Into the Infested Side

by Shane Hegarty

Away from him, up where the town finally gave way to the thrust of crooked cliffs, high on a verge, he thought he saw someone lit by the moonshine. A man, perhaps, with lank black hair hanging down to a heavy coat. It was as if he had simply materialised there.

  Maurice even thought he might recognise him as a face he’d known over the years in Darkmouth.

  But that man had been gone since the recent invasion. His shop a charred shell. Presumed dead.

  Maurice raised a hand in greeting. There was no wave in return.

  “Is that you, Glad?” Maurice called out, but, when he squinted again, the figure was gone, or more or less anyway, replaced by a drifting shadow of something that may or may not have been there.

  Finn’s arms ached where the rope from Niall Blacktongue’s weapon had wrapped them tight to his body. One hand was wedged at the base of his back, the other was jammed at an awkward angle towards his shoulder blades.

  His back hurt because he was sitting against the rough bone wall inside the tower, pins and needles fizzling through his left leg as he tried to move without toppling over.

  “Sorry,” his grandfather had said after shooting a rope at him.

  “Sorry,” as he’d pushed him through the heavy tower door.

  “Sorry,” as he’d dropped Finn against the wall.

  “If you’re really sorry, then let me go,” Finn said, trying to kick, but, thanks to the rope, just flopping a bit like a stranded dolphin.

  “I can’t,” his grandfather told him. “It took me so long to find you.”

  Finn examined his grandfather, his thick blob of hair, his complexion almost as fresh as it was the day he’d had his portrait painted. He looked like Finn’s father. Not as muscular, but stronger than Finn had expected him to be. He couldn’t decide what was really going on here, was disconcerted by how, even through his anxiety, there was a certain tenderness about his grandfather. As well as what seemed like an undercurrent of fear.

  Fear of Finn.

  What could I do to him? thought Finn. I can’t even scratch my nose.

  But it was there, the fear, alongside the strange gentleness. It was in complete contrast to the blasted, scarred skin of the very same man that Finn had seen at the head of an army of Legends just a few weeks ago. Or many years in the future. Whichever it was. Thinking about it scrambled Finn’s mind.

  Finn sat up against the wall as best he could, where the shards of bone prodded and scratched at him. Niall faced him from the far curve of the tower’s interior. His breathing was uneven at times and he closed his eyes as if trying to tame it. Finn didn’t like the look of that. He didn’t like the look of anything in here.

  “Are you going to hand me over to the Legends?” Finn asked.

  “No!” insisted Niall, indignant, shaking his head as he fumbled under his heavy cloak, as though searching for something. “This tower is made from the bodies of every Legend ever imprisoned here. Hundreds of years of the dead, piled higher and higher. The Legends don’t really like coming to this place. Too many ghosts. We’re not here to become new ones.”

  “But you talked to the Legends. You got Cornelius and Hiss, the Orthrus, to guide us here. I mean, that must have been you, right?” Finn thought back to Hiss telling them that the human who had given him his instructions had looked like Finn.

  He’d thought it was his father. He’d been very wrong.

  “Well, yes, it was,” said Niall. “But it doesn’t matter that I talked to the Legends. It’s what I talked to them about that’s important.”

  “What did you talk to them about?”

  His grandfather removed a small metal cylinder from beneath his cloak. “You.”

  Finn felt dizzy. “Why?” he asked.

  “Because you will be there at the end of everything.”

  Finn felt even dizzier.

  He’d tried to dismiss the prophecy so many times, tried not to think about it, but now his grandfather had come to the Infested Side just to find Finn and his head was spinning with the idea that actually he really was important in all of this.

  Important in a way that made his grandfather afraid of him.

  He shuddered, tried to concentrate on the moment, to take stock. He recognised the cylinder Niall was carrying as a Desiccator canister. This situation was not developing in a particularly cheery manner.

  Finn pushed his legs out, tried to back his way up the wall, but couldn’t get his balance. “What are you going to do with that? Are you going to desiccate me?”

