Finn scrambled up the ladder of a slide that went straight through the window of the funhouse, depositing him into a ball pit in which Tiberius and Elektra were already half buried.
The Bone Creature pushed its claws through the top window, just over their heads, missing Finn’s nose by millimetres. Elektra and Tiberius, finally realising the danger, screamed. As the vast monstrous hand withdrew, it scraped against the window frame, snagging a couple of fingers and simply detaching them, so they fell apart into the bones they had been made from.
Elektra and Tiberius swam through multicoloured plastic balls and scattered, ancient bones.
Finn grabbed something that looked like a thigh bone. “Come on!”
He ran down another slide. They followed, clattering into each other on the mat at the end.
The Bone Creature reached into the funhouse again. Finn hit it with the thigh bone, only succeeding in sending a jarring shudder back up through his own arm. For all that it was concocted of whatever bones made its way to it, the creature was tough enough that a whack made no impact. Instead, the bone wriggled in Finn’s hand, as if it had a mind of its own.
There was no way out of the back of the funhouse – they needed to go through the front. He pushed the two kids forward, across a spinning floor, until they literally fell, half dizzy, out of the exit door and on to the grass. The thigh bone began to burn his palm as it struggled in his grasp, until Finn let go and it shimmied to be reabsorbed into the foot of the Bone Creature, which was still rummaging for them inside the funhouse.
Multicoloured balls flew from the structure. A giant unicorn head fell from its roof, impaling the ground beside Finn.
“I don’t like this any more,” said Elektra.
“Is this a ride?” Tiberius asked.
The Bone Creature became wedged in the funhouse and as it tried to free itself, Finn sought some kind of shelter. There was only one thing that offered any sort of solid cover. A large tubular building at the very bottom of something very tall, very long. And very sparkly.
“The rollercoaster!” Tiberius shouted with glee.
They ran for it, the small ones fuelled either by excitement or fear or both. Behind them the Bone Creature shook itself free of the funhouse, mirrors slicing the ground beneath it, debris showering all around.
“We’re in trouble,” said Finn, as if this wasn’t already obvious.
They reached the snaking fence at the rollercoaster’s entrance, meant to corral queuing customers when the funfair was open. There were three layers of fencing, and Finn had to vault them while Elektra and Tiberius ducked in between.
The Bone Creature threw a hand, a volley of bones smashing around them, spraying shards. One sliced off Elektra’s left ponytail. She screamed. Another narrowly avoided taking Finn’s left ear off.
He kept going, jumping the last rail. It brought them to a gate into the start of the rollercoaster, next to a measuring chart telling tourists exactly what height people needed to be to go on the ride. Tiberius ran straight past it, clearly too small, but Finn didn’t think it was the time to enforce the rules.
“It’s here!” cried Elektra, looking over her shoulder.
The creature was striding towards them, a chunk of pink-plastered wall skewered on half its head. Elektra screamed again, and kept screaming. Worse, she stopped at the entrance to the rollercoaster so she could scream some more. Just before the Bone Creature scrubbed her from the earth, Finn grabbed her and hauled her into the small building.
The Bone Creature’s foot hit the ground where they had stood, splintering bones spraying towards them.
“Woo-hoo!” cried Tiberius, and Finn wondered if he shouldn’t just throw the boy back out there.
No. That was not what a Legend Hunter did.
They were inside a worryingly open building – a tunnel really, through which the rollercoaster track ran. The light was dim, and there were more railings for the queues, each leading to a numbered square on which visitors would stand before getting into their car. Parked up for the night was the rollercoaster itself, a purple affair, each car bright with sparkles, its seats empty, its harnesses raised.
The Bone Creature punched the outside of the building. The rafters trembled, loose plaster dropping from it. In the booth, something sparked, a fuse blowing perhaps.
Finn realised the thing could see somehow. Maybe the microscopic organisms that controlled it acted as one giant eye. It bent down for a better view, and pushed a hand in again.
