Tales of the Peculiar

  “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
it remains one of the more obscure, if fascinating, tales.

  —MN

  The Locust

  There was once a hard-working immigrant from Norway named Edvard who went to America to seek his fortune. This was back in the days when only the eastern third of America had been settled by Europeans. Most of its western lands still belonged to the peoples that had roamed it since the last Ice Age. The fertile plains in the middle were known as the “Frontier”—a wild place of great opportunity and great risk—and this was where Edvard settled.

  He had sold everything he owned in Norway, and with that money had bought land and farming equipment in a place known then as the Dakota Territory, where many other new arrivals from Norway had also settled. He built a simple house and established a small farm, and after a few years of hard work even prospered a little.

  People in town told him he should find a wife and start a family. “You’re a strapping young lad,” they said. “It’s the natural order of things!”

  But Edvard resisted marrying. He loved his farm so much that he wasn’t sure he had room in his heart to love a wife, too. He’d always felt love was impractical, that it got in the way of more important things. As a young man in Norway, Edvard had watched his best mate throw away what could have been a life of adventure and fortune when he fell in love with a girl who couldn’t bear to leave her family in Norway. There was no money to be made in the old country, and now his old friend had a wife and children he could barely feed—sentenced to a life of compromise and deprivation—all thanks to a whim of his youthful heart.

  And yet, as fate would have it, even Edvard met a girl he took a fancy to. He found room in his heart to love both his farm and a wife, and he married her. He thought he could not possibly be happier—that his tough little heart was now full to bursting—so when his wife asked him to give her a child, he resisted. How could he possibly love a farm, a wife, and a child? And yet, when Edvard’s wife became pregnant, he was surprised by the joy that filled him, and looked forward to the birth with tremendous anticipation.

  Nine months later, they welcomed a baby boy into the world. It was a difficult birth that left Edvard’s wife weak and ailing. There was something wrong with the baby, too: its heart was so big that one side of its chest was noticeably larger than the other.

  “Will he live?” Edvard asked the doctor.

  “Time will tell,” the doctor replied.

  Unsatisfied, Edvard took his child to see old Erick, a healer who’d made a reputation for himself in the old country as an uncommonly wise man. He put his hands on the boy, and within moments his eyebrows shot up. “This boy is peculiar!” Erick exclaimed.

  “So the doctor told me,” said Edvard. “His heart is too large.”

  “It’s more than just that,” said Erick, “though precisely what’s special about him may not manifest itself for years.”19

  “But will he live?” asked Edvard.

  “Time will tell,” Erick replied.

  Edvard’s son did live, but his wife only grew weaker, and finally she died. At first Edvard was devastated, and then he grew angry. He was angry with himself for allowing love to disrupt his plans for a practical life. Now he had a farm to work and an infant to care for—and no wife to help him! He was angry, too, at the child, for being strange and special and delicate, but especially for sending his wife to the grave on his way into the world. He knew this was not the child’s fault, of course, and that being angry at an infant made no sense, but he couldn’t help it. All the love he had unwisely allowed to blossom inside him had turned to bitterness, and now that it was there, lodged in him like a gallstone, he didn’t know how to get rid of it.

  He named the boy Ollie and raised him alone. He sent Ollie to school, where he learned English and other subjects Edvard knew little about. In some ways the boy was recognizably his son: he looked like Edvard and worked just as hard, tilling and plowing beside his father every hour that he wasn’t at school or asleep, and never complaining. But in other ways the boy was a stranger. He spoke Norwegian with a flat American accent. He seemed to believe that the world had good things in store for him, a peculiarly American idea. Worst of all, the boy was enslaved to the whims of his too-large heart. He fell in love in an instant. By the age of seven he had proposed marriage to a classmate, a neighbor girl, and the young woman who played the organ at church, fifteen years his senior. If ever a bird should fall from the sky, Ollie would sniffle and cry over it for days. When he realized that the meat on his dinner plate came from animals, he refused to eat it ever again. The boy’s insides were made of goo.

