Darkmouth

by Shane Hegarty

  “As long as it’s organic,” explained his father, “what can be shrunk can also be brought back to its proper size and shape. Most of the time. The plan is to bring this fella back so that we can test the device. Mr. Glad offered to lend a hand.”

  “I shall be the beautiful assistant in this magic trick,” Mr. Glad said with a grin.

  Finn’s father unclicked the trigger unit from the Desiccator’s handle and, as he walked back, slotted it into a groove at the base of the canister. “The Desiccator and Reanimator do the same thing in a way, Finn, only backward. One shrinks, the other expands. Same principle, same chemicals, only reversed. Legend Hunters used to carry two weapons, one for each job, on the off chance they wanted to reanimate a Legend to interrogate them or experiment on them or, as would happen, just to annoy them. But I thought one would do, so I adapted a Desiccator to do both.”

  “He made his first when he was just fifteen,” remarked Mr. Glad, still pottering about the device. “He called it the De-desiccator.”

  “It sounded right at the time,” said his dad as he held the reconstructed weapon to his right eye and peered down its length, then felt the solidity of the trigger sitting beneath the canister.

  “But why do you need my fish?” asked Finn.

  “For years we’ve been dealing with the Legends one by one,” his father said. “Shoot one, put it in a jar, wait for another, shoot it, put it in a jar, and on and on, attack by attack. The machine I’ve been working on will put a stop to them once and for all. The trick was to do it without turning the whole of Darkmouth into a giant lump. And that’s where having a few live Legends on the shelves comes in useful.”

  He approached the cage, barrel outstretched. With his thumb, he pushed the brass switch upward and a low whine built from within, getting higher and higher in pitch before becoming impossible to hear. Then came a steady tick, tick, tick.

  The Reanimator was ready.

  Bubbles was nibbling the stone at the bottom of his bowl.

  “We’re going to give this a go,” said Finn’s dad, “but, when I say run, you run out that door, you understand? And don’t come in until I say so.”

  Finn nodded. His temple throbbed. “What about Bubbles?”

  “If all goes according to plan, he’ll be grazing on his own poo as normal tonight.”

  Through the bars of the cage, his father tapped the hard ball of Hogboon with the rod. The desiccated Legend was briefly engulfed in a deep, even green glow that died down quickly.

  The ball hopped. Like a jumping bean, it lurched forward, sideways, forward again.

  There was an almighty scream.

  28

  Broonie screamed.

  And screamed.

  And continued screaming.

  If the scream had been broken down into its constituent parts, it would have been discovered to contain approximately forty-three vowels, twenty-eight consonants, and several sounds that could fit in either category, or neither, or both.

  He couldn’t quite decide which was worse: being desiccated or being reanimated. He knew a bit about Desiccation. They taught them about it on the Infested Side, how the net smothered the Legend, slowing its metabolism remarkably so that, from the victim’s point of view, time stretched on for much longer than the half second or so it actually took to be desiccated. How long depended on size. For a creature about as big as an adult human—or, indeed, an actual human—it could feel as long as a day, depending on what he or she had for lunch.

  But for, say, a Hydra, about the size of three elephants, give or take its seven dragon heads, the experience of Desiccation would appear to stretch a horribly long time. To the only Hydra ever to have been hit by a Desiccator, it would have felt like he had been frozen for exactly 243 years. Given that it happened 150 years ago, presumably from his perspective he’s still stuck there and really quite furious about it.

  Broonie’s experience had involved feeling stuck for a great many hours, while the world around him appeared frozen. There was nothing to do but wait as the stream penetrated every part of his body—every fiber, every cell, every molecule. One of the great mercies of the Desiccator net, Broonie discovered, was that, during this phase, its victim felt nothing at all. Except, of course, great boredom.

  Finally, as the process neared its end, there was a mildly peculiar sensation, a bit like a butterfly snoozing on Broonie’s neck. He even allowed himself to think, You know what? This isn’t so bad after all.

  Then nothing.

  Until . . .

  The final phase of Reanimation felt as follows:

  1)Like having his body pulled by his nose through a tea strainer.

