[♪ Opening theme song continues ♪]
[♪ Woman hums ♪]
[Starring]
[Riley Tarot]
[Ripley Wolfhard]
[and]
[Emily Dinklefae]
[with]
[Beastfolk]
[a Warg]
[and]
[a Kobold]
[Boss Monster]
[Simeon, thee Oft-Mighty]
[Narrator]
[To Banshee a Siren]
[Level Designer]
[Frolic]
[Dungeon Master]
[Happier Words for Sadness]
[Level 1: A Tragic Instance]
[♪ Opening theme song ends ♪]
[♪ Woman sobs ♪]
When was the last time he cried and meant every tear?
Indifferent to the mercy or scorn of others? Unafraid of revealing the ugly, shameful bits of himself — those society and his pride both demanded he keep hidden away? Letting all those pent-up emotions go, like he'd been holding in a breath for longer than was sane to do, yet no one worried he might suffocate because they held breaths of their own and hadn't gone mad yet?
When was the last time he wept with such abandon?
That his heart wrenched till its beating stilled — almost — and he stole each breath from the wind; gasping, moaning, and sniffling to the taste of his snot, desperate for the warmth of his mother's bosom at his cheek and her hand in his hair as she embraced him; hid him from all the wicked, frightful things of this world so cruel?
As a boy — when his preschool teacher had called him a name for being tardy. Riley didn't remember what, only that it broke him — so much so that he never returned.
Music was a beautifully harrowing thing, he realised.
Could not a melody rouse emotions and thoughts best kept hidden in the annals of one's psyche? As easily as it oiled creaky bones in a ballroom and revealed unabashed smiles on the faces of children with missing front teeth as they played a singing game, no less?
Yet all his life, Riley had never heard a song that whisked him out of his flesh and into another's so viscerally. He'd been that bedridden little boy as she sang to him; the woman humming the lullaby had been Riley's mother — though her voice was a stranger's to his ears.
Riley had tasted the grain in the cold porridge she'd fed him — oats and sour barley. Smelled the mint and spicy sage in the ointment she'd rubbed onto his torso with gentle but calloused fingers. And wheezed when the evening breeze turned the ointment frigid as it soothed the ache in his little chest with each painful breath he took.
Riley shuddered.
He'd recognised angst on the woman's weary brow and affection in her crooked smile. There was a tenderness so pure in her green eyes. She'd looked younger than his twenty-two years, though far wizened by a harsher life; as though she'd had her boy while still a child herself.
That broke him.
Riley had loved her.
A part of him still did, even as his senses returned to him when the music faded — no. He heard it get louder still.
How?
It was only then that he realised he'd been humming along to her lullaby.
Riley's face paled as he bit his tongue, tasting iron.
That was not his mother.
Riley wasn't that bedridden little boy either — he'd known the mercy of good health all his life. The lad clung to those truths; both were bucketfuls of cold water to his face — waking him out of a bittersweet reverie and into a nightmare.
[Gasps]
The tension in the twine beneath his skin had eased, to little effect; it was as though the altar had sutured each thread to a tendon and then a muscle fibre in a grim backstitch. It was all Riley could do to stifle a scream at those monstrous, batlike creatures hovering above him.
He'd hoped the woman's hums had conjured the creatures in his mind but was not so lucky: Riley smelled their fetid flesh and breath; his skin prickled, taking to gooseflesh at the torrents of air their gaunt wings crashed onto him.
Those were not beastly imaginings — they were real, and they meant hell.
The bat-creatures were hunchbacked, yet taller than any man; with lanky limbs on ashen flesh. Their faces chiselled and uncannily human — yet wrong: no lips, nostrils too upturned, and maws that gouged so unnaturally wide it hurt to look, revealing glass-like teeth and obsidian tongues.
Riley saw tar everywhere he expected peach in those unholy mouths.
[Insomniac Batfolk screech]
But it was their eyes that sent a chill down his spine — Christ, were they sewn shut?
[Air rumbles with mana]
Riley shuddered as that spark sizzled again; it licked his guts and tickled his brain.
Mana? he thought, delirious. Where have I heard that before?
[♪ Hums to opening theme song ♪]
A place, was it? No — from someone, perhaps?
