Darkmouth

by Shane Hegarty

  Then his father’s voice. “More coming through here too. Desiccator not firing. Switching to close-quarter weapons.”

  “Time to get medieval, Hugo!” Steve yelled in glee over the din at his end.

  “Finn?” asked his father. “What’s your status?”

  At that moment, Finn’s head was busy with three competing thoughts.

  First was how unlikely the odds were that both his and his father’s Desiccators would seize up, in the same way, at exactly the same time.

  The second was that there was still something about the pattern of these gateways that seemed a little too neat.

  And third, gradually elbowing its way to the front of his mind, was the realization that in the gateway he faced, a dark blob was getting closer.

  Another Manticore spilled onto the asphalt. A second emerged almost immediately behind, landing on top of the first, scratching and biting.

  When the Manticores finally stopped attacking each other, Finn was gone.

  49

  For half a second, lightning showed Finn the way down the empty school corridor, illuminating a thousand forced grins on the faded class photos scattered along the wall.

  Then blackness again. No sound but Finn’s slow creak past classrooms. Through his radio, he could hear the sounds of a town under attack, his father occasionally shouting the latest from his hand-to-claw fight with invading Manticores, Steve responding with yells of delight and the spit of a Desiccator. He heard Emmie too, saying something. “I’ll go to the car,” or maybe, “I’ll throw the bar,” he wasn’t sure. But she sounded okay, and he felt relief at that.

  From inside or outside the school—he couldn’t be sure which—Finn heard the distant sound of a Dumpster being knocked over and a crash of cans tipping out. He froze and lifted his visor a little to hear better. All he could make out was the rain outside.

  Finn kept moving through the corridors, looking for the right place to hide, perhaps to ambush. But ambush with what? He had his Desiccator, but it felt lifeless in his hand.

  He crept onward through the building. Lightning briefly revealed a stuffed fox midprowl, midsnarl, in a glass box. A rumble of thunder followed.

  He wondered what his father would do in these circumstances, but quickly remembered that his father was in these circumstances and wasn’t creeping around a school, looking for somewhere to hide.

  Maybe it was better to ask himself what his father would want Finn to do in these circumstances. But he knew it definitely wouldn’t involve creeping around a school, looking for somewhere to hide.

  Yet here he was.

  It seemed as if the storm had abated a little. The gaps between flashes of lightning were longer, meaning greater stretches of the pitch black as Finn moved through the corridors. He checked his scanner and saw that the gateway outside the school had closed.

  Finn reassured himself that he knew these halls, strolled through them almost every day, knew their angles and turns, could have navigated them blindfolded. Then he walked smack into a wall he didn’t expect to be there.

  His grunt, and the sound of a small shock wave rippling through the suit, seemed to echo around the entire building. He held his breath and stood absolutely still, his eyes wide.

  Lightning lit the hall. No Manticores. Darkness again.

  He lifted his visor a little, but couldn’t see any better. In the blackness, he searched for the button on the side of his helmet that activated the night-vision function and switched it on. Instantly, the world shifted, becoming a basic rendering of green blobs and dark patches.

  Especially green was the Manticore-shaped blob only a couple of yards away.

  Maybe it would go away if he turned the night vision off. So he did that.

  An otherworldly voice, low and malevolent, floated across the blackness: “What is in the dark and not too bright?”

  He turned the night vision back on. The green blob jumped at him, snarling.

  Finn fell onto the floor and began scrabbling away backward, but the Manticore reached him quickly and sunk its teeth into the armor at Finn’s knee.

  He belted the Legend with the butt of his Desiccator until it let go, a couple of its teeth following after it. As the Manticore jumped again at him, Finn launched his Desiccator at it, striking it square in the jaw. Another tooth popped free.

  Undeterred, the Manticore swung its tail toward him and fired off a poisonous dart. Finn felt the missile lodge in the small gap he had opened in his visor, its razor tip almost scratching at his chin.

  In shock, Finn yanked the dart out. The Manticore came at him again, claws and broken teeth bared, and, just as its front paws reached his shoulder, Finn stabbed the creature in the belly with its own dart. The Manticore howled and, with its claws digging into Finn’s suit, began to flail horribly until Finn threw the Legend free. The Manticore dropped to the ground, jabbering crazily. Despite its aggression, Finn felt a welling sympathy for it. This close up, it was actually a beautiful creature, its coat a golden sheen, the skin beneath it taut against its muscles. He half reached out, wondering if he should perhaps help it.

  It tried to bite him. Finn jumped back, suitably chastened, feeling a crunch beneath his feet. The Manticore’s jabbering calmed and it slumped suddenly into complete stillness.

  As Finn’s nerves settled again, he felt a growing delight bubble through. Does this count? he wondered. He had stopped two Manticores after all. He had felled them, immobilized them, finally beaten Legends. Is this a successful hunt? And that crunchy stuff I stepped on: that was its teeth!

  He stepped away and tried not to think about that.

  His radio came to life again, but all he could hear were his father’s steady, controlled grunts as he fought. It clicked off, then on once more, replaced by Steve’s Desiccator firing furiously. Finn again thought of Emmie out there, and wondered if she was involved in that battle or stuck in the van, safely removed from the action.

