Chasing Imagination

Casper

I wasn’t willing to compromise. Whoever this girl was, I had stupidly allowed her to follow me down here, and I was going to pay for it, but the least I could do was make sure that she didn’t escape and notify the world of our location.

‘Come with me,’ I ordered.

Petrified with fear, yet bound by it also like a trance, she began to move forward, her eyes always on the gun.

‘Come on, Amy,’ I coaxed, keeping it gentle. She was scared of me; there was no doubt about that. It was my fault more than hers. I just couldn’t risk the world finding out where we were, or it would be the end of all of us.

‘Where are you taking me?’ she asked, her voice little more than a whisper. I lowered the gun, keeping her calm, but I never put it away so as to always remind her that I had it, and I was not afraid. I had killed before...

‘To my home,’ I said. ‘Come with me, and I will show you what our life is really like.’

‘What if I don’t want to see it?’ she challenged.

I paused. ‘I’m afraid you don’t really have a choice. You see, you chose to follow me down here. And I can’t let you leave. I can’t risk you telling anyone.’

‘I won’t tell anyone!’ she cried hurriedly. ‘I swear!’

‘I can’t take that risk,’ I said apologetically. It was not normally my choice to ruin peoples’ lives. ‘And even if you keep to that, there’s still a chance that you might let something slip out.’

Still she looked terrified, and I stood behind her, making her walk along the tunnel. She was here now; she was so close to the entrance. There was no going back.

The simple, innocent looking cupboard-like door stood at the end of the corridor. On it was a safety hazard sign, telling the public to keep out. There was a keypad in the wall beside it, and I tapped in the eight digit code number, and the lock clicked open.

Inside was a cupboard. It looked genuine, so any officials who did make it past the code lock would really assume that it was just a storage cupboard. The large, black box at the top could have been full of a few hundred volts, but in reality it was just full of empty, disconnected wires; not something that could cause any sort of harm.

No. The entrance to our base was only for those who knew where to look.

The back of the cupboard, whilst it wasn’t easy to tell, was in fact another door with another code lock. I tapped in the numbers and that clicked open in turn. I ducked under the cupboard shelf, holding Amy and pulling her in behind me, and shut the door.

We descended the slight slope, passing through the corridors, all the time in silence, until we got to the door. I could faintly hear chatter and music coming from the other side.

Amy

I had no idea where I was or where I was going. What was this insane place?

I could hear sounds coming from the other side of the door. It was strange; like the computerised radio music, only...different...real.

Yes. That was the key. This music was not coming from a computer. It was real. And within it, I could sense emotion. It was not just a string of complementing notes placed in a seemingly random order on an instrument of choice; it was vintage music. There was anger, and there was sadness, but there was excitement also, all within the sounds of this voice and these instruments. These real, non-computerised instruments.

The boy opened the door, and I actually gasped aloud. Inside was a large room, all poorly and simply decorated, with off-white, tile and concrete walls a little grimy and graffiti-covered, like the rest of the underground. The ceiling was low and the lights were dim. In the room, however, were at least twenty or thirty people, most of them young adults, but some significantly older, all dressed unusually, some much weirder than the boy I was following.
Despite my fear, I was undeniably fascinated. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

Four of them were standing at the far end of the room. One was singing into a microphone. Two were playing...guitars, were they called? I didn’t know. I had never seen a real musical instrument before. The other was repeatedly bashing a drum kit; a sort of brash, angry sound, which somehow managed to add to and complete the guitars and vocals.

‘Stay there,’ the boy ordered. He had to raise his voice over the music. I saw him run across the room as I waited, plastered against the wall, wondering if anyone had seen me, wondering what they thought of me, wondering how I was going to get out of here.

A moment later, he reappeared with two men, both looking about thirty, following behind. They were very odd looking. One of them had floppy, blonde hair, in a similar style to my boy’s. The other’s hair was black and even longer—falling way past his shoulders like a girl. This was perhaps the weirdest man I had seen in here. He was wearing an oversized black t-shirt with strange, dark patterns on it, dark blue jeans, and, the weirdest bit of all, strange, swirling skin art right down the length of one of his arms and across his neck line, and little bits of metal actually stuck into his face. I’d heard of people having their ears pierced, but this was just creepy.

‘Come with me,’ the creepy man ordered. I didn’t dare disobey; he looked like he could kill me if he so chose to. The blond man, whose clothing was still strange, yet dwarfed by the black-haired man’s sense of style, also walked with us. The boy who had brought me here started off walking behind me, but when I next looked back, he was gone.

They took me off the main room and down another short tunnel, and into a small, dimly lit room, made of concrete and dirty tiles like the rest of the subway. Even in here, I could still very faintly hear the music, and I began to wonder, even through all this fear and mesmerisation, whether it could be heard above ground.

The room was empty apart from a large, wooden table, with one chair on the far side and three chairs opposite.

‘Sit down,’ the blond man ordered, gesturing to the single chair.

I froze. The creepy man nudged me, and in my trance-like state, I all but fell into the chair.

'Please, let me go!' I cried desperately. There was nothing left to lose. I just knew I had to try everything I could to get out of this insane place.

The creepy man suddenly grasped my face by the chin, wrenching it up so I was looking him in the eye.

‘Stop screaming,’ he ordered. ‘Be quiet. Or you’ll pay.’

The door clattered open, and in walked the strange, young man who had first brought me here.

