Worlds Explode. Shane Hegarty
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.