Chaos Descends

by Shane Hegarty

  … and he caught it, just as the Hydra wrenched the swing clean from its bolts, and roared free.

  Finn backed up even further against a tall garden wall, canister in one hand, searching for his knife with the other. Maybe if he found that, he could stab the Legend in the eye and distract it enough for him to run under its belly and—

  Instead, he found something else. A cufflink. Nils’s cufflink. Silver. Square. A natty design on it. But a cufflink all the same.

  He shrank back.

  Emmie was trapped in one corner of the playground, stuck in the centre of a climbing frame, a porthole revealing a face of fear. The Hydra was flailing itself free from the walls of the crumbling pre-school, one of the heads already striking the edge of Emmie’s hiding place.

  And Finn was armed with a cufflink.

  Wait.

  A cufflink that he now realised had a small button on its side. A small red button. He remembered Nils telling him about this. The Half-Hunter who loved his gadgets talking about wanting something explosive. Now Finn wondered …

  “Take this!” he shouted, more confidently than he felt, and pressed the button on the cufflink just as the Hydra broke free of the building.

  He wasn’t sure what he expected. Something to shoot out of the cufflink perhaps. But instead the small square of metal launched itself into the air, spinning towards the Hydra’s back, distracting at least one of its heads as it caught the playground lights. It reached as high as its back, where Broonie looked at it with a little curiosity, and immediate suspicion.

  Then the cufflink burst. It was a decent explosion as far as cufflinks go, but not nearly enough to kill a Hydra. Or badly hurt it. Or scratch it at all really.

  But it did two things.

  First, it bought Finn enough time to scramble away.

  And second it left Broonie with a nasty scorch mark across his face. “Be careful!” the Hogboon shouted.

  This happened to be the same moment Broonie realised the small explosion had blown the muzzle from his mouth. And the restraints from his hands. He jumped away and, as he did, he shouted the word he’d been dying to say for a long time now.

  “Sausages!!”

  The two snoozing, dormant heads awoke. It was as if a switch had turned them on, a hypnosis deactivated by a single word.

  The heads launched themselves at the seven heads on the other five necks and instantly the Hydra was at war with itself, a creature in a battle for control of its own body.

  Finn didn’t know that the Hydra had been hypnotised by an Orthrus, turned against itself by the power of suggestion and a single trigger word. All he knew was that he had his chance. He held the canister, found the button on the side to prime it to explode, steeled himself to press it, run and stick it on the belly of the Hydra.

  And, just as he was ready, Emmie skimmed down the slide –“Wheeeeeee!” – straight under the belly of the Hydra, and shoved her Desiccator canister into it without even stopping.

  Broonie was already on the ground beside them, sweating and babbling in a mix of relief and despair and disbelief and joy at the sight of a Hydra in chaos.

  “You said wheeeee,” Finn said to Emmie.

  “Yeah, I know. Not very cool at all, was it?”

  “Not cool at all,” smiled Finn.

  “Can we go, please?” begged Broonie. “I want to bury my face in a bucket of worms and never go anywhere else again.”

  The three of them bolted from the playground, just in time to feel the air sucked in around them, as the Hydra imploded with a not-so-stifled whooooooooppp.

  Every night, as the streets of Darkmouth emptied and quietened, the town’s street cleaner would emerge from his small cottage at the edge of town, whirr up the rotating brushes on his push-along sweeper and head out to do his job. His name was Dessie and he’d done the same thing for twenty-five years, night after night after night. And tonight he headed out to do the same, a little grumpier than usual, having slept through his alarm. As a result, he’d had to rush his meal, which would be dinner to everyone else, but was both dinner and breakfast to him – meaning that he’d had to shovel down his bowl of Chocky-Flakes and pasta.

  As he’d hurried about his house, he thought he’d heard something outside, but, when he pulled up his coat collar and left through the front door, all seemed quiet. He popped on his protective earmuffs, revved up his sweeper and began his nightly route through the town. He was proud of his work, of the way he could make a filthy cobble gleam.

