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As word of Lavinia’s mysterious talent spread, their house began to receive a steady stream of visitors, all of whom wanted Lavinia to take away their nightmares. Lavinia was thrilled; perhaps this was how she was meant to help people.17
But her father turned them all away, and when she demanded to know why, all he would say was, “It’s unbecoming for a lady to stick her fingers into strangers’ ears.”
Lavinia suspected another reason for his disapproval, however: more people were coming to see Lavinia than her father. He was jealous.
Bitter and frustrated, Lavinia bided her time. As luck would have it, a few weeks later her father was called away on urgent business. It was an unexpected trip and he hadn’t had time to arrange for someone to watch the children.
“Promise me you won’t . . .” her father said, and pointed at his ear. (He didn’t know what to call the thing she did, and didn’t like talking about it in any case.)
“I promise,” Lavinia said, fingers crossed behind her back.
The doctor kissed his children, hefted his bags, and went. He’d only been gone a few hours when there was a knock at the door. Lavinia opened it to find a miserable young woman standing on the porch, pale as death, her haunted-looking eyes ringed by dark circles. “Are you the one who can take away nightmares?” she asked meekly.
Lavinia showed her in. Her father’s office was locked, so Lavinia brought the young woman into the sitting room, laid her down on the couch, and proceeded to pull a huge quantity of black thread from her ear. When she was finished the young woman wept with gratitude. Lavinia gave her a handkerchief, refused any payment, and showed her to the door.
After she’d gone, Lavinia turned to see Douglas watching from the hall. “Papa told you not to,” he said sternly.
“That’s my business, not yours,” Lavinia answered. “You’re not going to tell him, are you?”
“I might,” he said nastily. “I haven’t decided.”
“If you do, I’ll put these right back where I found them!” She held up the wad of nightmare thread and made as if to stick it in Douglas’s ear, and he fled from the room.
As she stood there, feeling slightly bad for having scared him, the thread in her hand rose up like a charmed snake and pointed down the hall.
“What is it?” she said. “Are we going somewhere?”
She followed its lead. When she came to the end of the hall, it turned and nodded left—toward her father’s office. Arriving at the locked door, the little thread strained toward the lock. Lavinia lifted it up and let it worm inside the keyhole, and a few moments later the door came open with a click.
“My goodness,” she said. “You’re a clever little nightmare, aren’t you?”
She slipped inside and closed the door. The thread slid out of the lock, dropped into her hand, then pointed across the room toward the drawer where her father had stashed the other threads. It wanted to be with its friends!
She felt briefly guilty, then chased the feeling away—they were only reclaiming her rightful property, after all. Crossing to the drawer, her thread repeated its trick on the padlock that secured it, and the drawer slid open. Upon seeing each other, the new thread and the old tensed and reared back. They circled each other on the desk, tentative, sniffing each other like dogs. Then each seemed to decide the other was friendly, and in a blur they meshed together to form a fist-sized ball.
Lavinia laughed and clapped her hands. How fascinating! How delightful!
All day long people came to the door seeking Lavinia’s help: a mother tormented by dreams of a lost child; small kids brought by anxious parents; an old man who each night relived scenes from a bloody war he’d fought half a century ago. She drew out dozens of nightmares and added them to the ball. After three days the ball was as large as a watermelon. After six it was nearly the size of their dog, Cheeky, who bared his teeth and growled whenever he saw it. (When the ball growled back, Cheeky dove out an open window and didn’t come back.)
At night she stayed up late studying the ball. She prodded and poked it and studied bits of it under a microscope. She pored over her father’s medical textbooks looking for any mention of thread that lived inside the ear canal, but found nothing. It meant she had made a scientific breakthrough—that, perhaps, Lavinia herself was a breakthrough! Beside herself with excitement, she dreamed of opening a clinic where she would use her talent to help people. Everyone from paupers to presidents would come to see her, and one day, perhaps, nightmares would be a thing of the past! The thought made her so happy that for days she was practically walking on air.
