Into the Infested Side

by Shane Hegarty

  “The same nonsense over and over?”

  “And over. And over. Every day for the two years since he came here, Your Hulkness,” confirmed the Hogboon. “Even as he eats, which is rarely. Although I’m not sure what’s not to like about a plate of juicy scaldgrubs.”

  On the ground, a plate of fat, spiky maggots writhed untouched.

  “Ljensboytareskypartljensboytareskypartljensboy tareskypartljensboytareskypartljensboytareskypart,” continued Niall Blacktongue.

  Gantrua listened. Closed his eyes to take in the sound. Licked his lips to ingest any vapours of the Promised World. “He must stay here,” he said finally.

  “I hadn’t planned to take him anywhere else, oh most gracious and wise and muscly sire.”

  “Ljensboytareskypartljensboytareskypartljensboy tareskypartljensboytareskypart.”

  Gantrua bent low, the creak of leather and armour filling the room, and with a crooked finger lifted Niall Blacktongue’s chin and pulled a talon across the skin that had melted in the human’s great explosion, when energy had burst forth from his seemingly puny body and annihilated half of Gantrua’s army. He looked into Blacktongue’s eyes, where the colour had been blasted away. Sighing in frustration, he released the human’s head to flop back into his chin, stood and ducked to exit the cell.

  The human recommenced his mantra.

  “Ljensboytareskypartljensboytareskypartljensboy

  tareskypartljensboytareskypartljensboytareskypart.”

  “You must do everything in your power to keep this human alive until he is better,” Gantrua instructed the Hogboon.

  “Aye,” said the shaking Hogboon.

  “And, when he is better, I will kill him.”

  Gantrua left the tower, knocking a chunk from the stone frame of the door as he emerged into the world outside. It was just another gouge in a tower already mutilated and crumbling where its roof touched the sky.

  At its entrance, two Fomorian guards stood to attention. Gantrua ignored them, instead mounting the back of his Sleipnir, which snorted and bucked until he grabbed it firmly by the throat to calm it, then dug his heels into its flank to spur its eight legs onwards.

  He rode away from the tower, through a long rank of heavily armed Fomorians. Then another. And more still. Each parted to make way, until he was gone, leaving behind hundreds of Fomorians, armed, nervous, massed in wide rings of might round the tower and its single human prisoner.

  Finn shaded his phone’s screen from the morning sunshine, covering it with the palm of his hand to better see the picture of the map on it. He zoomed in, moved the image around, then lifted his head again to scan the grassy cliff he and Emmie were standing on. Ahead was spread out a glistening green sea. Away to their left, the buildings and walls of Darkmouth huddled up against each other as if afraid. And, below their feet, lush but uneven ground.

  Nothing else.

  “There should be something here,” said Finn, disappointment tightening his voice. “The X says it’s in the centre of this area somewhere. See?” He pointed at the picture.

  Emmie squinted at it. “No. Sorry.”

  Since finding the clue hardly an hour ago, Finn had feared another dead end. They had been wrong so many times already. So, they had agreed they should check this clue out alone, to say they were off to school as always, an illusion of normality even when their world had been turned upside down. No worrying Finn’s mother. No raised hopes. No drama. No Assessor. No Steve. No one to disappoint but themselves.

  The two searched again, Finn’s bag jolting on his back, the clatter and clash of the fighting suit stuffed inside, as he marched through clumps of grass, pushed aside weeds with his feet, carefully lifted knots of thorns.

  They criss-crossed the cliff, looking for something, anything.

  “Anything?” Finn shouted to Emmie.

  “Nothing!” she shouted back.

  The table in the painting had featured some objects that had seemed relevant and a few that didn’t. There was the mirror and its map obviously. There was also a compass pointing south-east, which happened to be the direction from the house to this crest of cliff. There were two books without titles, but one looked quite like the thin notebook Finn had found which had Niall Blacktongue’s initials on it. He had brought that notebook with him this morning, just in case it helped.

  But there were other things in the painting. A magnifying glass, some coins, a feather in an ink pot. They could have meant anything or everything. Or nothing at all.