  2)Like being a balloon a millisecond before it bursts.

  3)Like waking up to find all his insides on the outside. (The outside of the house that is.)

  When Broonie finally stopped screaming, he lay panting on the floor for a moment before he assessed exactly where he was. Which was in a cage. In a large room. In a world of pain.

  The chief mercy of Reanimation was that it lasted for a relatively short time and there was a small part of the middle toe of his right foot which didn’t feel any pain. At least not much pain when compared to the rest of his body.

  But the air was revitalizing. Clean. Cool. The air of the Promised World. And, as he came to, it became clear that there were three humans staring at him. He didn’t recognize the oldest one, but the other two were familiar. One was the Legend Hunter. The other was the boy.

  Broonie pushed himself up, slowly, painfully, trying to put as much weight as he could on the one toe on his right foot that didn’t feel so bad. Eventually, he raised himself enough to reach out a hand toward the boy.

  He pointed a finger at him.

  “What’s he doing?” asked the boy.

  “Charge the device, Hugo,” said the older man.

  “Wait!” shouted the boy.

  Broonie extended the finger toward the child and willed himself to be articulate now that he had another chance to deliver his message. “The . . . ,” he managed to say.

  Finn’s dad turned a large dial about a third of the way around.

  “Now, Hugo!”

  “. . . boy . . . ,” stuttered Broonie.

  The Legend Hunter struck hard on a fat red button.

  “. . . will . . . ,”

  In the window on the side of the device, the crystals sparked, then flared a yellow that momentarily filled the room.

  Broonie gurgled a final word, but it was drowned by a great sound from the device, as if it was taking a breath deep enough to suck all the oxygen from the room.

  “Run!” shouted the Legend Hunter, but the boy stayed where he was, mouth open, until the Legend Hunter grabbed him by the elbow and pulled him away.

  An explosion ripped through the room, followed by a shockwave of crackling atoms. Broonie raised his arms in defense, but it was useless.

  With a stifled whooop, he was once again sucked into a hard ball small enough to fit inside the average pocket.

  It was a bit more pleasant than being reanimated.

  But only a very, very small bit.

  29

  Finn, his dad, and Mr. Glad burst back in through the door. Finn was confused and desperate to know just who, and why, and when, and what that Hogboon had been talking about.

  His father ran straight to the cage, which he picked up and rattled until its door swung open and the desiccated Hogboon rolled out across the floor.

  Mr. Glad picked up the apple from where it still sat on the table next to the device. “Shall I?” he asked.

  “By all means,” said Finn’s father.

  Mr. Glad took a deep bite from the apple’s pink skin, chewed on it, and pulled a face like it was the greatest tasting apple any human being had ever had the pleasure of sinking their teeth into.

  Finn’s father dropped to his hands and knees and inspected the bonsai trees. “Not so much as a twig out of place. Not a leaf. Nothing!” He hopped to his f
eet again.

  Finn walked over to his fish, tapping the glass to see if Bubbles was okay.

  “I think it worked,” declared Finn’s father.

  “You did it, Hugo,” said Mr. Glad, taking another bite of the apple. “Great stuff.”

  “Dad . . . ,” Finn uttered quietly.

  “I wasn’t sure, Glad, to be honest. I mean, I had oscillated the frequency, and narrowed the range, and all of that, but still I couldn’t be sure.”

  “Dad, the fish . . . ,” Finn prompted a little louder.

  “You’d have done Gerald proud, Hugo.”

  Finn’s father’s delight fell away a little at that.

  “Sorry, Hugo, I didn’t mean to remind you of . . . It wasn’t my intention.”

  “Dad?”

  “What is it, Finn?”

  He walked over to where Finn was inspecting the glass.

  “Dad, where’s Bubbles?”

  The goldfish was gone. The only signs he had ever been there were shaken pebbles, drifting slowly downward, and a few scales floating free on the surface. Finn looked on the floor, but Bubbles had not jumped or fallen out. He was simply gone.

