Scar Island(6)

There were no windows. No torches. Not even a single, flickering candle. There was no light at all in the room, none except the shifting, swaying light of the lantern behind him. But in that unsteady light, Jonathan saw a silent face behind each black cell door as they passed it. A pair of hands, sometimes, gripping the iron bars. The light was too dim and the room too big for him to see any of them clearly, but he knew they could all see him, walking in the lantern light. He could feel all their eyes on him.

Mr. Mongley stopped at a cell door and rattled it open with his ring of keys. He stepped to the side and Mr. Warwick started to shove Jonathan in.

“Wait,” he protested. “I can’t sleep in here!”

Mr. Warwick gave him a final push and slammed the metal door. “Then don’t,” he said through the bars as Mr. Mongley turned the key in the lock.

“What about a bathroom?”

Mr. Warwick raised the lantern and held it through the bars. The cell was narrow—Jonathan could have almost touched both walls with a hand if he stood in the middle. A few feet from the cell door, against the side wall, was a single bed on a metal frame, covered with a thin, lumpy mattress and one ragged blanket. No pillow, of course. And no window. No chair. No desk. No sink. The only thing in the cell besides the bed was a rusty bucket sitting in the back corner.

Mr. Warwick swung the lantern toward the bucket. “That there’s yer night bathroom, boy. Sleep tight. And Mr. Mongley don’t take to no talkin’ after all-dark, so I’d be keepin’ yer mouth shut tight, if I was you. Which I ain’t, thank the devil.”

And with that the light jerked away and disappeared step by step, leaving Jonathan to stand in thickening, choking blackness. Mr. Mongley’s cane tapped away with it. There was the creak of the metal door opening, then a final crashing clang as it slammed shut, taking the last of the light with it.

At first, there was nothing but silence and absolute darkness. Jonathan could hear his own desperate breathing, and the hammering of his heart. A cold draft blew through his cell door and goose bumps popped up on his neck. He wrapped his arms around his body.

Water dripped and dropped and dabbled all around, a crazy constant pattering and pittering. And then, all around the room, he heard a scraping and shuffling sound. He strained his ears and then realized that it was all the other boys, walking back from their cell doors to crawl into their skinny beds. Mixed in was the squinchy squeak of mattress springs as bodies lay down and curled up.

He cocked his ear and stepped toward the wall to his right. There had been a watching face in the cell next door, he remembered, but he didn’t think he’d heard the sound of footsteps or mattress springs from that cell yet. His closest neighbor might still be standing at his cell door, only a few feet away.

Jonathan leaned one hand against the damp stone wall and pressed his face through the bars closest to the wall.

“Hey!” he whispered, as loudly as he dared. “Is anyone there?”

There was no response.

“Hey!” he tried again.

There was a sound, like a sigh or a breath. He screwed his eyes shut in the darkness and listened harder.

“What?” Jonathan asked.

There was the sigh again, just as faint, but this time Jonathan’s ears picked up the sounds inside it.

“Quieter,” the voice whispered, almost impossibly quiet. “Mongley hears everything.”

“Mongley’s gone!”

“No. He always stays. All night. Quieter.”

Jonathan shook his head. He couldn’t possibly speak any quieter.

“What kind of place is this?” he asked.

“A bad place. Quieter.”

A chill shook Jonathan’s body. His teeth were starting to chatter. It made the whispering harder.

“It can’t be as bad as it seems.”

The voice paused before answering. Like it wanted to say a lot more than it could in a smoke-thin whisper.

“No. It’s worse. You’ll see tomorrow,” the voice breathed at last. “Quieter.”

Jonathan gulped and took a few deep, shaky breaths. Behind him was a cold bed with no pillow and a bucket he didn’t even want to think about. He changed the subject.

“I’m Jonathan. What’s your name?”

“Walter.”

“Do you have any food?” Jonathan’s hunger got the better of him, and his rumbling belly grabbed him by the throat when he asked the question, raising his voice above the whisper he’d intended. His question came out as a desperate plea. It echoed, just barely, in the dark cavern of the room.

Somewhere off in the darkness, Jonathan heard a grunt. Then, coming closer through the total blackness, the tap-tap-tapping of a cane. Beside him he heard Walter scuttle back to his bed. Jonathan held tight to the metal bars, eyes wide, his head rotating from side to side, seeing nothing. The tapping came closer, and closer, straight toward him.

Finally, it stopped. In the echoing stone chamber Jonathan couldn’t tell where it had stopped—in the middle of the room, or inches away. He waited, breathless.

There was a whoosh and another grunt and then Jonathan was hit by a shocking surge of freezing water. It hit him full in the face and drenched his clothes. His breath was sucked from his lungs by the frigid water.

“No talking,” Mr. Mongley hissed like a dying rattlesnake. Jonathan gasped and coughed, his body racked by violent shivering. “The next bucket won’t be water.”