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“Listen to me, Finn,” Hugo said. “Do you think I want to be here? Do you think my only plan is spending my life with pets whose toenails are out of control?”
“Then what is your plan?” Finn asked, frustration building. “Because I don’t see it.”
“I have it under control, Finn. You just need to be patient.”
“And while we wait,” Finn said, “we’re crammed into a small house, waiting for disaster, knowing they’re scheming something but we just can’t see what yet.” He was getting properly angry now.
His father stopped towelling the dog. “Please just go to school, play football, do whatever, but I need you to let me deal with this in case things really do get out of control.”
Mr Green shouted from outside the room, “Hugo! Rabbit poo! Now!”
Hugo gritted his teeth. Took a long, calming breath. “You need to understand, Finn,” he said before leaving. “The most effective way to grab victory is to first look like you’ve lost everything.”
“That makes no sense,” Finn muttered, alone now.
The labradoodle sneezed, covering Finn in flecks of water.
Wiping himself down, Finn stepped into the salty Darkmouth air. Things were definitely as bleak as they’d ever been. He could sense it. It was as if the world itself had darkened. Then Finn realised that it had. While he’d been in with his dad, a low, heavy cloud had dragged itself across the sky. The bright, cloudless blue of the day had given way to a near twilight.
A drop of rain splashed on to Finn’s shoulder. He put his hand out and caught two more.
It wasn’t supposed to rain today.
The rain fell heavier, stinging drops hopping off his head, bouncing off the road around him.
Rain meant Legends, breaking through.
Finn looked up, took a raindrop in the eye. He wiped it away, and when he did he realised that the ground around him was being lit by a growing golden glow.
Finn felt a tiny prick in his neck, like he’d been stung, smacked at his skin as he swung around to meet the chest of someone. Something. He looked up, saw an eye staring at him. One eye. No more.
“Sorry, kid,” the Legend said, voice deeper than hell. “You’re coming with us.”
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The gateway opened for a few seconds.
About three minutes later, four panting assistants finally arrived at the scene, carrying Desiccators awkwardly. They’d been delayed by an argument about which alley to run down. Half of them had said they should go right. Half said they should go left. They ended up going straight ahead which, by sheer luck, was exactly where they should have gone in the first place.
They burst into the dead end near the back of Woofy Wash, where the gateway had torn its way into our world.
But there was no gateway.
There were no Legends.
Even the rain had gone, stopping so suddenly it was as if someone had turned off the shower tap.
The assistants looked at each other with some bemusement.
“There’s nothing here,” said one of them.
“I told you we should have gone right,” said another.
“You said we should have gone left. I said we should go right,” said a third.
A noise startled them and the assistants lifted the Desiccators they’d brought.
But it was only Hugo, throwing out a basin of dirty, rabbit-poo-filled water.
They kept their weapons raised. He paused, liquid slopping about the edge of the basin.
The assistants lowered their weapons. Hugo threw the water along the ground, so that it lapped and splashed at their gleaming shoes, then returned inside.
As if a single entity, the assistants turned to clatter and bump their way away from the dead end back towards the main street, still arguing about which direction they should have gone in.
But someone else remained unseen. Emmie had followed their movements, knowing they’d be so wrapped up in the thought of catching Legends that she could shadow them easily.
She crouched to the ground, found a patch of dust, exactly the sort created when something comes through a gateway. But there was only one smattering, as if a large foot had been placed in this world, and immediately withdrawn. Otherwise, there was no sign of scratch marks on walls, or bite marks on bins.
Nothing.
She was about to leave the scene when something else caught her eye. A small bottle of Shampoodle rolling across the ground, spilling a dull blue chemical from its open top.
Emmie walked to it, rolled it with her foot and glanced back at the door of Woofy Wash.
Something was wrong, although she couldn’t quite figure out what it was. Finn would know what to do, she decided.
She set off to find him.
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Finn woke.
He was trapped in a small space, so dark he could see nothing at all, not even the hand in front of his face.
Hold on, he thought, maybe my hand is missing.
No. He wiggled his fingers and it felt like they were all present and correct. But he still had no sight. No light. Only a sandpapery surface at his back and a gooey, ribbed roof he could feel inches from his face.
Panic grabbed him, even as his mind was slow to get moving, heavy, dopey, unable to quite fix on where he was or how he had got here. He tried to stay composed, to figure it out.
The sharp sting on his neck. Passing out. He must have been drugged, Finn thought, and dragged here. Wherever here was.
The smell was so deeply terrible it was invading every pore in his body. He would need a change of skin if he ever got out of here. He tasted it on his tongue, wanted to pull his tongue out in disgust.
It would be pointless trying to find a way to describe the stench in Earthly terms, because there was nothing on Earth like it. It was a smell that belonged only to one place.
The Infested Side.
Finn’s breath quickened. He groped for a wall either side of him, and found bars of some sort, surrounding him on at least three sides. And those bars were wedged into a hard but slippery surface. The fourth side was narrow and soft and his hand couldn’t quite find the wall.
It made his stomach crawl. Or maybe that was the movement he now realised he was feeling in jolts. He was moving. In fact the whole room was moving.
Up. Drop.
Up. Drop.
