Darkmouth (13 page)

F
inn ran straight to the library, following the now familiar thuds and whirrs of activity.

“Dad, I've just thought of something!”

Finn's father was at the machine, trying to work something out of a crevice. Mr. Glad emerged from around the other side of the device, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to the elbows. He lifted his chin by way of a greeting.

The smaller of the room's empty cages had been pulled forward. Between it and the device stood a small round table holding two things: an apple and Finn's goldfish bowl. Bubbles the fish bumped lazily against the glass.

On the floor in front of the device was a ring of bonsai trees.

“Dad, I just figured something out about the man at the gateway.”

“Go on,” said his father, not looking up.

“I thought the man was taking something from it.
That's what it looked like to me anyway.”

“Yeah?” With a grunt, his dad snapped out whatever he'd been working at. It sparked, singeing his fingers.

“Only . . . what if he wasn't taking something
from
the gateway, but
putting something into it
?”

“Like what?” said his dad, distracted.

“I don't know.” Finn hadn't thought that far. “How about an object? Or a message maybe?”

Shaking his stinging fingers, his father stood up to ponder that idea. His face slowly broke into an aspect Finn wasn't entirely familiar with, but guessed might be something approaching respect.

“That's not bad,” he said. “I suppose it would make sense if someone over here was working with . . . Hold on, what happened to your head?”

Finn had absentmindedly flung off his hat as he'd run into the house, exposing the cut at his temple. “Nothing,” he said.

“Nothing?” said his dad. “That's a lot of blood for ‘nothing.'”

Mr. Glad, who had been busying himself around the machine, interrupted. “I think we're ready to go, Hugo.”

Finn looked at the machine, then at his goldfish bowl. “Um, why is Bubbles here?”

The two men ignored him, engaging in a flurry of checks and cross-checks while Finn hovered, feeling somewhat deflated. Mr. Glad carefully stepped over the bonsai perimeter, walked to the adjacent shelves, and began rifling roughly through the jars. “What'll we use? A Hippalektryon? Too unpredictable. The Hippogriff? Too dangerous.”

“I nearly lost a kidney to that,” said Finn's dad.

“That was a tough day all right. How about the Hogboon?”

“Yes, use him. He brought the crystal here so he can have the privilege of seeing how we're putting it to good use.”

Mr. Glad lifted the stopper from the jar and placed the hard ball of desiccated Hogboon in the cage.

Finn's father darted over to a wall and grabbed a Desiccator. Expertly, he pulled its barrel free, twisting its handle away. Removing the gun's canister, he peered inside, sloshed it about a little, and then screwed the canister and barrel together so it was more like a rod with a fat end to it.

“I've never shown you a Reanimation before, Finn,” said his father. “Never needed to. You're going to love this.”

Finn had read about Reanimations, and understood the process as well as he understood the science behind a Desiccation—which was not very well at all.

“As long as it's organic,” explained his father, “what can be shrunk can also be brought back to its proper size and shape. Most of the time. The plan is to bring this fella back so that we can test the device. Mr. Glad offered to lend a hand.”

“I shall be the beautiful assistant in this magic trick,” Mr. Glad said with a grin.

Finn's father unclicked the trigger unit from the Desiccator's handle and, as he walked back, slotted it into a groove at the base of the canister. “The Desiccator and Reanimator do the same thing in a way, Finn, only backward. One shrinks, the other expands. Same principle, same chemicals, only reversed. Legend Hunters used to carry two weapons, one for each job, on the off chance they wanted to reanimate a Legend to interrogate them or experiment on them or, as would happen, just to annoy them. But I thought one would do, so I adapted a Desiccator to do both.”

“He made his first when he was just fifteen,” remarked Mr. Glad, still pottering about the device. “He called it the De-desiccator.”

“It sounded right at the time,” said his dad as he held the reconstructed weapon to his right eye and peered down its length, then felt the solidity of the trigger sitting beneath the canister.

“But why do you need my fish?” asked Finn.

“For years we've been dealing with the Legends one by one,” his father said. “Shoot one, put it in a jar, wait for another, shoot it, put it in a jar, and on and on, attack by attack. The machine I've been working on will put a stop to them once and for all. The trick was to do it without turning the whole of Darkmouth into a giant lump. And that's where having a few live Legends on the shelves comes in useful.”

