Mr. Warwick’s lips pulled back to show a toothless smile. “Why, the Hatch, me boy! A door, of sorts. And beyond it: death and despair and darkness! It be a door that holds back a monster. Ancient she is, and dark, and hungry, and just barely held back. She’s there, though, knockin’ and waitin’ and bidin’ her time! Not locked in, boy, but locked out—and not for long, I’d wager!”
Mr. Warwick stared into Jonathan’s face with his one eye for a breathless moment before breaking into a wheezing cackle. “Aye,” he said, running his tongue over his toothless gums. “Death himself is yer downstairs neighbor. Yer room be straight up here, with the other no-goods.”
Mr. Warwick stumbled ahead with the swinging lantern. Jonathan stood for a second longer, his eyes peering past the rope and down the darkened stairs. He knew the morbid cyclops was just trying to scare him, the new kid, with his ghost stories. And Jonathan was past believing in most kinds of monsters. But up from the stairwell came a thump and a rattle, then a slurping growl. He shivered and hurried after the retreating yellow light.
They rounded a corner and then stopped before a large metal door. At eye level, just above Jonathan’s head, was a small rectangular opening crossed with metal bars. Mr. Warwick rapped on the door with his knuckles. The knocking echoed in the cold hallway. Water dripped all around them in the darkness, and there was occasional scurrying, off in the shadows.
Through the opening in the door came the sound of shuffling footsteps punctuated by the steady thwock of a cane hitting the stone floor. A bald forehead and a glaring pair of eyes appeared in the little barred window.
“It’s I, Mr. Mongley,” Mr. Warwick said to the eyes. “I’ve got me the new one here. No pillow for ’im, either, so you know.”
The half face disappeared and there was a jangling of keys and then the door swung open. Mr. Warwick pushed Jonathan through the doorway and stepped in behind him.
Beyond the door was nothing but darkness, but Jonathan could tell from the echoes and the movement of the air that the room was large, with a tall ceiling. Besides the smell of ocean and mold and wet stone, there was also here the smell of sweat and bodies and the unmistakable odor of an overused bathroom.
The man who must be Mr. Mongley stood glaring at him sideways, one shoulder hunched over. He shielded his eyes from the light of the lamp.
“It’s all-dark,” he rasped. His voice was a scratchy hiss, like his throat was stuffed with cotton. He was wearing the same blue uniform that Mr. Warwick and Mr. Vander had. Without another word he turned and limped off, thumping away into the darkness on a crooked black cane.
“Go on, go on,” Mr. Warwick grunted, poking Jonathan in the spine.
Jonathan’s eyes darted around the shifting shadows as he followed the hunched form of Mr. Mongley. There were puddles on the floor here, too, big and small. He could just make out, on both sides of him, openings in the walls. Large rectangular doorways, each with a lightless room behind it, each blocked with the sturdy metal gate of a jail cell. They were jail cells, he realized. Or, he reminded himself, madhouse cells. They were cells built to hold the criminally insane of the previous century.
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.”