“Okay,” Sebastian began when they all met at the table, exhausted and limp from dragging dead bodies across a hundred yards of stone. “First things first. I’m in charge.”

Colin turned his head to give Jonathan a very meaningful look. Jonathan bit his tongue and didn’t look back.

Sebastian was sitting in the Admiral’s big wooden chair, his feet up on the table. Benny was sitting next to him, with Roger and Gregory nearby.

“Why are you in charge?” Tony asked.

“Because I say so, Tony. We can’t have no one in charge. It’d be dumb. And I’ve been here the longest. And I’m the oldest.”

“I’m older than you are,” Gerald protested.

“Shut up, Gerald. I’m in charge. Anyone have a problem with that?”

“Do we have another choith?”

“No.”

“Could we have electionth?”

“No. And you better shut up right now, Colin.”

“Let it go,” Jonathan whispered through clenched teeth, nudging Colin. “It’ll be fine.”

Colin just shook his head and frowned. His hand flitted up to pinch nervously at his neck.

“Okay, now that’s settled. First rule is …” Sebastian smiled like a cat with a mouthful of feathers. He spread his hands wide. “… there are no rules.”

There was a little scattered clapping among the group. Some nervous laughter. Sebastian looked around at them, a little frown on his face.

“Why do you guys look so scared?”

No one answered. Eyes dropped to the floor.

“What’s wrong with you guys? This is the best thing that ever happened to us!”

There was still no answer except the sound of the rain still pattering in the courtyard outside the window.

Sebastian jumped to his feet.

“What? You think we can’t do this? You think we can’t take care of ourselves and have fun?” Sebastian shook his head.

“Come on! The stupid Admiral? He called us scabs, right?” Sebastian’s face darkened. “Picked off and thrown away, he said. But now he’s gone. And here we are. Still around. ’Cause you know what you get when you keep picking at a scab?”

He looked around at them, his eyes shining.

“Bloody fingers?” Miguel suggested.

“An infection?” Walter asked.

“No!” Sebastian spat. “You get a scar, idiots. A scar. And scars are tough. The Admiral was wrong. We ain’t scabs. We’re scars.”

“Yeah!” Benny piped up eagerly. “Scars, man!”

Jonathan’s stomach suddenly twisted and tightened. He blinked quickly and rubbed at his sleeves with sweaty palms.

Sebastian’s mouth spread into a grin and he opened his arms wide.

“Look around, guys! This whole place belongs to us. We’re the kings. No one to boss us around. No one to get us in trouble. It’s our island now. Ours. We don’t need nobody. ’Cause we’re Scars now. Scars with a capital S. The tough Scars that got left behind. It’s our island.”

“Hell yeah!” Roger cheered in his deep voice. “Our island!”

“Our island!” Gregory echoed.

Sebastian slammed his fist down on the table, his face glowing with triumph.

“This whole island belongs to the Scars now!”

“Scar Island!” Benny crowed.

Sebastian had them now. There were cheers and smiles and high fives. Even Walter was nodding his head and grinning.

“This ain’t Slabhenge anymore!” Sebastian hollered. “It’s Scar Island from now on! Say it!”

“Scar Island!” all the boys shouted.

All the boys except Colin, who just sat looking around, pale and frowning.

And all the boys except Jonathan, still rubbing his arms and blinking.

Sebastian sat back down, his face flushed.

“The jerks are gone,” he said. “We can do. Whatever. We. Want.”

There was more clapping, more cheering.

“Except … we should eat meals together, I think,” Sebastian added. “To check in. Make sure we’re all okay. That makes sense, right?” He looked at Jonathan. Jonathan dropped his hands quickly from his arms. He shrugged and nodded.

“So do whatever you want, guys. Run around. Eat some more. Whatever. But be back here for dinner. Have fun, Scars.”

Everyone sat and looked at each other for a moment. Then Francis stood up and started toward the kitchen. David got up and headed for the door that led outside.

“Wait,” Jonathan said. “What about the generator? We still need electricity, right? For the fridge and the … freezer?”

Sebastian pursed his lips. “Oh, yeah. Right. We’ll, uh, take turns. It only has to get done, what, like three times a day?” He looked to Benny, who nodded eagerly. “We’ve all done it, we know how it works. So, first, how about … you and you,” he said, pointing at Miguel and another kid Jonathan didn’t know yet. “Head down and fill it up.” They grumbled and trudged away together.

