Chaos Descends

by Shane Hegarty

  “In an active volcano,” said Matilda.

  Lucien sought out another face. “You, George,” he said to a short fellow at the dessert section. “Your family invented the intestinal combustion engine.”

  “It was a messy business,” said George.

  “But it worked,” Lucien told him, with conviction. “It made your family famous. But us? Me? What are our achievements? A well-stocked canned goods shelf? An efficient laundry service? Look at us. Look at us!”

  The assistants glanced at each other, heads down in shame, embarrassed by how their biggest daily battle was over which grey tie to wear to work.

  “No longer,” said Lucien, and a couple of voices shouted in support. “Darkmouth is in crisis. Darkness has taken hold there. It is time that I, we, stepped in and saved the last Blighted Village from those who wish to destroy it.”

  More voices, maybe half the room now, shouted in agreement.

  “It is time we stepped out of the shadows of our ancestors, and became warriors once again.”

  The shouts and whoops were loud, constant.

  “I will go to Darkmouth. I will bring back glory!”

  The canteen erupted in cheers.

  “You’ll need a packed lunch,” said Axel, but he was drowned out by the ovation for Lucien.

  All was quiet. More or less. What remained of the stage was a crazy mess of wood and jabbing steel, all slumped at an alarming angle. A couple of surviving, but dark, stage lights were bent at a precarious angle, and the banner stretched between them whipped in the wind, straining against its ropes.

  Sparking light came from a severed wire, pulled free in the collapse and jolting dangerously on the ground. Beyond that was the flat glow of the town, its street lights occasionally matched by the flare of a Desiccator out there where Hugo, Gerald and the Half-Hunters must have been facing the Fomorians.

  “I guess that puts paid to any Completion Ceremony,” said Emmie.

  “I don’t know,” Finn said. “All they’ve wanted is for me to become a Legend Hunter at the earliest opportunity. If I don’t do it now, my dad’ll be so annoyed. He’s supposed to join the Council of Twelve after all of this.”

  “They’re going to need him now. They’re going to need eleven of him.”

  “Poor people,” said Finn sadly. “Poor Nils. Cedric. Aurora. That man with the strange sayings. All gone.”

  “Aurora was awesome,” said Emmie.

  “I wonder how she got that scar on her face.”

  “I was scared to ask in case it was something really boring, like she was mowing the lawn.”

  “I think it was probably a better story than that,” decided Finn.

  There were further flashes of blue, Desiccators firing.

  “Did you ever notice that picture in our hall?” he asked Emmie. “The one of me, Mam and Dad on holiday?”

  “The one where you’re in the tent?”

  “Yeah. Anyway, that picture was taken in Darkmouth. On the cliffs, before they were … well, you know.” He watched the skies. “That’s the closest we’ve ever got to a holiday. And it rained heavily. Just, like, normal, everyday, non-life-threatening heavy rain. So we didn’t even stay that long. Mam and Dad packed up the tent, we headed home and I ended up camping in the library instead.”

  “That was your holiday?” said Emmie.

  “Yep. We sent a postcard and everything. To ourselves. It arrived two days later, and my mam had written on it, ‘Having a great time in Darkmouth!’ Except the picture on the front was of a kitten playing with a ball of wool because it wasn’t a postcard at all, but a birthday card that had been torn in half. Shops in Darkmouth don’t have postcards. Darkmouth doesn’t have tourists.”

  “Until this week,” Emmie said.

  “I’ve never had a holiday. Ever. Never been anywhere but here. Unless you count the Infested Side, which wasn’t much of a holiday.”

  “No swimming pools,” said Emmie.

  “Maybe I’m just meant to stay in Darkmouth. Like my dad. Like all those people in the portraits.”

  “I like it here,” said Emmie. “This was my holiday. Me and my dad’s …” The words got caught in her throat.

  Finn picked up a couple of pebbles and knocked them together. He checked his watch. It was almost time for Mr Glad and the Trapped to reappear. If they were going to reappear, that is, now that they had opened the gateway for Gantrua and his army. Finn thought Mr Glad would be back, though. Because the traitor had unfinished business: revenge on Finn, and his family, for trapping him.

