Shane Hegarty: Darkmouth

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2015

Published in this edition 2017

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd,

HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

The HarperCollins website address is:

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Text copyright © Shane Hegarty 2015

Illustrations copyright © James de la Rue 2015

Shane Hegarty asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.

James de la Rue asserts the moral right to be identified as the illustrator of the work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007545612

Ebook Edition © 2017 ISBN: 9780007545780

Version: 2017-02-03

For Maeve, who made the adventure possible.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

From A Concise Guide to the Legend Hunter World, Vol. 2 …

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

From A Concise Guide to the Legend Hunter World, Vol. 3 …

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

From the publisher’s introduction to the final section of The Most Great Lives of the Legend Hunters …

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

From A Concise Guide to the Legend Hunter World, Vol. 5 …

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

From A Concise Guide to the Legend Hunter World, Vol. 6 …

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

From A Concise Guide to the Legend Hunter World, Vol. 7 …

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Thank Yous

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Books by Shane Hegarty

About the Publisher

The town of Darkmouth appears on few maps because very few people want to find it. When it is marked on one, its location is always wrong. It’ll be a bit north of where it’s supposed to be, or a bit south. A little left or a little right. A bit off.

Always.

Which means that visitors to Darkmouth invariably arrive having taken a wrong turn, soon convinced they’ll reach only a dead end. They drive through a canopy of trees, whose branches reach from either side to clasp ever tighter overhead, becoming thicker with every mile until the dappled light is choked off and the road is dark even on the brightest of days. Then, just as the wood is almost scraping the paint from their car, and it seems that the road itself is going to be suffocated, the visitors travel through a short tunnel and emerge on to a roundabout filled with blossoming flowers and featuring a sign that reads:

The next line has been updated by hand a couple of times:

On a wall lining the road there is large striking graffiti. It says only this:

Except the last S forms a serpent, with mouth wide and teeth jagged. Visitors peer at it and wonder, Is that a …? Could it be a …?

Yes, that snake really is swallowing a child.

The travellers – by now a bit desperate in their search – have finally reached Darkmouth. Their next thought is this: Let’s get out of here .

So they go right round the roundabout and head back the way they came. Which is a shame, because if they were to stay they would realise that Darkmouth is actually quite a nice place. It has a colourful little ice-cream shop on the harbour, benches dotted along the strand, picnic tables and fun climbing frames for the kids.

And no one has been eaten by a monster for some time.

In fact, they aren’t really monsters at all. They might look monstrous, and the locals might refer to them as monsters, but, strictly speaking, they are Legends. Myths. Fables. They once shared the Earth with humans, only to grow envious, then violent, so that a war raged through the world’s Blighted Villages for centuries.

Now Darkmouth is the last of these Blighted Villages. And Legends show up only occasionally.

This morning just happens to be one of those occasions.

Thinking back on it all later, Finn identified that morning as the time when things began to go badly wrong.

Thinking on it a little bit more , he realised he could identify just about any morning of his first twelve years as when things began to go wrong. At the time, though, he wasn’t doing much thinking. Instead, he was running. As hard as he could. In a clanking armoured suit and heavy helmet. In the rain. Away from a Minotaur.

Five minutes earlier, everything had seemed to be going a bit more to plan, even if Finn wasn’t entirely sure what that plan was.

Then it had been Finn doing the chasing, carrying a Desiccator, a fat silver rifle with a cylinder hanging in front of the trigger. He was the Hunter, lumbering through the maze of Darkmouth’s backstreets in a black helmet and fighting suit – small dull squares of metal knitted together clumsily – so that when he moved it sounded like a bag of forks falling downstairs.