“Hide in the car,” Finn told them.
Elektra dived in. Tiberius jumped in beside her.
“Heads down,” Finn advised, sliding into the row behind.
The Bone Creature smashed against the side of the building again, shaking more plaster from the ceiling, triggering a flurry of light and carnival music.
The children screamed.
“Quiet,” begged Finn of Elektra and Tiberius. “That thing will exhaust itself eventually, so until then we just need to stay in here and let whatever is happening outside happen.”
The giant crept along, over a skylight, an eerie softness in its skeletal step.
Finn hoped it really would exhaust itself. He wasn’t so sure, though.
“I think it’s going away,” said Elektra and sat up.
Finn also sat up, just so he could tell her to get back down again.
Wondering what was happening, Tiberius sat up too.
Thunk. The Bone Creature hit the building.
Something frazzled in the booth.
The restraints dropped down in the car, securing the three of them to their seats.
“No,” said Finn, trying to force the bar back up. It wouldn’t move, locked in by a safety mechanism that had clearly been designed without the slightest consideration for people needing to escape a rampaging monster skeleton.
The rollercoaster shunted.
“No,” repeated Finn, still trying to pull free.
“Yes,” said Tiberius.
“I’m going to be sick,” said Elektra.
Alerted, the Bone Creature reappeared at the exit of the building, stooping to try again to scoop out the human contents of the tunnel. Its head appeared just as the rollercoaster jumped forward, kept moving and then shot forward like it had been fired out of a cannon.
The ride – on the sparkliest rollercoaster ever built – had begun.
Finn and the children ducked as the car smashed through a ribcage, slowed a little as it climbed up the rails. The Bone Creature came back at them, swinging wildly as the car plunged downwards at terrifying speed. Finn gripped the rail. Elektra kept shouting she was going to be sick. Tiberius had his hands up like he was on a holiday somewhere other than hell.
In ordinary circumstances, Finn might have joined him – he might even have admitted that the sparkliest rollercoaster ever built was also about the most fun. But this was not fun. They were not in control. And the Bone Creature was preparing to smash down on the rails ahead of them.
The car broke through, however, taking a few fingers with it, and steadily, slowly climbed the peak that Finn only now realised was a shocking height. But it was high enough to be well above the reach of the Bone Creature. For a few awful seconds the car crawled at the crest of the climb, the rollercoaster’s highest peak. A bird flapped by, and Finn wished he could fly away too.
Down on the ground, he saw Lucien scramble free from the smashed-up souvenir shop, lit absurdly by still-twinkling lights.
“Elektra!” he called up. “Tiberius!”
Tiberius waved at his dad.
The Bone Creature seemed conflicted about which of them to go for first. Then the rollercoaster dropped, leaving Finn’s stomach behind as it plummeted at horrendous speed.
A flash went off. An automatic photo of their great adventure. If Finn were to ever see it, he would see the twisted, gravity-deformed laugh of a six-year-old boy so small for the ride he was in danger of falling out. He would have seen the crying terror of the
boy’s eight-year-old sister, who had never asked to be on this thing in the first place.
And he would have seen himself, frozen with his arms over his head as the car smashed through the Bone Creature’s hip, splintering it so that it hovered momentarily as if trying to find a way to hop. It couldn’t, and instead crashed down to the ground.
Its toppling was temporary. As the rollercoaster shot along the track, the Bone Creature quickly regathered itself, stood again.
They zipped through a strobing tunnel, then stopped. Suddenly. Completely. Maybe a hundred feet in the air. Silence again, and darkness. The Bone Creature was looking around as it rose, unable to locate them.
Sparkling purple glitter sprayed from either side of the car.
The towering giant of death saw them again. There was no way out. Even if they could get out of the restraints, the only escape was jumping off the rollercoaster to the ground far below.
The rollercoaster car blinked its lights.