  “I’m going to save you,” said Niall as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “I’m going to save everybody.”

  Finn didn’t understand. He was tied up on the Infested Side. How was this being saved?

  Placing the canister on the floor, his grandfather gave it a little tap with his finger and immediately an arrow wobbled into action on the cylinder, starting a climb from zero towards a 100 scratched at the top.

  “Thirty-two years,” Niall said, walking to a grate high in the door and peering out at the grim landscape beyond.

  Finn shifted against the wall, moved his back along the spiking bones.

  “That’s how far back in time you’ve travelled,” Niall went on, returning to Finn. “The blood crystals in Darkmouth are unique, as far as I know. They seem to grow at the join between our two worlds, almost as if pushed through from this, the Infested Side.”

  He crouched down, facing Finn. “If you just pluck a crystal and open a gateway, as you must have done, it will always bring you back thirty-two years from the day you do it. Why? I don’t honestly know. But here’s the stranger thing – it’s all about the dust. It seems to be created by the effort of growing the crystals in the fracture between here and there. And if you fiddle with that dust, mess with the quantities and all that, then you can use it to travel many years into the past or...”

  Niall reached for Finn, causing him to flinch. He showed an empty palm as a gesture that he meant no harm and lifted the red notebook that was sticking from the pocket of Finn’s blackened school trousers.

  “…you can travel to the future.”

  He stood up to flick through the notebook. On the floor, the cylinder’s gauge reached 20. Finn had seen a Legend desiccated on the Infested Side before, when Steve had shot a flying serpent as it attacked Broonie. The result had been a flailing, horrible mess. Finn did not want to become one of those. He moved again up the wall, an infinitesimal amount, hoping Niall couldn’t see what he was doing.

  “Have you travelled in time too?” he asked Niall, to distract him.

  “To meet you? Yes. I’ve come forward three years, give or take,” his grandfather said, not looking up from the notebook, but grimacing just a touch, due to some unseen discomfort. “You travelled back from your time. I travelled forward from mine to intercept you. The mathematics are all here, in this notebook,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve only just left this behind in Darkmouth, but to you it must be a relic, ancient history. Do you know what these are?” He showed Finn what looked like scribbled equations.

  “Calculations?” asked Finn, feeling the rope dig into his wrists.

  “Yes,” said Niall. “See this graph here? It’s how much dust needs to be on the crystal to take you to a particular year. They’re just ordinary crystals underneath, but once the dust interacts with them it changes everything.”

  Finn peered at it, trying to understand, and even through the spidery scrawl of Niall’s handwriting got a sense of what it meant. “But this notebook is also so much more,” said Niall, still leafing through the journal. “It’s also a diary, in maths and diagrams and whatnot, of my search for you.”

  Finn winced again at a pain that seemed to very briefly pass through him. He began to realise it must be energy, from whatever crystal Niall had used to open his gateway, crackling through him just as it had done before the explosion.

  That made Finn wriggle more against the bone wall.

  The gauge crept past 40. Finn felt nerves
prickle his skin. He did not want the device to reach 100.

  “You need to know why I’m doing this. You need to know it’s for the right reason,” said his grandfather.

  “Doing what?”

  Niall took a breath. Released it slowly. The cylinder’s gauge wobbled past 50.

  “I rediscovered that cave. ‘The Cave at the Beginning of the World’ it was called centuries ago, because every day, as the first light of morning touched the crystals, a gateway would open, quite naturally, on its own.”

  The Cave at the Beginning of the World, Finn thought. Linked to the Cave at the End of the World.

  “So, I learned to control the crystals. Sometimes I cleaned them of their dust. Sometimes I caked them in it. And then I opened gateways to see where they would take me. They always brought me to the Infested Side. But not always to the same time. After each journey, I recorded the results. That’s how I was able to build that graph, make those calculations, travel to this exact point in time.”

  Finn’s shoulders tensed, he ground his teeth, let the energy pass.

