A small woman with sing-song voice and Gaelic accent, Ms Anderson was the youngest staff member at the Academy at twenty-one years old. According to Phantasia’s fellow students, she was a new teacher, having replaced the ageing Mr Hainsworth, famed for his drawn-out lectures in a monotone voice. On the contrary, Ms Anderson’s lessons in ancient literature and languages were the only ones Doyle paid attention in. Sitting at the front of the class, he would always be eager to answer questions and request assistance with his work.

“Which of the Cataclysmic poets did you read for homework?” she asked him. Doyle took a second to answer and Phantasia, with her extraordinary perception, could hear Byron whisper ‘Kent’ under his breath.

“Kent,” Doyle replied. Ms Anderson smiled and tilted her head, clutching the book she was holding closer to her chest.

“And tell me, Doyle, what did you think of her poem ‘End’?”

“Deep,”

“In what way?”

“Well, it were about people dying, weren’t it?”

“T’was about a whole city perishing, Doyle. Millions dying.”

“Exactly, millions dying. That’s deep,”

Ms Anderson smiled again, then moved over to Byron. “And what about you, Byron? Who did you read?”

“Delaney,” he replied. Ms Anderson gave him a quizzical look. “He’s a post-modern poet,” Byron explained, “Contemporary, you know?”

“Ye were meant to be reading the Cataclysmic poets, Byron,”

“Sorry, Miss, but I just find them out-of-date. Those poems are from a bygone era, hundreds of years ago, when the world was a different place. There’s no room in the present for their kind of self-satisfied thinking. There’s no time left to waste on over-analysing the past. We have to live in the now. True expression, true emotion is transitory.”

Ms Anderson’s eyes were narrowed, her jaw tight. Before she could lose her temper, Lysander pulled himself off his seat, his hand waving. “Miss! Miss! I read The Hungry Dinosaur!”

Angelo was quick to continue. “Why, I had the pleasure of reading that fine poem just the other day. I must say, I never once anticipated that a dinosaur could be quite that hungry!”

Ms Anderson’s sour face broke into a fit of giggles, which she tried to hide behind her book. “You boys can’t take anything seriously, can you?” she said.

“But Lifante was a Cataclysmic poet, wasn’t he?” said Lysander.

“He was indeed,” replied Ms Anderson, “A surrealist who dealt with the horrors the world was suffering by satirising them into children’s poems.”

Byron turned around in his chair and glared at the two clowns from beneath the rim of his hat. He took a breath, as if he were about to say something, but Doyle nudged an elbow into his side. Phantasia could hear him whisper, “Man, stay cool okay? Those kids aren’t worth it.”

The self-proclaimed ‘Poet Laureate of Torsten’ kept quiet from then on, but Phantasia could see the disturbances in his aura and way his bonds with Lysander and Angelo were like rotting vines somehow kept alive from a balance of their mockery and his hatred of it. If they couldn’t get on as friends – as much as Phantasia wished everyone could – couldn’t they just ignore one another?

Once the lesson was over, and the class filtered out, she approached Ms Anderson, who had begun to pack things away into her desk.

“Is there anything I can do for ye?” asked the teacher, putting aside the books she’d been organising.

Phantasia pulled the book from her bag and placed it on the desk. “I found this old book. I thought you might be able to look at it?”

Ms Anderson ran her fingers over the cover, then flicked through a few pages and picked it up, cradling it in her gentle hands as she turned each page with care. “Why, Phantasia, this is gorgeous! It’s, oh my, how old? But so well preserved!”

“It was sealed in a vault beneath the church. There was a small library down there. Stuff about combating demonic invasion. I looked through a load of the books, but this one has an enchantment to stop it being read by us, eh, magical types,”

Ms Anderson held the book under her desk lamp, then examined the spine. “Looks like an anti-magic enchantment. Ye can only physically read it, not with magic senses like you have. I’ll have a gander at it tonight, see what secrets I can unravel. Ah’ll let ye know how it went in tomorrow’s lesson,”

But tomorrow was a long a wait – at least for someone who didn’t sleep. Phantasia spent the rest of that day sitting atop the church, flicking through the various books she’d recovered and reliving the tales of five-hundred years ago. Vagrant tribes, settling in the ruins of a dead town to ward off the demons pouring from the gates of Hell so that, one day, people could return to the land their ancestors built. It was the sort of thing some of her friends would love, but most of them would never believe and, until the source of those illusions was dealt with, no number of magic circles or demon summonings would convince them.

~ What secrets lie hidden beneath the church? ~
~ Next: A football tournament and gossip in the shower room?! ~

Chapter 26
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