  Weirdly, he found that he hoped Mr Glad would be back, otherwise Steve was going to be lost for ever.

  This had better work, he thought.

  The breeze ran through his hair, and he felt exposed without his helmet. There were further flashes out in the town.

  “I’m hoping those lights and bangs are a good thing, not bad,” he said to Emmie.

  “There weren’t many Legends out of the tunnels,” said Emmie reassuringly. “They’ll be OK. Anyway, your dad won’t give up. I don’t know about the other Half-Hunters. Hopefully, they haven’t just run away.”

  “Well, I’d know how they felt.”

  “You haven’t run away this time,” said Emmie. “And, you know, thanks for that. I kind of lost it back there for a while after my dad was taken.”

  “I owed you. All this is my fault,” said Finn, running the pebbles through his fingers, looking up to see if there was any action in the sky yet.

  “You can’t say that,” said Emmie. She meant it.

  “It’s true,” insisted Finn. “Mr Glad wouldn’t have come back and taken your dad if I hadn’t trapped him in the first place.”

  “I was there when Mr Glad was pushed into a gateway in your library,” said Emmie. “We didn’t know what it would do. We saw him kind of burst or whatever. He looked pretty much dead to me.”

  “He came back,” said Finn. “The only good thing about that is that we know your dad can too.”

  In the sky above them, a glimmering of light. There and gone before Finn could even catch exactly where it had appeared from.

  They were coming.

  Finn didn’t want to admit how nervous he was, but couldn’t avoid being reminded anyway. The quivering epaulettes on his shoulders gave him away. He hated those epaulettes, cursed the fact that he’d ever agreed to include the stupid things. The whole uniform was intended to be ceremonial, a suit for showing not fighting in. He pulled an epaulette free, threw it to the ground. Tore the other one off, discarded it too.

  “They look so stupid,” he said. Then he felt a bit guilty about littering, so picked them both up and put them in his pocket.

  Another light in the sky. Silent lightning, just as earlier when the Trapped had appeared in the Black Hills.

  Finn and Emmie stood, alert now.

  The wind pushed a slab of flooring from the pile of the stage.

  Finn looked at his watch. “They should be able to appear about now. You hide. I have to face Mr Glad on my own.”

  “That’s just not right,” insisted Emmie. “I want to wait with you. I’m not scared.”

  “I know,” said Finn. “But we have a plan. And the first part of it relies on Mr Glad seeing me alone. As bait. And the second part relies on you being over there at the fireworks.”

  Away from the stage, out of sight in the dark, were half a dozen grids of tubes facing skywards, each filled with rockets of various sizes and shapes. A complex network of wires ran to one fat wire and a launch box.

  More importantly, the fireworks now carried something very precious. Small packets of the dust, left over from when Finn handed them out to the Half-Hunters. He’d held on to them, and was glad he’d done so.

  Emmie smiled. “It should work.”

  “It should.”

  “It’s totally crazy, though.”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded. “OK, let’s do it. But are you sure? You can still back out of this.”
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br />   “I can’t,” said Finn as light rolled through the unseen clouds above. “I won’t. Not now.”

  He stepped towards the crumpled stage. Emmie turned away.

  “Keep out of sight,” he told her.

  “OK,” she said. “But if I have to save you I will. It seems to be all I do.” She smiled broadly, cheekily, and then ran off, away from the stage.

  Finn watched her go.

  He waited.

  Clouds built in the sky. Crackled with energy.

  Then, behind him, a word on the breeze.

  Maybe. He couldn’t be sure.

  He looked up at the sky, a pink flutter of light. No thunder, but another word on the breeze. But what made Finn’s hair prickle was that the word seemed pretty clear to him.

  “Boy.”

  He spun, but saw nothing except for the roll of light in the sky above, the silent approach of a storm.

