Chasing Imagination

Casper

Amy looked up from where she sat curled up on her bed. All the breath I had taken in disappeared instantaneously and I was left gasping for oxygen. She looked worse than I had ever seen her.

Tears painted her face, the mascara that dripped from her eyelashes staining them grey. All her makeup was smudged across her skin in dirty pools of mud and her wavy hair was a bush, falling forward, matted by the tears. She was shivering as she sat there in her sleeveless top, and her skin was a worrying shade of decay, looking like she was seriously ill and close to fainting or being sick.

‘Amy!’ I cried, running to her. I almost had my arms around her before I felt her shaky hands trying to push me away. I staggered back as though her force alone had shoved me backwards, but in reality it was from shock.

‘Get away from me!’ she snapped venomously. The eyes that were always so cold were now beyond mere ice. They were hard stones; slabs of dark granite in her face.

‘What’s wrong?’ I whispered, all the strength waning from me in an instant. I knew what it was; I just didn’t want to admit it.

‘You know what’s wrong,’ she said coldly, those granite eyes fixing themselves on mine.

‘Please...please honey, I’m sorry,’ I said. Now it was the turn for my voice to shake. As every word she said grew in conviction, so did mine weaken.

‘You’re a monster, Casper!’ she shrieked unprecedentedly. I was afraid. She’d never come anywhere close to losing it like this. ‘You just killed a man, and you don’t even care! You were laughing about it, and don’t say you weren’t because I saw you. I was there!’

I couldn’t deny it: the conversation between Matt, Felix and I had been far too light for the subject matter.

‘It’s not what you think it is,’ I said.

‘What was it then?’ she challenged.

‘It’s just...’ how did I explain it?

The answer was that I didn’t. There was no excuse. For the last few years, I had been a monster. And I didn’t notice it, because I was surrounded by fellow monsters, and I was fighting monsters. It took only one innocent to walk in amongst us and expose us for what we truly were, and suddenly the existence we had built up came crashing down. We had been fighting monsters all this time, and in doing so, we had become monsters ourselves.

Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster.

How true that saying was.

‘It’s the Dreamers, Amy,’ I spluttered out, sinking down onto the very end of her bed. I had to sit down or else I thought my legs would give way beneath me, but I couldn’t bear to get any closer to her stone eyes than I had to. ‘They get inside your head. It’s this...it’s this existence! It’s this whole fucking world!’

My voice grew in volume and anger with every word. But still she watched me with bitterness.

‘You told me to kill,’ she whispered, shuddering at the thought. ‘You told me I had to take a gun, and fight. You were going to make me one of you. You were going to turn me into a monster.’

I shook my head in despair. ‘Amy, the whole world is a monster. It has been for decades now. How else can you survive but become a monster yourself?’

I couldn’t look at her for a long time, and when I eventually did I didn’t like what I saw.

‘What if I don’t want to?’ she said, fixing those eyes on me once again.

I sighed. ‘You may not have a choice.’

The anger inside her finally erupted.

‘There’s always a choice!’ she shrieked, standing up abruptly, towering over me where I sat. The granite eyes seemed to catch fire; volcano eyes now, the lava spewing like blood from an artery.

Anger lurched inside me as well. I stood up, taller than her, but not by much.

‘Don’t you dare say that,’ I warned in a low whisper. ‘If there was any other way, I would have taken it. Do you think I want to kill people?’

‘I thought not,’ she said icily, ‘until half an hour ago.’

That was the final straw.

I could have exploded, or I could have died.

Or I could have picked up the crumbling bricks of my life and apologised.

But for the sake of both myself and Amy, I all but died.

‘Well fuck you,’ I muttered, turning and storming out of the room. I pulled the door shut behind me with such a colossal bang that the walls seemed to shudder in fear.

I almost hoped she would come running after me. Tears burned in my throat as I could hear her voice in my head. It came after me, it called out my name, it begged me to come back.

But that was imagination. And this was reality.

And no one was running after me.

Amy

The Dreamers were monsters, and there was no other way of describing them.

This was all a game to Casper. It was all about killing the most notorious Marauder; shooting the best shot; getting one more than your friends. It was a game, and it was a competition.

Why hadn’t I gone back with the policeman the other night?

I would have been spared. I wasn’t a Dreamer. Because being a Dreamer wasn’t a name or a label or anything that could be measured. It was a state of the mind. And it wasn’t just to do with imagination.

I had escaped the monsters up above, only to find that the underground was crawling with them as well.

I was on the verge of losing it completely, tearing at my hair and running long nails down my skin, when Linzy walked in.

‘Oh sorry Amy, I would have knocked—oh God, what’s wrong hun?’ She hurried to my side, crouching down by the bed and wrapping an arm round my shoulder. ‘What’s happened? Did you get hurt?’

‘No,’ I mumbled in amongst my sobs. It wasn’t technically a lie; not in the way she’d asked the question. When she said ‘hurt,’ she meant wounded in battle. In terms of that, I was physically fine. It was just my mental health that had been torn to pieces.

‘Are you sure?’ she asked softly. ‘What’s wrong?’

I didn’t answer. I was half blind by tears, my throat was on fire and I couldn’t speak.

‘See, I heard you were brilliant,’ she said softly, smiling at me in an attempt to cheer me up. ‘I heard you killed Dana—‘
‘I didn’t kill her!’ I shrieked, so loud I must have awoken the dead. Linzy practically staggered backwards, looking wounded as Casper had when I’d pushed him away.

‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of,’ she said, picking up on what I was hinting at.

‘It is,’ I said. ‘Of course it is! I killed her.’

I knew I was contradicting what I’d just said. After all, if it was a police investigation, I’d be counted as a murderer, same as Imogen.

A murderer.

I was a murderer.

How had I not noticed my life tearing itself to pieces?