Worlds Explode

“There should be something here,” said Finn, disappointment tightening his voice. “The X says it’s in the centre of this area somewhere. See?” He pointed at the picture.

Emmie squinted at it. “No. Sorry.”

Since finding the clue hardly an hour ago, Finn had feared another dead end. They had been wrong so many times already. So, they had agreed they should check this clue out alone, to say they were off to school as always, an illusion of normality even when their world had been turned upside down. No worrying Finn’s mother. No raised hopes. No drama. No Assessor. No Steve. No one to disappoint but themselves.

The two searched again, Finn’s bag jolting on his back, the clatter and clash of the fighting suit stuffed inside, as he marched through clumps of grass, pushed aside weeds with his feet, carefully lifted knots of thorns.

They criss-crossed the cliff, looking for something, anything.

“Anything?” Finn shouted to Emmie.

“Nothing!” she shouted back.

The table in the painting had featured some objects that had seemed relevant and a few that didn’t. There was the mirror and its map obviously. There was also a compass pointing south-east, which happened to be the direction from the house to this crest of cliff. There were two books without titles, but one looked quite like the thin notebook Finn had found which had Niall Blacktongue’s initials on it. He had brought that notebook with him this morning, just in case it helped.

But there were other things in the painting. A magnifying glass, some coins, a feather in an ink pot. They could have meant anything or everything. Or nothing at all.

Yet the map itself, while spare in details, seemed clear. This was where they were supposed to be. Maybe.

On the cliff edge was a crumbling stone hut, which locals called the Look-out Post, but 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.”

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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.