The Bone Creature lifted its arm to grab them, blocking out the world around.
Then, shockingly sudden, the rail dropped away steeply beneath them. The car plunged downwards, near vertical, away from the crushing reach of the Legend.
Tiberius and Elektra screamed, of course. They screamed so loudly Finn could hear nothing but that and the whoosh of the world as they fell.
He gripped tight as the monster moved away from them above, and the ground rushed up to meet them below.
Krunk.
The ride was over. The car cruised steadily towards the point at which they’d joined. The fall had been its final thrill, a last moment of joyful terror for the patrons to experience. It was meant to scare the life out of them. It had worked.
They were back in the tunnel. The lights dropped. The ride sighed its last. The restraints lifted. And everything went dark.
They heard the crunching steps of the Bone Creature outside, getting quieter, as it left them behind to seek out a new victim.
Finn looked around the dark tunnel.
And realised something.
“It’s the lights,” he said to the kids in the seats in front of him.
They were too busy sweating and jabbering and whooping and crying to listen.
Finn kept talking anyway. “It can’t see in darkness so the lights are what attract it most of all. The fires on the Infested Side. The sparkle and strobes here. They lure it.” He began to lift himself out of the rollercoaster car. He had an idea.
“Where are you going?” Elektra asked, wiping her nose with the back of her hand.
“To do something really stupid,” he said, stepping on to the platform.
The Bone Creature was not diminishing. It was not collapsing. It was not retreating into the earth from where it had come.
If anything, it seemed to be growing stronger, more solid. Every splinter that fell from it, every bone that was jarred loose, found its way back, fixed itself to whatever point was needed. It was a structure held together by millions of unseen organisms, but together they created something singular. Something almost indestructible.
It had its pick of the theme park. The Ferris wheel at its farthest edge was a ring of light against the darkening sky. Swing-chairs bobbed in the breeze, their chains clanking, light running up and down the central stem. And in there, though the Bone Creature couldn’t see him, was Lucien, creeping through the dark, trying not to make any noise.
He was clinging to the ball that was Gantrua, knowing now it was a charm that would protect him, but with no idea how, or what he should do if the Bone Creature approached.
And for the first time, Lucien had the look of a man who wanted all this to go away. The right lens of his glasses had a crack running down the middle. Dust covered his head. Because he’d been standing beside something glittery at the time the Bone Creature struck, his hair kept glinting under the artificial lights.
But the Bone Creature didn’t seem to have noticed him as he made his way towards the exit, creeping along under the cover of the settling dark.
The Legend sent a shudder through the ground with each step, its rattling bones loud and terrifying. Lucien half tripped on a kerb and when he righted himself, flustered and hurried, he found the Bone Creature was practically down at his level. Its attention was on some small toy scuttling along the ground, an escapee from the souvenir shop. It was a brightly lit duck, with rotating feet on its side pushing it along.
Lucien did not dare breathe.
The Bone Creature picked up the toy between what might be considered its fingers, held it to its face, and, deciding it was of no interest, dropped it again. The duck landed on Lucien’s head, bouncing off and causing him to shriek. Just a little, but enough.
The Bone Creature liked lights, but it couldn’t ignore noise either.
Lucien fell backwards, dropping Gantrua, who rolled away from him.
“I’ve changed my mind,” he was saying as he tried to crawl away. “I don’t want to fight now.”
The Legend loomed down at him, jaws wide.
Lucien covered his head. “Noooo—”
Behind the Legend, a streak lit the air, burst into phosphorous light, drifting across the sky.
“Hey, over here, you big … big … made-of-bones thing,” Finn shouted, throwing aside the now-empty flare gun. He rested a foot on the desiccated Gantrua.
The Bone Creature turned and saw him.
But it was not what Finn was doing that earned its attention.
It was what he was wearing.
