Chapter Text
Chapter 1:
Seven
On a stained mattress, surrounded by darkness, on a colossal ship rocking to and fro under the currents of the ocean, Seven woke abruptly from a nightmare. He quickly sat up and looked around, reality flooding back as he tightly gripped the mattress in his small fingers. He slowly ran a hand through his matted hair, trying to part the sweaty locks. Eventually, his heartbeat calmed and his breathing returned to normal. He was ok: the Nursery was perhaps one of the safest places in the Prison.
His sudden waking had, thankfully, not alerted any of the other children. As his eyes adjusted to the ever-present gloom, Seven saw their figures curled up on their beds, fast asleep. The blind Janitor - with his peeling face and unnaturally long arms - luckily wasn't here either.
And…neither was Eight, the girl who slept next to him. Seven stretched his fingers out across the mattress, feeling over to where she usually lay right beside him. But the bedding was cold. All that was there was her doll, which had been given to her by the Janitor for being one of the most well-behaved children. It was possible the Janitor had just accompanied her outside the Nursery, which happened every now and then when a child had to use the bathroom during the night.
There was no way Seven could go back to sleep now, being too shaken up from his nightmare. Darkness had pressed in from all sides, and he had been swimming in a seemingly endless pool of deep, rank water. He hadn't been able to tell left from right, up from down. Then a slimy, bony hand had closed around his ankle.
Seven shivered. Maybe he was trapped here forever, never to escape or see the light of day ever again. He decided he might as well try and sleep again, curling up once more on the lumpy bed. But sleep wouldn't come...and what's more, Eight was taking an awfully long time to return. Had she even been taken to the bathroom at all?
Seven sat up again. Something wasn't right - children never took this long to return from somewhere. Straining his ears to listen, Seven could hear the dull thrum of the petrifying Eye outside, a carved eye that was switched on at nighttime and turned escaping children to stone if they were caught in its beam of light. He could hear the creak of the ship's machinery; the occasional shifting of one of the kids across from him. No sign of Eight or the Janitor.
Seven's curiosity got the better of him. He listened for a few moments more, to be absolutely certain the Janitor wasn't nearby, and then he quietly climbed down from his bed and crept across the floor. The door to the Nursery was slightly ajar, and he slipped through with ease. Every hair on his body stood on end, and a nervous tingle swept across his skin. He had never dared to sneak outside the Nursery alone.
Before him, two more storeys below, was the Eye Beam with its deadly light. Seven peered down through the darkness and his breath hitched - the Janitor was down there, and he appeared to be chasing someone, sweeping his long arms across the floor and relying on his hearing and smell to track them. Was he chasing Eight?
No - because after a few seconds, the Eye Beam swivelled back across the space and lit the floor well enough for Seven to catch a glimpse of her. She was standing very still so the Janitor didn't hear her, shielded from the Eye Beam by a stray cage on the floor.
She was trying to escape while the Janitor's attention was on someone else. And in that split second - with the Janitor distracted, with Eight igniting that scrap of hope inside him - Seven decided he would escape too.
Seven ran across the floor, past the bolted doors where the 'mad' kids were kept, and into that one abandoned room that had stood empty for as long as he could remember. He'd never explored it, only ever seeing it in passing on trips to the playroom. The room was in disrepair, as with many areas of the ship, and the floorboards were broken. Seven peered into the hole and saw that if he dropped down, he'd land on a bed on the storey below.
It was a gamble, but Seven knew he may not get a second chance at escape. Bracing himself, he dropped down through the wrecked floorboards and landed on the bed below. A cloud of dust rose up from the impact, and he coughed it out of his small lungs. He was in another abandoned room that had once been home to one of the mad kids. Drawings were littered all over the floor: scribbles of eyes, a long-armed figure who had to be the Janitor, and a child in a bright yellow raincoat. Seven had heard rumours about them - an escapee girl by the name of Six - but he did not have time to dwell on her. Running to the exit, he found himself on the second storey.
