Worlds Explode

Outside, the sky was clear and still. Another night falling on a world without his father.

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The next morning, sun crept into Darkmouth and an early summer breeze travelled across the sea, tickling the low waves that ran up to the raggedy shoreline and warming the fat rocks that littered the small crescent of beach at the town’s southern edge. Reaching the wide mangled cliffs that separated Darkmouth from the rest of the world, the breeze rose up until it ruffled the grass lining the top.

A basset hound scampered across the stony beach, stopping briefly to sniff a pebble, pee on it, then move on again.

“Yappy!”

The animal’s owner, Mrs Bright, scrambled after it, struggling to keep her footing on the shifting layer of stones.

“Yappy! Come back, Yappy, you stupid animal.”

She stopped for a moment and looked back along the beach. It curved away into the early morning haze, its stones kissed by the sun-sparkled sea that lapped at the long sweep of the bay. Inland, the houses of Darkmouth huddled together, as if cowering from some unseen danger, but, in this clear morning light, it looked like a normal town. You couldn’t see the shimmer of broken glass on walls, the dull glint of bars on windows, the tight squeeze of the town’s mazy alleyways. You could only see the painted house fronts, the wooden shop signs, the little playground of swings and slides. It was almost, in fact, a thing of beauty.

I really hate Darkmouth, thought Mrs Bright.

Mrs Bright wasn’t supposed to be living here at all. She had made the mistake of marrying a man from Darkmouth who had come not only with a dog she couldn’t stand, but a promise that they would live in the town for exactly one year, and no more, before moving on to any place of her choosing.

He died suddenly eleven months later.

She was left with a house she couldn’t sell and a dog she didn’t want.

“Yappy!” she shouted. “Where did you go, you useless mutt?”

She scanned the beach for the dog again. No sign. She moved towards the corner of the cliff, where rock jutted towards the water and the shore narrowed. Squeezing herself carefully round the base of the looming cliff to the beach on the other side, she could still see nothing of her tiresome pet.

“Yappy! I’ll leave you here, don’t think I won’t.”

From somewhere she heard a muffled yap.

She stopped. Listened. Heard it again.

Squinting at the black stone of the cliff, its layers of rock turned in on itself as if it might collapse at any moment, Mrs Bright realised there was an opening. It was small, a fissure not much taller than herself, and bent over as if buckling under the weight of the land above it.

She had walked this part of the beach many times and never noticed a cave before. Loose soil and stones were scattered at the entrance, apparently freshly fallen. There must, she thought, have been a rock fall, maybe caused by the heavy rains that accompanied the recent invasion of those things. Another reason why she wanted out of Darkmouth at the earliest opportunity.

There was another bark from inside the cliff.

Mrs Bright sighed, stepped carefully over the rubble at the opening, manoeuvred round a large rock and carefully made her way inside.

It was a cave, its walls narrowing as she moved deeper into it, the roof sloping down so that she needed to stoop as she called again for the dog.

“Yappy!”

Her shout echoed back at her just as she squeezed through a gap and into a chamber that stretched high into the blackness above her. The cave was so dark that Mrs Bright could hardly see the ground at her feet.

She gave one final call for the dog and heard nothing but her own breathing and the sound of trickling water.

As Mrs Bright turned to leave, she realised she could see now. A flickering crimson light crept across the hollowed-out rock. Then something else occurred to her: the light was coming from inside the cave.

From somewhere in the direction of that light, Yappy yapped.

Mrs Bright peered towards it. She made out a smudge of deep red, the soft edge of a light obscured by a fold in the cave wall. Cautiously, she edged towards it.

“Is that you, Yappy?”

It most definitely was not.

Mrs Bright’s strangled scream echoed through the high cavern.

Many dogs are intelligent, perceptive beasts with an almost supernatural sense of danger.

Yappy was not one of those dogs.

A couple of minutes later, he emerged from the cave, stopped at a large stone at its entrance, sniffed it, peed on it, sniffed again. He dropped something from his mouth, a curved pink and white object, sniffed around a bit, licked between his legs, sniffed around some more, picked up the object again and scuttled away down the beach. The sun climbed above the horizon into a sky of near unbroken blue. But, if anyone had been looking up at that moment, they would have seen the merest hint of a cloud cross the sun, dimming it almost imperceptibly before burning away again.

And they would have presumed it was just a trick of the light that the cloud briefly appeared to change, solidify and form the shape of a howling face.

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Finn waited at the front door of his house, his father’s hulking car parked outside. Black with a few old scrapes scoring the paint, its familiar sleekness had been dulled by the dust slowly settling on it as the days and weeks went by. It was becoming a spectre and a reminder of Finn’s failure to find his father.

In those last violent moments before the gateway closed and he turned to face the approaching army of Legends, Hugo had told Finn he believed in him, that he knew he’d find a way into the Infested Side. Finn the Defiant he had called him, and Finn had carried that faith with him through the first few days following his father’s disappearance. Yet each speck of dust on that car was a reminder of every day, every hour, every second of failure since. His father believed in him. But Finn was struggling to. All he knew for sure was that he’d been unable to stop Mr Glad pushing his mam through a gateway and his father had been lost while rescuing her. He felt that guilt as heavily as if a Hydra was squatting on his chest.

The morning breeze picked up for a moment, spreading goosebumps across Finn’s arms. He grabbed his backpack, a dead weight that needed to be hoisted with a grunt on to his back. An arm of his fighting suit fell loose from its open zip.

He was in the habit of carrying the armour every day, just in case it was required, and would sit in class with an eye on the weather outside the window. The merest spit of rain – it always rained when portals opened from the Infested Side – was enough to give him the jitters.

Finn twisted in an awkward effort to shove the arm back into his bag. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw something move. An animal was scampering up the street. It was a dog – a basset hound – stopping occasionally to sniff a paving stone or to pee on random parts of the street.

Even from a distance, Finn could see its coat was sodden and it appeared to be carrying something in its mouth. He only half watched the dog approach, his mind still largely occupied by the awful thought that he might never find a way to his father, and partly distracted by his continued inability to stuff the fighting suit arm into his bag.

The next thing he knew the hound was sniffing at his leg. Finn looked down, the dog looked up and Finn realised it was wearing false teeth. Not false teeth for dogs, if there even were such a thing, but human false teeth. Large pink and white gnashers, crammed into its mouth so that it sported the widest, most surreal grin he had ever seen.

The dog had a tag round its neck. My name is Yappy, it read. If you find me, you can keep me.

Yappy shook his wet coat, spraying salty water and tiny stones in every direction as Finn jumped out of the way.

He recognised the dog. He had met its owner about the town, spotted her coming in and out of her house over the years, had seen her walking through the town with a headscarf and a scowl as she barked at the dog.

He had a flashback to meeting her a few weeks ago, the day the Minotaur first came through. She was huddled in a doorway on Darkmouth’s main street, Broken Road, while the Legend rampaged through the town. She hadn’t been particularly confident in Finn’s chances of stopping the creature. She’d had a point.

The dog had been in the doorway too. It didn’t have those teeth then. Finn was pretty sure he’d have noticed a thing like that.

“Your owner’s name is Mrs Bright, isn’t it?” he said to the dog. Accepting a tickle under its sodden chin, Yappy looked up at Finn. The teeth glinted in the bright morning light.

It coughed out the dentures and, following another violent shake of its hair that left Finn’s knees flecked with tiny pebbles, it trotted away, stopping only to pee at the corner before disappearing.