Scar Island(56)

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.