Seven watched in time to see the Janitor shuffling back underneath the Eye Beam with a squirming child in his hands. As he passed through the light, the security beam had no effect on him. Seven was not surprised. After all, the Janitor was not human. He was a grotesque puppet-like creature much larger than any of the children, with short, stumpy legs and eerily long arms to reach high shelves and fleeing children. His face had sagged down over his eyes, blinding him, and his polished wooden skull was visible under his hat. The Janitor was apparently not smart enough to fix his face, otherwise, he would have smoothed out the rolls of saggy skin over his eyes and been able to regain his sight a long time ago.
Seven crossed the second storey only after the Janitor had vanished through a door, and then quickly climbed down a large stack of metal cages to reach the final floor. The Eye Beam was dangerously close now, but in order to escape from the Nursery, he would have to outrun it. Seven watched the Eye Beam's path from his place next to the cages, memorising its movement and counting the seconds that he would have to hide in the dark spots before it swivelled around again and turned him to stone.
Once he was ready - or as ready as he could ever be - Seven darted out from behind the cages and ran to a pillar in the centre of the room. He could not be certain, but he thought he saw Eight's figure disappear around a corner just as he reached his new hiding place. It was too dangerous to call out to her though, and he didn't have the time anyway - the Eye Beam was about to shift again, and he prepared to sprint to safety.
He counted down...3, 2, 1 - and a window of opportunity opened before him. Dodging the crumbling forms of petrified children who had already fallen victim to the Beam, Seven raced out from behind the pillar and safely rounded the corner with time to spare. Catching his breath, he looked over his shoulder and whispered a quick prayer for the stone children who hadn't made it. Then, not daring to stay in one place for too long, he continued.
The playroom and the bathroom had both been deserted, eerily quiet and dark. The emptiness had spooked Seven, and he'd slipped as quickly as he could through the cold metal bars and into the next room. Normally these bars were electrified, but Seven assumed that was only during the day when the children came to play there. Luckily, they had been turned off for now.
Glancing up, Seven laid eyes upon what seemed to be the only sign of life in the place. On the tiny, barred window, someone had secured a rope of some kind. He climbed up to it and saw that it was made up of several bedsheets, tied end-to-end and reaching right down the side of the Prison wall. Seven couldn't believe his eyes. Here was a way out, a path to freedom, and it seemed to have come to him so easily. But who had left this? Had it been Eight? Had she already escaped?
Gripping the rope and giving it a tug to test its strength, Seven climbed down the rope and reached the bottom safely. He looked back up at the barred window in amazement, sure that if he blinked too hard the bedsheet rope would vanish. It was a miracle that it had been put here, and he hoped that other children would find it too before the Janitor did.
Beyond the Prison was a vast expanse of metal walls and floors, large wooden crates and various tunnels and drainpipes. Seven found his way into another room and saw that a drain in the floor had been opened up. Eight had surely loosened it, right? Had she dropped down? There was only one way to find out. Seven sat at the edge of the drain and dangled his legs inside. All that he could see was yawning darkness, and there was no telling how far down the drainpipe stretched.
Seven braced himself and prepared to drop once more, and then he pushed off the edge of the drain. Adrenalin gripped his entire body as he slid down a cold, wet expanse of metal pipeline - and then he felt himself falling through empty space, falling through time, before he fell into a deep, dark water-filled pit below.
Panic overtook him as he re-lived the terror of his nightmare. The sewage water filled his mouth and covered his eyes and ears, and he spluttered, flailing as he tried to keep his head above the surface. In the dim light, he spotted several floating pieces of debris - wooden planks, suitcases, empty metal cans - and swam as quickly as he could over to them. Seven hauled himself up onto them and made his way to a solid platform at the other side of the space. There, he finally climbed up and allowed himself a few minutes to recover, panting and trembling in every limb.
He had decided to escape, to push through the most dangerous areas of the Nursery and pursue the figure who he thought was Eight...but this was horrible. Shivering from the cold and trying to wring water out of his faded clothes, Seven almost wished he could be back on his bed in the Nursery. He wouldn't be completely free there - with the Janitor's patrolling and the Eye Beam's light - but at least he would be safe and warm and fed, and in the company of other kids.