  His vision went white with lightning, except for the long dark shadow of the final Manticore, which loomed along the wall of a bisecting corridor.

  Finn’s radio crackled in his earpiece. Flustered, he grabbed at it to muffle its tinny sound. But it was too late.

  Out there in the dark corridors, the remaining Manticore had heard the tiny disturbance. The Legend turned and stalked in his direction.

  50

  The human was close. The Manticore could feel it. It could smell it too, although the scent was almost overpowered by the appalling odor of generations of juvenile humans that had soaked into every pore of the building.

  The Legend moved stealthily forward while trying to concoct a particularly impressive riddle for its moment of triumph. Something original, perhaps witty. Something to tell its friends about when it returned home.

  Briefly distracted by that thought, it rounded a corner onto another corridor, registered nothing, and moved on.

  Then a radio crackled again, louder this time. The Manticore paused, listened, its ears upright and swiveling like antennae.

  It turned back toward the corner it had just passed and made its way up the corridor.

  In the darkness, the Legend could just about make out the line of closed doors on either side of the corridor. Except for one. From behind that open door, a radio fizzled, throwing out distorted voices. The creature licked its lips, smiled at its fortune and at the particularly brilliant riddle it had decided upon.

  The Manticore charged through the open door, pouncing into the room with a blood-burbling snarl. It smashed straight into brush handles and a stack of paint cans.

  Lying on the floor was the radio. It crackled again.

  Finn slammed shut the door to the janitor’s closet before the Manticore could escape. He dragged a table across the door to wedge it tight. Then he grabbed another table and pushed it across too. He also rammed a chair against that table. Better to be safe than sorry.

  Trapped, the Manticore scratched frantically at the door in an angry, loud, f
utile attempt to get out.

  Relieved, Finn half fell backward through the door of a classroom. It was his own. Feeling his way into it, he backed against a wall and slid down onto the floor. The night vision was becoming a strain on his eyes, so he turned it off.

  As his eyes became used to the dark, he peered up at the window. Outside, the night grunted with thunder.

  The scanner glowed weakly. There was nothing now where his gateway had been, but another had opened farther east. He would be expected to handle it.

  The position of these gateways prodded at his brain again. Something about them seemed to matter. He just couldn’t figure out what.

  From across the corridor, the Manticore continued its attempts to dig its way out of the closet, its vicious curses echoing across the halls.

  Lightning lit the classroom, flashing bright across the whiteboard, which was decorated with the triangles and angles from Finn’s math class. As thunder rumbled across the sky, a realization crossed Finn’s brain.

  He hauled himself up and used the dim light of the scanner to illuminate the whiteboard. Then he looked at the screen of his scanner again. It wasn’t obvious. It wasn’t neat. But the gateways formed a rough pattern over the town. It looked like a crystal.

  Across the screen, he pulled his fingers from each point inward. His eyes widened. His mouth fell open. The lines he had drawn led to one definite point at the center of Darkmouth.

  One particular street.

  One single building.

  Finn narrowed his eyes. It was almost as if the gateways had been designed to draw attention away from that building, to distract from something happening there.

  He hesitated for a moment, pushed down his fear. He knew what he needed to do. He knew where he needed to be.

  He turned and sprinted for home.

  51

  Across Darkmouth, the rain flowed along the streets, windows shook with thunder, and street lights flickered in the storm. Not for the first time, bizarre hybrid creatures were attempting to run riot through the town.

  But the people of Darkmouth didn’t do what they usually did. They didn’t cower in doorways. They didn’t hide indoors. The murmurings of discontent had grown in the stores and cafés, in the beauty salons and butchers, at the school gates where parents gathered, and in the schoolyards where children played. The people of Darkmouth had been passive for too long. A storm had broken and their patience with it.

  They emerged from houses and shops and restaurants. One by one. Then two by two. Small groups merging to march through the damp streets. All heading in one direction. To the source of this misery in their town.

  Finn ran hard. As he got closer to his house, and farther from any open gateway, it occurred to him that he had better be right about this—because he was supposed to be heading for another gateway, not away from them.

  At the same time, he felt the familiar wobble in his legs as fear urged him out of any notions of being a hero. He ran through it, tried to leave it behind him on the drenched streets. The pattern of recent gateways had seemed unmistakable to him: they formed a jagged perimeter, spread wide away from the center. That center was his house.

  If someone wanted to drag Finn and his father away from their base, this would be an effective way of doing it. And, if someone wanted to drag a Legend Hunter away from his base, it was never going to be for the most kind-hearted of reasons.

  But, more than that, his mam was there.

  It took him a while to notice the steady trickle of townspeople, despite the storm, moving in a direction that was suspiciously similar to the one he was headed in. He pushed on through Darkmouth’s maze of streets, every step announced by the splash of boots in water and the clatter of his armor. Rain obscured his vision and he almost missed the mob gathered in a small gap of an alley.

  He slowed and doubled back to see the crowd massed at a wall, screaming demands, calling for blood. Through their legs, Finn could make out a figure cowering against the brickwork and batting away the occasional kick and punch.

