“Bad things,” said Hugo. “Very bad things.”
They each let that sink in.
“I still couldn’t figure out why the bones were appearing above ground,” said Tiger-One-Twelve. “Not until it happened here too. Not until Emmie told us you had seen that Bone Creature on the Infested Side, Finn, and I knew it must be happening here too. What I still don’t fully understand is why these bags, pieces of armour and other things of yours are showing up all over the world.”
“I think I know the answer to that,” said Finn. He looked at Emmie. “There are Legends in the Infested Side, ones I met, who kind of, like …” he felt embarrassed saying the word, “worship us, I suppose. Worship Emmie and me.”
Hugo raised an eyebrow.
“I know it sounds stupid, Dad,” said Finn, “but that’s what they told me. I left a few things behind when I exploded on our last visit there. They said they were relics.”
“Like the way religions have relics of saints,” said Hugo, amused at this idea of his son being such an icon.
“I suppose,” said Finn. “I know it sounds weird but they buried them in the ground as gifts to the Bone Creature. Offerings. All over the Infested Side. They thought the relics might stop it.”
A couple of people Finn could not identify were still out there among the bones, scanning the ground for something. Hugo and Tiger-One-Twelve seemed unconcerned.
“They’ve buried things like this pen all over the Infested Side,” Finn went on. “When the Bone Creature was pushing through from there—”
“It was pushing the relics through with it,” concluded Tiger-One-Twelve. She pointed at the two people among the bones. “That’s what those two are looking for out there.”
She gave them a wave, and the pair came closer, lit by the glare of a low unicorn-shaped lamp.
Finn recognised both people immediately. One was the man from the Bubble Blast Car Wash, who Finn had said a passing hello to back in Darkmouth. The other was someone they’d spent more time with.
“Anne,” said Finn, seeing it was the woman who had given them a lift from the train station to Slotterton.
“She calls herself Wolf-Three-Five,” said Emmie. “Which I think is cool. Anyway, it turns out it was no coincidence that she was near the train station when she picked us up. She’d been following us all along.”
“We’d heard about you breaking out of Darkmouth,” explained Anne, walking over.
The man from the Bubble Blast Car Wash, meanwhile, carried on searching through the bones.
“I was sent to keep an eye on you, and almost lost track of you to be honest,” Anne carried on. “I didn’t expect for us to run into each other like that.”
“Your recklessness caught her on the hop,” said Hugo, matter of fact.
“I wanted to tell you, and I called Tiger-One-Twelve to see what I should do next,” said Anne, “but you were gone by the time I hung up.”
“As a team, we’re pretty comprehensive when writing The Most Great Lives,” said Tiger-One-Twelve. “But while we started by looking at you, it became more and more obvious we needed to keep an eye on Lucien. It became clear that your father was right to worry that Darkmouth was being taken away from your family through a conspiracy.”
Hugo saw a look flit across Finn’s face. “And that you were right too,” Hugo said, to please him.
“What will happen with Lucien now?” asked Emmie. “They’ll lock him up for sure, won’t they?”
“I doubt it,” said Tiger-One-Twelve, and Emmie’s shoulders slumped. “Without a Council of Twelve to do it, he’ll go back to Liechtenstein and argue his case with the other assistants. The problem is that there were a few of them who went along with his plan and they won’t want it all revealed through The Most Great Lives. And the problem for us is that we rely on whoever’s in charge of the Legend Hunters for co-operation in the first place. I fear that when all this settles down and someone takes control again, the Most Great Lives publishers will come to some kind of agreement which will involve putting this part of the story at the back of a very high shelf to let it gather dust.”
“It’s not fair,” said Finn.
“It’s not,” said Hugo, “but it might be better than the alternative, which was to put us in a jar at the back of a shelf. This way, at least, they all go to Liechtenstein and we get Darkmouth back. That’s what matters.”
“That’s not all that matters,” said Finn, weary but firm. He looked at Tiger-One-Twelve. There was something he needed to ask. “Tell me, do you all trust me yet?”
Tiger-One-Twelve did not immediately respond, but looked around her, and to Hugo. Then returned to Finn.
Before she could speak, there was a shout from where the Bubble Blast Car Wash man was inspecting the bones.
“I found something!”
They stepped over bones and glitter, walked around debris and souvenirs.
The Bubble Blast Car Wash man was standing in a circle of grass, from the centre of which rose a large plastic statue of Smoofy. Crouching down, he wiped dirt from a solid rectangular object half pulled from the earth.