But he had already made it this far, and he knew he could only go forwards. "Come on," Seven told himself firmly, looking around for his next move. "We've made it this far, there's no going back."
In the next space was something odd. A light caught Seven's eye, and as he squeezed through a gap in the wall, he saw that it was a glowing flashlight. He ran over and picked it up. Was this Eight's? She had to have come this way! Seven swept the flashlight from side to side across the space and saw a puddle of inky black leech-slime on the floor. Beyond it was a trail of bare footprints slightly larger than his own.
"Eight!" Seven called. "Eight? Are you around here? It's me, Seven!"
He listened, but there was no answer. Entering the next room, the young boy was alarmed to see a large, slimy leech crawling towards him. He quickly raced away from it, following Eight's footprints - but then they abruptly stopped. Why did they stop? What had happened to her?
Seven didn't have the time to ponder where Eight had gone. He sprinted away before the leech closed in, wondering if she had even survived as far as he had at all.
And so, he continued through the sewer, encountering nothing but the odd rat and blood-lusting leech, seeing nothing but puddles and pipes and floating trash. Seven grew cold, tired and lonely. The constant swimming and wading through the stinking water had been taking its toll. He guessed that it was almost time for the children in the Nursery to get out of bed now. His stomach growled, meaning it was probably close to breakfast time. Most of the night had passed, and he hadn't progressed very far because he'd needed to stop every so often and take breaks from swimming.
Seven had just entered a new room with a long stretch of water, and a platform on the other side. He scanned the room for leeches and then decided it was safe enough to jump in and quickly make it across. But before he entered, his bare foot brushed something at the water's edge. With the aid of the flashlight, Seven crouched down and saw that it was an off-white dress identical to the ones the girls in the Prison wore. Eight's? It was sticky with black leech-slime, and Seven guessed that Eight had taken it off so she could swim better, stripping down to her undergarments. Maybe she had also left it as a clue for other escaped kids, a way of saying 'I made it this far, and so can you! This is the way, so keep going!'
Seven knew that Eight was very intelligent. As one of the older kids in the Prison, she would often sit in the playroom and read the picture books from cover to cover, poring over the words and illustrations to glean any sort of knowledge she could from them. When the Janitor wasn't around, she'd also sing hushed nursery rhymes to the younger children to soothe them if they woke from a nightmare or needed comfort. Seven had no doubt in his mind that the bedsheet rope was her work, and that this dress was another ray of hope she had left.
Tucking the flashlight into the collar of his shirt so it would stay as dry as possible, Seven entered the water and began to swim across. But before he was even halfway across, Seven noticed something that terrified him. Forming behind him was a stream of bubbles, and he caught sight of a long, skinny arm under the murky water.
Putting on a burst of speed, Seven swam as fast as he could to the other platform before the thing could reach him. He'd heard whispered rumours about this, had seen scribbly drawings of a tall, old woman submerged in water - and that was what caused his nightmare. But he never thought he'd actually come face to face with the Granny.
Seven's small hands grasped the platform and he dragged himself up as quickly as he could, rolling over the side and scrambling as far away from the water's edge as he could. Shining the flashlight back across the water, he saw a pale hand with long, bony fingers sink back down and disappear. Seven shivered violently at the sight of it and hurried through a grate in the wall, trying to put as much distance between himself and the aquatic monster.
Exhausted with fatigue and fear, Seven sat down with his back against a wooden crate and caught his breath. He placed the flashlight beside him to illuminate the room, not daring to turn it off. He thought this place was safe enough to stay in for the time being: there was no deep water here and no way the Granny could follow him through that tiny gap.
Who - or what - was she anyway? Seven hadn't gotten a good look at her, but the rumours and drawings described her as some lanky old woman with grotesque, soggy skin who lived in water. How did she get to the sewers in the first place? Why was she on the ship at all?
"Hello?"