  “Anyway,” continued Niall, “I survived those journeys to the Infested Side the same way you did. Igniting when the energy inside me from using the crystal built up to the point where I couldn’t hold it any more. Destroying when necessary. I kept travelling back in time, forward in time. I travelled as far as the crystals would take me. But here’s the thing: there was a dead end. It would only take me as far as one particular day. One specific moment. A day in the future where something terrible happens. A catastrophe more destructive than anything I had seen before. And I saw you there. I saw you tearing the sky apart.”

  Niall dropped his hand by his side, the notebook flapping open in his loose grip. He looked at Finn. “I was in the future, on the Infested Side, yet I could see Darkmouth beneath a great sea of fire, engulfing the town we’d protected for generations. Spreading out across the entire world. And at its centre was you. You,” he repeated as if bemused by that idea. “You were at the end of the world. You will be the end of the world. Both worlds.”

  Finn had stopped squirming. Almost stopped breathing. The silence in the tower was as thick as the stench that pervaded the whole of the Infested Side, but Finn’s head was loud with confusion and fear and the prophecy ringing like an alarm in his head. He didn’t want to believe it. It sounded impossible. Then again, he’d exploded once already today. Impossible was losing all meaning.

  “I...” Finn swallowed, his mouth dry. “...destroy the world?”

  “Worlds technically. But yes, I’m afraid so.”

  Finn swallowed again. “So, what are you going to do with me?”

  “Ask yourself: what would you do if you saw that? What would you do to stop it? Ah, you’re only a boy. I don’t expect you to have the answers.” Niall cocked his head a little, fingered the notebook with both hands. “I couldn’t just travel to any point in time, wander into Darkmouth and stop you. Remember, the crystals only lead to the Infested Side. But then, on one trip here, by pure luck I saw a man and a girl and you.”

  Finn had a flashback to the figure they’d chased into the Fire Spits. “That was you we saw in the forest.”

  Niall looked at the canister. It was past 80 now and moving steadily upwards. He seemed patient, deliberately so, as if scared he would lose control.

  “I had found you, here of all places,” Niall continued. “But I still needed to isolate the right moment to intercept you. If you had used a blood crystal to come through, I knew you’d be in danger of exploding as soon as I touched you. So, I moved back and forth, tracking down a point after you’d ignited, but before the Legends could realise you were now powerless and capture you.”

  He stood at the high narrow grate in the tower’s door. Finn shifted awkwardly at the wall where he was stranded.

  “Keeping the Legends away was easy enough,” Niall continued. “I spread rumours about how dangerous you were and they believed me because, well, they saw my power at first hand. Finding the Orthrus to guide you was easy too because it belongs to those in this world who want peace, just like I do.”

  Finn rubbed his back against the bones of the wall, felt their sharpness against his ropes. Time was running out. He needed to get out of here. Somehow. And then he had a thought.

  “Maybe we can get to my dad, using crystals here and ones in Darkmouth. Or something,” he added, because he really didn’t know how it worked. “If we find him, he’ll know what to do, how to fix everything.”

  His grandfather opened the notebook, flipped through it until he found the place he wanted. Then he held it so close to Finn’s nose that he had to back away from it to focus. It was a page Finn had seen before, covered in numbers and squiggles and intersecting circles.

  “See that? That’s one way we could find your dad. One way to cross from here and now to here and then. You open a gateway from here to the Darkmouth of your time, then, without stepping through, you immediately use a crystal to open another gateway right next to it. The two portals stuck together essentially make a tunnel that links this Infested Side now to Darkmouth in the future, and then loops back into the Infested Side of the future.”

  Niall saw the blank look on Finn’s face. “It’s complicated. But it could work. All three places and times would be connected. You would just open a door from this Infested Side, through Darkmouth and into where Hugo is stuck. He could step right through and go home if he wanted.”

  “So, we can do it?”

  “No.” Niall moved his thumb and revealed a doodle of a skull and crossbones. “Well, you could, but only if you want to kill everyone in Darkmouth. Attaching one portal to another is very, very messy. It would almost certainly rip apart the fabric of space and time, leave a gaping hole between Darkmouth and the Infested Side. And it would not be so easy to just zip it up again.”

