[♪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]
[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, bat-like 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, toothy maws of writhing black tongues and flying ribbons of saliva, cartoonishly paused — 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 father wearing that grey 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 father's ear.
What? No, he thought. No! What even is that?!
Riley had borrowed a LEGO set from Finn three days before the tragedy. In his nightmares, a safety belt wedged over his shoulder and under an armpit always trapped Finn beneath a seat — like the newspaper had said. Finn would scream at Riley to build a fire truck 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 truck 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 chills down Riley's spine: the man's eyes — Lord, his eyes!
Someone had sewn both shut.
[Gasps]
Is that why he never cried at Finn's funeral? thought Riley, his nails met with cold, sweaty palms and drew blood.
Mr Knightley shot a long, 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 — thankfully, the boys had their mums on their side.
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 run 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. The boys 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 around 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 they 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 had clenched both fists as he confessed to his role in sullying the art; but Tom had surprised him as he laughed long and hard at that, then thanked Riley for it.
"Really, you helped me pick up the brush again, Tarot; 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 bat-like, humanoid monster on one: gaunt, no lips, eyes sewn shut; but he couldn't be sure. "I felt compelled to paint it for Finn — he loved the stars. This is silly, but remember how Finn insisted he'd become an astronomer when he grew up, even after we told him 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 him 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 waved goodbye 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 signed up for 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 the auditory range for humans, but Tom had 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.
Those soundless notes stimulated his brain and helped reliably trigger what the therapist called "out-of-body experiences." It was like lucid dreaming, but angstier. 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, crying; he hadn't called Riley by that nickname in years. "It was surreal."
Of the handful of people Riley 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, then Tom sobbing was only rational.
Treatments for mental illness had come a long way since the horror of lobotomies. Riley had long read science-fiction novels and even speculative medical journals about a future where we stimulated our brains with sound instead of recreational 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 — mostly 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? 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]
The caption gave Riley his answer, and an epiphany: hadn't there been flashes of blue when the music had enthralled him? Yes — the subtitles had kept him sane. Reminded him this was real, and that was not; that what he'd seen was likely all in his head. The blue didn't caption his thoughts — Riley had established this already.
The woman's beautifully tragic hums he'd heard as warm breaths in his ear — that was real. Real as that pernicious applause and the shivers it had given him.
But she'd said something, thought Riley. I saw.
Yes — toward the end, her lips had moved. She'd whispered something to her boy, though not a word of it touched Riley's ears. Whatever she'd said, the subtitles hadn't got it either.
It's possible that the subs can't caption what I don't hear, Riley thought. 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 — certainly not the woman's hums and sobs. The captions had got those right. And something else altogether. A most peculiar — and perhaps humorous — thing.
Were those… opening credits I saw flash? thought Riley.
The lad felt silly for the thought until he mulled it over: hadn't the captions described the woman's hums and sobs as an "opening theme song", and those horrific, lauding voices in the dark as an "audience"?
Riley's eyes widened.
The subtitles had been right about everything up to that point — the spool, his baby talk, the bat-creatures' screeches, and even his mental state. Was it unthinkable for them to be right about the music and the supposed credit roll?
Starring Riley Tarot, he thought. Wolfhard, and Dinkle… Dinklage?
Riley 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]
That spark, Lord; it always trailed behind the screeches, like thunder after lightning, Riley realised; the lad clenched both fists as it sizzled inside every iota of his being, deeper than even the altar's twine wormed. But he couldn't help lingering over that peculiar phrase.
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," a red-haired boy had said to Riley many years ago, grinning as he drove his LEGO fire truck around a purple tetrahedral die. "What did you think it was?"
[♪Humming stops♪]
The spell broke.
Tears streaked down his face, unbridled; Riley hadn't merely remembered those words, he'd heard Finn speak them — in the boy's own voice.