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“Are you feeling all right?” asked her father.
Before she could answer, there came a loud bang from the direction of her bedroom. The new nightmare ball had finished forming, and now it wanted to be near her.
Thud. Thud.
“Douglas, are you playing tricks?” her father called out.
“I’m here,” said Douglas, wandering out of the kitchen in his pajamas. “What’s that noise?”
Lavinia raced to her room, removed the chair, and opened her door. The thread had indeed formed a sphere. This New Baxter was huge—nearly half her height and as wide as the doorway—and it was mean. It rolled around Lavinia in a tight circle, growling and sniffing, as if deciding whether or not to eat her. When her father came bounding upstairs, New Baxter leaped at him. Lavinia shot out her hand and managed to grab one of its threads, and using all her strength she managed to hold the creature back.
She yanked New Baxter into her room and slammed the door. Her heart hammered as she watched it eat her desk chair, discharging a pile of wood chips behind it in an excremental trail.
Oh, this was bad. This was terrible.
Not only was New Baxter like a rabid dog compared to Old Baxter—it was made not from the dreams of an innocent child but the nightmares of a rotten-souled murderer—but there was a killer on the loose, and thanks to her he was now free of fear and inhibition. If he killed again, it would be at least partly her fault. She couldn’t just throw New Baxter in a fire and be rid of it. She had to put it back from whence it had come: inside the young man’s head.
The idea frightened her. How would she find him? And when she did, what would stop him from killing her, too? She didn’t know—all she knew was that she had to try.
She pulled a fat handful of threads from New Baxter and wound them around her arm like a leash. Then she yanked it across the room and through her open window. On the ground outside was a torn piece of the young man’s shirt. She picked it up and gave it to New Baxter to sniff.
“Dinner,” she said.
The result was instantaneous: New Baxter nearly pulled Lavinia’s arm off, tugging her across the yard and then down the road by its leash. New Baxter chased the young man’s scent trail for much of the day, leading Lavinia all through town in circles, then out the other side of it. They traveled down a rural road into the middle of nowhere. Finally, just as the sun was setting, they came upon a large, isolated building: Mrs. Hennepin’s orphanage.
Smoke was pouring from the lower-floor windows. It was on fire.
Lavinia heard screams from the other side of the building. She ran around the corner, pulling New Baxter after her. Five orphans were at an upper-floor window, gasping for breath as smoke billowed around them. On the ground below stood the young man, laughing.
“What have you done!” Lavinia cried.
“This house of horrors is where I spent my formative years,” he said. “Now I’m ridding the world of nightmares, just like you.”
New Baxter strained toward the young man.
“Go get him!” Lavinia said, and dropped the leash.
New Baxter spun across the ground toward the young man—but instead of eating him, it leaped into the young man’s arms and licked his face.
“Hey there, old friend!” the young man said, laughing. “I don’t have time to play right now, but here—go fetch!”
He picked up a stick and threw it. New Baxter chased it straight into the burning building. Moments later there came an inhuman scream as New Baxter was consumed by flames.
Defenseless now, Lavinia tried to run, but the young man caught her, knocked her to the ground, and wrapped his hands around her throat.
“You’re going to die now,” he said calmly. “I owe you a great deal for removing those awful nightmares from my head, but I can’t have you plotting to kill me.”
Lavinia struggled for breath. She could feel herself blacking out.
Then something jerked inside her pants pocket.
Old Baxter.
She took him out and jammed him into the young man’s ear. The young man pulled his hands away from Lavinia’s throat and fumbled at his ear, but he was too late; Old Baxter had already wriggled inside his head.
The young man stared into the distance, as if reading something only he could see. Lavinia squirmed but still could not get away from him.
The young man looked down at her and smiled. “A clown, a few giant spiders, and a boogeyman under the bed.” He laughed. “A child’s dreams. How sweet—I shall enjoy these!” And he resumed strangling her.
She kneed the young man in the stomach, and for a moment he removed his hands from her throat. He then curled his hand into a fist, but before he could strike her, she said:
“Baxter, heel!”
And Baxter—old, faithful Baxter—exited the young man’s head suddenly and violently, flying out of his ears, his eyes, and his mouth along with a gout of thick red blood. He fell backward, gurgling, and Lavinia sat up.
The children screamed for help.
Gathering her courage, Lavinia got up and ran inside the house. She choked on the thick smoke. Mrs. Hennepin lay dead on the sitting room floor, a pair of scissors jutting from her eye socket.
The door to the stairway was blocked by a wardrobe—the young man’s doing, surely.
“Baxter, help me! Push!”
With Baxter’s aid, Lavinia was able to knock the wardrobe out of the way and open the door, and then she ran up the stairs, out of the worst of the fire and smoke. One by one she carried the children from the house, covering their eyes as they passed Mrs. Hennepin. When they were all safe she collapsed on the lawn, half dead from burns and smoke inhalation.
She woke up days later in a hospital, her father and brother looking down at her.
“We’re so proud of you,” said her father. “You’re a hero, Vinni.”
They had a thousand questions for her—she could see it in their faces—but for now she would be spared answering them.
“You were thrashing and moaning in your sleep,” said Douglas. “I think you were having a nightmare.”
So she had been—and so she continued to for years afterward. She easily could have reached into her own head and taken them out, but she did not. Instead, Lavinia devoted herself to the study of the human mind, and against great odds went on to become one of the first female doctors of psychology in America. She founded a successful practice and helped many people, and though she often suspected nightmare thread was lurking in the ears of her patients, she never used her talent to get rid of it. There were, she had come to believe, better ways.
• • •
Editor’s note:
This story is unusual for a number of reasons, most prominently its ending. The pacing and visuals of its final act have a distinctly modern feel, and I suspect that’s because it’s been tinkered with in the not-too-distant past. I was able to find an older, alternate ending in which the nightmare thread Lavinia removes from the young man rises up to consume her, like a whole-body version of the stockings she knits early in the tale. Unable to peel off this wriggling second skin, she flees from society, having become a nightmare herself. It’s tragic and unfair, and I can see why some latter-day tale-teller chose to invent a new, more empowering ending.
Whichever ending you prefer, the moral remains more or less the same, and it, too, is unusual. It warns peculiar children that there are some talents that are simply too complex and dangerous to use, and are better left alone. In other words, being born with a certain ability does not mean we are obliged to use it, and in rare cases, we are obliged not to. All in all, this makes for a rather disheartening lesson—what peculiar child, having suffered through the challenges of peculiarhood, wants to hear that her ability is more curse than blessing? I’m certain that’s why my own headmistress only read this to the older children, and why
