Tales of the Peculiar Page 9

  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.

&nb
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.”

  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.