Tiger-One-Twelve and Hugo reached them first, and stopped as Anne held a light up to the object.
“Oh no,” said Tiger-One-Twelve, hardly loud enough to be heard.
“Wait there, Finn,” Hugo said, putting a hand out to stop him just as he reached them. He then stood in front of him, blocking his view.
But Finn could see Emmie, and he saw that whatever was there caused her to clasp a hand over her mouth.
“What is it?” Finn asked, increasingly concerned and irritated that he was being blocked from seeing it.
“Maybe it’s a hoax of some sort,” said Anne.
“Maybe. It surely can’t be real,” said Bubble Blast man.
“Yes it can,” said Tiger-One-Twelve.
Finn tried to manoeuvre around his father to see it, but was blocked. “Why won’t you let me see it?” he asked, worried.
“So far, we’ve been finding objects Finn left behind when he travelled to the past,” continued Tiger-One-Twelve, crouching down to the object, whose cracked edge Finn could just make out.
It was stone, covered in a black sheen that reflected the colours of the Smoofyland lights.
“But the crystals in the Darkmouth cave didn’t just open gateways to the past,” said Hugo. “They took my father Niall to the future too. We don’t know how far, but we know he went there.”
“So you’re saying …” began Emmie, glancing from the object to Finn.
“That it’s possible an object from Darkmouth could some day in the future travel to the Infested Side and become a relic,” said Tiger-One-Twelve.
“And then be brought back to the present,” said Hugo, sounding disturbed.
Frustrated, Finn tried to pull his father aside, without any luck. “I need to see it,” he insisted.
Hugo turned, put his hands on Finn’s shoulders, squeezed. “It could be nothing,” he said. “You need to understand that before you see this.”
He stood aside.
The others parted too, letting Finn see the object.
They watched him approach it, each of them solemn. It felt strange, like he was at a funeral.
Then he understood why.
The object was a slab of stone, cracked at the top. But as he crouched and pushed aside the last flakes of dirt, the words chiselled into it were clear.
Meanwhile
Many thousands of miles away, the breeze was blowing from the wrong direction.
It flowed through the desert, pushing a tiny line of sand ahead of it, forcing it across the lip of a dune, down the slope towards the abandoned village, across the flat earth and past the hut in which the old man Warmaksan the Unflinching waited. Dutiful. Patient. A little bored, if he was to be honest with himself. Which he wasn’t, because that might let in the threat of craziness. This was not a place he wanted to go crazy. There was enough crazy here without him adding to it.
He noticed that breeze, though. Noticed how it tickled at his toes, how the sand settled in small piles against the legs of his chair. Most of all, he noticed it was coming from the wrong place.
Before, the breeze had always come from the west, running up against the back wall of the hut in which he sat. This one blew in from the east.
Warmaksan the Unflinching considered this, reached for the length of steel and blades that constituted his closest weapon, then withdrew a little before deciding, once and for all, to grasp it tight. Because he’d noticed something else in the breeze. Something far more ominous. Something he had not experienced since he was a child, which the desert had not tasted for decades.
Rain.
It was light, a spray carried into the hut by that breeze. He walked towards the door, slowly. The glare of the day outside had been dimmed, the temperature had dipped.
As he reached the doorway, he was startled by the slither of a lizard darting under his feet in search of shelter.
Warmaksan stepped outside and almost stood on another lizard. Then a third. The ground was writhing with them, pouring from the sand, scattering across the surface, all heading in one direction. Away. Out of the village.
He watched them go, tails flicking, each a rapid blur of panic, then turned again in the direction from which they were coming. Beyond was another building, a small outhouse long ago abandoned to anything but desert and emptiness. Behind it was a light, a smudge behind the building, a shimmering edge leaking from either side.
Weapon high, Warmaksan walked towards it. Slow, steady steps. Reluctant but dutiful. Rain ran down his nose, tickled the edges of his mouth.
He rounded the back of the building, and saw the gateway.
It was about as wide as he could stretch his hands out. Thin, it was still enough for him to peek through. Against the blue of his sky it was a streak of ominous, sparkling gold.
There was a crack in the world.
And it was widening.
The house smelled of other people. Their clothes. Their food. Their mess.
Finn’s bedroom smelled of Tiberius and Elektra in particular. It was a tip, torn apart by the unconstrained behaviour of the two children who had lived there for a while.