  The real trouble with Ollie started when he was fourteen—the year the locusts came. No one in Dakota had seen anything like it before: swarms big enough to blot out the sun, miles wide, like a curse from God. People could not walk outdoors without crushing insects under their feet by the hundreds. The locusts ate everything green they could find, and when they ran out of grass they moved on to corn and wheat, and when that was gone they devoured wood and fiber and leather and roofs made of sod. They would strip the wool from sheep in the fields. One poor soul was caught in a swarm of them and had the clothes eaten off his back.20

  It was a scourge that threatened to destroy the livelihood of every settler on the frontier, Edvard’s included, and the settlers tried everything they could think of to combat it. They used fire and smoke and poison to try to drive the bugs away. They pushed heavy stone rollers over the ground to squash them. The town near Edvard’s farm mandated that every person over the age of ten deliver thirty pounds of dead locusts to the dump every week, or be fined. Edvard threw himself into the task enthusiastically, but his son refused to kill a single locust. When Ollie walked outdoors, he even shuffled his feet so as not to accidentally squash one. It nearly drove his father to distraction.

  “They’ve eaten all our crops!” Edvard shouted at him. “They’re ruining our farm!”

  “They’re just hungry,” his son replied. “They’re not hurting us on purpose, so it isn’t fair to hurt them on purpose.”

  “Fairness doesn’t enter into it,” Edvard said, straining to control his temper. “Sometimes in life you have to kill in order to survive.”

  “Not in this case,” said Ollie. “Killing them hasn’t done any good at all.”

  By this point, Edvard had gone completely red in the face. “Smash that locust!” he demanded, pointing at one on the ground.

  “I will not!” Ollie said.

  Edvard was livid. He slapped his disobedient son, and still he refused to kill them, so Edvard thrashed him with his belt and sent the boy to his room without supper. As he listened to Ollie crying through the wall, he stared out the window at a haze of locusts rising from his ruined fields and felt his heart hardening against his son.

  Word spread among the settlers that Ollie had refused to kill locusts, and people got angry. The town fined his father. Ollie’s classmates pinned him down and tried to make him eat one. People Ollie hardly knew hurled insults at him on the street. His father was so angry and embarrassed that he stopped speaking to his son. Suddenly, Ollie found himself with no friends and no one to talk to, and he became so lonely that one day he adopted a pet. It was the only living creature who would tolerate his presence: a locust. He named it Thor after the old Norse god and kept it hidden under his bed in a cigar box. He fed it dinner scraps and sugar water and talked to it late at night when he was supposed to be sleeping.

  “It’s not your fault everyone hates you,” he whispered to Thor. “You were just doing what you were made to do.”

  “Chirp-churrup!” replied the locust, rubbing its wings together.

  “Shhh!” Ollie said, and he slipped a few grains of rice into the box and closed it.

  Ollie began to carry Thor with him everywhere he went. He grew very fond of the little insect, who perched on his shoulder and chirped when the sun shone and would hop about merri
ly when Ollie whistled a tune. Then one day his father discovered Thor’s box. Enraged, he snatched the locust out, took it to the hearth, and threw it into the flames. There was a high-pitched whine and a quiet pop, and Thor was gone.

  When Ollie cried for his dead friend, Edvard kicked him out.

  “No one sheds tears for a locust in my house!” he shouted, and pushed his son outside.

  Ollie spent the night shivering in the fields. The next morning, his father felt bad for being so harsh and went outside to find the boy, but instead he came upon a giant locust sleeping between rows of ruined wheat. Edvard recoiled in disgust. The creature was as big as a mastiff, with thighs like Christmas hams and antennae as long as riding crops. Edvard ran into the house to fetch his gun, but when he came back to shoot the thing, locusts swarmed around him and flew into the barrel of his rifle, clogging it. Then they swirled in the air before him and divided themselves into letters that spelled a word:

  O-L-L-I-E

  Edvard dropped his gun in shock and stared at the giant locust, which was now standing on its hind legs, as a human would. It didn’t have black eyes, like locusts do, but blue ones, like Ollie’s.

  “No,” Edvard said. “It’s not possible!”

  But then he noticed that the torn collar of his son’s shirt was around the creature’s neck, and a cuff of Ollie’s pants was attached to its leg.

  “Ollie?” he said tentatively. “Is that you?”

  In what seemed to be a nod, the bug moved its head up and down.

  Edvard’s skin prickled strangely. He felt as if he were watching the scene from outside his body.

  His son had turned into a locust.

  “Can you speak?” Edvard asked.

  Ollie rubbed his hind legs together and made a high-pitched noise, but it seemed that was the best he could do.