“I worry we’ve very little time,” said Clara pointedly.
“I do understand.” The Assessor picked up a biscuit. “But there is time at least for one more of these before I have to leave.”
Fully aware of the intense irritation now radiating from his mother, Finn distracted himself by looking at his new watch, admiring how the delicate curves of its steel hands caught the light of the fat moon flooding through the window.
Outside, the sky was clear and still. Another night falling on a world without his father.
The next morning, sun crept into Darkmouth and an early summer breeze travelled across the sea, tickling the low waves that ran up to the raggedy shoreline and warming the fat rocks that littered the small crescent of beach at the town’s southern edge. Reaching the wide mangled cliffs that separated Darkmouth from the rest of the world, the breeze rose up until it ruffled the grass lining the top.
A basset hound scampered across the stony beach, stopping briefly to sniff a pebble, pee on it, then move on again.
“Yappy!”
The animal’s owner, Mrs Bright, scrambled after it, struggling to keep her footing on the shifting layer of stones.
“Yappy! Come back, Yappy, you stupid animal.”
She stopped for a moment and looked back along the beach. It curved away into the early morning haze, its stones kissed by the sun-sparkled sea that lapped at the long sweep of the bay. Inland, the houses of Darkmouth huddled together, as if cowering from some unseen danger, but, in this clear morning light, it looked like a normal town. You couldn’t see the shimmer of broken glass on walls, the dull glint of bars on windows, the tight squeeze of the town’s mazy alleyways. You could only see the painted house fronts, the wooden shop signs, the little playground of swings and slides. It was almost, in fact, a thing of beauty.
I really hate Darkmouth, thought Mrs Bright.
Mrs Bright wasn’t supposed to be living here at all. She had made the mistake of marrying a man from Darkmouth who had come not only with a dog she couldn’t stand, but a promise that they would live in the town for exactly one year, and no more, before moving on to any place of her choosing.
He died suddenly eleven months later.
She was left with a house she couldn’t sell and a dog she didn’t want.
“Yappy!” she shouted. “Where did you go, you useless mutt?”
She scanned the beach for the dog again. No sign. She moved towards the corner of the cliff, where rock jutted towards the water and the shore narrowed. Squeezing herself carefully round the base of the looming cliff to the beach on the other side, she could still see nothing of her tiresome pet.
“Yappy! I’ll leave you here, don’t think I won’t.”
From somewhere she heard a muffled yap.
She stopped. Listened. Heard it again.
Squinting at the black stone of the cliff, its layers of rock turned in on itself as if it might collapse at any moment, Mrs Bright realised there was an opening. It was small, a fissure not much taller than herself, and bent over as if buckling under the weight of the land above it.
She had walked this part of the beach many times and never noticed a cave before. Loose soil and stones were scattered at the entrance, apparently freshly fallen. There must, she thought, have been a rock fall, maybe caused by the heavy rains that accompanied the recent invasion of those things. Another reason why she wanted out of Darkmouth at the earliest opportunity.
There was another bark from inside the cliff.
Mrs Bright sighed, stepped carefully over the rubble at the opening, manoeuvred round a large rock and carefully made her way inside.
It was a cave, its walls narrowing as she moved deeper into it, the roof sloping down so that she needed to stoop as she called again for the dog.
“Yappy!”
Her shout echoed back at her just as she squeezed through a gap and into a chamber that stretched high into the blackness above her. The cave was so dark that Mrs Bright could hardly see the ground at her feet.
She gave one final call for the dog and heard nothing but her own breathing and the sound of trickling water.
As Mrs Bright turned to leave, she realised she could see now. A flickering crimson light crept across the hollowed-out rock. Then something else occurred to her: the light was coming from inside the cave.
From somewhere in the direction of that light, Yappy yapped.
Mrs Bright peered towards it. She made out a smudge of deep red, the soft edge of a light obscured by a fold in the cave wall. Cautiously, she edged towards it.
“Is that you, Yappy?”
