Shane Hegarty - Darkmouth

Finn couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for her. “There is something else …” he said, going to a small door squeezed between the kitchen and dining room. A stranger might think it was a cupboard because there was seemingly no space for anything larger.

The door had a handle, but Finn ignored that and instead pressed each of the door’s four panels in a practised sequence. He made a bit of a show of it, enjoying this rare dose of power he felt from knowing he’d kept the best for last.

“Ta-da!” he said with a flourish he immediately felt silly about.

There was the clunk of a lock opening. With a little effort, he pushed the door open with his shoulder and stood back so Emmie could enter first. She stepped through, peering into the deep dark that greeted her.

Finn flicked a switch and a single bulb flickered just over their heads. Then light raced along the ceiling away from them, illuminating bulb after bulb after bulb. It was not a room at all. It most certainly was not a cupboard.

“This corridor,” Emmie gasped. “It’s huge ! It must take up a few of the houses next door.”

Finn gave her a look, and she frowned for a moment, then gasped.

“The whole street? Your house takes up the whole street ? That’s insane!” She gave him a shove in delighted disbelief.

The hallway was narrow with a high ceiling. The lights bathed the faded brickwork, which changed in colour and texture every few metres, the street having been built one house at a time over many, many years. The entrance appeared to be the oldest part. “We just call it the Long Hall. It was like this long before I was even born,” explained Finn. “Our ancestors started off with our house where we still live, and over the years took over one house at a time, until we were the only ones here.”

Running along the length of the corridor’s right-hand side were closed doors, some wooden, some steel, and each marked with letters and numbers that would mean nothing to anyone who wasn’t a member of the family: the first was T4; the second E1; the third S3.

The left wall was lined with large portraits, some reaching from floor to ceiling. The first few were dark and faded. In them, the people wore metal armour topped off with shoulder spikes, helmets with antlers attached, and they carried basic but fierce weapons: double-bladed swords, nets rimmed with steel, shields studded with blades.

As Finn and Emmie moved slowly along the great corridor, the armour in the portraits grew increasingly modern and sleek, and the weapons changed from sharp instruments to guns.

The paintings were mostly of men, but women began to feature as the paintings became more obviously recent. Each had a nameplate: Sean the Brave, Hugh the Stone-Headed, Ragnall Iron Trousers, Aisling the Powerful, Conor Red Skull, William the Surprised, Rachel the Stubborn, Rory the Esteemed.

Each bore a striking resemblance to Finn.

“My ancestors,” he said.

Emmie looked at the portraits. “Weird names.”

“We don’t get a surname at birth,” Finn explained. “We gain one. Each of these people is named because of something they did or their personality.”

“What’s yours then?” asked Emmie.

“I don’t have one yet.”

“So you’re just Finn?”

“Until I get my Legend Hunter name. Everyone at school thinks it’s a bit strange not to have a surname, but it would feel strange to me to have one. Finn Smith, Legend Hunter. Doesn’t quite work, does it?”

“Suppose not,” said Emmie quietly.

It occurred to Finn that he had never asked her an obvious question. “What’s your surname anyway?”

“Er, Smith.”

“Oh.” Finn felt heat flush through his face.

“Don’t worry about it. I can blame my dad for that one,” said Emmie, who didn’t seem too bothered and was already scanning paragraphs of text framed beneath each painting.

She read from one.

“Conor Red Skull, Darkmouth, Ireland. Active during the late seventeenth century, he once went four days without sleep while tracking down and slaying two dozen Legends who had entered through three simultaneous gateways. It is said that he was so stained with blood it never properly washed off his skin. He earned his Hunter name due to his inability to spend any time in the sun without getting burned.”

“Each portrait has an entry like that,” said Finn. “It’s taken from The Most Great Lives, which is this book we have to read while training to become a Legend Hunter. Books actually. There’s a lot of them and they’re about all of the Legend Hunters throughout history.”

“Does that mean you’ll be in a book one day?”

“Um. Yeah, maybe. When I become a proper Legend Hunter,” said Finn.

“Cool.”

Finn flushed again, the heat prickling his face. Emmie moved on, eventually stopping at the second to last portrait. It was of a man who looked about as furious as it was possible to get. Across his lap was a simple rifle and behind him was a row of shelves lined with jars, whose labels the artist hadn’t bothered to add detail to. On a small table beside him was a miniature tree, leaning away from him at a sharp angle.

The nameplate on the frame read Gerald the Disappointed and the text below was particularly lengthy, going into some detail about the many adventures of his early life, including his rescue of a family of Legend Hunters hemmed in on the Scottish island of Iona; the year in which he staved off 154 Legend invasions of Darkmouth; his world-renowned bonsai collection; and how he once single-handedly felled a massive three-headed Cerberus, armed with just a single rock (“… albeit a very pointy rock,” The Most Great Lives clarified).

Finn hovered patiently while Emmie read. Finally, she spoke. “Nice nickname. Suits the face.”

“That was my great-grandfather,” replied Finn. “I never knew him.”

“Bet he was a barrel of laughs.”

“He trained my father. My dad says he was pretty fierce.”

“Why did he have to train your father? What happened to your grandfather?”

Finn gestured towards the last portrait. This man wore armour but no helmet, and was the only one in any of the portraits who was not holding a weapon. Instead, he was surrounded by scientific instruments and scraps of paper. He didn’t look particularly confident or aggressive. His chin wasn’t held high and his eyes were pointed down, as if he was meek or maybe even a little afraid.

“That was my granddad, my dad’s father.”

“Niall Blacktongue! Excellent name.”

“Not really,” said Finn, downbeat.

Emmie read the entry aloud. “Niall Blacktongue was the first Legend Hunter to try and talk to the Legends, to reason with them and attempt to understand why they wanted to come into this world. He died. No one likes to talk about it. ”

That was it. Nothing else.

“I don’t get it. What happened to him?” asked Emmie.

“He died,” Finn responded haltingly. “No one likes to talk about it.”

There were two empty frames at the end of the row, with nameplates ready and waiting, but nothing engraved on them just yet.

“Who are those for?” asked Emmie.

“They are to remind us of our responsibilities to all of the Hunters who have gone before, all of these people along the wall. You only get a portrait when you’ve passed the role of Legend Hunter to someone else or if you, eh, well, die.”

“Wow, that must be pretty scary.”

“Well, you know, it’s our way of life, I suppose. That first empty frame’s for my dad.”