Drowned (17 page)

“It’s so dark in here! I can’t see anything!” Fern squeals, grabbing my hand tighter. “Where are we?”

In here, it’s impossible to tell. We’re not ten paces away from the entrance to the lower level that I’d spotted earlier, but it might as well be a million miles. I tear a piece of cloth from my tunic and strike the flint against the wall furiously, finally igniting the fabric after five or six tries. Then I find a torch on the wall. Immediately, a halo of gold light stretches out into the dark chamber, illuminating the metal disc in the floor.

“What is this?” Fern asks, taking a can and inspecting it. “Is this some kind of weapon?”

“It’s food. I know you’re hungry. I will give you some in a little bit,” I say, pocketing a can for later. I can’t remember when the last time was that I ate, and there’s no telling how long we might be looking for Tiam. Or what kind of food might be available where we’re going.

She shakes a can near her ear, suspicious. “Where did it come from?”

“It’s been here since the floods began. Hurry,” I say, thinking of those terrible creatures. It may have been my imagination, but I’m almost certain I heard them here, as well. I lead Fern to the entrance to the subbasement, the small raised disc in the floor. I wasn’t sure before, but now I can see her tiny little fingers will be perfect for this job. “Can you open this?” I ask her. “Just put your fingers in there and see if there’s a release? Or if you can pull the cover up?”

She squats and surveys the thing. “Sure.” Moments later she’s dug up the metal cover and I help her heft it the rest of the way and slide it to the side. “Easy,” she says, smiling broadly.

There’s a strange smell coming from down below, not so much moldy as earthy and decaying. It’s familiar. I think it’s the same smell I’d noticed in the old laundry room. And the laundry room was chilly, too. This air that rushes up to greet us is colder, and the steady dripping of water is louder now. Dripping...in a watertight compartment. That is what the guard had said; that the subbasement was watertight. Something tells me it’s not so watertight anymore.

I shine the torch down and see two small rungs of a ladder, nearly rusted through and coated with greenish slime and barnacles, and then...nothing. I reach my arm in and swing the light around. Just blackness, from all directions. Beyond those two steps could be a bottomless pit, for all we know. Still, I know this is where Tiam is. I hand Fern the torch and lower myself down slowly. Before I’m halfway down, I know something went wrong here once. I slide into dank water, stagnant and ice-cold, up to my waist.

I stand there for a moment, shivering, wiggling some slimy substance between my toes. Something grazes my calf. A weed. A piece of underwater plant life, that’s all. I hope. I wait, cringing, but feel nothing.

“What’s going on?” Fern cries down. “I hear noises at the door up here.”

“Come on down,” I say. “Quickly. Pull the cover shut if you can.”

“I can,” she breathes heavily, working hard. I hear the metal screeching against the stone as she pulls the cover over the opening, locking us in here. I try to shake the feeling that it’s forever as I pull her waifish body from the ladder and set her down. Everything beneath her armpits disappears into the black water. Her eyes bulge out perfectly round, and her lips curl. “Oh! It’s water. It’s so cold!”

“It’s not so bad once you get used to it,” I lie. It’s icy. I can no longer feel my toes, my ankles. I wonder how long this water has been down here. I wonder how it came to be down here, whose mistake it was. We’re in the center of a narrow corridor. I hold the torch up high and squint down each way, but the path disappears into darkness only a few yards ahead. I try to determine where above us my quarters are in relation to our position, then motion down the corridor. “Let’s go this way.”

“Ohhhkay,” Fern says, as if she’d rather not, but follows behind me anyway, shivering. “Tiam is down
here?
Why?”

“Yes,” I say. “Long story.”

My foot rams into hard metal, and I yelp before realizing there’s another cart down here, like the one Burbur wheels through the halls. It’s just a rusting, rotting skeleton, leaning badly over to one side as if it’s come here to die and doesn’t want to be disturbed.

The passage begins to slope downward, and the ceiling does with it. I look up ahead, where the entire passage delves underwater. Not passable. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s the other way. I turn and motion for her to do the same. “On second thought...let’s go this way.”

Fern’s teeth chatter as she nods, her eyebrows raised suspiciously.

We come to a door on the left side. There’s a raised metal panel in the center, with a patchwork of a dozen or so circles punched into the frame. It’s a pattern I’ve seen before. The door to the laundry room was like this. We’re getting close. I raise the torch to illuminate a plaque on the wall that says BOILER. It’s a word I don’t know. But it’s not LAUNDRY, so we move on.