A damp breeze blasted through each time it rose, heating his ears. There was also a deep, unnerving gurgle from somewhere terribly close.
Finn wriggled on to his tummy, feeling the roughness against his face, giving him the shudders as he reached out and pushed his hands through the bars, whose dark outlines he could just make out against the redness of the walls.
He prised open a gap in his prison, working it wider with his fingers, just enough for grey light to pour into the space and show him the bars were, in fact, large fangs.
He was lying on a tongue.
A pink tongue, rough and pulsating with each of the breaths pushing up from the throat at which his feet dangled.
A giant tongue, in a giant mouth.
Finn allowed himself to panic some more. It had been a bad day already but now he was something’s lunch. Could this day get any worse?
Pushing his face towards the crack in the mouth of whatever creature was carrying him, Finn saw water rushing past outside, a blur of dark waves, getting closer. And closer. He retreated just before the creature hit the sea, brine leaking through the mouth as Finn breathed hard and shallow.
Yes.
His day could get worse.
Up. They were out of the water.
Drop. Whooosh. Back into it.
A few seconds later, the creature hit something hard, slid to a sudden halt. Finn gripped on to a long tooth to stop himself being thrown back into the deep cavern of the creature’s gullet.
Blurpp. A rumble was building from deep within the throat, getting louder, closer.
Oh no, thought Finn, at the precise moment a belch hit him.
The mouth opened and he was propelled into the grey light of the Infested Side.
He looked around, dazed. He was lying on a shoreline, a beach of smashed rock in the shadow of a looming mountain, chunks missing from its slopes and most of it swallowed by heavy cloud.
The sea creature retreated into the waters before Finn could even get a proper look at it. He was instead distracted by a huge figure approaching up the beach, feet stuffed into boots with three clawed toes stabbing through. It had granite hands, muscles popping from the wide shoulders. Glancing up, Finn realised this was the single-eyed giant, the Cyclops that had grabbed him from Darkmouth in the first place. This must be one of Gantrua’s goons, out for revenge.
It snarled something at him.
Finn jumped to his feet, his skin sticky with sea-creature saliva, his hair flattened and damp, his legs numb from being trapped in such a small space for … well, he didn’t know how long. But they had enough feeling left to help him scramble across cutting stones among which were scattered splintered and broken tools – axes, knives, picks, hammers.
He stumbled, saw the nearing shadow of the Legend. He needed a plan. Perhaps he had an expert move learned over many hours at training. Maybe he could threaten to explode, just as he had done before in this world – draw himself up and stare even the mightiest of them down with his power. Even if he didn’t really have it any more.
Instead, Finn did what he had so often done best.
He ran.
He heard the roars and shouts of other Legends joining the Cyclops. He didn’t look back. He needed to keep pushing along the shifting rock and broken tools of this beach, which sloped upwards now, away from the sea towards the scarred mountain and, he hoped, some sort of shelter. The Legends were closing. His legs burned with adrenalin. He needed to keep climbing this slope, to get somewhere safe.
Finn reached the top of the slope and went straight over a cliff.
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Finn held on to a blackened, blasted tree root, one foot dangling over a sheer drop that a quick and frightening glance told him went down far enough that there were dark angry waves where the floor should be.
The sea. On both sides. He was on some sort of narrow cliff jutting perilously out over the waves.
And he had come within a Manticore’s whisker of falling straight off, had thrown a hand out just quick enough to save himself. For now.
He wrapped his arms around this lone root and prayed it would not break. He never wanted to let go.
Above him was dark cloud. Below him was darker sea. And behind him on the cliff, he realised, was a pair of boots bigger than his head. Three claws were sticking through one of them. The Cyclops.
“Don’t be trying to fly out of here,” said the deep-voiced Legend, offering a hand.
Finn’s grip slipped a little on the slimy root. He grunted with the effort of holding on, but he wouldn’t be able to for much longer. He felt dead either way.
Then a more familiar voice intruded.
“Accept that helping hand,” it said.
Finn saw four paws on the ledge now. Beside them, the lime-green arrowhead of a snake dropped into his eyeline.
“We need your help,” said Hiss, “and you won’t be much use if you’re dead.”
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“The number you have dialled is either unavailable or—”
Emmie didn’t wait to let the message finish but ended the call, put the phone back in her pocket and continued her search for Finn. She’d tried contacting him several times in the couple of hours since the gateway appeared. There had been no answer yet.
She had also walked a good part of the town, head up, watching out for him, ignoring the usual glares of the fearful townspeople and the curiosity of the assistants infesting Darkmouth.
She had not found Finn, nor any sign of him. Nothing about this felt right. She broke into a run, rounded a badly bent signpost, ducked around a postbox with a dent punched in it, jumped across a puddle of rainwater and almost knocked Lucien over as they collided at a turn in the street.
“Take it easy there, young lady,” he said, stepping back and searching for something on the ground. He found his pen, picked it up, began to weave it through his fingers in a practised fashion. “I got this pen the day I graduated as an assistant. Writes with squid ink. Don’t want to lose it.”
She went to pass him.
“Where’s your friend?” he asked, causing her to stop.
Emmie loathed Lucien but there was the fact of his superior rank and she had to recognise that or it might make things far worse for her and her dad. And things were bad enough as they were.