The answer was on the tip of his tongue; he could taste it, but Riley lost the thought to that melody. Before he knew it, the lad hummed that woman's lullaby again. It flirted with his sanity and numbed Riley's mind to all but those flashes of blue.
[Insomniac Batfolk screech]
…
The creatures suddenly froze in their plummet: unfettered, glass-toothed maws of writhing black tongues and flying ribbons of saliva, cartoonishly halted — as though Chronos had lifted a finger and time held its breath. No; ever the stubborn mule, it passed still, Riley realised, but slower: seconds had become minutes.
[♪ Humming intensifies ♪]
His skin tingled as those threads wormed inside him, stretching and tightening his flesh all at once. The blood had long drained from his face, and his hands and feet were cold. There was no fear in his expression, however — he couldn't move a muscle to show it, but Riley's dark eyes screamed his dread.
All the lad could do was wiggle his bloody digits, think, breathe, and hum — why was he humming?
Christ, thought Riley. Is this what happened to Tom at the shrink?
Thomas Knightley — his best and oldest mate.
Tom had lost his little brother, Finn, in a traffic accident when they were twelve: school bus vs lorry, driver drunk at the wheel. Tom had walked from the wreckage unscathed — miraculously — but a closer diagnosis had found him with PTSD, anxiety, and chronic depression.
Riley had missed school that day for a dentist's appointment, but had nightmares about it when he'd heard his parents whisper, saying that poor Finn burned alive when they'd thought he wasn't listening.
Riley could still see his dad wearing that ashen cardigan in the waiting room; the man couldn't hide those glass-like teeth of his as Riley's mum's long, pitch-black tongue snaked into his ear.
What? No, thought Riley. No! What even is that?!
He'd borrowed a LEGO set from Finn three days before the tragedy. In Riley's nightmares, a safety belt wedged over Finn's shoulder and under an armpit always trapped him beneath a seat — like the newspaper had said.
Finn would scream at Riley to build a fire engine fast, or give him back the set, as he watched the trail of burning fuel inching closer and closer.
[♪ Breathless humming ♪]
Riley never built the fire engine in time.
He'd gasp awake right as Finn held a burning hand out — then cry himself back to sleep, biting his duvet to stifle his shudders. Finn was only nine; Riley was twelve, and it terrified the boy. Those taloned fingers writhing in flames still had him shuddering.
Taloned? thought Riley. That's not right.
But he never talked about his nightmares because Tom had it worse. The stench of petrol had him screaming his lungs out at filling stations well into their teens. Those screeches were agony to Riley's ears.
Screeches? he thought, something warm and wet dripping out of his ears. Hollers maybe — and Tom's were never agonising.
His mate never took the prescribed meds, though — or another car ride. Tom's dad didn't like chemicals in his boy's food, let alone his brain; said it would murder the artist in him before the cancer did. It's a wonder how a man so paranoid smoked a pack a day; perhaps not.
Is that why the inside of his mouth was the colour of tar? thought Riley, suddenly sick to his stomach. Or was it the colour of peaches?
Mr Knightley's studio — a third of his garage — always smelled of diesel, oil paints, apple-flavoured breath mints, and cigarettes. Something about that noxious concoction made the man's art that much more riveting to a young Riley. It reeked of adulthood and failure — two things Riley thought best to avoid for as long as possible.
A certain piece especially haunted Riley's memory; Mr Knightley had painted it not long after the accident. The man was a deft impressionist; his brush strokes looked almost careless yet deliberate: a hue of pinks, reds, yellows, and blues haloed a boy walking on embers in the billowing clouds of a gripping sunset.
The boy-angel had burning wings on his back — that gave him away.
"Is that one Finn?" Riley had stupidly asked; the art had enthralled him so — that he forgot he wasn't supposed to talk when Mr Knightley was painting.
The man froze, brush in hand at his canvas, until a blob of paint as green and bitter as bile dripped onto the concrete. He said nothing back — not without lips he couldn't — but Mr Knightley clenched his fists before he flung his brush right at the painting Riley supposed was of his dead son; missing it entirely, although a streak of sickly green driblets now marred the top half of the sublime piece.