This corridor begins to slope downward, too. I turn to Fern as we walk. Her teeth chatter in rhythm, and her eyes have now taken on the shape and luster of the full moon. The water is now nearly to her shoulders.

Suddenly, she rocks to the side and catches her breath. “Coe...” she begins, but stops.

I turn to her. Her mouth is frozen in an O. “Yes?”

“Something...” she begins in a whisper, but her teeth are chattering too hard to form the words. Finally she spits it out, the thing I’d had an inkling of all along.
“Something is under the water!”

I shake my head. “It’s just seaweed,” I say, trying to keep the doubt out of my voice.

She doesn’t move except to shake her head vigorously in disagreement. The rest of her body is stiff. “It’s a scribbler!”

“Don’t be silly. How would it get down here? And what would it—”

I stop suddenly when I hear it. It’s a sound that seems to come from everywhere, rising and falling and echoing through the corridor, just as it does in my worst nightmares.

Hissing.

Fifteen

Round the Prickly Pear

A
ll right,
I tell myself.
Calm. Think.
Somehow willing myself to think only makes the hissing louder.

I lift the torch and scan the ceiling. It’s comprised mainly of poles of all sizes, running parallel with the corridor. They’re of all colors—red, blue, black, silver—and continue along the length of the corridor, disappearing into the darkness. No, not poles. They’re pipes. I’m not sure what the others are for, but there were black ones of the same size in the laundry room. I raise the torch higher, and it casts a shadow of the pipes on the stone far above them. There appears to be at least a little space between the piping and the ceiling.

I force the torch into Fern’s hands and wade through the muck to the old skeleton of a cart. I try to wheel it, but it doesn’t move, so I yank it up and it creaks in protest but follows. “Come here, Fern,” I yell. She breaks from her statue pose and hops her way through the water with the speed and grace of a dolphin, then begins climbing onto the cart before I can even tell her to. It groans and rocks some more, but I hold it steady for her so she can get her footing. Once she is standing on it, the water is only up to her calves. She looks at me, confused. “See if you can climb up. Over those pipes.”

She looks up, grabs a pipe and tries to wiggle herself up. Squeezing the torch in the armpit of my bad arm, I grab hold of her leg and hoist her up. She slides up easily, and I hand her the torch and follow behind her. There isn’t much headroom; lying flat on my stomach with my chin on a pipe, the back of my head scrapes the ceiling. But we are safe. The hissing continues for a bit, the glossy outlines of the creatures winding through the black waters below, making small ripples. “Okay,” I say, still trying to catch my breath. “So, there are scribblers down here.”

“What do we do now?” she asks, looking past her toes at me.

I thrust my chin down the corridor. “We crawl. That way.”

We can’t even crawl, really; the best I can do is wiggle. Fern can lift up onto her forearms and knees slightly and manage a low scramble with her legs slightly separated. She moves ahead of me like a little spider. After a few moments, she calls back to me, “I think I would rather be spending time with Finn.”

“Is it bad out there?”

“He’s horrible!” she squeals. “I don’t know what got into him. He is the one who told Ana not to feed me when I lost the shovel.”

I bite my tongue hard. He knew the shovel wasn’t lost. He knew I had it. My blood starts to boil.

“And he was the one who had the idea of having a competition to win Tiam’s spot. He killed the twins.”

I gasp. What
has
gotten into him? Something tells me he’s taking this idea of survival of the fittest a little too far. “Both of them?”

“Uh-huh. The competition was between Mick and Finn. Finn won, but he wouldn’t stop kicking Mick. And when Vail tried to step in to stop him, Finn turned on him. Everyone was saying that Wallow was a bad leader, and they all wanted Finn. Well, Finn is worse! People are starting to get scared of him.” She shudders. “And then I heard Ana talking, and she says there are only four hundred of us left. Can you— Oh!”

She’d been gradually inching over to the left, until the last time she brought her knee down, it slipped on the leftmost pipe. What happens next occurs in a heartbeat. Balancing the torch in my good hand, I watch helplessly as her midsection, then her chest, then her blond head follows. When I finally manage to cast aside the torch and free my good hand, I reach over and grab strands of her hair and her bony wrist.

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” she screams, her sticklike legs flailing beneath her. “Don’t let go, Coe!”

“I won’t,” I say. But without another arm, it’s impossible to lift her up. She’s forty pounds of dead weight, and I don’t have the strength in my good arm. “Calm down, try to pull yourself up.”