  Yet the map itself, while spare in details, seemed clear. This was where they were supposed to be. Maybe.

  On the cliff edge was a crumbling stone hut, which locals called the Look-out Post, but only because “Look out!” were someone’s last words before being grabbed by a Legend here a hundred years ago.

  Emmie joined him, wincing at the stench of wee in the hut. Finn looked inside the simple old shelter, then outside it, where an orange life jacket and a solid buoyancy ring were placed in case someone fell into the sea.

  “You sure this is the right place?” Emmie asked.

  Finn wasn’t sure at all. “Yes,” he said.

  Heads down, they made another sweep of the terrain. Finn could feel his breath growing laboured with stress, the nagging sense of anger that he’d fooled himself into believing this was it. He stopped at a patch of grass and weeds, darkened as if from some old campfire or splash of poison. Poking at it with his fingers, he caught himself on a thorn which scratched his right wrist and tore free a coloured rope wristband he’d once made for himself when he was supposed to be doing his homework.

  He was licking at the scratch as he met up with Emmie again.

  She put her hands in her pockets, glanced around so she didn’t have to catch his eye. “We could always—”

  “We’re not telling your dad, Emmie.”

  “OK. Then maybe—”

  “Or my mam. Definitely not my mam.”

  They remained on the same spot, Finn half hoping something would just come to him.

  “Maybe it’s hidden,” said Emmie. “Or buried and grown over.”

  “If it is, the map isn’t very precise,” said Finn, kicking at the hard ground with his heel. “We’d probably dig up half this cliff before we found anything.”

  A sound drifted across the breeze and reached their ears.

  Yap.

  It was coming from some distance away.

  Yap. Yap.

  It was coming from below them.

  Yap. Yap. Yap.

  “Do you hear that dog?” Finn said to Emmie as he marched off towards the edge of the cliff.

  He jogged to where the grass began to rise up to meet the plunging edge, then dropped on to his belly and peered over the cliff at the crescent of rock-strewn beach at its base. Emmie flopped on the grass beside him. Finn pointed at a mound of rubble. A buckle in the cliff. The glimpse of a large hole crumpling under the weight it shouldered. And a basset hound peeing at the entrance.

  “That’s Yappy, the dog with the teeth,” Finn said.

  “That’s why he was covered in salty water and bits of sand,” said Emmie.

  The giddiness of hope rose inside Finn again. “That’s it. Whatever we’re supposed to find, it’s in there.”

  Finn and Emmie followed the sound of running water. Finn rummaged through his bag, pushing aside the miscellaneous objects stuffed in there – fighting suit, a radio, his lunchbox, fruit, books. He fished out a torch. Under its narrow light, the two of them shared a look that meant they had heard this sound before. But there had been no water then. Only the fizzing light of a gateway between this world and the other.

  They squeezed through the ever-narrowing rock, ducking a little as the roof came down to meet them. The sound encouraged them to keep moving forward. It was the sound of promise, of a way to Finn’s father. To Finn, it was not just the sound of magic. It was the sound of hope.

  In fact, it was just the sound of water after all. Nothing more. Nothing
less. At the back of the cave, the most meagre of waterfalls was leaking through the rock and running into a small pool at the foot of the wall.

  Finn threw a groan about the chamber, his deep frustration bouncing about every corner of the cave, echoing back at him for a while after he closed his mouth, as if his frustration was so intense it had become bigger than him, taken on a life of its own.

  Excitement left him and weariness flooded in. Another dead end. The deadest of ends.

  He sat back against the cave wall, sliding down to his haunches, the torch dropping by his side and leaving them in near-total darkness, save for the muted beam of light creeping across the floor. Catching the edge of something. A reflection. Low down and small, but sharp.

  Emmie spotted it.

  Without explaining, she picked the torch from the floor and pointed it towards the reflection. Light glinted back at them. A sparkle.

  Finn’s expression turned from one of defeat into curiosity. He pushed himself to his feet and together they moved to a hollow low in the wall, worn away behind a large stone.

