Estravon ran back towards the cave.
“Shush, Yappy,” Finn begged the dog as he clambered over the mound at the cave entrance.
Yap, replied Yappy. Yap. Yap. Yapyapyap.
Pushing towards the darkness, Finn wished he hadn’t given his torch to Emmie. As any natural light became choked off, he had to trust his hands, the feel of the walls as they narrowed either side. His head scraped the roof of the cave, causing him to wince in pain.
In his pocket was the crystal that Emmie had shoved into his hand as they were leaving the cave. She had distracted Estravon while rounding the headland, and Finn had dashed back, the waves drowning out the clatter of the armour in his bag, but not the drumbeat of his heart in his ears.
Finn knew he would need to make this count. It was his only chance. He was going to try and open a gateway with the crystal. At least they would know there and then if it would work.
He felt the cave wall open up in front of him, sensed the sound suddenly released to bounce round the high roof of the chamber. He gripped the crystal tight, making sure he didn’t drop it in the near-total darkness.
As his eyes tried to adjust a little, Finn recalled what he had seen when Mr Glad had opened a gateway, the day his father disappeared. He remembered how Mr Glad had searched for a snag in the air on which to attach the crystal. Broonie had done the same thing, reaching up and scraping down an invisible divide until he found one and opened a way into the Infested Side.
From outside the cave, he heard Yappy yapping and Estravon shouting.
Hurriedly, Finn pushed the crystal into his palm. It felt sleeker than the dust coating suggested it would, a little greasy compared to the clear crystals he’d held before. Yet his grip felt more secure, and the crystal stayed in his hand so that he could relax it a little, hold it out flat and run his other hand down the empty air in search of something in nothing.
The scramble of feet coming through the cave grew louder; the intrusion of torchlight began to dance in the chamber.
Finn searched for a snag. No luck. He tried again. It still wouldn’t take.
Light flared fully into the room.
“This will all go in my report—” shouted Estravon.
“Wait!” Finn shouted. “I’ve got it.”
He had caught the crystal on something. Slowly, he spread his fingers and opened his palm to let the crystal go, while keeping the other hand cupped underneath, ready to catch it should it fall. But it didn’t budge from its invisible hook.
Under the white light of two torches, Finn could see the edges of the crystal become agitated, the smokiness accelerating inside. Where his skin met the crystal, it felt almost ticklish, as if it was writhing into position.
Briefly, he laughed at the impossibility of that while turning his head to Emmie, whose eyes were wide with encouragement. Estravon stepped between them, sporting a look of deep unhappiness. “That is not good,” the Assessor said. “That is not good at all.”
The tickle turned into a crackle on Finn’s palm. He moved his hand to separate it from the crystal, but it didn’t come away. His skin felt glued to the air.
Finn stopped laughing. “Erm, Emmie...” he said.
She stepped towards him, halting as the crystal sparked a little.
Finn felt heat flow through his right hand. With his left, he pulled at the stuck wrist, but couldn’t release it.
“What’s going on, Finn?” enquired Emmie, torch lighting up his panic.
The red crystal crackled, fizzed in his palm, like a trapped firework ready to explode.
“Put that crystal down,” demanded the Assessor.
“I can’t!” shouted Finn.
“Put. It. Down. Now.”
“I’m trying to!”
A judder of energy shot up his arm, through his torso, sparked through his backpack, wracking his body, contorting him, sending a shock through him so total he couldn’t even scream. It felt like his body had been taken hold of by an injection of fire into his shoulder, his chest, into every vein, every cell of his arm.
With the crack of a detonation, Finn was fired across the chamber and into the opposite wall. For a moment, he was out. Gone. As if he’d been switched off.
Then he jolted back into consciousness, winded, gulping for air. And his vision was dominated by a pulsating glow of red.
He shook his head. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Emmie and Estravon standing rigid, gawping. But they weren’t looking at him.
They were looking at the great blood-red gateway Finn had opened in the cave.