  He moved slowly, deliberately, through the streets, his world shrunk down to the square of road in front of him about to be scrubbed by the rotating brushes, and their muffled sweeping as they turned. At one point, over the hush of his ear defenders, he thought he heard some kind of thudding not too far away. A crash maybe. A gurgle mixed in there. And, as he pulled the large earmuffs away from his ear, and the brushes wound down to a stop, he thought he may possibly have heard a not-so-stifled whooooooooppp off across the houses.

  But there was nothing else. Just silence.

  So he revved up the street sweeper again, once again imagining it was a Formula One racing car, put on his ear defenders and began his long sweep of the street.

  Near the obelisk, he spotted a crisp packet. Even at a distance of fifty metres, his instinct, honed by long experience, allowed him to detect and track it as it swirled about a gutter, hopped up on the pavement. He revved the sweeper and, not even realising he was making motor-car noises in his throat, went straight for it. He stopped, picked up the packet and crossed the street to the bin.

  Then he stopped.

  The bin was at an odd angle, shoved aside a bit, as if it had been knocked or pulled.

  It made the street look disorderly. The street cleaner did not like disorderly. So he pulled the bin across again, and twisted the catch at the bottom that secured it to its metal base. No more disorder, he thought, and swung the sweeper round towards the curve on to Broken Road, happy that neatness had been returned to Darkmouth.

  Then he stood at the end of the street, mouth agape, at the sight of rubble, broken glass, rogue mannequins and disorder on a massive scale.

  “Ah now …”

  Meanwhile, directly beneath his feet, ten metres down below the street, Finn, Broonie and Emmie were creeping through the tunnels towards the pipes at the base of the obelisk. They were preparing to flood the tunnels with Desiccator fluid, to shrink an army of Legends, all the while completely unaware that their best escape route had just been sealed off.

  Below Darkmouth, Finn, Emmie and Broonie hurried onwards. Behind them, in the vast network that ran beneath the town’s streets, they could hear noises. Growls. Shouts. Yelps. The distant scrape of claw on stone. The crashing of shelves, the smashing of doors, the splintering of wood and metal.

  “This is crazy,” said Finn.

  “You’ve only just realised that?” Emmie responded, serious but revitalised by their encounter with the Hydra.

  “What if someone presses the remote control again and this time it works and releases all that fluid? We’ll be desiccated with everything else.”

  “Ah,” said Emmie as if she hadn’t thought of that. “Well, they’ll have noticed we’re gone by now. Surely they’ll guess what we’re doing?”

  “We’d better hope so,” said Finn.

  “Will someone tell me what’s going on?” demanded Broonie. “Actually, on second thoughts, don’t tell me what’s going on. I’m better off not knowing what ridiculous misadventure I’m being dragged into.”

  The sound of the army of Legends in the corridors behind was growing louder.

  “I just can’t escape them,” said Broonie, glancing back fearfully. “Or you, or that fella Mr Glad, or anyone.”

  They passed a poster that read:

  “Mr Glad?” said Finn to Broonie.

  “Oh yeah, he’s over there in my world too, you know. The dust does it, the magic that allows him to appear.”

  “Did you see him?”
asked Emmie as they passed another poster.

  “Saw him. Heard him. It was all ‘vengeance this, vengeance that’. He hates you for trapping him. Really hates you. Understandable, I suppose. It doesn’t look like fun.”

  “Fantastic,” said Finn, not meaning that at all. “Anything else?”

  “Yes,” said Broonie. “They’ve promised to save him. I mean Gantrua has, in return for his help. They say they can give him his body back.”

  Emmie stopped, swung round and pinned Broonie against the wall. “How?” she demanded.

  “Oi,” complained Broonie, “don’t pinch.”

  “How do they get the Trapped back?”

  “Let me see if I can remember,” said Broonie, frowning. “Oh yes, they fill the sky with pure dust. At the moment, they kind of mix it up a bit, using a Troll and some gibberish. But douse him in enough pure Coronium and, apparently, no more Ghost Glad. Just him. An ordinary bag of goosebumpy bones like the rest of you humans.”

  The noise of the ravenous Fomorians down the tunnels was echoing towards them.