  It was Broonie.

  “Stand back,” Finn said in the deepest, most authoritative voice he could muster, which wasn’t particularly deep. Or authoritative. “I’ve got this Legend.”

  The crowd paused in their attack to watch Finn stride toward them, as tall as he could be, visor down, waving them aside.

  One man resumed his attempt to kick Broonie.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Finn said. “Kick that creature in the wrong spot and it will explode.”

  Everyone took a step back, although they didn’t look entirely convinced.

  Broonie jumped up from the wet ground.

  “Why should we trust you?” asked a man.

  “Our mobile Legend Hunting unit is around the corner,” said Finn. “We’ll deal with this creature there.”

  “Don’t let him take me,” pleaded Broonie theatrically. “They do such awful things there.”

  “Go and get one of your weapons then,” the man said to Finn. “We’ll hold on to him until you come back and shoot him here.”

  “I could do that,” said Finn. “But only if you want to all run the risk of being sucked into the, erm, Vortex of Tears.”

  “The Vortex of Tears?”

  “It happened to my uncle once. He was there a thousand years before he was found again.”

  He pushed through the people, grabbed Broonie by the arm, and dragged him away from the crowd. “That actually hurts,” Broonie muttered.

  “Silence, Legend,” Finn commanded. He pulled Broonie around the corner, out of sight, and said, “Run.”

  “That’s what you told me last time,” said Broonie. “A direction would be good.”

  “Anywhere.”

  Broonie shook his head, sighed, and pelted away, allowing Finn to resume his race back home, followed by a small, angry mob that had quickly realized that there was no mobile Legend Hunting unit around the corner, no intention to kill the Legend, and probably no Vortex of Tears, although no one was prepared to take the risk on that one.

  52

  Finn turned onto his street. There were a few dozen people there already, their anger crackling with the thunder.

  “I stood in the salon and watched these people tear dangerously through our streets,” he heard a woman say, her hair high and stiff, protected under a large orange umbrella. “This cannot go on any longer. We need to take matters into our own hands!”

  “Should we ring the doorbell?” asked a man.

  “I don’t see Hugo’s car here,” said another. “He must be out chasing monsters. We can call back later.”

  “No!” insisted the first woman. “We will not be kept out.”

  “Excuse me,” said Finn, pushing his way to the front. He struggled to fish a key ring from a pocket tucked within his armor, and finally, under the uncomfortable gaze of a mob temporarily disconcerted by his arrival, managed to unlock the front door and go inside.

  “Well, of all the . . . ,” harrumphed the ringleader before she was silenced by Finn closing the door on her.

  Inside, the house was dark save for the occasional flicker of lightning; quiet except for the rain on the windows and the creak of Finn’s fighting suit. He lifted his visor and crept on.

  “Mam?” he croaked as loudly as he could. “You here?” In a flash of light, Finn saw that the door to the Long Hall was open. He was startled by a bang behind him. Then the urgent rapping of a palm on the door. He spun back around toward the front door and saw a familiar silhouette hammering on its glass.

  He let go of his weapon and opened the door for Emmie.

  “Now listen, young man—” said the increasingly irritated woman at the head of the growing protest, but the rest of her speech was cut off by Finn slamming the door shut on her again.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked Emmie.

  “We’ve been calling you on the radio,” she said, trying to catch her breath, “and it was silent until there was just
some snarling from what sounded like a really angry Legend. I was worried something had happened to you, but my dad was having too much fun to care. It’s like Christmas morning for him, all this shooting. Only he wouldn’t let me do anything but watch from the van. So I said I’d run over to see if you were here. Which you are. So is everyone in the town. They’re not happy out there. These fighting suits are itchy, aren’t they?”

  She finally took a deep breath.

  Finn checked the scanner on his belt. Three gateways remained open.

  “What are we actually doing here, Finn?” asked Emmie.

  “I don’t know exactly, but I suspect it’s because someone doesn’t want us here.”

  “Brilliant,” said Emmie, then cocked her head in a quizzical manner. “Hold on. What?”

  Finn showed her the scanner. “The gateways opened around the town, bringing us away from the house.”

  “So, we needed to come to your house because there are no gateways here.”

  “Yes, but that means there must be something else,” he said eagerly, before calming down. “I think.”

  Emmie thought about that for a second. “Do you think that something could be a someone? Or a something?”

  A sudden, distant thud echoed up the Long Hall.

  Emmie looked at Finn. “You don’t have to do this.”

  “No, you’re the one who doesn’t have to do this,” said Finn. He moved toward the open door to the Long Hall, fighting the urge to stall and failing. “I’m supposed to be the Legend Hunter here. You don’t have to come with me.”

  “Are you kidding?” she said, smiling. “We’re in this together. I owe you that. Besides, you’re the one with a Desiccator. Hold on, where’s your Desiccator?”

  “Oh yeah, about that. I threw it at a Manticore. It was a great shot actually. . . .” But Emmie was already through the door. Finn followed, telling himself that whatever lay at the end of this hall would be nothing he couldn’t deal with. He was a Legend Hunter. Almost. Someday soon. Maybe.