Slowly the rest of the boys wandered away in different directions, most in groups of two or three. Sebastian headed out into the courtyard. Benny followed like a puppy at his heels.

Colin and Walter and Jonathan were the last left at the tables. Colin still looked unhappy.

“Cheer up,” Jonathan said to him. “Now the good times start.” Colin just rolled his eyes.

“So … what is there to do around here?” Jonathan asked.

It was Walter’s turn to roll his eyes. “Who knows? All we ever did was work, man. Mop the floors, clean the kitchen, scrub the toilets. I’ve been here weeks and I bet I ain’t seen any more of the place than you have.”

“Well, then,” Jonathan said, standing up. “Let’s go exploring.”

Walter hopped up to join him, and after a moment Colin did, too.

“We’re gonna need lanternth,” Colin said with a sigh. “I know where they keep them. Matcheth, too.”

A few minutes later, the three of them were walking through one of the snaking, shadowy hallways that had been so confusing to Jonathan the night before. Jonathan and Walter each held a hissing lantern.

“This place is like a maze,” Jonathan said, moving his lantern from side to side to banish suspicious shadows in the corners.

“It is a maze,” Walter said. “I heard they built it that way on purpose, to confuse the crazies. So only the guards would know their way around, you know?”

Jonathan slipped on an especially slimy stair and, putting out his hand to catch himself, almost grabbed a huge brown rat. He jerked his hand back and the rat squeaked angrily and slithered into a hole between two blocks.

“Well,” he said, standing up. “If they weren’t crazy when they got here, I bet it didn’t take too long to get that way.”

Walter looked uneasily at the hole the rat had disappeared into.

“Yeah, man. You got that right.” He shook his shoulders in an exaggerated shiver. “This place gives me the heebie-jeebies. Thinking about all them crazies that lived here. And died here.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. It echoed in the corridor like turning pages. He looked from Jonathan to Colin. “You guys believe in ghosts?”

Colin shook his head, but he didn’t look so sure.

“I don’t know,” Jonathan said, squinting into the blackness ahead of them. “But if there are ghosts, this sure seems like the kind of place they’d be.”

“Yeah,” Walter answered. “No lie.” He looked at Jonathan. He had second thoughts written all over his face.

Jonathan put on a smile that was a lot braver than he felt.

“Well, let’s go find ’em, then.”

Walter shook his head and almost smiled.

“Fine. I’m following you, though.”

They wandered up and down staircases and peeked into sinister-looking side passages. Jonathan was hopelessly lost within minutes. They found one room they were pretty sure used to be some sort of dungeon; rusted chains dangled from the walls. They took a quick look and then kept going.

Suddenly, the light of Jonathan’s lantern fell on something familiar. It was a rope, stretched across a staircase spiraling down into darkness.

“Hey! I know where we are! Mr. Warwick showed this to me.”

Colin and Walter stood shoulder to shoulder with him.

“Yeah,” Colin whispered. “He loved to try and thcare uth with thith.”

“The door to the deep, he called it,” Walter said in a low voice.

“The Hatch.” Jonathan nodded. “What’s really down there?” He felt both Walter and Colin shrug beside him.

“No one knows, man,” Walter whispered. “They’d never tell us. Some big, dark secret, I guess.” From the stairs rose the same thumping and slurping Jonathan had heard the night before. He swallowed, then stepped forward and lifted the rope. He ducked his head beneath it and stepped down onto the top stair.

“What are you doing?” Colin hissed.

“I wanna see it,” Jonathan answered.

He took another step down, then another, holding his lantern out before him. When he didn’t hear any footsteps behind him, he looked back. Colin and Walter were still standing on the other side of the rope in the corridor.

“Come on,” he whispered. His voice echoed eerily in the tight staircase. “Don’t make me go alone. Things are always bigger and darker when they’re secret. Let’s find out how bad it really is.”

Walter gulped. Then he ducked under the rope and followed Jonathan.

“No way,” Colin said. “I’m thtaying here.”

“Suit yourself,” Jonathan said. “But we’ve got both lanterns.”

Colin scooted under the rope and joined Walter. “Jerkth.”

Jonathan reached back to pat Colin on the shoulder.

