Hero Rising

“Listen to me, Finn,” Hugo said. “Do you think I want to be here? Do you think my only plan is spending my life with pets whose toenails are out of control?”

“Then what is your plan?” Finn asked, frustration building. “Because I don’t see it.”

“I have it under control, Finn. You just need to be patient.”

“And while we wait,” Finn said, “we’re crammed into a small house, waiting for disaster, knowing they’re scheming something but we just can’t see what yet.” He was getting properly angry now.

His father stopped towelling the dog. “Please just go to school, play football, do whatever, but I need you to let me deal with this in case things really do get out of control.”

Mr Green shouted from outside the room, “Hugo! Rabbit poo! Now!”

Hugo gritted his teeth. Took a long, calming breath. “You need to understand, Finn,” he said before leaving. “The most effective way to grab victory is to first look like you’ve lost everything.”

“That makes no sense,” Finn muttered, alone now.

The labradoodle sneezed, covering Finn in flecks of water.

Wiping himself down, Finn stepped into the salty Darkmouth air. Things were definitely as bleak as they’d ever been. He could sense it. It was as if the world itself had darkened. Then Finn realised that it had. While he’d been in with his dad, a low, heavy cloud had dragged itself across the sky. The bright, cloudless blue of the day had given way to a near twilight.

A drop of rain splashed on to Finn’s shoulder. He put his hand out and caught two more.

It wasn’t supposed to rain today.

The rain fell heavier, stinging drops hopping off his head, bouncing off the road around him.

Rain meant Legends, breaking through.

Finn looked up, took a raindrop in the eye. He wiped it away, and when he did he realised that the ground around him was being lit by a growing golden glow.

Finn felt a tiny prick in his neck, like he’d been stung, smacked at his skin as he swung around to meet the chest of someone. Something. He looked up, saw an eye staring at him. One eye. No more.

“Sorry, kid,” the Legend said, voice deeper than hell. “You’re coming with us.”

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The gateway opened for a few seconds.

About three minutes later, four panting assistants finally arrived at the scene, carrying Desiccators awkwardly. They’d been delayed by an argument about which alley to run down. Half of them had said they should go right. Half said they should go left. They ended up going straight ahead which, by sheer luck, was exactly where they should have gone in the first place.

They burst into the dead end near the back of Woofy Wash, where the gateway had torn its way into our world.

But there was no gateway.

There were no Legends.

Even the rain had gone, stopping so suddenly it was as if someone had turned off the shower tap.

The assistants looked at each other with some bemusement.

“There’s nothing here,” said one of them.

“I told you we should have gone right,” said another.

“You said we should have gone left. I said we should go right,” said a third.

A noise startled them and the assistants lifted the Desiccators they’d brought.

But it was only Hugo, throwing out a basin of dirty, rabbit-poo-filled water.

They kept their weapons raised. He paused, liquid slopping about the edge of the basin.

The assistants lowered their weapons. Hugo threw the water along the ground, so that it lapped and splashed at their gleaming shoes, then returned inside.

As if a single entity, the assistants turned to clatter and bump their way away from the dead end back towards the main street, still arguing about which direction they should have gone in.

But someone else remained unseen. Emmie had followed their movements, knowing they’d be so wrapped up in the thought of catching Legends that she could shadow them easily.

She crouched to the ground, found a patch of dust, exactly the sort created when something comes through a gateway. But there was only one smattering, as if a large foot had been placed in this world, and immediately withdrawn. Otherwise, there was no sign of scratch marks on walls, or bite marks on bins.

Nothing.

She was about to leave the scene when something else caught her eye. A small bottle of Shampoodle rolling across the ground, spilling a dull blue chemical from its open top.

Emmie walked to it, rolled it with her foot and glanced back at the door of Woofy Wash.

Something was wrong, although she couldn’t quite figure out what it was. Finn would know what to do, she decided.

She set off to find him.

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Finn woke.

He was trapped in a small space, so dark he could see nothing at all, not even the hand in front of his face.

Hold on, he thought, maybe my hand is missing.

No. He wiggled his fingers and it felt like they were all present and correct. But he still had no sight. No light. Only a sandpapery surface at his back and a gooey, ribbed roof he could feel inches from his face.

Panic grabbed him, even as his mind was slow to get moving, heavy, dopey, unable to quite fix on where he was or how he had got here. He tried to stay composed, to figure it out.

The sharp sting on his neck. Passing out. He must have been drugged, Finn thought, and dragged here. Wherever here was.

The smell was so deeply terrible it was invading every pore in his body. He would need a change of skin if he ever got out of here. He tasted it on his tongue, wanted to pull his tongue out in disgust.

It would be pointless trying to find a way to describe the stench in Earthly terms, because there was nothing on Earth like it. It was a smell that belonged only to one place.

The Infested Side.