He approached the cage, barrel outstretched. With his thumb, he pushed the brass switch upward and a low whine built from within, getting higher and higher in pitch before becoming impossible to hear. Then came a steady
tick, tick, tick
.

The Reanimator was ready.

Bubbles was nibbling the stone at the bottom of his bowl.

“We're going to give this a go,” said Finn's dad, “but, when I say run, you run out that door, you understand? And don't come in until I say so.”

Finn nodded. His temple throbbed. “What about Bubbles?”

“If all goes according to plan, he'll be grazing on his own poo as normal tonight.”

Through the bars of the cage, his father tapped the hard ball of Hogboon with the rod. The desiccated Legend was briefly engulfed in a deep, even green glow that died down quickly.

The ball hopped. Like a jumping bean, it lurched forward, sideways, forward again.

There was an almighty scream.

B
roonie screamed.

And screamed.

And continued screaming.

If the scream had been broken down into its constituent parts, it would have been discovered to contain approximately forty-three vowels, twenty-eight consonants, and several sounds that could fit in either category, or neither, or both.

He couldn't quite decide which was worse: being desiccated or being reanimated. He knew a bit about Desiccation. They taught them about it on the Infested Side, how the net smothered the Legend, slowing its metabolism remarkably so that, from the victim's point of view, time stretched on for much longer than the half second or so it actually took to be desiccated. How long depended on size. For a creature about as big as an adult human—or, indeed, an actual human—it could feel as
long as a day, depending on what he or she had for lunch.

But for, say, a Hydra, about the size of three elephants, give or take its seven dragon heads, the experience of Desiccation would appear to stretch a horribly long time. To the only Hydra ever to have been hit by a Desiccator, it would have felt like he had been frozen for exactly 243 years. Given that it happened 150 years ago, presumably from his perspective he's still stuck there and really quite furious about it.

Broonie's experience had involved feeling stuck for a great many hours, while the world around him appeared frozen. There was nothing to do but wait as the stream penetrated every part of his body—every fiber, every cell, every molecule. One of the great mercies of the Desiccator net, Broonie discovered, was that, during this phase, its victim felt nothing at all. Except, of course, great boredom.

Finally, as the process neared its end, there was a mildly peculiar sensation, a bit like a butterfly snoozing on Broonie's neck. He even allowed himself to think,
You know what? This isn't so bad after all
.

Then nothing.

Until . . .

The final phase of Reanimation felt as follows:

1)
     
Like having his body pulled by his nose through a tea strainer.

2)
     
Like being a balloon a millisecond before it bursts.

3)
     
Like waking up to find all his insides on the outside. (The outside of the house that is.)

When Broonie finally stopped screaming, he lay panting on the floor for a moment before he assessed
exactly where he was. Which was in a cage. In a large room. In a world of pain.

The chief mercy of Reanimation was that it lasted for a relatively short time and there was a small part of the middle toe of his right foot which didn't feel any pain. At least not much pain when compared to the rest of his body.

But the air was revitalizing. Clean. Cool. The air of the Promised World. And, as he came to, it became clear that there were three humans staring at him. He didn't recognize the oldest one, but the other two were familiar. One was the Legend Hunter. The other was the boy.

Broonie pushed himself up, slowly, painfully, trying to put as much weight as he could on the one toe on his right foot that didn't feel so bad. Eventually, he raised himself enough to reach out a hand toward the boy.

He pointed a finger at him.

“What's he doing?” asked the boy.

“Charge the device, Hugo,” said the older man.

“Wait!” shouted the boy.

Broonie extended the finger toward the child and willed himself to be articulate now that he had another chance to deliver his message. “The . . . ,” he managed to say.

Finn's dad turned a large dial about a third of the way around.

“Now, Hugo!”

“. . . boy . . . ,” stuttered Broonie.

The Legend Hunter struck hard on a fat red button.

“. . . will . . . ,”

In the window on the side of the device, the crystals sparked, then flared a yellow that momentarily filled the room.