  “That’s why the locket stopped Mr Glad before,” realised Finn. “The dust of the crystal inside it. If he’d trapped me, he would have absorbed it. It’s not that it would have poisoned him or killed him or anything—”

  “He would have become human again,” said Emmie, her face brightening.

  “Normal. Powerless.”

  “My dad’s not lost. We can get him back!”

  The sound of approaching Legends was getting louder. “I am so happy for you,” said Broonie, shaking off Emmie’s grip. “But might I suggest that if you want your dad back, you need to not be dead.”

  They started down the tunnels again.

  “Although I’m destined to expire in this place, aren’t I?” Broonie said. “My lovely skin will be nothing but worm meal in this world.”

  “You need to stop being so glum about everything,” said Finn, reaching a short corridor leading to a door, its ceiling lined with zigzagging pipes. “Don’t you trust us by now?”

  He opened the door to the storage room, lit blue by the huge vat of sparkling Desiccator liquid. Its level had dropped after they’d siphoned so much off for the bombs that did not work, but there was still a lot in there. More than enough.

  “Your idea is to give everyone in this tunnel a bath?” said Broonie, unimpressed.

  “That’s the device the switch was meant to control,” said Finn, pointing to an old-fashioned timer attached to a complex-looking motor running a series of cogs that in turn were attached to a wide tap drooping like an elephant’s trunk from the lower part of the vat. “Isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” said Emmie, looking at it, then him. “At least I think that’s what Gerald said earlier.”

  “Well, this is not at all going to end in disaster,” snorted Broonie.

  “We probably just put the time on the timer that we need, open the tap and run. Right?” said Finn.

  “Or do we turn the tap and then do the timer?” asked Emmie.

  “We should have paid more attention when Gerald explained it all,” said Finn.

  “You should have paid more attention,” said Emmie. “I’d just lost Dad.”

  “I sort of assumed the remote control was going to work,” admitted Finn.

  “Me too,” said Emmie.

  They both sighed.

  “It is going to end in disaster, you understand that, yes?” said Broonie. “It always ends in disaster.”

  The hubbub and clamour of oncoming Fomorians was getting closer, echoing through the tunnels, warning Finn and Emmie that they needed to get this done quickly.

  Finn pulled at the teeth of the timer, setting it at three minutes. “Is that enough time? It had better be.”

  Timer set, Finn grasped the cog whose teeth connected to the wide tap. It didn’t budge at first, and needed him to grunt with effort before it turned. Once. Twice. A third time.

  “Do you think that’s done it?” he asked.

  A great ominous gurgle ran through the ceiling, a blaub travelling upwards through the obelisk above as the liquid loosened, prepared.

  “Sounds like it,” said Emmie as they ran.

  Back the way they came.

  Past the safety posters.

  To the ladder to the surface.

  Breath rasping in their throats, hearts pounding.

  Finn, one foot still missing a boot that the Hydra had eaten, climbed up awkwardly and put his energy into opening the hatch above in one swift movement so they could get out quickly before the Desiccator fluid flooded the tunnels, and them.

  There was a problem.

  “It’s stuck,” he said.

  From down the tunnel came a gurgle. A blaup. The sound of thousands of gallons of Desiccator fluid about to burst from their container and rush through the tunnels.

  “What do you mean it’s stuck?” asked Emmie.

  “I told you,” said Broonie, having to shout to be heard over the approaching rattle of Fomorian armour and weapons echoing through the tunnels. “Disaster.”

  “It won’t open,” said Finn, straining at the handle.

  “It has to open,” she said.

  “It won’t. It’s like there’s a weight on it.”

  “But we checked the bin,” said Emmie, voice strained. “It was clear.”

  “Well, it’s not now.”

  Finn abandoned his futile attempt to open the hatch and slid back down the ladder, the metal at his kneecaps rattling along the rungs until he reached the ground and stood in the tunnel, deciding which way to go. The clamour of Legends down the tunnels. An echo growing, encroaching.

  Blaurrp went the liquid.

  “We’ve only a couple of minutes,” Finn said. “We’ll have to take another exit.”

