“Let me tell you a story,” he began. “When the revolution came, I was twenty-one and I was studying climate science in Hamburg. I had dutifully taken my dream pills every day since I could remember, and when the deluge came I had no idea what had hit me. The city went berserk and people began tearing everything down, burning buildings, trashing the televator stations and breaking down the city walls. I was terrified; it felt as though I was the only person in all of Hamburg who had not lost their senses. The others went wild—I’m sure it was much the same here. It was as if they were consumed by a fever. Some few stayed sane and news reached us that if we were to survive, we needed to head to the banks of the river Elbe and walk northwards towards the harbour until we found others. I was too terrified to leave my apartment.

“The others, the mad ones that we came to call the Sleepless, broke our sky-dome and the air became thick with the smog from outside. It became hard to breathe. I had always been an asthmatic and so, I became terrified that I would choke and die. This terror became so real for me, and so overwhelming that all I could think about was clean air. My greatest desire was to breathe clean air! It is a stupid thing to wish for during the end of the world, but there you go.

“Something strange happened to me then. I bent reality. The air around me was suddenly clean, and I could breathe. For many hours I stayed in my apartment after this happened, trying to make other things happen with my will, but I was unable to. I was going to run out of food in a few days and I knew I had to leave. I decided to rob a chemist. I took this backpack, the one I have here, and a cricket bat and I left my apartment. I robbed the chemist down the road, and stuffed as much medicine as I could find into my pack. I stole candy bars too, and bottles of water.

“I made my way to the river as quickly as I could. I found the banks deserted. I could do nothing else, and so I waited there.”

Lara came in, walking carefully and carrying three cups of tea. She brought one to me and then took Luke his. She climbed up onto the bed and sat between us. She quietly sipped her tea and watched Luke.

“I waited for five hours and just before the sun came up, I heard the unmistakable sound of a horseman approaching,” he continued. “I would know the sound of a well-trained horse trotting anywhere—I grew up on a farm. I knew the mind of the rider must have been sound. A madman would not have been able to ride a horse.

“I’d had the good mind to make a flag by tying an old shirt to a branch that had been lying nearby. I stepped out into the pathway and began waving it. I prayed to whichever gods might have been listening that this was not one of the Sleepless I was hailing over to me. It was not. It turned out that this man was a Dreamer. It was this man—a very famous man, where I come from—who first brought me to the City under the river, where I learned what had saved me from the same fate as the Sleepless. It was there that I learned my skill with healing. And the trick of bending time that bettered you when we tussled earlier.”

“Which City are you talking about?” I asked. “Was it some sort of bunker that had been built underground, under the Elbe?”

He shook his head. “This is a place like no other place. The oldest city in the world, older even than Xi’an or Jerusalem. Only Dreamers can enter it. It is a place that is almost underground but is also somewhere else. It is a part of what the ancient Greeks used to call the Underworld. And magic is very, very real there.”

“It sounds like a scary place,” Lara interjected. “But not worse than Johannesburg.”

“It sounds like an imaginary place,” I said.

Luke chortled.

“I know it sounds ‘out there’,” he said. “But fifteen years ago, none of us would ever have believed in the likes of the creatures that walk the Earth today. And yet, there they are.”

“You know where they come from?” I asked.

He nodded. “They are our demons. We have dreamed them into flesh. They are things of our minds—our nightmares. They are parts of ourselves, or memories or fears that we have not yet defeated.”

“So you are saying that we dreamed those monsters into being?” I asked.

“Yes. That is exactly what we have done.”

“And then mankind was literally consumed by its own demons?” I said. “That’s too ironic.”

“It is. But, as you know, it is nothing to laugh about. Those things have power over you, and your fear strengthens them. Your monster from earlier—the one you stopped me from killing—who is she to you? Why’d you stop me from killing her?”

“Luke tried to kill Medusa?” Lara asked.

I nodded.

“Medusa is our mother,” Lara said.

***

Tell us: If somebody you loved turned into a monster what would you do?