Baylor's Guide to Dreadful Dreams

by Robert Imfeld

  TIP

  10

  Cleaning is still worse than any nightmare.

  “RISE AND SHINE, MY DEAR family,” Mom called from downstairs. The unmistakable scent of bacon wafted into my nose, and I immediately hopped out of bed and ran downstairs.

  “Bacon?” I asked Mom, and she smiled and pointed to the kitchen table.

  “And eggs, and pancakes,” she said. “We’re going to need all our energy today!”

  I stopped halfway to the table and turned back around.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s the day before Thanksgiving,” she said. “You know what that means.”

  Of course. I’d forgotten because I try to block out this day from my memory every year.

  “It’s cleaning day!” she exclaimed. I couldn’t tell if she was actually excited to clean or if she was just faking it.

  I sighed. I should have known the bacon was a trick. Every year my mom forces the entire family to clean the house from top to bottom before our extended family shows up for Thanksgiving. Except that, really, it winds up being me and my dad who do all the work since Mom is usually busy prepping the food for the next day, and Jack and Ella aren’t exactly the best cleaners.

  My dad stalked into the kitchen and we looked at each other like soldiers entering a battlefield. We were resigned to our fate.

  After breakfast, armed with Mom’s very detailed instructions, we set out cleaning all sorts of places we usually never think about—beneath the fridge, along the baseboards, on top of doorframes, and even behind the toilets. Honestly, who on earth looks there for anything? Everyone knows that if something falls behind a toilet, whether it’s a piece of toilet paper or a retainer, it’s best left forgotten about for all of eternity.

  Hours later, our elbows and backs screaming in agony, we passed out on the couch, completely exhausted. Before I knew it I’d drifted off to sleep again and found myself back on Loved Ones’ Lane. Oddly, it wasn’t as dark as usual. In fact, it was more of a peaceful sky blue, and it looked like only a sporadic few of the shooting stars were lit up. That made enough sense; just about everyone I knew would be awake this time of day.

  I walked to the end of the lane to see if the ocean was there, and to my shock, the sun was out, and the water stretched as far as I could see.

  Just there in the distance I could see the white capsized boat clearly, the two dark figures on top.

  It was there again? Who kept having this bizarre dream? And why could I access it this way?

  I dove in and swam through the water, which glittered so beautifully in the afternoon sun, like diamonds were encrusted in the waves.

  Before I reached the boat, I heard singing. It was the guy, his voice smooth and velvety as he belted out “Amazing Grace.” He clearly had a lot of practice.

  I once was lost,

  but now I’m found

  ’Twas blind,

  but now I see . . .

  “Hello?”

  The singing immediately stopped.

  “Who’s there?” he said, his voice devastatingly hopeful.

  “It’s me, Baylor,” I said, climbing to the top of the boat. “We just met the other day.”

  “Oh,” he said, disappointed. Blisters covered his lips, all sore and bloody, and I found it amazing he could sing through that pain. “I thought I dreamed that.”

  “Well, you did,” I said. “And I’d guess you’re dreaming this now, too.”

  “Seems more like a nightmare.”

  “Your singing was great,” I said. “Nothing nightmarish about that.”

  “I dreamed I was singing to my baby sister,” he said. “She loves when I sing that. She plays peekaboo whenever I sing ‘but now I see.’ ” He paused, and when he spoke next, his voice was heavy and cracking. “And now I don’t know if I’ll ever see her again.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because I’m stuck on this boat,” he shouted, “in the middle of God knows where.”

  “But it’s just a dream.”

  “It’s not,” he said, tears rolling down his dry, cracked skin. “It’s not a dream. It’s real.”

  And he must have woken up, because I suddenly popped back to the edge of the lane, the ocean scene gone once again.

  * * *

  When I woke up from my nap, I ran up to my room so I could tell Kristina everything.

  “It doesn’t make sense, though,” she said. “Even if he was dreaming, you don’t know this person. You shouldn’t be able to visit his dreams.”

  “But I’m not really visiting them, not the way I do with everyone else. He comes to me.”

  “Even weirder, though. You can only channel spirits whose loved ones are nearby. We’re not exactly close to the ocean.”

