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Her father looked startled. “You can put the nightmares back?”
“Yes, I . . .” She nearly told him about Glen Farcus, then thought better of it. “I think I can.”
He took a deep breath. “It’s much too heavy a responsibility for someone your age. Promise me you won’t try to do any of this again until you’re older. Much older.”
She was in such a torment of itching now that she was only half listening. “I promise!” she said, then bolted upstairs to pull off her stockings.
Locked in her room, she took off her dress and tore at the stockings—but they wouldn’t come off. Baxter liked being bonded to her skin, and no matter how she pulled and pried, he wouldn’t budge. She even tried using a letter opener, but its metal edge bent backward before it could separate Baxter from her skin even a tiny bit.
Finally, she lit a match and held it near her foot. Baxter squealed and squirmed.
“Don’t make me do it!” she said, and held it closer.
Baxter reluctantly peeled off her and resumed spherical form.
“Bad Baxter!” she chastised him. “That was bad!”
Baxter flattened a bit, drooping with shame.
Lavinia flopped onto her bed, exhausted, and found herself thinking about something her father had said: that taking people’s nightmares was a great responsibility. He was certainly right about that. Baxter was a handful already, and the more nightmares she took from people, the bigger he would grow. What was she going to do with him?
She sat up quickly, lit with a new idea. Some people deserved their nightmares, her father had said, and it occurred to her that just because she took them didn’t mean she had to keep them. She could be the Robin Hood of dreams, relieving good people of their nightmares and giving them to the wicked—and as a bonus she wouldn’t have a ball of nightmare thread following her around all the time!
Figuring out who the good people were was easy enough, but she would have to be careful about identifying the bad ones; she’d hate to give the wrong person nightmares. So she sat down and made a list of all the worst people in town. At the top was Mrs. Hennepin, the headmistress of the local orphanage, who was known to beat her charges with a riding crop. Second was Mr. Beatty, the butcher, who everyone said had gotten away with killing his wife. Next was Jimmy, the coach driver, who had run over blind Mr. Ferguson’s guide dog while driving drunk. Then there were all the people who were simply rude or unpleasant, which was a much longer list, and the people Lavinia just didn’t like, which was longer still.
“Baxter, heel!”
Baxter rolled over to where she was sitting.
“How would you like to help me with an important project?”
Baxter wriggled eagerly.
They began that night. Dressed all in black, Lavinia put Baxter in his bag and slung him across her back. When the clock struck midnight, they snuck out and went all over town giving nightmares to people on the list—the worst to those at the top, itty-bitty ones to those further down. Lavinia pulled strands from Baxter and sent them wriggling up drainpipes and through open windows toward their intended targets. By the night’s end they had visited dozens of houses and Baxter had shrunk to the size of an apple—small enough to fit in Lavinia’s pocket. She returned home exhausted, falling into a deep and happy sleep the moment her head touched her pillow.
After a few days, it became clear that there would be consequences for what Lavinia had done. She came downstairs to find her father sitting at the breakfast table, tut-tutting at his newspaper. Jimmy, the omnibus driver, had gotten into a terrible accident, so exhausted was he from lack of sleep. The next morning, Lavinia learned that Mrs. Hennepin, agitated by some unknown malady, had thrashed several of her orphans into a coma. The morning after that it was Mr. Beatty, the butcher who was rumored to have killed his wife. He had thrown himself off a bridge.
Racked by guilt, Lavinia swore off using her talent until she was older and could better trust her own judgment. People kept coming to her door, but she turned them all away—even the ones who appealed to her feelings with tearful stories.
“I’m not taking any new patients at this time,” she told them. “Sorry.”
But they kept coming, and she began to lose her patience.
“I don’t care; go away!” she would shout, slamming the door in their faces.
It wasn’t true—she did care—but that little act of cruelty was her armor against the infectious pain of others. She had to wall off her heart or risk doing more harm.
After a few weeks it seemed she had mastered her feelings. Then, late one night, there was a tap at her bedroom window. Pulling back the shade, she saw a young man standing in the moonlit grass. She had turned him away earlier that same day.
“Didn’t I tell you to go away?” she said through the cracked window.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I’m desperate. If you can’t help me, perhaps you might know of someone else who can take away my nightmares. I’m afraid they will drive me mad.”
She had hardly looked at the young man when she’d sent him away earlier, but there was something in his expression now that made her gaze linger. He had a gentle face and kind, soft eyes, but his clothes were dirty and his hair askew, as if he’d narrowly survived some trauma. Though the night was warm and dry, he was shaking.
She knew she should have closed her shades and sent him away again. Against her better judgment, she listened as the young man detailed the terrors that tormented his sleep: devils and monsters, succubi and incubi, scenes conjured straight from Hell. Just hearing about them gave Lavinia the shivers—and she was not someone who got the shivers easily. Yet she was not tempted to help him. She wanted no more troublesome nightmare thread, and so she told him that, as sorry as it made her, she couldn’t help him. “Go home,” she said. “It’s late; your parents will worry.”
The young man burst into tears. “No, they won’t,” he wept.
“Why not?” she asked, though she knew she shouldn’t have. “Are they cruel? Do they mistreat you?”
“No,” he said. “They’re dead.”
“Dead!” Lavinia said. Her own mother had died of scarlet fever when Lavinia was young, and it had been very hard—but to lose both parents! She could feel a gap widening in her armor.
“Perhaps I could bear it if they had died a peaceful death, but they did not,” said the young man. “They were killed—murdered—right before my eyes. That’s where all
my terrible dreams came from.”
Lavinia knew then that she was going to help him. If she had been born with this talent in order to free just one person from their nightmares, she thought, it had to be this young man. If that meant Baxter would become too large to hide, well, then she would just have to show Baxter to her father and admit what she had done. He would understand, she thought, when he heard the young man’s story.
She invited him inside, laid him on her bed, and reeled out amazing lengths of black thread from his ear. He had more nightmares clogging his brain than anyone she’d treated, and when she had finished, thread covered her floor in a wide, squirming mat. The young man thanked her, flashed a strange smile, and slipped out her window so quickly he tore his shirt on the jamb.
An hour later, Lavinia was still puzzling over that smile when dawn broke. The new thread hadn’t finished coalescing into ball form, and Baxter, who seemed frightened of it, cowered in her pocket.
Her father called the children to breakfast. Lavinia realized she wasn’t quite ready to tell him what she’d done. It had been a long night, and she needed something to eat first. She swept the thread under her bed. She closed her bedroom door, locked it behind her, and went downstairs.
Her father was sitting at the table, engrossed in the newspaper.
“Awful,” he muttered, shaking his head.
“What is it?” Lavinia asked.
He laid the paper down. “It’s so depraved I hesitate even to tell you. But it happened not far from here, and I suppose you’ll hear about it one way or another. A few weeks ago, a man and his wife were murdered in cold blood.”
So the young man had been telling the truth. “Yes, I heard,” Lavinia said.
“Well, that’s not the worst part,” said her father. “It seems the police have finally identified their chief suspect—the couple’s adopted son. They’re hunting him now.”
Lavinia felt her head go light. “What did you say?”
“See for yourself.”
Her father pushed the paper toward her across the table. Above the fold was a grainy likeness of the young man who had been in her room only hours earlier. Lavinia fell heavily into a chair and clung to the edge of the table as the room began to spin.