“I—I can’t,” she moans.

She’s looking down. The hissing is louder. The once-calm water is frothing below her. I can see the outlines of black bodies of scribblers as they slither beneath their next meal. “Fern, look at me.”

She doesn’t look up, she just squeals and cries, hysterical.

“Fern!”

She turns her head to me. He eyes are wide and fearful.

“Fern, I will not let go,” I say to her calmly. “I’ve always thought of you as my sister. Do you know what a sister is?”

She shakes her head vigorously.

“A sister is someone who will protect you, no matter what. And I am not letting go, do you hear me?” I say. “Now, you can do this. The wall is right behind you. If you kick against it you can pull yourself up.”

She looks over her shoulder, then bites her lower lip, propels her feet behind her and launches herself up so that her elbows are resting on the pipe. Then she manages to squirm the rest of her little body up to safety.

All the fear I’d had to keep in during those tense moments, while pretending to be the strong one, spills out of me. I start to cry. “Thank goodness,” I breathe into her ear as we lie there across the pipes, panting. “I don’t want anything to ever happen to you.”

She gives me a small smile. “Now I
really
would rather be with Finn. But I’m happy you’re with me.”

I pick up the torch and we continue on. Fern moves with determination, like a person who wants to be anywhere else. The pipes are hard and uncomfortable to lie on, much less move over, so I find myself lagging behind. Concentrating hard, I dig in and really leap forward, froglike. I find my face pressed against the black bottoms of Fern’s tiny feet. “Why have we stopped?”

“There’s a wall here.”

“Oh.” Great. I poke my head down and see another door on the left wall. I can just make out the
L
and the
Y
on the plaque beside it. Thank goodness. “He’s here. In this room.”

“How do we get in there?”

“We crawl down and open the door.”

“But...the scribblers?”

“They’ve stopped hissing.” I figure we can get down in there and inside the room before they come at us again. Maybe. Of course, once I open the door, all the water will come rushing into the laundry room, and will I be able to close the door before the scribblers come? It’s not the greatest of plans.

Fern senses my apprehension. “No. Way. Coe.”

“Okay, okay,” I say, trying to peer around her in the dark. “Scooch over so I can get up there.”

She moves on her stomach to the side, and I slide in next to her. Straight ahead of us is a wall of stone. It looks as if it’s the end of the passage. That’s where the pipes come to an L-joint and veer off to the left. Predictably, they disappear into the wall, right above the laundry room. I inspect the place where the pipes meet the wall. It’s too dark to see but it seems as though it’s not watertight. Did someone carve through solid stone in order to fit the pipes there? I press my finger against the wall there. It’s spongy. Not stone. Decayed wood, I think.

“Hold on,” I say, drawing my head and shoulders back and bringing my feet in front of me. I bring my heel to the soft section of the wall, and push with as much might as I can muster in such a small, enclosed area. It budges, just an inch. Fern catches her breath. I do it again and again. Each time, the wall moves out a bit, until at last it falls away, and there is a hole large enough for us to climb through.

“You did it!” Fern exclaims, holding tight to the pipes. She shivers. “Hooray. Let’s get out of here.”

“Hold on.” I don’t want to dash her glee by bringing up the horrible creature Tiam and I fought the last time we were together in this room. The creature that puts the ferociousness of the scribblers to shame. I haven’t heard from Tiam in much of a tide; he could have fallen victim to one of them and be lying dead on the floor right now, a hideous, bloody sight. I motion for her to give me the torch. “Let me look.”

I swing the torch out into the room and peer over. The room looks even more enormous from this angle. There are piles of crates everywhere, but the light doesn’t stretch out far enough to see the door to the laundry chute or the place where I’d left Tiam. “We’ll have to go down,” I tell her.

I turn onto my stomach and drop down feetfirst, then motion for her to do the same. When she falls into my arms and looks around, she sighs, relieved. “Yay. It’s dry in here.”

“Tiam?” I call out. No answer. I call his name louder.

“Why isn’t he answering?” she asks, following behind me.

She starts to gravitate toward a crate, so I pull her back toward me. “Stay close.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Why?” She looks around and then says, “What is that noise?”

I freeze and listen. I hear it, too. Whispering. Gulping, I yank her toward me. “Tiam!” I yell, urgent.