It most definitely was not.
Mrs Bright’s strangled scream echoed through the high cavern.
Many dogs are intelligent, perceptive beasts with an almost supernatural sense of danger.
Yappy was not one of those dogs.
A couple of minutes later, he emerged from the cave, stopped at a large stone at its entrance, sniffed it, peed on it, sniffed again. He dropped something from his mouth, a curved pink and white object, sniffed around a bit, licked between his legs, sniffed around some more, picked up the object again and scuttled away down the beach. The sun climbed above the horizon into a sky of near unbroken blue. But, if anyone had been looking up at that moment, they would have seen the merest hint of a cloud cross the sun, dimming it almost imperceptibly before burning away again.
And they would have presumed it was just a trick of the light that the cloud briefly appeared to change, solidify and form the shape of a howling face.
Finn waited at the front door of his house, his father’s hulking car parked outside. Black with a few old scrapes scoring the paint, its familiar sleekness had been dulled by the dust slowly settling on it as the days and weeks went by. It was becoming a spectre and a reminder of Finn’s failure to find his father.
In those last violent moments before the gateway closed and he turned to face the approaching army of Legends, Hugo had told Finn he believed in him, that he knew he’d find a way into the Infested Side. Finn the Defiant he had called him, and Finn had carried that faith with him through the first few days following his father’s disappearance. Yet each speck of dust on that car was a reminder of every day, every hour, every second of failure since. His father believed in him. But Finn was struggling to. All he knew for sure was that he’d been unable to stop Mr Glad pushing his mam through a gateway and his father had been lost while rescuing her. He felt that guilt as heavily as if a Hydra was squatting on his chest.
The morning breeze picked up for a moment, spreading goosebumps across Finn’s arms. He grabbed his backpack, a dead weight that needed to be hoisted with a grunt on to his back. An arm of his fighting suit fell loose from its open zip.
He was in the habit of carrying the armour every day, just in case it was required, and would sit in class with an eye on the weather outside the window. The merest spit of rain – it always rained when portals opened from the Infested Side – was enough to give him the jitters.
Finn twisted in an awkward effort to shove the arm back into his bag. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw something move. An animal was scampering up the street. It was a dog – a basset hound – stopping occasionally to sniff a paving stone or to pee on random parts of the street.
Even from a distance, Finn could see its coat was sodden and it appeared to be carrying something in its mouth. He only half watched the dog approach, his mind still largely occupied by the awful thought that he might never find a way to his father, and partly distracted by his continued inability to stuff the fighting suit arm into his bag.
The next thing he knew the hound was sniffing at his leg. Finn looked down, the dog looked up and Finn realised it was wearing false teeth. Not false teeth for dogs, if there even were such a thing, but human false teeth. Large pink and white gnashers, crammed into its mouth so that it sported the widest, most surreal grin he had ever seen.
The dog had a tag round its neck. My name is Yappy, it rea
d. If you find me, you can keep me.
Yappy shook his wet coat, spraying salty water and tiny stones in every direction as Finn jumped out of the way.
He recognised the dog. He had met its owner about the town, spotted her coming in and out of her house over the years, had seen her walking through the town with a headscarf and a scowl as she barked at the dog.
He had a flashback to meeting her a few weeks ago, the day the Minotaur first came through. She was huddled in a doorway on Darkmouth’s main street, Broken Road, while the Legend rampaged through the town. She hadn’t been particularly confident in Finn’s chances of stopping the creature. She’d had a point.
The dog had been in the doorway too. It didn’t have those teeth then. Finn was pretty sure he’d have noticed a thing like that.
“Your owner’s name is Mrs Bright, isn’t it?” he said to the dog. Accepting a tickle under its sodden chin, Yappy looked up at Finn. The teeth glinted in the bright morning light.
It coughed out the dentures and, following another violent shake of its hair that left Finn’s knees flecked with tiny pebbles, it trotted away, stopping only to pee at the corner before disappearing.