Was he always missing a pair of lips? thought Riley, that tightening knot in his stomach turning to dread. No, Finn and Tom and I poked fun at polaroids of Mr and Mrs Knightley kissing at their wedding!
[♪ Breathless humming intensifies ♪]
Riley paled, and Mr Knightley clenched his stubbled jaw as he gave the boy a pointed look that said he'd have punched him in the face had Riley been older. But the threat of violence wasn't what sent shivers down Riley's spine: the man's eyes — Lord, his eyes!
Someone had sewn both shut.
[Gasps]
Riley's nails met with sweaty palms and drew blood.
Is that why he never cried at Finn's funeral?
Mr Knightley shot a gnarled, trembling finger at the street, and Riley ran out of the garage, holding his breath. That was the last time Tom's dad allowed "the neighbour's child" inside his "studio."
But Mr Knightley needn't have gone so far.
Riley wouldn't be the neighbour's child for much longer — he was there to say goodbye that day; the Tarots were moving. Tom and Riley were determined not to let that ruin their friendship — the boys had their mums on their side, thankfully.
Mrs Knightley had lost a son and her remaining one, his brother; to Tom, Riley was like another from his mum next door — the three boys had been inseparable: sleepovers, backyard camping, breakfast cereal derbies, comic cons; the lot.
Riley was Mrs Tarot's only son; shy, but a loudmouth around friends, yet altogether terrible at making them. So imagine her surprise as he'd burst into her sitting room one day when he was seven or eight with muddy feet — they'd talked about that! — along with two adorable little boys, each bearing a katydid for her!
It was the obvious choice; there was no thinking twice about it. Tom, Riley, and their chaperoning mums visited each other every week, then once a month, on holidays, and finally, at fourteen — two years after Finn's death — the visits stopped altogether.
Life happened; they grew older and apart.
Almost five years later, a hungover Riley would see that fateful painting, out of the corner of his eye, on the wall of a nondescript room inside a certain residence hall at the University of Leeds — but someone had dabbed shades of silver and grey round the green driblets; they had become brilliant stars, dazzling a different colour depending on the angle and under what lighting you looked at the painting from.
A stupefied Riley walked into the room without knocking first — someone had left the door ajar. He'd have liked to blame it on them, but Riley knew a gambit when he saw one — and had the manners to call it red.
Twice that painting had driven him to act thoughtlessly!
Hunched at a desk right under it was his old mate, Tom; he was scribbling MATLAB code into a notebook whose margins were full of pencil sketches when he looked up and saw Riley.
For a while, neither man spoke.
Tom and Riley hadn't seen each other since both were children, but at a glance Riley had recognised the close-clipped ginger curls, freckles at his ears, and the shake of his leg when absorbed in something.
But had Tom recognised him?
Riley had grown whiskers of a moustache that never lasted another semester, was hungover from nursing his breakup with Audrey, altogether unkempt, and probably reeked of vomit.
But he needn't have worried.
If there was any doubt left that this man was his childhood friend or that they'd both recognised each other, the tiny gap between Tom's incisors as he grinned at Riley was practically a DNA test — and a litmus for friendship — both.
[♪ Humming slows down ♪]
"Tarot! Quite the party boy, aren't you?" he'd said, embracing his old friend — Tom was taller than Riley remembered. "I wondered when you'd come round — finally read my email?"
Riley hadn't. Tom had written to his mum's old address. But that didn't matter; the boys were together again, and the rest was in the footnotes.
Tom had dabbed the stars into the painting, Riley would learn — Mr Knightley never picked it up again; it'd been collecting dust behind an engine block when his mate had found it in '98.
Riley twiddled his thumbs as he confessed his role in sullying the art; but Tom had him raising an eyebrow as he laughed long and hard at that, then thanked Riley for it.
"Really, you helped me pick up the brush again, mate; lately my hands itch if I'm not sketching something every odd minute," Tom had said, flipping through the notebook — ink and charcoal on nearly every page. Riley thought he'd seen a batlike, humanoid monster on one: gaunt, no lips, sewn-shut eyes; but he couldn't be sure. "I felt compelled to paint it for Finn — he loved the stars. This is silly, but remember how he insisted on becoming an astronomer when he grew up, even after we'd convinced Finn that astronauts were cooler?"