  Finn had done an ever-expanding number of crazy things in his life. Most of them, he had to admit, had happened by accident rather than design. Or because of incompetence. Or because someone made him do them. Or because he had simply done them without thinking. Or some kind of mix of all those things. But this was a foolishness he was entering into of his own free will.

  This was his idea. This was his increasingly ill-thought-out idea.

  He was alone, except for the nearby presence of a crushed Fomorian, buried underneath a stage that jittered precariously in the breeze. And he hadn’t even taken into account the prophecy he’d hoped had been left behind on the Infested Side, but, the more he thought about it, didn’t exactly come with an expiry date. All he knew was that Niall Blacktongue had claimed to see him at some point in a fiery cataclysm that ripped the sky apart.

  Tonight was probably as good a time as any for such an occasion.

  “Boy.”

  He looked around again, twitching with nerves, realising he had dug a fairly decent hole into the ground with his right foot even without its boot on. He was a mess. An already dented fighting suit missing a leg. A big toe sticking out in the breeze.

  Something caught the edge of his vision. A star where there had been none, drifting out of place. Just one, almost imperceptible at first, but Finn could see it begin to drop slowly. And he felt a shiver run through him, his teeth chattering so much that he had to quieten them with a palm under his jaw.

  The light brightened, grew, got closer. And Finn felt the dread build within him as it did.

  He had wanted Mr Glad to leak into Darkmouth. Right at this spot. And he had come, pouring into reality in the dead air above the collapsed stage.

  Finn took a moment to wonder if he should have gone through with this. If he was really that desperate to prove himself, to act the hero. He glanced over at a low nearby wall where he had placed his locket containing the dust that was meant to protect him. He had left it there because he knew the only way to attract Mr Glad was to offer himself as defenceless bait. It had seemed very clever when he first thought of it.

  It was not very clever at all, he realised.

  It was a really dangerous, stupid, idiotic thing to have done.

  It was time to back out.

  It was too late.

  “Boy.”

  Mr Glad poured like melting tar into the world.

  The first thing Finn did when Mr Glad appeared was to dash back, almost falling, so that he could grab the locket from where he’d placed it. He’d been defenceless as bait, but now he needed to hold it out to ward off the phantom presence.

  Mr Glad watched curiously. Finn didn’t sense him flinch, didn’t get any indication that Mr Glad saw him as much of a threat. Then again it was hard to get a full idea because of the way the Trapped man’s skin crawled. Up his face. Across his neck. A queasy rippling of a body that existed between spaces.

  “Why so disgusted?” said Mr Glad. His voice seemed to come from some other place, reverberated through the air, a thrum across the surface of existence. Finn could feel it in his kidneys. “You made me like this. You should be proud. Are you proud?”

  Mr Glad moved forward, and Finn did all he could to stand his ground, locket held out in front as a shield.

  “You pushed me into the jaws of a gateway and locked me between worlds,” said Mr Glad. “But something else happened. Every time you opened a gateway after that, I was torn back into this world, and then into their world, put back together a thousand times, through pain a hundred thousand times greater than you can possibly imagine.”

  Finn took a step back, locket still held out in front of him. He found himself backed up against the stage, had to push himself away from it.

  “I have travelled through the skin of the worlds,” said Mr Glad. “I have seen its veins. Its gristle. I have been all those things.”

  “It doesn’t have to be like this,” Finn said.

  “And what have I learned?” continued Mr Glad, ignoring him. “That time is a boiling river, sucking you under, throwing you to the surface every now and then. But I have seen into two worlds. I have seen that you are getting older, but no wiser. That you are not special. That you have no destiny beyond the certainty of disappointment and defeat.”

  “I know Gantrua promised to bring you back, to make you human again,” Finn told him, backing away round the edge of the crumpled stage. “We could do it too. I know what the dust does.”

  “I’ve learned I can control those who I trap. Their thoughts are my thoughts. My movements are their movements.”

  Finn thought of the voices he had heard in that brief moment when he too was almost trapped. Recalled the feeling of giving in, of falling under the control of Mr Glad. “I can use the dust to bring you back. I know it draws you from between the worlds and that enough of it can bring you back completely, just like you were before,” he said. “I can help you. You don’t have to be … this way.”