  Growing in it was a small crop of crystals.

  “Could they be...?” asked Emmie.

  “The same crystals that make gateways?” queried Finn. “They can’t be. They only grow on the Infested Side, don’t they? These have to be just ordinary, everyday crystals.”

  “Ordinary, everyday crystals in a cave marked on a map hidden for decades in a missing Legend Hunter’s painting?” she replied.

  “OK, maybe not,” admitted Finn.

  They lay flat on the ground to examine the crystals more closely, and saw that these didn’t have the diamond purity of the ones that had been brought to Darkmouth by Legends. Their reflections were instead dulled by the coating on each of them, a thin layer picked up from growing through what seemed to be fine dark red dust in the hollowed-out rock at their roots.

  But, under the torchlight, another quality became apparent.

  “It’s alive,” said Emmie, pressing her beam up to the tallest crystal. Inside was a smokiness that writhed slowly, rising to the top, falling gently again, in constant motion.

  Finn reached out to pull at the crystal.

  “Should you do that?” asked Emmie.

  Finn shrugged. “I don’t know what more could go wrong.”

  Actually, in his head, he had a lengthy list of things that could go wrong, but thought twice about sharing it.

  Finn took hold of the crystal. He expected it to resist, but instead it came away easily, softly releasing itself from the cave wall as if ripe, like an apple ready to be plucked.

  He stood up straight, holding the crystal high under the torchlight. Within it were tendrils of smoke, gentle in their movement. The finest coating of scarlet dust clung to the sweat of his palms. He touched the dust with a finger: it seemed dried in, more like clay than sand.

  Emmie lay beside the hollow for a few seconds longer before pushing herself up from the cave floor too.

  “Do you think these might open a gateway, to help us get to Dad?” asked Finn, still examining the crystal.

  “It’s probably impossible,” said Emmie, pointing her torch up under Finn’s chin, so that long shadows were cast from his ridged brow. “But we should definitely try it.”

  “Maybe we should bring it back to the library,” he suggested. “Dad went through a gateway there and that would open it to the same spot on the Infested Side. He might be waiting there for us. But you can’t tell anyone, Emmie. Not a soul.”

  “I’m afraid that’s a bit too late,” said a voice in the darkness.

  “Besides,” the voice went on, “I can’t begin to tell you how many rules it would violate.”

  Emmie swung her torch and illuminated Estravon the Assessor.

  “Well, I could tell you how many rules it would violate, but we’d be here all day,” he said. “All that matters is that you have to hand that crystal over. Now.”

  Estravon stepped forward so quickly that Finn hardly had time to close his grip on the crystal, and instead found surprisingly strong fingers prising it from his grasp. Finn felt immediate shame at the struggle being so short, his prize so easily lost.

  “You can’t take that,” protested Emmie.

  “I have to take it,” said Estravon, indignant, “according to rule 43b of section 5 of the, oh, stop rolling your eyes, young lady. The rules matter. There’d be anarchy without the rules. There’d be people running around doing whatever they wanted without recourse to the proper procedures and, if you doubt me, then just have a look at where we’ve all been led this morning.”

  “I need that crystal,” said Finn. “It might help me get to my dad.”

  Estravon stood back, examining the crystal under his torch’s light. He appeared genuinely curious, as if this discovery was as much of a surprise to him as it was to Finn and Emmie. “Well, that is an odd one. Some town this, isn’t it? Full of surprises. I found that ice-cream shop on the harbour too. Tasty. They do an amazing nutty chocolate sauce.”

  “How did you know we were here?” asked Emmie.

  “Finn told me,” answered Estravon, still closely examining the crystal. “Well, his watch did. There’s a tracking device in it.”

  Finn felt the fat watch on his wrist and then disgust ran through him at having fallen so easily for the Assessor’s camaraderie. Finn had led him right to them. He really needed to be more careful in future.