Finn picked up the teeth.
“What’s that you’ve got?” asked Emmie, coming down the street, schoolbag slung over her back, woollen hat forced down over her hair.
“I’m not sure,” said Finn. “I mean, they’re false teeth, but I don’t know why a dog had them.”
“A dog had them?” she said as she reached him.
“Yeah, in its mouth.”
“And you’re holding them now?” said Emmie, disgusted. “Lovely.”
Finn felt the slippery teeth in his hand and shuddered. He found a wad of tissues he had stuffed in his jacket, wrapped the teeth up and put them in his pocket.
“That’s even lovelier,” observed Emmie.
“I know who owns them,” he said.
“How? Did they write their name on the gums? ‘If found, please return to the mouth of whoever.’”
“No. I recognised the dog that just dropped them here. It belongs to Mrs Bright. We’ll call in on the way and hand them back.”
“Make sure you tell her to put them through the dishwasher first. By the way, you should brush down your trousers. You’ve got half the beach on them for some reason.”
Finn gave them a quick scrub with his thumbs, then frowned. “Do you reckon my trousers smell sort of seaweedy?”
Emmie sniffed him. “Nah, you’re OK.”
“Sure?”
“Nah. I mean, yeah. There’s no smell.”
Finn suspected Emmie was lying just to make him feel better. Which she was.
Mrs Bright wasn’t home.
They knocked on her door, rang the doorbell, but she did not come out to reclaim her teeth.
“He likes Chocky-Flakes,” said Emmie, leaning against the wall of the house.
“Who likes Chocky-Flakes?” asked Finn.
“The Assessor. He loves that cereal. Ate about three bowls of it last night and another three this morning. He went for a walk and came back with an ice cream and a giant grin on his face. Then he just disappeared to his room where he said he had to file his report.”
Finn tried to peer through the net curtains behind Mrs Bright’s barred front window. “She’s not home,” he said, but knocked one last time anyway.
“And he talks in his sleep. I could hear him through the bedroom door. ‘Snuggles,’ he said. ‘Come here, Snuggles.’”
“Snuggles?” wondered Finn.
“Snuggles,” Emmie confirmed. “I’d say it’s his cuddly toy.”
From the house neighbouring Mrs Bright’s, there came the sound of locks and chains being undone. Clank. Rattle. Clunk. The door opened and a man popped his head out to greet Finn with a lukewarm, “Oh, it’s you.”
“Have you seen Mrs Bright?” Finn asked.
“No. Saw her yesterday with that dog of hers. Not since then. She’s probably walking. She likes walking. Well, she does a lot of it anyway. It’s hard to tell if she actually likes it. Hard to tell if she likes anything at all really.”
Finn considered handing the teeth to the neighbour and asking him to hold on to them, then decided that troubling him with another person’s well-worn dentures probably wasn’t the right thing to do.
“If you do see Mrs Bright,” Finn said, “please let her know I have something that belongs to her.”
“What is it?” the neighbour asked.
“I think she’ll guess. She can find me at—”
“She’ll know where to find you. Everyone does. Speaking of which, any sign of your father yet?”
“Not yet, but he should be back any time soon.”
The neighbour raised an eyebrow at that. “I’m Maurice Noble by the way,” he said. “I went to school with your father as it happened. I wasn’t at your house.”
“Excuse me?” asked Finn, confused.
“That night the monsters invaded. I didn’t protest at your house with all those other people. I didn’t agree with it. There are still a lot of us here who would prefer to have you lot around to protect us.”
“Thank you.”
“Although it’s true that there have been no monsters since your father disappeared.”
“Well—”
“Not a single one.”
“That’s right, but—”
“And I’m not sure what to make of that. No one is.”
Finn stuttered again, but Maurice Noble ignored that and glanced at Emmie instead, who was hanging back on the edge of the footpath. “Still, better the devil you know, I suppose. We could do with getting him back.”
“We all could,” said Finn.
