Chasing Imagination

Casper

I remained holding Amy’s hand as I led her up the stairs. She followed obediently and, despite being notoriously good at reading people, I couldn’t tell what she was thinking at all. It unnerved me; I wanted to know how she felt. I couldn’t deny that she was afraid, but I hoped that there was something else as yet unreadable hidden behind her eyes as well.

We reached the top floor, where the fire escape finished, and from then on we had to climb. Thankfully, there was an old, virtually hidden metal ladder that led right up to the roof. I liked to imagine that it had been put in place for situations like this, but of course it hadn’t. I didn’t know why it was there, but I didn’t actually care anyway.

‘Where are we going?’ Amy asked, a little breathless from climbing ten or more flights of metal stairs that clanged under our feet so loudly it felt as if the sound would wake the dead.

It was imperative that no one found us up here.

‘Up,’ was all I replied, placing my hand on one of the ladder rungs, then my foot on one further below.

‘Why?’ she asked. Her curiosity was fantastic. Curiosity was what brought her here in the first place; I was glad it hadn’t changed. The government taught us never to question anything; the Dreamers taught the contrary.

I smiled at her, her face highlighted silver under the moonlight of an almost clear night. ‘Because I said so.’

I wasn’t sure what it was, but something about me made her comply without arguing.
My fingers were pink and numb in the cool spring night by the time I reached the top rung and hoisted myself over the edge and onto the roof. Steadying myself briefly, I then bent down onto my knees and leant over, the vertical drop below almost dizzying, and reached out a hand to Amy.

‘Thanks,’ she muttered, grabbing it tightly and using it to help her pull herself onto the top. Without letting go of her hand once, I helped her to her feet and grabbed her as she swayed ever so slightly. We stood, an icy night wind whipping through our hair and roughening our bare skin, mere inches from each other, looking into each other’s eyes.

Amy made to turn round. I grabbed her softly but firmly.

‘Don’t look down,’ I whispered. ‘Look out.’

She did as I said, turning her head not down, over the edge and into the abyss, but to the side, looking out to the north.

London.

Whatever anyone said about modern cities being soulless, there was still something so magical about seeing millions of lights twinkling in a dense dark, casting an ethereal glow up above the city as though it was being shone upon by some other-worldly rays. And London stretched out before us now, so close, yet we could see so far from this high vantage point. It seemed to go on forever; endless constellations scattered about in the ocean of night, guiding the way through the darkness.

Amy gasped. It was only soft, but I heard it even over the constant whistling of the wind. She stood, transfixed, gazing with wide brown eyes that were warmer than I had ever seen them, out across the city’s infinity.

‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ I asked, conscious only now that her hand was still intertwined in mine, keeping it warm against the wind’s chill.

‘It’s so...big,’ she whispered. ‘I knew London was large, but that’s just...’ she gestured with her arm, outstretching it in a wide arc before her to try and describe with movement the scale of the world we now stood before.

‘Endless,’ I finished for her in a whisper. ‘And that’s not all of it. There’s so much more that stretches on for miles beyond what we can see from here.’

‘It’s so beautiful,’ she said.

‘I know,’ I said, smiling. She was happy. I had taken the effort to bring her out here; as an act of apology more than anything, and she was receiving it better than I could have hoped.

Amy

How was the world suddenly this big?

I had travelled before; I had been up as far as Scotland, and I had been into continental Europe too—as far away as Italy, but it never felt like this. Never before had I been able to stand and just see it stretch out so infinitely before me. It was like the planet had suddenly expanded to become a thousand times bigger than what I had ever assumed it to be.

I had never seen so many lights. Each one of them was a star, burning distantly yet brightly in the endless depths of what would otherwise be a dark abyss, setting the world on fire. But they were beautiful. I had never learnt to appreciate beauty, for beauty came hand in hand with imagination, but I knew for certain now that this was the embodiment of beauty. And then, since I became a Dreamer, I had never imagined that I could perceive the world as being beautiful ever again. Not the oceans; not the mountains; not the beaches. It was all so disgusting.

Except it wasn’t. However my perception of the world had changed, the truth about it still remained the same. It had been here for millions of years before the Revolution; all those trees and rocks and seas sitting there before people even came to be on this world. And no matter how long the Realisten party lasted for; no matter how long dreams and imagination were suppressed for, the world would still be standing when it was all brought back into the light. And when the Realisten were brought to their knees, and the cruel monsters that suppressed us begged for mercy, then maybe the people of this beautiful world would appreciate it once again.