  “I’ll be honest,” Estravon continued, “I wasn’t sure you would find anything, but when doing an assessment it always pays to be a couple of steps ahead just in case. I did have to sleep in my car on a country lane outside the town while I waited, though. A mission like this requires a little subterfuge, you see. And a measure of discomfort and physical sacrifice. Plus, the only hotel in Darkmouth has been closed for years so I didn’t have much choice.”

  Estravon pulled a small plastic bag from his suit, placed the crystal into it, zipped the bag shut and put it back in his jacket pocket. He then looked at his hands and the blood-red residue left behind.

  “Do you think it’s one of the gateway crystals?” asked Finn, feeling helpless now, and switching to a softer approach in the hope of persuading the Assessor to let him try it out. “Because there are more. We could use them to send in a rescue party.”

  “More of the crystals?” said the Assessor, interest piqued.

  Finn had immediately failed in treading more carefully.

  The Assessor motioned them to move aside so he could stoop to examine the hollow in the rock. “There’s only one more here,” said Estravon.

  Finn frowned – but Emmie shot him a look while putting a finger to her mouth.

  Bending down, Estravon pushed at the crystal with his bare finger, examining the powder on the tip of his finger. “Did you ever have sherbet?” he asked them, a grin filling his face. “I doubt this tastes too good, though. There we go.”

  He eased the jewel-like object from the rock with little effort. The hollow was bare of crystals now, except for a couple of tiny buds poking through the film of red dust that clung to the rock.

  “So?” asked Finn. “Do you think we should use them to send a rescue party?”

  “Oh, I doubt it,” Estravon said cheerily. He took the plastic bag out and added the crystal to the other, before tucking them both away again in his suit jacket. “Aside from the specific risk-assessment regulation forbidding rescue parties, I’m not sure it’s going to matter anyway. Yes, they’re crystals, but they’re probably just standard ones with nothing at all to do with gateways. After all, if crystals were to just pop up and open gateways all the time that would be a health-and-safety nightmare.”

  Holding the torch under his armpit, he inspected the dust on his hands before giving them a clap in an effort to be rid of it. He didn’t appear satisfied so took out a small bottle of hand soap, squidged it on his palms, gave them a clean and then grabbed his torch again to point it towards the way out.

  “We have to se
e what the crystals do,” insisted Finn.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll run tests just to be conclusive,” said Estravon. “Although, when I say we will run tests, I obviously don’t mean you. Now it’s time to go. Your co-operation would be appreciated. For the report and all of that.”

  Sulking, angry, Finn started for the exit, with Emmie and the Assessor following. They emerged into the daylight at the base of the cliff, where Yappy sniffed busily at the stones littering the entrance. Narrowing their eyes to the brightness, they made their way unsteadily across the stones, where crashing waves splashed at them, until they rounded the small rocky headland. There, Emmie walked closely alongside the Assessor.

  “You know I came here to Darkmouth with my dad,” she said. “We spied on Finn’s family.”

  “Yes. I appreciate that,” said Estravon. “Now we do need to get a move on.”

  “I haven’t stopped spying, you know,” Emmie continued. “Actually, there are a couple of things I could tell you about what’s happening here that you really should know.”

  “Watch your step,” he said, holding her elbow. “Seaweed.”

  “Number one,” she said, pulling her arm away. “That dog that was sniffing about at the cave? Its owner was in contact with the Infested Side. Definitely. And she’s been missing ever since. That has to be important.”

  Somewhere behind them, Yappy yapped.

  “I’m not sure that’s very likely,” said Estravon.

  “Number two,” Emmie said, walking on. “Has it occurred to you to ask us how we even found that cave in the first place? Surely that’s quite important for your assessment.”

  Back towards the cave, out of sight, the dog was yapping incessantly. “I had fully planned to investigate that particular...” The Assessor stopped and looked around, distracted.

  The dog kept barking.

  “Where’s the boy gone?” he asked.

  “Oh yeah,” said Emmie. “Maybe there’s a third thing I should have mentioned. It’s about the crystals.”

  A smile crept across her face as she held a palm up to display the red, dusty residue clinging to it. But she wasn’t holding a crystal. “There might have been three of them,” she said.