  Mr Glad stopped moving. It was as if he was letting that idea percolate, run through the roughly formed neurons of his mind. “The dust could give me shape again,” he said, and Finn felt a glimmer of hope. Mr Glad was contemplating this idea.

  “It could restore your body,” said Finn. “Make you normal again. A Hogboon told me. Broonie. He learned about it on the Infested Side. He said the Legends control you and they promised you life. But they’re lying – they’ll never do it. They only want to keep you as a weapon, keep you Trapped for ever.”

  Mr Glad looked at Finn, what passed for a head cocked to one side, eyes burning. But Finn sensed the humanity in there, the conflict, the sadness within.

  “You will use the dust to bring me back?” asked Mr Glad.

  “For good.” Finn sensed this was working, that he was softening Mr Glad.

  “After all I’ve done …?”

  “It’s not too late,” Finn assured him. “I’ll be the Legend Hunter here. I’ll make sure you’re OK.”

  Finn was sure he could see the turmoil in Mr Glad, not just in the shifting of his body, but in his thoughts.

  Mr Glad surveyed the scene, as if taking in the view of Darkmouth. The place that was once his home. That could be his home again. “This town has had so many strong Legend Hunters, for generations. I know now that with you as this town’s Legend Hunter …” he looked deep into Finn’s soul, a scowl floating to the top of his writhing mouth, “… Darkmouth will die.”

  He moved towards Finn again. Finn stumbled back, knowing that his gambit had failed. He held the locket out in front of him again, a defence that suddenly seemed far weaker than it had before. He knew he was failing. The other Trapped were still missing. Steve was still missing. But Mr Glad was still here. And he was steadily pushing Finn back into a corner.

  “You see, boy,” boomed Mr Glad, flowing towards him, “you are so naive. You have no idea of what I am now. No idea what power I have gained. No idea how much stronger the Legends have made me. They think they control me. Yet every time I have been torn into this world, or that world …” He pushed out his right arm as if p
ointing, but his hand was missing behind the curtain of the air, perhaps in the Infested Side. “… I have grown stronger. Gantrua had no idea what he was creating. You think I am trapped here? You think they are deceiving me? Wrong. I am in control of them. I am more powerful than I have ever been. And there is so much more to come.”

  Finn waved the locket at him.

  “Do you really think that can protect you?” Mr Glad asked him.

  “Yes,” said Finn, locket dangling from the end of the chain. “Because otherwise you would have killed me already.”

  Mr Glad laughed, a hideous sound. “Maybe you are cleverer than you look. Tell me, boy, what do you plan to do? You must know that one day you will forget that trinket, and I will be there. Waiting.”

  “That’s why I want to make a deal with you,” said Finn. His heart was a jackhammer in his chest.

  Mr Glad didn’t laugh. No, it was nothing so straightforward as an evil cackle, or anything that Finn might have understood. The response was deeper, a derisory grunt that sent a minor quake through the air, shook his fighting suit.

  “What could you possibly offer?” asked Mr Glad, floating still, every part of him in constant motion.

  “Me,” answered Finn. Once again, his brain tried to shut down and replace all this bravery with more normal thoughts about soft furry animals, his mammy and just getting the hell out of there. “I’ll put the locket away, let you take me. On certain conditions.”

  Electricity sparked on the ground beside the collapsed stage, making it even harder to focus on the shifting form of Mr Glad as he hovered above the rubble and debris. He seemed closer all of a sudden, as if he had leaked forward. Finn took a step back, his cold feet uncertain on the rough ground.

  “The dust in the locket can be for Steve,” Finn said. “Just let me use it on him. Bring him back and I’ll use it to save him, bring him into this world again, and then you can have me. I’ll take his place.”

  His brain had shut everything down so that his vision was limited, his thinking stifled, his entire energy diverted into preventing himself just collapsing, jabbering with fear. And he was trying to make a deal with a demon.