This was what we were fighting for. As Dreamers, we could see this beauty. As civilians, the rest of the world could not. And if we were to ever start a revolution of our own, we would first have to change their perceptions.

‘You see it, don’t you?’ Casper said after a long, yet thoughtful silence.

‘See what?’ I whispered.

‘See the beauty,’ he said. ‘You see what I’m seeing.’

‘Of course,’ I replied, ‘how could you deny that this,’ I made an arc-like gesture with my arm once again, ‘is beautiful?’

‘Look up,’ he said.

Without question, I looked up.

The almost clear sky above me was like a reflection of the distant city. Once again, tiny orbs of fire burned in the blackness, the crescent moon a great, glowing beacon in amongst all the pinpricks of light. Stars...so many stars...more than I had ever seen before in my life. The longer I looked, the more I saw. Even when I thought I was staring into nothingness, I realised that, if I looked closely enough, gazing into the abyss of night, the abyss also gazed back at me, and even more stars were visible, no matter how many millions of light years away they may be.

‘I once heard someone say that if people took a few minutes every night to look at the stars, they would see the world a lot differently,’ Casper said into the quiet.

I didn’t know where to look—there was so much beauty, a cloak of it that wrapped itself around this lonesome city tower. I couldn’t decide which was more beautiful; the endless sprawl of city lights ahead or the scattered web of stars above.

‘I see what they were saying entirely,’ I replied in little more than a whisper.

Casper took a deep breath and turned his head towards me. I met his eyes.

‘Then you’re a Dreamer now, Amy.’

A high-pitched wailing started up somewhere below, not far away, piercing through the night.

I felt Casper’s entire body tense up beside me. As though electric shocks had been sent right through his veins, his grip on my hand intensified, and the magical look in his eyes began to burn with fear.

‘Police sirens,’ he whispered.

All at once, everything seemed to go into overdrive. My heart began to pound and I couldn’t breathe. The world around me, so beautiful just a second ago, seemed to crumble as it spun and blurred like a hurricane. We were right in the eye of this storm, and they were coming for us. The sirens seemed to be screaming from all directions...it felt as if they were even inside my head, screeching and blaring as they raced round and round in circles, yet always somehow getting closer and closer.

We shouldn’t be out here. If we were found now, we were trapped.

Casper had called me a Dreamer.

So many people had called me a Dreamer.

I had called myself a Dreamer.

And by doing so, I had been condemned.

‘Amy!’ Casper was calling out my name, his voice frantic. He grabbed me and pulled me towards the edge of the building. He nudged me towards the ladder but, even though I was slowing us down in my spellbound state of terror, pushing me any harder would cause me to topple right over the cliff.

‘Get down!’ he was shouting. I could barely hear him over the rush of my heart, and the wind seemed to have started up again. What had seemed like a calm, magical whisper a moment ago was now an incessant scream, yelling in my ears non-stop so that I felt I was losing my mind.

‘I should never have brought you up here,’ Casper was saying, shaking his head in anger.

I reached the side of the building, staggering like a zombie and got down on my knees, leaning over to search for the rungs.

And I caught a glimpse of the abyss.

It was black. Down there, no lights shone along the narrow alley. The concrete ground was like a dark river of endlessness running through the town. I couldn’t see where the air ended and where the earth began.

I felt strong hands on my shoulders, and my instinct was to scream and push them away. But Casper was placing my frozen fingers on the rungs, pushing me over the edge so that I was certain that I was going to fall, but then I felt the rung under my flailing leg. I caught it with my knee as I swung around, and that sent bruise-like pain shooting into my leg. But I couldn’t stop. The sirens were growing louder.

I was frozen.

Casper gripped me, forcing me to look into his eyes.

‘Listen to me, Amy, you have to go. Now. If they find us, we’re dead. Hurry.’

The word ‘dead’ sparked some life within me. I knew what it meant, and I couldn’t bear for it to become a reality; not now; not today. Not after this moment.

Casper’s words had done me good. I morphed the fear channelling through my veins into adrenaline, pushing myself down the ladder at twice the normal speed. I saw Casper coming down after me, but all I could focus on was putting one hand on each rung, twisting my numb fingers round the shape of the metal and making sure I didn’t fall.
I jumped, staggering, onto the top floor of the fire escape, having to grip onto the metal railing to stop myself from collapsing.