“What’s that you’ve got?” asked Emmie, coming down the street, schoolbag slung over her back, woollen hat forced down over her hair.
“I’m not sure,” said Finn. “I mean, they’re false teeth, but I don’t know why a dog had them.”
“A dog had them?” she said as she reached him.
“Yeah, in its mouth.”
“And you’re holding them now?” said Emmie, disgusted. “Lovely.”
Finn felt the slippery teeth in his hand and shuddered. He found a wad of tissues he had stuffed in his jacket, wrapped the teeth up and put them in his pocket.
“That’s even lovelier,” observed Emmie.
“I know who owns them,” he said.
“How? Did they write their name on the gums? ‘If found, please return to the mouth of whoever.’”
“No. I recognised the dog that just dropped them here. It belongs to Mrs Bright. We’ll call in on the way and hand them back.”
“Make sure you tell her to put them through the dishwasher first. By the way, you should brush down your trousers. You’ve got half the beach on them for some reason.”
Finn gave them a quick scrub with his thumbs, then frowned. “Do you reckon my trousers smell sort of seaweedy?”
Emmie sniffed him. “Nah, you’re OK.”
“Sure?”
“Nah. I mean, yeah. There’s no smell.”
Finn suspected Emmie was lying just to make him feel better. Which she was.
Mrs Bright wasn’t home.
They knocked on her door, rang the doorbell, but she did not come out to reclaim her teeth.
“He likes Chocky-Flakes,” said Emmie, leaning against the wall of the house.
“Who likes Chocky-Flakes?” asked Finn.
“The Assessor. He loves that cereal. Ate about three bowls of it last night and another three this morning. He went for a walk and came back with an ice cream and a giant grin on his face. Then he just disappeared to his room where he said he had to file his report.”
Finn tried to peer through the net curtains behind Mrs Bright’s barred front window. “She’s not home,” he said, but knocked one last time anyway.
“And he talks in his sleep. I could hear him through the bedroom door. ‘Snuggles,’ he said. ‘Come here, Snuggles.’”
“Snuggles?” wondered Finn.
“Snuggles,” Emmie confirmed. “I’d say it’s his cuddly toy.”
From the house neighbouring Mrs Bright’s, there came the sound of locks and chains being undone. Clank. Rattle. Clunk. The door opened and a man popped his head out to greet Finn with a lukewarm, “Oh, it’s you.”
“Have you seen Mrs Bright?” Finn asked.
“No. Saw her yesterday with that dog of hers. Not since then. She’s probably walking. She likes walking. Well, she does a lot of it anyway. It’s hard to tell if she actually likes it. Hard to tell if she likes anything at all really.”
Finn considered handing the teeth to the neighbour and asking him to hold on to them, then decided that troubling him with another person’s well-worn dentures probably wasn’t the right thing to do.
“If you do see Mrs Bright,” Finn said, “please let her know I have something that belongs to her.”
“What is it?” the neighbour asked.
“I think she’ll guess. She can find me at—”
“She’ll know where to find you. Everyone does. Speaking of which, any sign of your father yet?”
“Not yet, but he should be back any time soon.”
The neighbour raised an eyebrow at that. “I’m Maurice Noble by the way,” he said. “I went to school with your father as it happened. I wasn’t at your house.”
“Excuse me?” asked Finn, confused.
“That night the monsters invaded. I didn’t protest at your house with all those other people. I didn’t agree with it. There are still a lot of us here who would prefer to have you lot around to protect us.”
“Thank you.”
“Although it’s true that there have been no monsters since your father disappeared.”
“Well—”
“Not a single one.”
“That’s right, but—”
“And I’m not sure what to make of that. No one is.”
Finn stuttered again, but Maurice Noble ignored that and glanced at Emmie instead, who was hanging back on the edge of the footpath. “Still, better the devil you know, I suppose. We could do with getting him back.”
“We all could,” said Finn.
“I’ll be honest, I was hoping for something a bit more positive than that. By the way, you have a leg sticking out of your schoolbag.” He disappeared back into his house, followed by the sound of locks slamming shut.
Clunk. Rattle. Clank.
Finn turned round so that Emmie could shove the leg armour of his fighting suit back into the backpack. The other leg popped out instead.
Finn sat in school, alongside Emmie, at a desk in a rear corner by a window, but he might as well not have been there.
His eyes and mind weren’t on the whiteboard or his teacher, Mrs McDaid, nor were they on the schoolbooks flapped open in front of him. They were instead concentrating on the slight darkening of the day. Was that rain?
Under the desk, he pulled his bag closer with his feet, feeling the weight of the fighting suit stuffed into it, ready to be worn if necessary.
From the desk beside him, Conn Savage leaned over and whispered out of the side of his mouth, “Oh, looks like a couple of drops of rain out there.”
Manus Savage stuck his head out from the far side of the desk, a cruel grin on his face. “Must be time for you to steal our bikes and wreck the town again.”
Since the attack of the Manticores, and the Minotaur’s rampage, the twins had felt a little less deadly to Finn. He had survived something worse than them. A bit worse anyway. But he did still owe them a new bike each, having commandeered theirs for himself and Emmie when being chased by the Minotaur.
He had returned the old ones, even if they were missing a few spokes. And wheels. And most of the other parts that make up a bike.
Still, Finn had prepared a really smart and funny response to the twins’ jibes and was ready to slay them with it. “Well, I—”
“Quiet, Finn!” said Mrs McDaid from the other end of the room. And that was that. His teacher spared him any real anger because of what she occasionally called his “special circumstances”, but Finn’s