‘Get off of her, Phil. She’s not going to cause you any harm.’

Phil, the creepy man, made a sarcastic sort of laugh. ‘I don’t think you’re in any position to negotiate are you, Casper?’

Casper’s brilliantly blue eyes stared Phil down. ‘Markus told me to lead this interrogation.’
Phil fell silent, moving a little further from my side. Whoever Markus was, he was obviously important.

Casper, the boy who had brought me into this crazy underworld, sat in the middle chair on the other side of the table. Phil and the blond man, whose name I still didn’t know, sat either side of him.

'Please--' I began, but Casper cut me off.

‘Don’t argue,’ he ordered. ‘You’ll only make it worse for yourself. Now, my name is Casper, this is Phil, and this is Aled.’ He gestured to the other two men in turn. Aled nodded at me, as if in way of greeting, at the mention of his name, but Phil’s face stayed stern.

‘Now,’ Casper continued, ‘this is routine procedure. Anyone new down here has to go through this same process; but the easier you are, the quicker you’ll be out again. So, first of all, I’ll pass you to Aled.’

‘Name?’ Aled asked abruptly, producing a lined notebook and a pen from under the table.

‘Amy Harper,’ I said.

‘When is your birthday?’

‘Fifth of November, 2116,’ I replied. There was no point in lying. It was not a habit I wanted to make, and I was no good at it anyway.

‘So you’re twenty,’ he confirmed. ‘And where do you live?’

‘Number twenty-four, East Side Road, Kingston,’ I said.

Aled nodded, scribbling all this information into his book. ‘Good.’

Casper took over from this point. I was glad of that—however recently we had met, and however strange our encounter, he seemed nice.

‘Do you have any questions? I’m sure you do,’ he said.

Where did I begin? Too many questions suddenly forced their way to the forefront of my mind, jostling for position, until I could barely pick one to ask.

‘Who are you?’ I began.

Casper smiled. This was an easy one. ‘We’re the Dreamers.’

‘The Dreamers?’

‘The rebels; the terrorists; the Revolutionists; whatever the government is calling us right now,’ he explained. ‘The Dreamers is just a name we give to anyone in our society.’

‘And am I in your base?’ I asked.

‘The main base is in London, but we have smaller ones beneath all the surrounding towns and cities,’ Casper explained. ‘They all connect up; they’re all linked by the underground railway networks and by tunnels from the Third World War.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘And, why do you want me here?’

Casper’s face looked a little mysterious, deliberately giving nothing away. ‘I’ll talk about that more in a minute. Do you have any more questions?’

I still had thousands, but it came to the point where, if I asked every single one, we’d be here all night. So I stopped.

‘I guess that’ll do for now,’ I told him a little glumly. In truth, I was perhaps even more eager to get away from here than I was to have my questions answered, and I was willing to put them on hold if it would make this painful process quicker.

‘Well,’ Casper began. ‘As with any organisation, we have to have a certain amount of rules. They aren’t ridiculous, because being a Dreamer means celebrating individuality and freedom and choice. But one of them is the policy on any civilian who comes into contact with one of us. And that includes you.
‘Quite simply, for the safety of the group, and indirectly the safety of all the Dreamers around the world, anyone who comes down here or meets one of us is not allowed back into society again.’

It took a moment to process this revelation in my mind. ‘What?’ I eventually whispered, already feeling tears knot in my throat and prick my eyes. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that you’re one of us now, Amy,’ Casper explained, his eyes and tone still gentle. ‘You can’t leave. You can’t return to your normal life. You can be a Dreamer, or you can be a prisoner. But you can't leave.’

‘Please,’ I began to beg. ‘I won’t tell anyone, I swear. If I do, you can come and find me. But I won’t. I promise I won’t.’

‘I never really thought that you would,’ he said. ‘I don’t see you as a malicious sort of person. But it’s happened to anyone who’s ever come down here, and we can’t make exceptions just for you. And we have to consider our safety. If you went up and told someone, of course we could hunt you down. But by then it may be too late for us. The damage will have already been done.’

‘But I have family and friends and a home and a life,’ I whispered, trying desperately to hold the tears back. I didn’t want to cry in front of them; in front of sweet but harsh Casper and abrupt Aled and horrible Phil.

‘I know,’ Casper said, and it seemed like he was sympathetic. ‘But there’s nothing we can do. You’re down here now.’

Why had I ever come? How could I have been that stupid? Why?

I was angry. As well as being sad and scared, I was angry. How could I have let this happen?

I stayed silent, afraid that speaking would trigger the tears to start falling.

Casper’s face turned hard like marble, glazing over so that his blue eyes solidified into shiny but deadly crystals.

‘So it’s settled,’ he announced. ‘Leave her in here and I’ll go and get Markus.’

Phil and Aled stood up almost simultaneously. Aled put away the large notebook and was the first to leave the room. Phil, on the other hand, deliberately caught my eye, giving me a smug smile that reminded me a little of a toad and made me want to punch his fat, arrogant face in at the same time.

‘See you later, kid,’ he smirked. Casper gave him a dark look before just about shoving him out of the door. They shut it, and I heard a key turn in a lock.

I was alone. And the tears came before I had a chance to stop them. I wasn’t like this; I wasn’t a cry baby. I could stand up for myself. I had to. I couldn’t fall apart; not here; not now.