  A frown had planted itself on Finn’s father’s face. It wasn’t going to be leaving anytime soon. “I’ll get you another goldfish. You won’t know the difference.”

  Finn thought of all the things that could have happened to Bubbles. Maybe he’d been desiccated into something smaller than dust. Maybe he’d been zapped, exploded, disintegrated, made invisible. Anything. He felt loss well inside him. His only pet. The only animal he was allowed to keep in a bowl in his room rather than in a jar in the library.

  “Poor Bubbles,” Finn muttered. Then he remembered the Hogboon’s words. “He said it again, Dad. The Hogboon said something to me. It was definitely me.”

  “Finn, you have to ignore that,” said his father. “He was disoriented. His head was all over the place.”

  “But he was talking to me.”

  “Finn, we’re trying to create the greatest weapon any Legend Hunter could hope for. Okay, so it still needs tweaking. There’s obviously some kind of problem here that we need to look into, but we scattered a wave that shrunk a small Legend, and not the apple or the plants. I don’t know what happened to your fish, but we’ll figure that out eventually. I don’t know if this will work on bigger Legends, but we’ll figure that out too. This will change everything. For us. For you.”

  “But the Hogboon,” pleaded Finn.

  “Enough about the Hogboon!” his father snapped. “Can’t you let me have one moment of pleasure?”

  The atmosphere spoiled, Mr. Glad put his apple down and began picking up some of the parts scattered around the device. Finn went to the table and lifted the fish bowl, careful not to let the water spill. Just in case Bubbles was still in there. Invisible. Or just really tiny.

  “Finn, it’s training time,” said his dad.

  “What?” Finn protested, a small wave of water sloshing out of the bowl and splashing on his hand.

  “I’ll give you fifteen minutes.”

  Finn left the library and didn’t return for a full nineteen minutes. It was as brave a protest as he could muster under the circumstances.

  30

  “Come on, Finn, this could save your life.”

  “What life? I don’t have a life. I’m here doing this with you.”

  Finn was wearing his fighting suit, which his father had handed to him as soon as he had arrived at the training room. Finn took it as an ominous sign, and that sat almost as heavily on him as the loose-fitting armor.

  He tried again to perform the move his father was teaching him. He failed again.

  Finn was frustrated: He knew these moves. He knew how they should go. He could play them out in his head. He could even imagine his own body performing them.

  He just couldn’t, well, actually do them.

  But he did the slide, then a bit more of a slide, grimaced, and stumbled to his feet, a wooden training sword outstretched and wobbling. As he rose, he was distracted by a Desiccator lying in a corner. Finn had a nagging concern that it was there for a reason as yet unrevealed.

  Mr. Glad wandered into the room and watched. “Drop your hips and slide,” he suggested. “Don’t force it. Use your momentum. Let me show you.”

  “We’ve got this covered, Glad, thanks,” said Finn’s father grumpily. “I think there was a problem with the core fluctuator on the device. Would you mind checking that out? It might need a spring or something.”

  “The core fluctuator?” asked Mr. Glad.

  “It’s the thing that looks like the old vacuum cleaner. Is the old vacuum cleaner.”

  Mr. Glad waited a moment, his eyebrow betraying a ripple of irritation, before slowly shuffling out.

  “Now, Finn,” said his dad. “Drop your hips. Feel the patterns.”

  “Feel the patterns? I don’t even know what that means,” said Finn.

  “Of movement. In yourself. Your opponents. It’s all in your mind.”

  Finn’s dad threw himself at the ground, slid deftly, and sprang to his feet facing Finn again, his wooden sword held steady at the tip of his son’s nose.

  “Then you clobber them. Got that, Finn?”

  “No.”

  “Great,” said his dad. “Now try it again.”

  Finn was horribly conscious of how clumsy he was. Rather than the move ending with him springing to his feet with liquid agility, he hauled himself up like an old man trying to get out of bed while wearing a concrete hat.

  “That was good,” said his father.

  “If you’re going to lie, at least put some effort into it,” responded Finn, panting.

  His dad ignored him. “Let’s do it again.”