“Relax,” he said. “Whatever’s down here can’t be worse than the dead Admiral, and we spent plenty of time with him today.”

“Thut up and go.”

The stairs were steep, and the boys held one hand against the slippery wall to steady themselves. The steps curved down around a corner and then stopped at a small, dark landing. The landing was a little bigger than a bed, and on the other side, another staircase climbed up and away from them, in the opposite direction of the one they’d come down. On one wall of the landing was another doorway, smaller and rounded on top.

The scraping, slurping, knocking sounds were coming from the smaller doorway. They were louder here, closer. Goose bumps popped out on Jonathan’s arms. He held his lantern as far out in front of himself as he could toward the doorway.

Through the doorway was another staircase. It dropped down into even deeper darkness. The lantern’s light couldn’t reach the end of it.

He felt Colin breathing in one of his ears, and Walter in the other, looking over his shoulder.

“I ain’t going any farther,” Walter whispered. The darkness down the doorway sloshed and chunked.

“Me neither,” Colin breathed.

“Fine,” Jonathan said. “I’ll go by myself.”

“Why?” Colin asked. “Why don’t we jutht go back, Jonathan?”

Jonathan stared down into the blackness. He answered without turning his head. His voice echoed back at him from the dark downward passageway, like he was talking to himself.

“It’s this big, awful secret, right? The Hatch, down here in the dark? Well, maybe, once you know it, it’s not all that terrible after all.”

He looked back over his shoulder and locked eyes with Walter.

“Maybe it’s the hiding that makes it horrible, you know?”

Walter furrowed his brow.

“Uhh … not really, man. I think we should get outta here. Like, fast.”

Jonathan turned back toward the rattling, grinding blackness. “Big, dark secrets can’t stay that way forever,” he murmured. His free hand rubbed absently at the wrist that was holding the lantern.

A dull, heavy thud echoed up the stairway toward them.

“Jonathan?” Walter’s whisper was right in his ear. “I am really, really, really”—he paused—“hungry. When you’re done playing with the monsters, you can find me in the kitchen, eating sausage.”

“I’ll be with him,” Colin added.

“Thanks, guys,” Jonathan said, and his only answer was the sound of their footsteps retreating back up the spiral staircase.

He held the lantern in a shaking hand and shuffled to the end of the landing, to the very edge of the final staircase. This one was narrower than the other corridors; the walls weren’t much farther apart than Jonathan’s shoulders.

Jonathan took a deep breath. Before him, there was another loud clunk, and a snuffling sound like a huge hissing nose. When he blew his breath out, it came out shaky.

He took the first step down. The steps were bigger drops down than the other staircase. He had to fall the last couple of inches. He took the next step down. He almost turned and ran when an especially loud metal rattling rang up from the darkness below. But he licked his lips and took a breath and dropped down another step. And another.

The darkness before him growled and crunched. The walls seemed to close in around him. He felt with his foot for the next step and realized that he was at the bottom. And that somewhere along the line, he had squeezed his eyes shut.

He opened his eyes.

He was in a tiny square room with a stone ceiling so low he could’ve reached up and touched it. It was freezing, and the walls were covered in dripping moisture as if they were sweating.

In front of him was a huge, round, metal door. Heavy iron bolts circled its outer edge. It was rusty and grimy and covered in shiny, green slime. It looked ancient. The door was big enough that, if it had been open (and he was extremely thankful that it wasn’t), he could have stepped through it without ducking. It was a door like a submarine would have, with the large iron handle in the middle that Jonathan knew would open the door if he spun it around.

The door seemed to rattle rhythmically, like it was breathing.

“The Hatch,” Jonathan whispered. He stepped toward it. He reached out with his empty hand. He could see the trembling in his fingers. They closed around the iron handle in the center of the door.

As his fingers touched the metal, his eyes dropped down to a round shadow at the foot of the door. The wavering light from his lantern flashed across it.

A human skull, white bone spotted with green slime, propped against the grimy stone doorway, black eye sockets gaping right at him, toothy mouth frozen in a silent scream.

The door suddenly rocked and banged against his shaking hand. There was a tremendous crack and a wet, sloshing thud, and a freezing mist sprayed Jonathan in the face.

He screamed and fell back, slipping on the wet stone. The lantern dropped from his hand and landed on the hard floor with a shattering crash.

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