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.