He picked a broken sword off the floor. Discarded books. Something that looked like a mummified Basilisk. He could hardly see the carpet for the stuff thrown around and used the broken sword to poke through the piles a little, knowing he’d have to tidy it up sooner or later. He just hoped that smell – their smell – would go quickly.
Knock knock.
His mam stood at his bedroom door.
“You think that’s bad? I found about half a tonne of sherbet clogging the drains,” said Clara. “The assistants were up to all sorts while we were gone.”
Hugo stood behind Clara, rubbing his chin with his knuckles – always a sure sign he was not relaxed – while holding something in his palm. “This is a six-hundred-and-fifty-year-old Minotaur claw that’s been in this family for generations, and I just found it being used as a toilet-roll holder.”
Finn managed to navigate a way through the mess to open a window and let fresh air sweep in. It felt good as it cooled his face.
Emmie came into the room. “You should tidy this mess up,” she said mischievously. “It looks like a Hydra ran loose in here.”
“Hey, don’t think all that Red Warrior stuff means you can go telling me what to do.” Finn smiled. “I’ve seen your bedroom and it’s messier than a Hogboon’s nostril hair.”
“Did you talk to your dad?” Clara asked Emmie. “He’ll be raging he missed everything that’s happened. Everything you did.”
“Yeah, he’s finishing up in Liechtenstein and getting back here as soon as he can,” said Emmie. “He says there’s turmoil over there at Headquarters while they figure out who’s in charge.”
“There are a lot of messes to clean up,” said Hugo, still rubbing at his chin. “Lots of things to worry about.”
They all looked at Finn.
“Hey, I’m not dead yet. I’m not going to be dead. So all of you stop looking at me like that.”
“There is some good news for you,” Clara said, breaking the gloomy atmosphere by handing Finn a letter.
Finn opened it, saw the Smoofyland logo at the top of the sheet of paper.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me. Mam, we can’t go there on holidays, please …”
“Just read it,” she said.
You are firmly instructed that you, and at least five successive generations of your family, are hereby banned from ever attending Smoofyland …
Finn laughed. “Excellent.”
“It’s not fair,” said Emmie. “I never got to go on anything. That rollercoaster looked brilliant. You know it’s the sparkliest—”
Finn’s sharp glare stopped her. She grinned.
“Anyway,” Emmie said, “I’m staying with you now until Dad comes back, and whatever happens here always tops any theme park.”
Peeling some sweet wrappers off his wall, Finn thought of everything that had happened, and the one thing yet to happen, but which now sat like a weight on their lives.
Finn the Defiant. RIP.
He felt their stares on the back of his neck.
There was no choice. He had to head towards whatever future was written. It would meet him here or elsewhere, but it would meet him.
And right now, he had to take on one great task, though at least he knew he wouldn’t be alone.
“Right,” he said, picking up a Desiccator wrapped in tinsel. “You can all help me tidy my bedroom.”
THANK YOUS
Special thanks to my amazing agent Marianne Gunn O’Connor and to Pat Lynch at the Marianne Gunn O’Connor Literary Agency.
Thank you to all the wonderful people at HarperCollins who helped make this book read and look so good. Thank you especially to my fantastic editor Nick Lake and to Samantha Stewart.
As always, I’m in awe of James de la Rue’s great illustrations. Thanks too to designers Elorine Grant, Matthew Kelly and Peter Crowther. Thank you to Marcus Fletcher, Anna Bowles, Madeleine Stewart and Mary O’Riordan for their careful readings and brilliant suggestions.
Thanks to Mary Byrne, Ann-Marie Dolan and Tony Purdue in HarperCollins Ireland, and to Jo Hardacre in HarperCollins UK.
As ever, the most love and gratitude are saved for my wife, Maeve, and to our children Ois’n, Caoimhe, Aisling and Laoise.
Thank you too to my parents, Marie and Tim, who always fed me books as a kid whenever I needed one. And very tasty they were too.
About the Author
SHANE HEGARTY was a journalist before becoming a full-time writer. He lives on the east coast of Ireland in a village not unlike Darkmouth. Only with no monsters. That he knows about.
Follow Shane on Twitter: @shanehegarty
Discover more at www.youtube.com/Darkmouth
Books by Shane Hegarty
The Darkmouth series
(in reading order)
DARKMOUTH
WORLDS EXPLODE
CHAOS DESCENDS
HERO RISING
About the Publisher
Australia
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United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
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http://www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
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Hero Rising Page 20