This gateway was different to any Finn had seen before. It wasn’t just that its colour was red when gateways were usually golden. It was the way the energy moved at its edges, grinding rather than groaning. It didn’t sparkle and flow, but writhed. Thick jagged tendrils poured back into the opening as if the gateway was consuming itself, feeding off its own energy. It was as if the effort of staying open caused it terrible agony.
Estravon looked like he couldn’t decide if he should be annoyed or astonished by this turn of events. “That. Is. Incredible,” he said, a palm to his forehead. “And terrible. And something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime. And you two are in so much trouble.”
Shading his eyes from the red light, Finn picked himself carefully off the ground and pushed away from the rock wall he had been flung against. He ached, but luckily his backpack had taken the force of the blow.
Emmie stepped forward to help him, but touching him sent a burst of static through her fingers, repelling her. “Well, that’s weird,” she said. “Are you OK?”
That was the truly strange thing. Right at that moment, Finn felt better than OK. He felt extraordinary. He felt wonderful. Amazing. Fantastic. Like nothing could ever hold him back again. It was a glimpse of perfection. Of ecstasy. Of strength he had never experienced before.
Then he felt really, really awful.
A headache hit him like a frying pan and he held his head because he felt it was about to explode. Or implode. Or both at the same time.
As Finn watched the gateway, even the tiniest movement made his head feel like it was a car in a crusher at the precise moment all its windows explode.
“You are not going into that gateway,” said Estravon, manoeuvring between Finn and the open portal.
“I don’t want to—” Finn tried to reply weakly.
“And you had better hope nothing comes out,” added the Assessor.
In Finn’s backpack, his radio clicked. A ripple of static.
“We don’t know if that is a gateway to the Infested Side,” said Estravon. “It’s not like any I’ve ever read about.”
The gateway’s tendrils writhed at its edges, slowly, steadily eating itself so that it shrank gradually but noticeably. Finn couldn’t quite believe he had opened a gateway – a very strange gateway – but it had worked. He hadn’t really thought about what should happen next.
“What do we do?” started Emmie.
Finn’s radio crackled again. Hearing it, with some effort Finn pulled the backpack forward, fumbled inside it.
“What do we do?” Estravon responded to Emmie, over the noise of the groaning gateway. “We hope nothing comes out. There’s not much else to do. We’re certainly not going in.”
Another crunching from the gateway. Another burst of static from the radio in Finn’s hand. “I don’t want to go in,” he said again.
“It would be a really stupid idea anyway,” said Estravon. “Although I’m beginning to think you might specialise in stupid ideas.”
“I just needed to know if the crystal worked,” said Finn, every word stabbing at his mind.
The gateway continued to feed on itself, a scar in the world, puckering and ragged but diminishing.
“I think it’s getting smaller,” said Emmie.
Finn tried to stand, but his legs buckled and he collapsed to his knees, exhausted. Emmie tried to catch him. A bristling electrical charge forced her away again. Finn s
ank further, defeated, in the fading light.
There was a crackle from the radio.
A voice.
Distant. Buried under static.
Finn pressed the radio to his ear, tried to catch the words.
“I’m going to need a lot of extra pages for this report,” said Estravon.
The voice came back again. “This— is—”
“A couple of different colour pens, I’d imagine.”
“Quiet!” demanded Finn, turning up the radio to its highest volume and holding it outwards so they could all hear the voice almost lost beneath an electronic hiss and the grinding of the gateway.
“Hew— of Dar—outh— If you hear this—”
Then there was only static again. Uniform. Undisturbed.
“Dad?” said Finn, pressing the button, croaking into the handset. “Dad? We’re here. Dad, answer me!”
No response. The only sound in the chamber was the grumble and suck of the gateway as it finally began to give up its fight to stay open. The radio was silent, the message cut off.