Had he?
There might have been a telescope at one of those backyard campsites; Riley wasn't certain anymore. The laughs, the stupid fights, and even the pranks foiled haunted his memory. But Riley remembered surprisingly little about Finn — the words were there, but what did his voice sound like? His laugh?
It gnawed at Riley how his memory stripped Finn to an idea — a handful of moments — and not a person, a lifetime.
Riley had to bite his tongue about asking Tom, as a joke, whether he went into STEM to spite his dad — until then, he'd thought himself a part of this family; a survivor, though he'd never been on that bus; a mourner, though he hadn't stayed to pick up the pieces with the Knightleys after Finn died — what right had he?
As Riley said his goodbyes to Tom that night, promising he'd email as soon as he got back to the flat he'd rented together with a chap from secondary school, Riley wondered whether Tom had seen through his smile — how plastic it was.
The lad felt sick to his stomach.
Tom and Riley would email back-and-forth the expected hello-how-are-yous and busy-talk-laters of people with little in common who, for reasons too rude to name, felt compelled to reach out — despite having nothing at all to say, really.
This dragged on; and the boys wouldn't meet in person until almost a month after their reunion — something about demented assignment backlogs from fiendish professors — when Tom emailed Riley one evening, but didn't say hello, only to meet at the park.
Riley hurried there.
Tom had consented to a clinical trial treating mental disease, it turned out. Nothing invasive. No experimental drugs, thankfully. But a therapist had played "psychedelic music" out of a bulky, futuristic instrument, developed by a London-based startup, in their session.
The "music" was outside Tom's auditory range, and that of most humans, but he'd heard it in his head somehow — as emotions: first elation, then dread, and finally revulsion. With each feeling came a memory more vivid than any he'd remembered before.
Tastes. Touches. Stenches.
It came rushing back, but upriver.
Those soundless notes stimulated Tom's brain and helped reliably trigger what his therapist called "out-of-body experiences."
It was like lucid dreaming, but angstier, and with a narrator. Tom had relived the accident in a controlled environment so he could realise it wasn't his fault — that he was only a child himself when it happened and couldn't have done much to save Finn.
"I held him in my arms, Rye — we laughed together," Tom had said, tearful and sniffling; he hadn't called Riley Rye in years. "It was surreal."
Of the handful of people he considered friends, Tom was the stoic, rational one — despite what the doctors said; perhaps because of it.
To see him so vulnerable had stupefied Riley.
What could he have said to that? I feel your pain? I'm here for you? That all sounded so superfluous. Riley could only squeeze Tom's shoulder as he sat beside him on that park bench for what had felt like hours — listening. Occasionally nodding and smiling, but saying nothing back, not even on the tube home.
They never talked about it after, but it had deepened Riley and Tom's friendship. It was one of Riley's fondest memories of him.
If his mate's therapy session had been anything even remotely similar to what that woman's heart-wrenching hum had done to Riley on that altar, then Tom sobbing was only rational.
Treatments for mental illness had come a long way since the horror of lobotomies.
Riley had often devoured science-fiction novels and even speculative medical journals about a future where we stimulated our brains with sound instead of psychotropic drugs — all the mind-bending and none of the addiction, apparently; he'd thought it too good to be true.
But then it happened to Tom that day, in the summer of 1999; Riley had written it off as inevitable progress — Y2K and all that — partly because he was uncomfortable asking for more details, lest that bring up Finn's name again.
But was that all there was to it?
Whatever became of that startup? Riley hadn't heard of them in the news at all. Had their business gone bust when the dot-com bubble burst? Or had the government appropriated their technology and buried it?
Sci-fi music and captions both — along with a healthy dose of conspiracy — how likely was all that?
…
[Insomniac Batfolk screech]
That caption gave Riley his answer, and an epiphany: hadn't there been flashes of blue when the music had first enthralled him? Yes — the subtitles had kept him sane, ironically. Reminded him this was real, and that was not; that what he'd seen was likely all in his head.