Broonie gurgled a final word, but it was drowned by a great sound from the device, as if it was taking a breath deep enough to suck all the oxygen from the room.

“Run!” shouted the Legend Hunter, but the boy stayed where he was, mouth open, until the Legend Hunter grabbed him by the elbow and pulled him away.

An explosion ripped through the room, followed by a shockwave of crackling atoms. Broonie raised his arms in defense, but it was useless.

With a stifled
whooop
, he was once again sucked into a hard ball small enough to fit inside the average pocket.

It was a bit more pleasant than being reanimated.

But only a very, very small bit.

F
inn, his dad, and Mr. Glad burst back in through the door. Finn was confused and desperate to know just who, and why, and when, and
what
that Hogboon had been talking about.

His father ran straight to the cage, which he picked up and rattled until its door swung open and the desiccated Hogboon rolled out across the floor.

Mr. Glad picked up the apple from where it still sat on the table next to the device. “Shall I?” he asked.

“By all means,” said Finn's father.

Mr. Glad took a deep bite from the apple's pink skin, chewed on it, and pulled a face like it was the greatest tasting apple any human being had ever had the pleasure of sinking their teeth into.

Finn's father dropped to his hands and knees and inspected the bonsai trees. “Not so much as a twig out of place. Not a leaf. Nothing!” He hopped to his feet again.

Finn walked over to his fish, tapping the glass to see if Bubbles was okay.

“I think it worked,” declared Finn's father.

“You did it, Hugo,” said Mr. Glad, taking another bite of the apple. “Great stuff.”

“Dad . . . ,” Finn uttered quietly.

“I wasn't sure, Glad, to be honest. I mean, I had oscillated the frequency, and narrowed the range, and all of that, but still I couldn't be sure.”

“Dad, the fish . . . ,” Finn prompted a little louder.

“You'd have done Gerald proud, Hugo.”

Finn's father's delight fell away a little at that.

“Sorry, Hugo, I didn't mean to remind you of . . . It wasn't my intention.”

“Dad?”

“What is it, Finn?”

He walked over to where Finn was inspecting the glass.

“Dad, where's Bubbles?”

The goldfish was gone. The only signs he had ever been there were shaken pebbles, drifting slowly downward, and a few scales floating free on the surface. Finn looked on the floor, but Bubbles had not jumped or fallen out. He was simply gone.

A frown had planted itself on Finn's father's face. It
wasn't going to be leaving anytime soon. “I'll get you another goldfish. You won't know the difference.”

Finn thought of all the things that could have happened to Bubbles. Maybe he'd been desiccated into something smaller than dust. Maybe he'd been zapped, exploded, disintegrated, made invisible. Anything. He felt loss well inside him. His only pet. The only animal he was allowed to keep in a bowl in his room rather than in a jar in the library.

“Poor Bubbles,” Finn muttered. Then he remembered the Hogboon's words. “He said it again, Dad. The Hogboon said something to me. It was definitely me.”

“Finn, you have to ignore that,” said his father. “He was disoriented. His head was all over the place.”

“But he was talking to me.”

“Finn, we're trying to create the greatest weapon any Legend Hunter could hope for. Okay, so it still needs tweaking. There's obviously some kind of problem here that we need to look into, but we scattered a wave that shrunk a small Legend, and not the apple or the plants. I don't know what happened to your fish, but we'll figure that out eventually. I don't know if this will work on bigger Legends, but we'll figure that out too. This will change everything. For us. For you.”

“But the Hogboon,” pleaded Finn.

“
Enough
about the Hogboon!” his father snapped. “Can't you let me have one moment of pleasure?”

The atmosphere spoiled, Mr. Glad put his apple down and began picking up some of the parts scattered around the device. Finn went to the table and lifted the fish bowl, careful not to let the water spill. Just in case Bubbles was still in there. Invisible. Or just really tiny.

“Finn, it's training time,” said his dad.

“What?” Finn protested, a small wave of water sloshing out of the bowl and splashing on his hand.

“I'll give you fifteen minutes.”

Finn left the library and didn't return for a full nineteen minutes. It was as brave a protest as he could muster under the circumstances.