Her brother, meanwhile, spent most of his time avoiding her. The ball made him deeply uncomfortable—the way it stayed in constant, wriggling motion even while sitting still; the subtle but pervasive smell it gave off of rotten eggs; the low, steady hum it made, impossible to ignore at night when there was no other noise in the house. The way it followed his sister everywhere, nipping at her heels like a devoted pet: up and down the stairs, to bed, to the dinner table, where it waited patiently for scraps—even to the bathroom, bumping against the door until she came out.18
“You should get rid of that thing,” Douglas told her. “It’s just trash from people’s heads.”
“I like having Baxter around,” Lavinia said.
“You named it?”
Lavinia shrugged. “I think he’s cute.”
But the truth was Lavinia didn’t know how to get rid of him. Lavinia had tried locking Baxter in a trunk so she could walk into town without him rolling after her, but he had broken open the lid. She had shouted and raged at him, but Baxter had simply bounced in place, excited for the attention he was being paid. She had even tried tying him in a sack, marching him to the outskirts of town, and hurling him into a river, but Baxter had gotten free somehow and come back that same night—wriggling through the mail slot, rolling up the stairs, and jumping on her chest, a filthy, sopping mess. In the end, giving the sentient ball of nightmares a name made its constant presence slightly less unsettling.
She’d been skipping school, but after a week she couldn’t miss any more. She knew Baxter would follow her, and rather than try to explain her nightmare thread to teachers and classmates, she stuffed Baxter in a bag, slung him over her shoulder, and took him along. As long as she kept the bag near her, Baxter stayed quiet and didn’t cause problems.
But Baxter wasn’t her only problem. News of Lavinia’s talent had circulated among the other students, and when the teacher wasn’t looking, a fat-cheeked bully named Glen Farcus put a witch’s hat made of paper on Lavinia’s head.
“I think this belongs to you!” he said, all the boys laughing.
She tore it off and threw it on the floor. “I’m not a witch,” she hissed. “I’m a doctor.”
“Oh yeah?” he said. “Is that why you’re sent away to learn about knitting while the boys all take science?”
The boys laughed so hard that the teacher lost her temper and made everyone copy from the dictionary. While they were silently working, Lavinia reached into her bag, pulled a single thread from Baxter, and whispered to it. The thread wriggled down the leg of her desk, across the floor, up Glen Farcus’s chair, and into his ear.
He didn’t notice. No one did. But the next day Glen came to school looking shaky and pale.
“What’s the matter, Glen?” Lavinia asked him. “Did you have trouble sleeping last night?”
The boy’s eyes widened. He excused himself from the room and didn’t come back.
That evening, Lavinia and Douglas received word that their father would return the next day. Lavinia knew she had to find a way to hide Baxter from him, at least for a while. Using what she’d learned in her hated home economics class, she teased Baxter apart, knit him into a pair of stockings, and pulled him onto her legs. Though the stockings itched something awful, Father was unlikely to notice.
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sp; He returned the following afternoon, dusty and road-worn, and after he’d hugged both children, he sent Douglas away so he could speak with Lavinia in private.
“Have you been good?” her father asked her.
Suddenly and fiercely, Lavinia’s legs began to itch. “Yes, Papa,” she answered, scratching one foot with the other.
“Then I’m proud of you,” said her father. “Especially because, before I left, I didn’t give you a very good reason for why I didn’t want you using your gift. But I think I can explain myself better now.”
“Oh?” said Lavinia. She was terribly distracted; it was taking all her willpower and concentration not to double over and scratch her legs.
“Nightmares aren’t the same as tumors and gangrenous limbs. They’re unpleasant, to be sure, but sometimes unpleasant things can serve a purpose. Perhaps they weren’t all meant to be removed.”
“You think nightmares can be good?” said Lavinia. She had found a small bit of relief by rubbing one of her feet against the hard leg of a chair.
“Not good, exactly,” said her father. “But I think some people deserve their nightmares, and some people don’t—and how are you to know who’s who?”
“I can just tell,” said Lavinia.
“And if you’re wrong?” said her father. “I know you’re bright, Vinni, but nobody’s that bright all the time.”
“Then I can put them back.”
