“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.”