Phantasia

Joel stared at the ceiling, unable to sleep. The second he closed his eyes the images would claw their way back into his thoughts and refuse to let go no matter how hard he struggled to free himself from their grasp. Kaori dozed at his side with her arms clutched around him as if he might vanish in the night. She’d escaped the underground before the worst – before the ritual had torn apart screaming bodies and melted then into a gross amalgam of horror. Joel had skimped on telling her the details to protect her innocence. What he didn’t understand was why his stomach was still churning: he’d seen worse things in movies and games!

Maybe it was the thought that he could have been among those sacrifices, that Kaori could have been the one selected by the shaman to be mutilated and raped to bring about their master’s arrival. The two of them had been stupid enough to be seduced by those same shaman months ago, and were it not for Phantasia they would have been dead by now. Only now did Joel realise just how close they had come. Lyra had made sure that thought was burned into his subconscious before she’d slunk off for the night, emphasising it with those cold eyes and that disapproving frown of hers.

Yeah, there was one thing that never changed about Joel: he was an idiot. A weak, ineffective idiot whose only purpose was to act the diversion while the real ‘heroes’ impressed everyone else their fancy gadgets and kung-fu moves. He glanced sideways towards the Ragnarok, standing in line with his other guitars as if it were just an ordinary instrument. As far as Joel was concerned, that was all it ever would be. He was no Herman Shimomura, who could slay demons with power chords and make flames dance to his melodies. He was Joel Gibson, a useless teenage failure who could hardly play a basic tune, let alone one imbued with magical power.

He returned his attention to the ceiling and began to pick out shapes in the swirling patterns of emulsion – faces, landmarks, cavern walls, horse skulls, gory mutations… Kaori murmured soft sleep talk, pulling him back to reality. Surely he couldn’t be the only one struggling to block out the horrors?

***

“You ready to talk about it now, son?”

Mr Smith was sitting at his workstation, a mosaic of windows to a vast repository of knowledge. John stood by the door, eyes darting from screen to screen to avoid meeting his father’s gaze. Images of the underground were separated by charts and graphs detailing every little nuance of the ‘mission’, from material composition of the cavern walls to records of his companions’ heart rates and adrenaline levels. Rather than explain his actions, John had preferred to hand over all his data and had escaped to his room to occupy his mind with fixing some archaic circuit boards. An hour later and he’d managed to pick up his makeshift soldering iron twice, and used it once. The evening’s events weren’t about to let him go so easily.

After a moment’s silence, John’s father returned his attention to his workstation. “When I was your age, I didn’t want to believe in any of it either,” he explained as he tapped his way through various files and reports, “And sixty-five percent of it I still don’t. Most people will call it ‘magic’ because they don’t understand it, but that stuff is as much a science as physics or chemistry. In the end you’ve just got to accept that we’re only human, and the universe is a damned big place. Take a hologram back five thousand years and people would think you could conjure dreams out of thin air,”

John averted his gaze from the monitors as unsettling images started to appear. “It’s not the magic that bothers me,” he said, “I understand now that it’s just science on another level. It’s…I can’t get it out of my head… the image, the sounds…” He shivered at the recollection, not daring to chance another look at the screens, “It makes me wonder if forgetting everything is better for me. I’d rather forget—“

Chapter 57
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