. Becauth—”

  “Because it’s my fault!” Jonathan interrupted, shouting. “They were my matches! She learned from me!” Jonathan’s voice broke off, his shoulders shaking with sobs. Ninety-Nine’s claws dug in harder to stay on. Jonathan closed his eyes against his tears and lowered his head. “It’s my fault.”

  He heard, through the storm and his own sadness, the sound of someone splashing toward him. Two hands, gentle as birds, came to rest on his arm. They worked at the buttons of his sleeves, then pulled the fabric up to his elbows. Jonathan didn’t fight.

  “How did you get the thcars?” Colin asked.

  Jonathan didn’t answer.

  “How did you get the thcars?” Colin asked again. Then, in a whisper so low only Jonathan could hear it, he added, “Tell them, Jonathan. If you tell them, they’ll believe you. They’ll follow you. You can thave them.”

  Jonathan took one breath. Then two. He opened his eyes. He lifted his head.

  “I didn’t start the fire,” he said. The words came out scratchy and faint. He cleared his throat and started again, his voice ringing clear into the faces of the lost boys around him, and into his own ears. “I didn’t start the fire. I woke up. And I heard her screaming. And I ran downstairs. But … the fire was too big. Too hot. I couldn’t get to her. I tried. I
tried so hard.” He held up his arms. The scar tissue, twisted and tough, flashed whitely in the lightning. “I tried until the firefighters got there and dragged me away. I did everything I could to save her.” He realized he was shouting, as much to himself as to the watching boys. “I did everything I could!”

  Tears joined the seawater on his face. Warm tears, clean and true.

  Walter walked up to him and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “It’s okay, man,” he said. “It’s okay.”

  Jonathan took a long, steadying breath. He nodded a thank-you to Walter, and to Colin. Then he looked up at all the other boys. The Scars.

  “We’ve got to get to the only part of this place that’s built on rock. The only part that isn’t going to wash away. We’ve got to get to the old lighthouse.”

  His words hung like a tattered flag in the windswept room.

  “He’s telling the truth,” a deep voice interjected. They all turned and looked to where Patrick sat, still tied to his chair but now atop one of the dining room tables. “About the lighthouse. There did used to be one here. Going way back now, to the old sailing days. It’s built on the stones, indeed.”

  Jonathan looked at Sebastian.

  “We need to go, Sebastian.”

  Sebastian’s jaw was clenched. His chest was heaving with shallow breaths. He looked down to the water around his thighs, then up at Patrick.

  “What about your boat?” he asked.

  Patrick shook his head.

  “No way. Too late for that. I barely made it out here, and the storm’s only gotten stronger.”

  Sebastian bit at his lip. His eyes cut to Jonathan. He nodded.

  Jonathan blew out a deep breath. He nodded back. Then he turned to Roger and Gregory.

  “Cut him loose,” he said. “And all of you, follow me.”

  Without waiting for an answer, Jonathan waded through the waist-deep water past Sebastian, past the waiting boys, toward the staircase that led up toward Sebastian’s room. The Admiral’s room. The lighthouse.

  Colin followed him. Ninety-Nine clung to Jonathan’s shoulder.

  When he got to the stairwell, he stopped and turned. The boys were filing after him. All of them. They looked lost and frightened in the raging wind and the flashbulb lightning. They were drenched and exhausted and terrified. They needed to be saved.

  Sebastian was up on the table. Sawing at Patrick’s ropes with his sword. He didn’t look terrifying. He looked like a confused kid, finding his way through the dark.

  Jonathan felt something bump him, and looked down. It was a piece of the ruined Sinner’s Sorrow, bobbing in the water. Several more pieces floated around him. He picked up a piece.

  “Everyone grab a piece,” he said. “We’re gonna need the wood.”

  The storm was like a beast hammering at Slabhenge. Even running up the stone stairwell, they could hear it outside, through the walls, howling to be let in.

  Jonathan ran past the doors to the grown-ups’ rooms, past the locked door to the Admiral’s office, to the far, dark end of the hall. The end of the hallway was a curved wall, crumbling with age. It was made of a different stone than the rest of Slabhenge. Bigger blocks of grayer rock, rock that looked even older than the rock Jonathan had grown used to being surrounded by.

  In the curved wall of ancient stone was a door made of tremendously thick slats of dark wood bound together with rusty iron. The door looked like it hadn’t been opened in years. Instead of a knob, it simply had a metal latch, like a pirate’s treasure chest, that connected to a bolt on the stone wall. Jonathan yanked on the latch, and it opened with a protesting creak of rusty metal that had been wet and unused for too long. He pushed on the door and it swung slowly open.

  Beyond the door was a round stairwell, leading up in one direction and down in the other. Its walls and stairs were made of the same gray rock. The air smelled stale. Dusty. Forgotten. It was even colder in the stairwell than it was in the rest of the school.

  The boys piled up behind Jonathan.

  “Up,” he said. “We’ve got to go up.”

  They raced up the stairs, taking them two at a time. Round and round the stairwell spiraled, up and up through dank darkness, with all the dark world raging outside the walls.

  Jonathan reached the top breathless. Colin was behind him, then the rest. Sebastian was the last, behind Patrick.