Riley was fairly certain that the blue either couldn't subtitle his thoughts, or hadn't hitherto for reasons he'd sooner deduce; perhaps to sow seeds of paranoia, lull him with a false sense of safety, even. It didn't matter what, exactly. Either possibility told him of an insidious entity pulling the strings behind the captions.
Perhaps at the very twine that wormed beneath his skin, too.
The lad had to remind himself then that the subtitles were resourceful, yes, but not of his making — let alone Riley's whim.
Someone was behind the blue, and that entity — being, thing, sin — hadn't lied yet, as far as he knew, but Riley didn't believe for a moment that it had told the whole truth, either; already, it had dealt its hand: the woman's beautifully tragic hums he'd heard as warm breaths in his ear, that was real, and captioned as such.
But she'd said something, thought Riley. I saw.
Yes — toward the end, and between sobs, her lips had moved. She'd whispered a litany to her boy, though not a word of it touched Riley's ears. Whatever she'd said, the subtitles hadn't got it either — or had hidden her dolorous prayer from him.
It's possible that the subs can't caption what I don't hear, thought Riley. But isn't that the point of them? To communicate the unheard, the unseen? Was all that really in my head?
Not all of it, surely — the captions had got something Riley was almost certain he couldn't have fancied. A most peculiar — and perhaps humorously unnerving — thing.
Were those… opening credits I saw flash?
If so, then the subtitles' supposed inability to caption the unheard was nonsense; after all, no one had read those out loud; all but confirming his suspicion about the blue's bias and likely puppeteer — why else would the captions tell him of some things discreet, but not others obvious?
Wait, why am I assuming the subs are telling me things? thought Riley. If there's an 'audience', yeah, then isn't it more likely that the subs are here for their sake?
Riley would have palmed his face then, could he move; he'd already thought it strange how impersonal the subtitles were, but it wasn't until that pernicious applause and the shivers it'd given him, that his entitlement bared its fangs at him.
Riley had subconsciously thought he was special for seeing the blue; that the captions were clues someone had prepared for his sake.
'Riley, in English', thought the lad. The subs say so every time I speak, don't they? Why tell me that? I know I speak English and that my name is Riley… but did the 'audience'?
When he'd first seen the blue, Riley had wondered whether there was a screen up there; he'd learnt there wasn't one, though perhaps that wasn't the question to ask. What if there were cameras, a film crew, and live viewers, like in those old sitcoms, instead?
The lad felt silly for that thought until he mulled it over: hadn't the blue described the woman's hums and sobs as an "opening theme song"?
Riley's eyes widened.
[♪ Erratic humming ♪]
The subtitles had been right about everything up to that point — the spool, his baby talk, the bat-creatures' screeches, and even his incessant humming. Was it unthinkable for them to be right about the music and supposed credit roll?
Starring Riley Tarot, he thought. Wolfhard, and Dinkle… Dinklage?
Christ, cast members!
Were there other people strapped to bloody altars somewhere? That warmed his heart more than he cared to admit, Riley almost felt guilty for it — the lad might not have been alone in that hellish cavern, after all!
Riley regretted that he remembered little else of those blue flashes — something about a "dungeon master," levels, and tragedy. Frolic and "boss monsters," too.
That reeked of tabletop RPGs and hot chocolate on wintry nights at the Knightleys. Had he been right to suppose a production studio backed by big tech was behind this? That had felt like he was throwing mud at a wall at first — but it didn't seem too unlikely now.
Is this a kind of reality show based on a game? thought Riley. Are the bat-creatures paid actors?
Surely not.
[Air rumbles with mana]
Lord, that spark; it trailed behind the screeches, like thunder after lightning; Riley clenched both fists as it sizzled inside every iota of his being, deeper than even the altar's twine wormed. But the lad couldn't help mulling over that arcane lingo again.
Mana — where had he heard that before?
Finn. Finn! What about him? thought Riley. Yes, that's right — Finn! I remember now; I heard about mana from Finn, didn't I?
"It's magic, silly," said a red-haired boy, grinning as he drove a LEGO fire engine round a purple tetrahedral die. "What did you think it was?"
[♪ Humming stops ♪]
That broke the spell.
Riley hadn't merely remembered those words — he'd seen the boy play at the altar's feet, heard Finn enunciate each syllable in that voice he'd feared forgotten evermore.