Scar Island(22)

The light went out, plunging Jonathan into absolute, eye-choking darkness.





Jonathan crouched on his hands and knees, panting in the blackness. He’d never seen such darkness before, so total and suffocating. Down in the deepest dungeon, pinned beneath a prison of dark stone, there was hardly even the memory of light. His eyes gasped like the mouth of a fish yanked out of the water. They found no light to breathe.

He waited for arms to wrap around his waist, long scaly fingers to close around his throat, teeth to pierce his shaking flesh. But one panicked breath passed. Then another.

All there was was complete darkness and the sound of his fear-gasping lungs and the same rhythmic watery thuds and sloshes of the Hatch. The stone under his hands was moist and clammy. The frigid, hard floor began to hurt his knees. His racing heart began to slow down, just enough for him to start to think. He tried to slow his lungs down.

He felt with his hands and found the lantern. The glass was broken and he shook and tapped it, but he knew that restarting it in the dark was impossible.

He was lost. In the dungeon of an asylum. In total darkness. With a skull. He couldn’t help but wonder where the rest of the body was.

“Crap,” he whispered, and tried not to freak out. Still on his hands and knees, he turned around and started crawling up the stairs, away from the Hatch, his hands feeling through the inky black mystery in front of him.

He found the steep stairs and tumbled up them, bumping his knees and knocking his elbow on the stone wall. Behind him, the Hatch rumbled and chomped. He scrambled faster, climbing up the staircase to the landing. He tripped on the last step and fell, twisting onto his back. Something scrabbled away from him in the darkness on sharp claws. It sounded big.

Gasping, he jumped to his feet and felt around for the walls. His breaths came fast and shallow. His heartbeat drummed in his head. He staggered with his hands reaching out in front of him like a blind man, until his foot hit a stair and he fell again onto brutal stone. With the Hatch behind him thumping as loudly as his heart in his ears, he raced up them in a stumbling crawl. He got to the top and felt a corner, a turn, and he shuffled with feeling fingers around it. The noise of the Hatch got quieter. He kept one hand on the wall to his right and fumbled down a long corridor until he could no longer hear the Hatch at all. He was still in absolute blackness, his eyes blinking and rolling and seeing nothing.

He stopped for a moment to catch his breath and calm down, leaning against the wet stone wall. He dropped his head against the wall and sucked in great gasps of the musty air and blew it out through round lips until his lungs weren’t heaving and his heart was merely pumping and not pounding.

Then he remembered: the rope! He’d never ducked under or run into the rope stretched across the top of the stairwell. Which could mean only one thing: He’d gone the wrong way. After his spinning fall on the landing, he must have stumbled up the wrong staircase, the one that had led in the opposite direction of the one he and Walter and Colin had come down.

He gulped and his breath started speeding up again. He’d have to backtrack, back down past the seething Hatch.

Or go forward. Into darkness and mystery and unexplored passages.

Behind him, dimly, he heard a sharp bang and grumble. The Hatch. It was just a door. A rusty, wet door of ancient iron that held something back. But for some reason, Jonathan felt like it was waiting for him. Hungry, in the dark.

He clenched his teeth and took a step forward.

The corridor was straight for a while, ten or fifteen steps. His fingers found one doorway, closed with a wooden door so rotten it crumbled under his fingertips, but he continued past it. At the end of the straightaway, the hall turned in a sharp L to the right, and Jonathan scooted around the corner. He stopped and listened, hoping to hear the voices of the other boys or even the sound of the ocean, which would mean a window or a door to the outside. But there was only the always-and-everywhere sound of water dripping, and his own echoey breaths, and the occasional distant scratching of claws in the dark.

He took a step forward and the world was gone. His foot found only air beneath it and he tried to catch himself on the wall, but there was no grip on the slimy surface and he fell forward with a scream.

Dank air whistled past his face. He thrust his arms desperately out in front of him and then he slammed with horrible force onto a down staircase, the edges of the stairs like sharpened fists hammering his body. He slid and rolled and bounced down the stairs, each stair yanking a grunt or a groan from him.

At the bottom, gasping in blackness, he lay with his cheek in a cold puddle and felt each pain and pulse in his body. He flexed his fingers. Wiggled his toes. Bent his knees and elbows.

“Nothing’s broken,” he said out loud. His voice sounded small and alone in all that empty darkness. There was the rusty taste of blood in his mouth.

He was just pushing himself up to his hands and knees when he saw it. He froze in mid-crouch and tried to blink it away—but it was still there.

Light.

A thin line of light, glowing somewhere off ahead of him. With nothing else in the blackness for his eyes to compare it to, he couldn’t tell if it was just out of reach of his fingers or fifty feet away. But it was there, shining in the darkness.

He started crawling toward it, his knees and palms splashing through grimy puddles. The light got clearer, more solid around the edges.

The line of light was coming from under a door.