  The top of the tower was a round room. On all sides were windows, sturdy double-paned glass crisscrossed by metal bars. The lightning filled the sky all around them. They were surrounded by the storm, teetering in the angry heavens. On all sides were windows to the black clouds and whipping wind and sideways rain.

  In the middle of the room, on a raised stone landing, was a great black iron bowl, big enough for Jonathan to have stretched out and lain down in. A massive curved mirror stood on the far side of the bowl, mounted on a mechanism of gears and bars and wheels that circled the bowl. To Jonathan’s right was a large metal handle.

  “The lighthouse,” Jonathan whispered. “Just like he said.”

  The boys stood in silence, looking out the windows at the hurricane that raged all around them, inches away. It was almost deafening.

  They could see all of Slabhenge when the lightning flashed. The courtyard, flooded now halfway up the windows into the dining room. The boat still rocked between the walls.

  They could see the roof that covered the rest of the school, rising and falling with the confusing ramblings of the mazelike building. They could see the other towers poking stubbornly up into the black skies.

  “Look!” Miguel shouted over the storm. “Look at the towers!”

  They all crowded to the windows.

  “What?”

  “What about them?”

  “There’s only three! One’s missing!”

  They all looked and saw it then. The far tower was gone. Simply gone. They could see where the stone walls led to the space that it should occupy, but the walls stopped in a jagged, sawtooth break. A loose pile of stones was all that remained of the tower, avalanching down into the white-capped sea.

  Jonathan looked at Colin. Colin was staring at the pile of rubble with wide eyes. It was Colin’s tower. The tower with his mattress and his papers and his three lonely candlesticks. Somewhere among those waves bobbed dozens of white paper cranes. And a few shiny gold chocolate wrappers.

  “There! Look at the gate!”

  They all spun back to the courtyard with its ghostly boat. The far side, with the watery stairs and the gate through which they had all entered Slabhenge, was crumbling before their eyes. The arch above the gate crashed into the water with a massive splash. The gigantic waves poured relentlessly through the gap, pushing and pulling at the hundred-year-old walls. They fell apart, stone block by stone block, as the water coursed through. Soon the whole wall was gone, a heaped mound of stones just below the water’s surface. The courtyard was left with walls on only three sides.

  With the one wall gone, the waves rushed unhindered into the courtyard, rising above the level of the dining room windows. It wouldn’t be long before the rest of the walls succumbed to the ravenous, storm-fueled waters of the sea.

  “The whole dining room’s under now,” Walter said, his voice hollow with shock.

  “The kitchen,” Tony said.

  “The freezer,” David added. They all stood and stared.

  “We should light the lighthouse,” Jonathan said, watching Slabhenge fall apart. No one heard him over the wind and the thunder and their own openmouthed amazement.

  “We should light the lighthouse!” Jonathan shouted, and stricken faces turned toward him.

  “Why?”

  “So they know we’re here!” he answered. “So they send help!” He looked into Colin’s eyes, then Walter’s, then Patrick’s. “I want to go home.” His voice cracked at the end and got lost in the mad confusion of noise. He said it again, from the bottom of his lungs. “I want to go home!”

  “If ye lig
ht it, they’ll know to come!” Patrick yelled from behind them. “When they can, anyway! This old thing ain’t been fired up since before I was born! They’ll notice it for sure, and they’ll know to come!”

  Jonathan ran to a large wooden bin that lined one of the walls and threw open the lid with all his strength.

  Inside, neatly stacked, were rows of split logs. Firewood. Stowed, dry and safe. By a man who began as a madhouse baby and ended as a forgotten librarian. In between, though, he was a lighthouse keeper.

  “We need paper!” he shouted, turning to face the group.

  “The school office is underwater by now!” Benny yelled back.

  “What about the Admiral’s room?”

  They all looked at Sebastian. He shook his head.

  “None in there! He didn’t even have a book!”

  Jonathan’s mind flashed. “The Admiral’s office!”

  “It’s locked, remember?”

  Jonathan smiled. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the rusty metal key that had fallen out of the dead Admiral’s jacket. Sebastian’s mouth dropped open.

  “Come on,” Jonathan said to him, tossing his piece of the Sinner’s Sorrow into the great iron bowl. “The rest of you, get the wood in the fire pit!” He took the lantern from Colin, then pulled Ninety-Nine gently from his shoulder and handed him to Colin. Colin grimaced and held him with two hands, out away from his body.

  Jonathan and Sebastian ran back down the lighthouse stairs. When they got to the old door, Jonathan swore.

  There was an inch of water running like a river down the stairwell, pouring in from the hallway. The water was even higher than he’d imagined. It was already to the second story.

  “We’ve gotta hurry,” he said to Sebastian. “This whole place is gonna fill up and fall down.”

  They bolted down the hall, their feet splashing through the rushing water. At the door to the Admiral’s office, Jonathan held the lantern up and stabbed the key into the lock. It clicked into place. Then turned. He shouldered the door open and they ran inside. The water rushed in with them.

  The office was lost in shadows, but Jonathan remembered it vividly from that first, awful night. The Admiral’s sneering voice, his demonic eyebrows. The pain of the Sinner’s Sorrow. The letter home, full of lies. The Admiral’s acidic words as he’d read Jonathan’s paperwork: You have done terrible things, haven’t you, Jonathan Grisby?