  “But that could bring us right to the Legends,” said Emmie.

  “We don’t have any choice. Or time,” Finn said, and started running, epaulettes bouncing on his shoulders, the metal plates of his armour clanking through the tunnel. Emmie followed and Finn was aware of the lightness of her steps and hush of her fighting suit behind him, in contrast with the growing racket of Legends up ahead.

  “When did you become so brave?” Emmie shouted.

  “When I had no choice,” Finn answered.

  The obelisk produced a blurp that reverberated through the tunnels. The Legends were still going crazy. Both sounded scarily close.

  “Tell me we’re nearly there,” said Broonie, trying to keep up.

  Emmie hurriedly looked at her watch as they crashed through the corridor, reached the corner that led to the next hatch to the street. “We’ve only got half a minute until this whole place gets shrivelled.”

  They reached the exit just as the Fomorians reached the end of the corridor ahead of them. Finn couldn’t hear anything now but the creatures’ hungry clamour.

  Emmie went up first this time, her weapon lost at the playground after half of it had been used to desiccate the Hydra. Broonie’s size and dexterity meant he could climb the edge of the ladder at the same time. Emmie turned the handle and the hatch moved aside easily. She and Broonie were out of it in no time.

  Emmie and Broonie disappeared into the street. As Finn scrambled up the ladder behind them, welcoming street lamps burst into sight.

  Fomorians reached the hatchway and, realising Finn was above, they stopped dead, piling up on each other, their claws clamouring for human flesh, bone, blood.

  Finn put his arms on the top of the hatch to haul himself out.

  Glaurrbbbbb went the obelisk, loud enough to carry through the snarling of the Legends, to send a shudder through the tunnels.

  Then a Fomorian grabbed Finn’s leg, warty hands wrapping round his calf. Finn jolted downwards.

  Desperately, Finn wrapped an elbow round a rung of the ladder while pointing his Desiccator straight down. The Fomorian let go of his leg and grabbed the weapon’s nozzle and pulled it so that it rested on a great dark nostril. Finn fired.


  The Legend took the blast full in the face, his dismay frozen in place for the merest of moments. But the bright fizzing blue of the shot also raced back up the barrel that Finn was still gripping. He let go just in time for Fomorian and weapon to implode into a leather-lined, metal-streaked ball and drop on to the heads of those vicious invaders following immediately below it.

  From above, Emmie thrust a helping hand down to Finn. At the same time, another Fomorian reached for him, grabbing him by his remaining boot and pulling hard enough that Finn thought his leg might be torn off. Ignoring Emmie’s outstretched fingers, Finn gripped the rung with both hands, and held on as tight as he could.

  “Give me your hand, Finn!” Emmie screamed.

  He couldn’t. He was clinging to the ladder while his leg was in danger of being ripped from its socket by a very angry Fomorian. A Fomorian with a grudge. A Fomorian who had lost his closest companion and soulmate in the course of the benighted life that he led as Gantrua’s guard.

  “I’m going to crush you up for what you did to Trom!” Cryf shouted, his head wedged into a helmet that appeared too tight ever to be removed again, his teeth chipped tombstones, his skin a moonscape of craters and scars, wounds built up over the years.

  “I’ll take your soft, skinny leg and I’ll use it to clean out my ears.”

  Cryf pulled on Finn’s foot and Finn felt the rung dig into the hinge of his elbow, the burning of muscles being yanked from bone. He thought he cried out in pain, but couldn’t be sure.

  “Give me your hand,” Emmie repeated, her eyes bright with alarm.

  He couldn’t let go of the ladder or he’d be torn to pieces. Below him, the rest of the Legends were piling in, eager to grab a bit of the human. Any bit.

  “Your hand!”

  All Finn could hear was growling, snarling, shouting.

  Until another sound gradually swelled, louder and louder.

  It was the deep but distinct blaaaaauuuuurrrpppppp as a flood of Desiccator fluid was released into the tunnels.

  Above the tunnels, a particularly grumpy Hogboon stood in the air, one foot facing towards escape, the other back towards the hatch. All the while, his brain argued with itself about what he should do.