“I’ll be honest, I was hoping for something a bit more positive than that. By the way, you have a leg sticking out of your schoolbag.” He disappeared back into his house, followed by the sound of locks slamming shut.
Clunk. Rattle. Clank.
Finn turned round so that Emmie could shove the leg armour of his fighting suit back into the backpack. The other leg popped out instead.
Finn sat in school, alongside Emmie, at a desk in a rear corner by a window, but he might as well not have been there.
His eyes and mind weren’t on the whiteboard or his teacher, Mrs McDaid, nor were they on the schoolbooks flapped open in front of him. They were instead concentrating on the slight darkening of the day. Was that rain?
Under the desk, he pulled his bag closer with his feet, feeling the weight of the fighting suit stuffed into it, ready to be worn if necessary.
From the desk beside him, Conn Savage leaned over and whispered out of the side of his mouth, “Oh, looks like a couple of drops of rain out there.”
Manus Savage stuck his head out from the far side of the desk, a cruel grin on his face. “Must be time for you to steal our bikes and wreck the town again.”
Since the attack of the Manticores, and the Minotaur’s rampage, the twins had felt a little less deadly to Finn. He had survived something worse than them. A bit worse anyway. But he did still owe them a new bike each, having commandeered theirs for himself and Emmie when being chased by the Minotaur.
He had returned the old ones, even if they were missing a few spokes. And wheels. And most of the other parts that make up a bike.
Still, Finn had prepared a really smart and funny response to the twins’ jibes and was ready to slay them with it. “Well, I—”
“Quiet, Finn!” said Mrs McDaid from the other end of the room. And that was that. His teacher spared him any real anger because of what she occasionally called his “special circumstances”, but Finn’s face flushed nevertheless.
He reverted to staring out of the window until Emmie slid a doodle under his nose. It was of a cross-eyed Minotaur with knotted horns.
“...isn’t that right, Finn?” asked Mrs McDaid.
Finn looked up to see his teacher staring at him from behind her desk, and quickly hid Emmie’s notebook under hi
s textbook as he answered. “Yes, miss.”
The class murmured.
“No, Finn, it is not right. You really need to pay attention, even though we all have great sympathy for your special circumstances...”
This turned out to be one of the better moments of Finn’s day.
Later that afternoon, Finn and Emmie wandered home again under clearing skies, through the sullen Darkmouth streets, past people with their heads down, except for when they gave accusing glances. They walked up Broken Road past its row of dusty shops. The dummies in the fashion store that looked like they’d been dragged from a skip before being dressed. The dusty bookshop with the little gathering of dead flies in the corner of the window.
They passed the damaged dental surgery where Finn’s mam should have been pulling teeth, fitting crowns, removing dead nerves, and all the other things she did that Finn loved to watch.
Except his mother wasn’t there. The rebuilding hadn’t even begun and probably wouldn’t until she had helped find a way to get Finn’s father back.
They stopped for a few moments at Darkmouth’s pet shop – Tails and Snails – where Finn stared wistfully at its window of flapping budgies and curled-up snakes. He felt he was being dragged as far away as possible from whatever hopes he had of being a vet.
They passed the police station with the now-dead flowers left at its entrance for Sergeant Doyle, grievously wounded saving Finn and Emmie, and who now lay in a city hospital, having finally got out of Darkmouth – but not in the way he would have liked.
The town had been sent a replacement, who hid out so effectively that most people were still unsure whether the new sergeant was a man or woman, bearded or clean-shaven, brave or scared.
“I should’ve stopped Mr Glad,” said Finn, idling at the front of the police station.
“You did,” said Emmie.
“Not in time to stop Sergeant Doyle getting badly hurt, though. Or half the town destroyed.”
“Seriously, you fought a Minotaur. You went to the Infested Side. You’ve really got to stop beating yourself up over the whole thing.” She jumped at him and, laughing, gave him a friendly punch on the arm. “That’s my job.”
Into the Infested Side Page 3