Finn hauled himself up, pulled his backpack on. He’d been scared before. He’d been scared by small things, big things, things he knew he shouldn’t be scared of and things he knew he should be really, really scared of. And he was scared now.
He didn’t know what he should do next. Go in. Stay out. Wait. The gateway was shrinking fast now. Time to make a decision.
“You’re not going in,” Estravon told him.
“You heard my dad,” said Finn. “You know he’s alive now. We have to help him.”
“We will try, after—”
“I just wanted to test the crystal,” said Finn, clarity pushing its way through his headache at last. “To see if it worked so we could get him.”
“OK,” said Estravon. “I’ll admit that might have been Hugo on the radio. That he may be alive over there.”
He looked at the gateway, which was flexing more wildly now, apparently exhausting itself.
“Promise him you’ll do your best to get his dad,” said Emmie.
Estravon rubbed his chin. “I’ll try.”
“Promise,” repeated Emmie.
“Right, I promise I’ll do what I can. No more silly tricks. No more sneaking around. And, for heaven’s sake, no more rule-breaking, got it?”
Finn contemplated that. He had heard his father’s voice. He was alive. Finn would be able to tell his mam that, give her some good news finally. Help would come. They would rescue him. “I need to get Dad back. And you’ll keep your promise to help?”
“I’ll help,” said Estravon. “As long as you promise you won’t go jumping into any gateways.”
The gateway cranked, pulsed, shrank almost out of existence before finding one final throb of energy to stay open.
Finn looked at it, then at Emmie. “I promise I won’t jump into any—”
The gateway burst.
With shuddering violence, scarlet tendrils shot into every corner of the chamber before disappearing suddenly and completely. All that was left was a tiny blood-red smudge drifting in the darkness.
But there was no one in the cave to see it. Finn, Emmie and Estravon had disappeared too.
In the last embers of the gateway’s light, droopy-eyed Yappy appeared, sniffed around the floor of the cave, cocked a leg and scampered away again.
Above, a fine residue of energy floated towards the roof of the chamber, through the rock, souring the soil above it, staining the roots knitted into it, the grass that fringed the clifftop.
The energy rose further into the wide sky, its particles at first drifting apart, then slowly coming together again, binding, cohering, until high above Darkmouth a shape appeared. It was a face, with empty eyes and a mouth distorted in anguish, that stretched across the sky before evaporating. It was similar to that which had appeared on the day Mrs Bright had disappeared, but this time there was a hint of shoulders, a smear of a body below. As if it was growing each time a gateway opened in that cave.
However, the only witness to this strange apparition in the sky was a lone seagull who had the misfortune to fly directly into it.
The bird was dead long before it hit the ground.
Finn felt every moment of time there ever was and ever will be, every possibility, every certainty, every passage of every molecule that has ever existed in two worlds.
Which was impressive given he crossed the gateway in under a quarter of a second. Or, more accurately, was sucked across it.
As soon as it was over, he noticed that his crippling headache was gone. Then he realised he was completely and utterly blind. He could hear voices. Well, heaving. And coughing.
“Oh, for the love of—” That was Estravon’s voice, interrupted by a splash of what Finn presumed were the Chocky-Flakes the Assessor had had for breakfast.
“That was incredible!” yelled Emmie with clear delight, obviously dealing with any travel sickness far better than the Assessor.
The strange thing was that Finn felt all right too. At least he felt all right compared to the last time he’d taken this return trip. Sure, he was on his knees and in a state of great horror, but his body was perhaps the tiniest bit less wracked than the last time he’d passed through a gateway; his mind had reassembled just a tad quicker. It was awful, but not quite as awful.
Except he still couldn’t see. At all.
“Emmie?” he called.
“I’m here,” she said. “I think. What just happened?”
Finn reached out and felt the coarse wool of her school uniform’s sweater. All he could sense were the sounds of Emmie and Estravon, and a rising stench that he realised was meeting one that already existed here. But his vision was gone and panic grabbed him. He had opened a gateway using a clearly unusual crystal, without thinking through the consequences, and had not only stranded himself and Emmie on the Infested Side, but had destroyed his eyesight in the process.