Finn was wrapped in fairy lights – twinkling, flashing purple, red and white criss-crossing his torso. He had a sparkly, flashing belt of them around his waist. Another was slung round his chest like a cowboy’s bandolier. On his head he’d strapped a Smoofy the Unicorn souvenir horn, lit bright white by the LED bulbs inside. On top of that were glowing ears. On his back, a porcupine bag with light-up prickles.
There was nobody in Smoofyland, possibly on the whole planet, more lit up right now than Finn. At least it covered up the raging redness of his embarrassed cheeks.
“Come on,” he continued to shout, and flung a lit-up sword at the Bone Creature.
It bounced off its leg harmlessly, but the idea wasn’t to hurt it. It was to encourage it to come at him.
“Do me a favour, Lucien,” Finn shouted, picking up Gantrua while keeping an eye on the approaching giant. “Never tell anyone about my unicorn headband.”
He lifted Gantrua up, kept his nerve as the giant skeleton reached for him, and then launched himself into the heart of the Bone Creature.
The Bone Creature had no actual heart, though.
No blood pumping around veins. No organs jostling for space below the ribcage.
There was only the space between the lines of bones, the tiny gaps where one misshapen or broken piece met another and another, until they formed some crude part of the puzzle.
No, the only heart in here belonged to Finn. And it was beating hard enough to echo about the interior of the vast monster. He heard the blood rush through his ears, could feel the veins bumpy on his skin. Sweat greased his palms, and he had to hold on tightly to Gantrua as he jumped, clutching him close to his chest like a rugby ball.
He ran–climbed up the creature’s leg, then skipped in under the grasping hand of the skeleton, through a gap between its makeshift hip and jagged ribs, lighting up its interior with a garish and bizarre twinkling display.
Finn looked for a foot-up, grabbed a row of connected, layered spines that made up the creature’s backbone as he pushed his foot against a row of wide bones brought together to form some sort of pelvis.
For a moment, the chamber of ribs was lit up, and he thought he saw the tiny creatures that had brought life to this giant, writhing in their millions, an ever-shifting, swirling mass of organisms coating the entire structure.
It – they – responded to him. Pulling away from the bones of the ribcage, the writhing, pulsing microbes moved towards Finn as he climbed hig
her, aiming for the point where the head met the body. That was where Sulawan had said the charm had to go, right? He just hoped he didn’t have to reanimate Gantrua first. There was no time for that.
As Finn hauled himself up, the Legend jolted, twisted, shards of torn bone spraying across the space.
He pulled the lights from his shoulders, threw the headgear off, let them drop, quickly left behind by the Bone Creature as it flailed across the ground, carrying Finn inside it, crashing through a fence below, hooking on to a bumper car and dragging it along.
The creature’s hands reached in through the ribs, scattered bones latching to the arms, to the fingers, lengthening them. One hand ripped at the ribs; the other thrust in towards Finn.
Finn stretched up, straining. As he did so, doubt flooded in.
What would happen if he failed?
How long after he died would his bones become part of this creature?
No matter now – the fleshless claws were almost on him.
One last effort.
One last try.
The desiccated ball of Gantrua, containing the charm, touched the neck.
A million creatures screamed.
The Bone Creature imploded in a hail of ivory blades.
As the Bone Creature fell, the park lit up.
It outshone the Ferris wheel, the sparkliest rollercoaster, the dancing fountains. A shock wave of light thrust outwards in a perfect circle, sweeping across Smoofyland, carrying no dirt, pushing no air, leaving no damage.
The light dissipated, dropped, and the theme park’s radiance seemed almost dark by comparison.
Except for the shower of bones raining down on the ground where a Bone Creature had stood only a moment before.
It was gone.
From the far end of the park, Emmie, standing beneath the entrance archway, watched the Legend’s sudden, total collapse. She scanned for Finn, but couldn’t see him.
Not on the ground where the Legend had last stood.
Not anywhere nearby.
It was as if he was gone, had disappeared along with the creature he’d destroyed.
Hero Rising Page 17