Shane Hegarty - Chaos Descends

A thump rattled the room, shook the dust, sent the silverfish scurrying for safety.

There was another louder thud, from the other side of the closed door. With one final crunch, and an accompanying grunt, the door swung inwards, crashing against the corner of a small writing table. In the darkness stood the silhouette of a very large man, his green eyes lit by the strip of daylight, a kilt settling about his knees.

Once he had assessed the room for a few seconds, the man bent and entered. Beneath a cracked brown leather jacket, the hem of his kilt danced about hairy legs and his metal sporran clanked under the weight of the seven knives slotted along the top of it. He drew a whistling breath through his whiskers, ran his finger along the writing table’s dust.

A tiny spider pushed through the grime on his fingertip and leaped towards the carpet.

“This room is perfect,” said the man.

He was Douglas, from the Scottish Isle of Teeth. He came from an ancient family of Legend Hunters, whose deeds still echoed through the annals. But Douglas’s deeds did not echo. He was unlucky enough to have been born into an age when Legends bothered only one town and one Legend Hunter family. It meant that he was a Half-Hunter, with the blood of a Legend Hunter, but no Legends to fight.

Instead, Douglas was a pastry chef. This way, he at least got to use knives at work.

Every day, Douglas longed to spill the blood of the Infested Side’s Legends, to prove himself in battle and earn his place in a line of great warriors. But right now, in this room, he had only one very important question.

“What time is breakfast served?”

A stooped woman shuffled in from the dimly lit hallway, carrying an extremely fluffy yellow towel and some shampoo in tiny plastic bottles. She pushed past Douglas and placed them roughly on the bed. This was Mrs Cross, the hotel’s owner, and her name was an appropriate one.

“We haven’t had guests in this place for thirty years,” she complained, “and as soon as I open again you lot demand a slap-up feed served to you as soon as you wake. Isn’t it enough that I brought shower caps?”

She dropped a crumpled plastic hairnet onto the towel.

The Half-Hunter glared at her, decades of pent-up frustration simmering behind his eyes.

“Breakfast is from seven until eight thirty every morning,” Mrs Cross sighed. She shuffled back out of the room, grumbling as she went. “If you’re even a minute late, you can suck on the towel for all I care.”

She pulled the creaking door behind her, until it stopped ajar on the rucked carpet.

Alone in the room, Douglas stood at the bed and, one by one, pulled the knives from his sporran. A short blade. A fat one. Bone-handled. Wooden-handled. Serrated. Smooth. A delicate one that was very useful for cutting apple pies.

He lined them up in a neat row next to the towel, then rummaged further in his sporran and placed a toothbrush alongside the knives.

Behind him, he heard the creak of a floorboard.

“Ah, porter,” Douglas said, not looking around, but fishing in his sporran for something else. “You must ha’ brought m’bag. You can put it in the corner there.”

Douglas pulled a comb from his sporran and added it to the bed’s line-up. Behind him, the unseen porter didn’t move.

“I said to put it over in the corner. Oh, you’ll be wanting a tip, I suppose?” Douglas turned while searching for change. “I coulda just carried the bag up m’self—”

In the shadows of the room, a figure was taking shape, pouring from a floating mouth as if formed by a scream. It filled out between feet and head. What might once have been hair was now a writhing mass of oozing tar. What might once have been a face was now a shifting landscape of scars in which sat eyes fiery with blood. What might once have been human was something even more horrible.

“Is that you ?” asked Douglas, pushing up his leather sleeves in anticipation of trouble.

In the shadows, the figure remained. Silent. Watchful. Eyes ablaze.

“They said you were dead,” said Douglas, the edge of his mouth curling in anticipation of a fight. “But ne’er mind, because it’s gonna be a pleasure to send you back to whatever hell you’ve come from.”

The figure held out charred hands, as if in a show of peace. Beneath the depthless black of its hair, those pupils were fixed islands on coursing rivers of blood.

Douglas ducked and grabbed a carving knife, spun while swinging the blade at the figure before him.

The weapon passed uselessly through the phantom.

The horrifying apparition waited until it could see the realisation cross Douglas’s face, a look that said: All the pastry knives in the world wouldnae be enough for this fight .

Then the phantom struck.

In a brief, desperate bid for safety, Douglas gripped the curtain, tore it from the window, so that a burst of light shocked the room.

The curtain did not help.

Douglas was gone.

Outside, ignorant of the terrible events in the hotel room, Darkmouth was busy with shoppers, giddy kids and the source of their excitement: Half-Hunters pulling suitcases behind them, pushing large boxes ahead of them, arriving in steady numbers, trying not to poke passers-by with the ceremonial swords that hung from their waists.

Coming down the centre of the road, ignoring the oncoming traffic, the honking of horns and shouts of protest, were two Half-Hunters in grey leather trousers and red padded jackets. They carried a huge banner, sagging along the ground between them. On it, between two dancing Minotaurs, was large lettering that read:

Finn could hear his own breath. Worse, he could smell it. Stale. Hot. Filling the helmet so that it made his nose twitch and his eyes water.

“My visor’s steaming up and—” A long wooden sword hit him hard on the side of the head. “Ah, come on!” Finn protested, through a ringing ear and murky vision.

The sword clattered him on the other side of the skull.

Through the fogged-up visor, Finn saw his father thrust forward from the long white space of the training room, his feet light on the soft mats that covered the floor. Finn dodged quickly and spun away.

“You can’t keep running,” said Hugo, turning to face him. In the sleek reflection of his dad’s helmet, Finn saw his own visor-covered face, the sides of his helmet daubed with red streaks of paint meant to imitate blood.

His father moved in with a skilful swish of a blade aimed at Finn’s nose. Finn just about reacted in time to block it, but his father loomed over him, pressing down slowly, surely, so that Finn’s knees began to buckle beneath him. “Sooner or later,” said Hugo sternly, “you’re going to have to fight back.”

“I hate to admit this,” said Finn, sinking under the pressure of the sword, his back beginning to bend precariously over his legs, “but you’re right.”

He dropped suddenly, almost limboing away from his father as Hugo stumbled forward at the sudden removal of the body that had been holding him up.

Finn hit his father in the hinge of one leg. Hugo dropped to one knee and Finn released a tiny laugh of satisfaction. He immediately regretted this celebration for two reasons.

First, the smell of this morning’s boiled egg filled his helmet.