“I can’t see,” he gasped. “I’ve gone blind!”
A flash of light briefly stabbed at Finn’s eyes. Then it was dark again except for the afterglow in his vision.
“You’re not blind,” coughed Estravon, followed by another flash, accompanied by the sound of a camera shutter. “And, if you were, that’d be the least of your worries.”
Emmie turned her torch on and, as the flare gradually cleared from Finn’s sight, it became apparent that Estravon had a camera in his hand and that they were still in the cave.
“We’re still here,” Finn groaned. “Maybe the gateway was too weak. Or it warped in some way, bringing us around and back again.”
“I’m not so sure it is the same cave,” said Emmie slowly, scanning the chamber with her torch. The beam fell upon an interior riddled with spikes of rock. Most were tiny, but only a couple of steps ahead of him one reached from the floor almost to the roof. “We would’ve noticed those stalactites before.”
“Stalagmites,” Estravon corrected her. “They grow up. Stalactites hang down.”
“And there’s that,” said Finn, pointing above them. Estravon turned his torch on and directed it upwards to where some kind of goo ran along the cave ceiling and walls. The goo was a dull golden colour that sparkled weakly under the torchlight. In places, it hung in long strings until their weight tore them to the ground with a splat. It was these that were creating the stalagmites, building them slowly and surely into hard, pointed structures.
With the camera in his other hand, Estravon took another photo, the flash less of a shock now that torches lit the chamber.
“Should you be doing that?” asked Emmie as she ran her fingers through the ooze on the wall nearest them. Sticky, it glued her fingers together where they touched. She sniffed it, whipping her head back in reaction to a pungent odour.
“I have to do it,” said Estravon. “It’s my job. I’m an Assessor. I am assessing so I can reach the obvious conclusion.”
The words didn’t need to be said, but Finn said them anyway. “That this is th
e Infested Side?”
“That this is a mess,” said Estravon. “And yes, that we’re on the Infested Side. I cannot begin to imagine how many regulations we’re breaking just by standing here. Actually, I can. There’s regulation 34, governing the misuse of crystals. Regulation 68-slash-3 on the correct uniform when engaging with the enemy—”
“We heard Dad’s voice,” interrupted Finn. “The signal came through the gateway. We should try him.” The radio was still in his hand, gripped tight throughout his brief journey through the gateway. He pressed the talk button. “Dad. Come in, Dad.”
“There’s the breaking of regulation 21 on proper radio protocols,” continued Estravon.
“Try again, Finn,” Emmie suggested.
“Hugo,” said Finn, even though it felt odd to use his father’s name like that, regardless of the circumstances. “Come in, Hugo. It’s Finn.”
There was nothing from the radio except mild, uninterrupted static.
“A good chance to see the famous Darkmouth, I thought,” mumbled Estravon, now looking through his pockets. “A break from the norm, I thought. Except we find crystals, or whatever they are, in our own world. Ah, here we are. And, if I’m right, this here in my pocket is about to confirm that we’re in...” He held a bag of dust up to the torchlight, with its fine red powder and the crumbled residue of what had been solid crystals. “...a whole heap of trouble.”
“You can’t bring crystals through gateways. Not without attaching them to living flesh,” explained Finn.
“I know that,” said Estravon. “I did spend three years studying Applied Gateway Chemistry. I was thinking more of what the loss of these two crystals means. Which is...?”
“That we did go through the gateway,” said Emmie. “And now we have no way of getting back.”
“Exactly,” said Estravon.
Finn didn’t say anything. If they were really stuck on the Infested Side without any crystals, they were in an extraordinary amount of trouble. The only thing distracting him from calculating exactly how much trouble was the intermittent spasm through his arm, which felt like a lingering aftershock from the ignition of the red crystal.
Into the Infested Side Page 6