Seven jumped, grabbing the flashlight and pointing it in the direction of the voice. In the bright beam of light stood a girl with dark skin and messy black plaits reaching to her waist. She shielded her eyes from the flashlight, blinking fiercely.
"Eight?" Seven asked, bewildered. He lowered the flashlight and the girl nodded. Seven noticed she was wearing nothing but saturated undergarments.
"Your name is Seven, right?" Eight asked. "I can't believe you made it this far..." Her dark eyes roamed over Seven's dripping clothes, his shivering form. "Are you alright? I see you found my flashlight…"
"Yeah." Seven stood up, handing the flashlight back to Eight, but she shook her head.
"You keep it for now. I'm glad it got you this far." She looked over into the looming darkness. "I haven't been able to go further than this without it. It gets really dark from here on out. And I was too scared to leave this place, with that old lady still around." Eight looked back at Seven, biting her lip. "You've seen her, right?"
Seven swallowed hard. He thought of the bony fingers, reaching above the sewage to drag him under the water. "The Granny? Yeah, I have." Then, after a silence: "What do you know about her?"
"Not much," Eight replied. "I've never met her. Well...at least not before she became a monster." She sat down next to the wooden crate, and Seven did the same. "But I've heard rumours about her from some of the earliest kids to have come onto the ship. Apparently she was a kind, caring old woman who helped the kids get showered and dressed and stuff. She was getting pretty old, and kinda sick, and she'd forget her jobs sometimes. But one day she just disappeared."
"And now she's here?" Seven whispered. "In the sewer?" Disbelief was written all over his face.
"Yeah," Eight answered. "It doesn't make sense, but this is a weird place anyway. Like the Janitor...he isn't even a proper human, more like a weird puppet-monster. I've been trying to learn more about this place - so I can find a way out."
"You left the sheet-rope, didn't you?"
Eight nodded. "Yes. I spent so many nights gathering all the sheets in secret. And the flashlight...It was mine before I even came on the ship, but I hid it before the Bellman or the Janitor could take it away, then I moved it to the Nursery when it was safe. It's been under my mattress for so long...I'm surprised it even still works."
"I just hope some other kids can find the rope before the Janitor does," Seven said.
"Me too. And I'm glad you did." Eight smiled weakly at Seven. He noticed how strained her face looked, how tired. Goosebumps dotted her skin. "I wonder if I did the right thing," Eight said finally, almost to herself.
"What do you mean?"
"Leaving the Prison, leaving all the other younger kids in there to fend for themselves. I couldn't risk telling anyone what I was planning, but I just hope some more of them manage to escape without my help." Eight looked away, drawing her knees up to her chest. Her voice became choked with tears. "I'm the only 12-year-old; I'm the oldest so I feel responsible for all the other kids. What are they gonna do without me?"
Seven patted Eight on the shoulder. He had seen lots of kids cry before, but he never really knew how to comfort them, and he hadn't been able to with the Janitor lurking around anyway. "It's ok, you're not responsible for them all. You did your best."
Eight sniffled. "That's why I left the rope and the open drainpipe. The footprints, my dress - everything. I wanted to leave clues to help everyone."
"And they did help! Otherwise, I would never have made it here."
Eight smiled again, but this time her eyes twinkled a little too. She wiped away her tears. "Yeah."
"What happened to you anyway? Were you attacked by a leech?"
Eight nodded. "After I came down the drainpipe I was startled by a leech. I managed to fight it off, but that's when I dropped the flashlight. I ran, and then I climbed to get away from it."
"That's why the footprints suddenly vanished!" Seven exclaimed. "Because you started climbing! I was scared there for a minute…"
"What? Oh...yes."
Eight's stomach growled noisily. Seven stood up and extended his hand to her. "What do you say we keep moving? We can work together to get out of here, maybe even find some food."
Eight took Seven's hand and he helped her up. She was quite a bit taller than him and having her by his side rekindled his hope.
"Then let's go," Eight said. "Stay close to me, ok? And keep the flashlight safe no matter what."