  Finn gave it another go, this time stumbling backward as he tried to get to his feet, and ending up on his back before rolling over to haul himself up once more.

  Closing his eyes to retain some composure, his dad said, “Okay, one more. Slowly. I’ll go first.”

  “I don’t want to,” said Finn.

  “You have to.”

  “Why?” asked Finn, holding his sword limply by his side. “You’re building a machine in there that’ll do my job for me. Just press a button and they’ll be gone. I don’t need to do this now.”

  “Wrong,” said his father, the steel now evident in his attitude. “You went to school today and came back with a wound.”

  “It was a tree!”

  “You got hit by something by the looks of it. Too wide for a stone. Definitely not a branch.” Finn’s face betrayed him. His father switched to a more soothing tone. “Finn, twice in a few days you’ve struggled with people instead of Legends. The truth is that if you can’t handle one you can’t handle the other. I know this isn’t always easy, but I believe in you. I have faith in you. You’re my boy. It will click for you.”

  “I need to know what—” started Finn.

  “I’ll teach you exactly what you need to know,” interrupted his father.

  “No, I need to know what the Hogboon meant.” His father broke away, but Finn pressed on. “You know something, don’t you, Dad? There’s something you won’t tell me.”

  His dad’s jaw was tense. A small vein pulsed in his neck. “Maybe a challenge will help sharpen you up,” he announced, before striding out of the room.

  He returned, carrying something in his arms covered in a blue blanket. He placed it on the ground between Finn and the Desiccator. “Sometimes the quickest way is just to jump in the deep end.” He yanked the blanket away. “I reanimated a Legend for you.”

  There, snoring gently, was a Manticore. The poisonous darts on his tail were each plugged with a wine cork and his mouth was muzzled, but his paws were free.

  Finn’s dad began backing out of the room.

  “Where are you going?” Finn asked, battling the panic in his voice.

  “Just remember your training,” said Finn’s dad. As he left, he pulled a rope from the be
lt around his waist and whipped the Manticore’s behind. It shrieked into life.

  “Dad!”

  A grate opened in the door and Finn saw his dad’s eyes peering through, then, briefly, his mouth. “You’ll be fine. Good lad.”

  31

  The Manticore was groggy and disoriented, like it was waking from a midafternoon nap, but, upon seeing Finn, its instincts kicked in immediately and it shot a dart at him. The dart bounced off Finn’s forehead and rolled away, still wedged in the cork.

  The Manticore flapped to the ceiling, dug its claws in, and clung there for a moment, trying to regain its senses. Finn guessed it was also trying to think of a fiendish riddle to shock him with.

  Finn’s dad reached in through the door and pressed a switch that sent sparks dancing through the ceiling. The Legend howled and dropped to the floor, the nasty aroma of frazzled fur filling the room.

  Finn dashed for the door, but too late. It shut again.

  Picking itself up, the Manticore focused on Finn.

  “Mmmpf mmpf mmmmmmpf,” the Manticore riddled, only to realize that its jaw was wired shut.

  That was clearly the final indignity. Muscles pulsed through its forelegs, ligaments rippling downwards until its claws sprang into view. They were ivory daggers, bright white in the dull light. The Legend went for Finn, who raised an arm instinctively, deflecting the Manticore into the wall with a thump. But the Legend quickly recovered and came at Finn again, who backed away and raised his wooden sword, pressing it into the creature’s belly and flipping the Manticore over his head.

  “Good boy,” shouted his dad from outside.

  “Stop it, Dad, this is unfair!”

  “You’re doing great. Watch out!”

  The Manticore landed directly on Finn’s chest, claws scrabbling at the boy’s armor plate and winding Finn as it forced him to the floor. Finn gripped the sword at each end, using it to hold off the creature as it scratched furiously at his face, until he instinctively used its handle to jab the Legend in the eye.

  As the Manticore howled and dropped off him, Finn quickly pushed himself to his feet. “Doing great!” he heard his dad say, but time had slowed, his vision had narrowed. All he saw was the Manticore, squaring off at the opposite end of the room and then leaping toward him.