Tales of the Peculiar (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #0.5) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,36
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.
“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.