  Finn’s heart sank.

  The arrow on the Desiccator device stopped moving, pressing the gauge’s ceiling a touch past 100. It began to whistle, like a kettle coming to the boil. Instead of attending to it, Niall put the notebook in the torn pocket of Finn’s shirt, tapping it to make sure it was in fully. He smelled of harsh soap, but there was something else beneath it. Something rotten.

  Despite that, Finn felt a flash of hope: As long as I have the notebook, if I can get back to the cave, I can get home, he thought. I only need to add dust to a crystal according to those calculations and then—

  “No,” said Niall, and for a second Finn worried that he could read his thoughts. “I’m afraid your father will have to find his own way back. Just like I did. And, in the end, I just had to do it the old-fashioned way.”

  He rolled his sleeve to the elbow. With each turn of the material, a new scar was revealed, progressively more fresh – some slices, some gouges, one oozing still. And, around them, red powder stained the rucked skin. He kept rolling up his sleeve until he reached a fresh wound, into which was clumsily stitched a red crystal, bloodied, protruding from the skin.

  Finn recoiled, feeling ill, the stench of half-healed flesh wafting at him. “You attached them to yourself,” he gasped. “You’re crazy.”

  “This is the last crystal,” said Niall, a heavy sadness dragging at his words. “In case I was lost here, I blocked off the cave in Darkmouth before I left. Removed all evidence of it apart from a few hidden clues. You found the map in the painting, I presume?”

  Finn didn’t have the stomach to even answer. He kept fidgeting against the wall, searching for the sharp bones at his back.

  “I’m sorry you’re so uncomfortable,” said Niall. “It will be over soon.”

  From his cloak, he pulled the long barrel of a rudimentary Desiccator. He picked up the cylinder and began to screw it to its underside. “Desiccator fluid needs time to work properly here, otherwise it’s, well, not pleasant. It’s ready now. But you have to understand that whatever they call me in your time – a disgrace, a traitor, whatever – one thing I am not is a killer.”

&
nbsp; “You can’t desiccate me. You might as well kill me.”

  “No. I’ll bring you back to Darkmouth. You’ll be one of so many desiccations, but you’ll be safe. Darkmouth will be safe. You’ll be alive, just not quite as you know it now.”

  “But I’ve done nothing wrong,” said Finn, panic lifting his voice an octave.

  “Not yet.”

  “I can change it. Whatever happened, I can stop it.”

  Niall lifted the Desiccator to his shoulder and pointed it at Finn. “I’m so very, very sorry.”

  With a snap at Finn’s back, the sharp bone he had been using to saw at the rope finally cut through. Before his grandfather had time to pull the trigger on the Desiccator, Finn had bolted up the staircase.

  Finn went two steps at a time, hands pushing against the narrowing walls, round and round, round again, dizziness in his head, fire in his lungs.

  Behind him, Niall’s boots scraped a steady, unhurried rhythm on the stairs. His voice floated from below. “It will be OK. Please.”

  It would not be OK. Finn knew that. He wasn’t quite sure how he was going to change it, though.

  The tower seemed never-ending as Finn raced up, bouncing against walls, crashing shoulder against bone. The steps were irregular, carved as they were from a solid mass of the dead, so that he slipped a couple of times, scrambling back to his feet to flee further up towards wherever it would lead him.

  The scratch of his grandfather’s boots echoed from down the stairwell as Finn pushed himself up, willed himself up further, even as his legs burned from the effort.

  The steps ended suddenly as the tower opened up into another narrower room. Finn sprinted round the curve in the hope that it would lead on to another staircase, but there was no gap in the wall of wedged bones. They were less weathered now, more fully formed, and included the empty, uncaring eyes of a skull that looked far too human for Finn’s liking.

  He had reached the top of the tower.

  “There is no other way,” Niall’s voice said, with a sadness as heavy as his approaching steps.