The light stretches forward, and I can see the chute in the distance. Before it, though, there is a lump... Actually two... No, three shapeless masses lying on the ground. Holding in my breath, we step forward, ever so slowly, until the torchlight illuminates the forms. The first thing I see is black blood, pooling around it.

Not Tiam. Please, not Tiam.

Then I see the fur. Masses and hunks of fur curled around blood. Claws and fangs. A black button eye, staring forever at nothing. No human parts. There are three of them. So, Tiam must have had a run-in with two more. But where is he?

A second later I realize my toes are wet and sticky. We’re standing in the blood.

“Agh!” Fern yelps. “Gross. What are those?”

“I don’t know. They’re not very friendly, though.”

Her body tenses like a board. “Where is Tiam?”

“I don’t know.” We step around the massacre, and I wave the torch ahead of us. There are footprints in the dust, his footprints, heading in the opposite direction and disappearing around a stack of crates. Of course. Leave it to Tiam not to stay in one place for very long. “I think we need to follow those.”

She nods and hugs herself, rubbing her bare shoulders. It’s freezing. “What has he been doing down
here?
”

I don’t know how to explain it without giving away Tiam’s secret about being afraid of closed spaces, so I just shrug and answer, “Exploring. You know Tiam.”

She laughs nervously. “He’s funny. He should explore someplace with
out
creatures that want to make him their dinner.”

I can’t help but laugh, too. “You’re right. Let’s find him and tell him that.”

I stop when I come to the candle, lying in the middle of the passage. It’s considerably shorter than it once was. The hair on my ears bristles. If it
is
his, then he’s down here, without any source of light. And that’s impossible.

At the end of the room I think we can go no farther, but then I spot a small corridor in the very corner, in the shadows cast by the crates. Tiam must have done the same thing, judging from the way his footprints hit the wall, turn and then head off in that direction. When we get to the opening, there is a big sign above it, but the letters have been scratched out. Over it, I can make out the words, scratched very faintly: B MT ENT.

It must be a passage to the palace, maybe a secret door to and from the building, used for emergencies. Maybe Tiam found a way out and is roaming the island now, trying to lie low and avoid Finn and the other commoners. If so, it makes total sense why he hasn’t been answering me. After all, he did say he would find his own way out, and for as long as I’ve known him, Tiam has always accomplished whatever he sets out to do.

I feel silly for spending all this time worrying and planning to help him. He doesn’t need me. Never has. It was foolish to think that maybe, for once, he did.

I turn my attention to the sign on the wall. What is B MT ENT? It feels as if I’ve seen the letters before, somewhere. Maybe in my book, but if so, I can’t place what part of the book it’s from. That’s strange, considering I have most of it memorized. I sigh, realizing I can’t even flip through the book since the ink is bleeding everywhere. But where else would I have seen those letters? Maybe I’m just dehydrated and hallucinating.

And then I realize what about those letters is familiar. The letters are wobbly, strange, not like the way Kimmie and Cass wrote. I think of letters, drawn in the sand, washed away by the tide. That was how he taught me to read and write. His
B,
especially, was very different. It was a vertical line, astride two perfect circles, stacked on top of one another. So as I gaze at the markings scratched into that wall, I can’t help but feel a little weak. I might be wrong, but
it looks very much like my father’s handwriting.

No. That’s impossible. Buck was a fisherman. He’s never had a reason to be down
here.

We creep on. It’s so dark that I can no longer make out Tiam’s footprints in the dust. The passage begins to angle downward, then two even narrower paths branch off to the right and the left. They look like cracks in the walls, mistakes, instead of actual pathways. They’re so narrow we’d have to walk single file. And as creepy as this place is, those pathways are even more so. I wave the torch down each and see nothing but blackness; no plaque announcing its purpose, no indication that it was meant to be traveled by humans. A giant black spider spins a web in the upper corner of the crevice, uninterrupted by our presence. I shudder, then continue down the wider middle passage. The safer passage.

We walk another ten feet or so before it breaks off again. Two more narrow passages. Then, twenty feet later, it does so again. Each time, we seem to be descending farther and farther underground. It’s so cold I see my breath billowing out ahead of me, something that only happens every once in a while at night on the island. I can hear Fern’s teeth chattering. That’s when I begin to hear the dripping. Not a good sign. The black walls glisten. The dusty floor turns to mud. Suddenly we’re splashing through water.

“Oh, no,” Fern whispers. “Not more water!”

We walk on another few feet, slowly descending until the water is up to our knees.

“Let’s go back,” Fern whispers, clenching her teeth.