  “Right. I can only channel spirits whose loved ones are nearby. Maybe it’s different with living people, though!”

  She stared hard at the wall. “Right,” she said. “Living people . . .”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I just think I need to chat with Fleetwood and some of the others about this,” she said. “You’re not really supposed to be channeling living people, just as a gentle reminder. It’s not like anything I’ve heard of before.” She eyed my shirt. “Make sure you keep wearing your amulet.”

  “Don’t you think the amulet is what’s causing this to happen, though?”

  “Regardless, you’re better off wearing it. Who knows what might happen if you wander off into this ocean without it?”

  I turned the amulet over in my fingers. I was going to keep wearing it, but I couldn’t help but feel concerned that a little stone was the one thing to keep me safe from any lurking dangers.

  * * *

  “All right,” my mom said after walking through the house and running her finger along random surfaces to check for dust, “it’s looking good, guys. Nice work.”

  My dad and I were sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for her seal of approval. We looked at each other and shook our heads.

  “Every year,” he mumbled.

  “I’m actually impressed too,” Kristina said, walking nearly lockstep with Mom. “There’s a real shine to the place.”

  “Kristina also thinks we did a good job,” I said.

  Dad widened his eyes for a panicked split second before he composed himself. “Well, thank you, Kristina.”

  “No question where Jack gets his bravery from,” she said sarcastically, sweeping past him and giving him a ghostly pat on the back, causing him to shiver.

  Mom’s phone beeped. “Oh, it’s Glenn! Hello?”

  Uncle Glenn is my mom’s brother. We spend every Thanksgiving with him, his wife (my aunt Cathy), and their kids, Gillie and Oli. Gillie was a year older than me and had just started high school, and Oli was ten.

  “Oh, he is? Oh . . . did he really? No, no, th-that’s fine . . . Okay, we’ll make up a bed for him then . . . See you tomorrow.”

  She hung up the phone and waited a moment before she said anything, like she was trying to figure out how to break terrible news.

  “What’d he say, Connie?” Dad asked.

  “Well,” she said. “Cathy’s dad missed his flight and now he doesn’t feel like dealing with the airlines, so . . . so he’s coming to dinner tomorrow.”

  A chill swept through the room.

  “Horty is coming to Thanksgiving?” my dad said slowly.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” she said, “I know. What could I say?”

  “How about, oh, I don’t know . . . hell no, Glenn, keep that monster out of my house! And that’s just off the top of my head, dear. Give me five more minutes and I’m sure I could get a lot more creative.”

  “It’s Thanksgiving, Doug. I couldn’t say no. Why not keep an open mind this year?”

  “What am I missing?” I said, not sure I’d ever been more interested in anything in my entire life. “Why don’t you like Horty?”

  “That’s family business, Baylor Dougl
as Bosco,” my mom said sharply, “so don’t you dare bring this up to your cousins, uncle, or, God forbid, your aunt.”

  I turned to Kristina and arched an eyebrow. She shook her head in equal confusion.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” she said, flailing her arms around, as though she were swatting Kristina into pieces. “Don’t you look at Kristina. And Kristina, if you know, don’t you dare say a word, or so help me, I will remember this moment for my entire life, and when I finally meet you, first I’m going to hug you, but the second thing I’m going to do is ground you for the next eternity.”

  I looked from a very confused Kristina to a very frustrated Mom, then to a very annoyed Dad, and threw my hands up. “Now you have to tell me,” I said. “What did he do?”

  “We are going to have a nice day tomorrow,” my mom said, as much to herself as to the rest of us, “and we are going to enjoy ourselves, and the food, and the company, and we’re going to remember everything we have to be grateful for, even if it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot at the moment, and we’re going to have a very . . . nice . . . time.”

  She stomped away, leaving Dad to fend off my questions. He was even more tight-lipped, though.

  “Don’t,” he said, before I had the chance to say anything. “Just don’t. Let it go.”

  Let it go? Did they not know me at all? I was going to find out what Horty did sooner or later, whether they liked it or not.

  Kristina and I headed to the family room; I plopped on the couch, turned the TV on, and started rambling incessantly.

  “How could we not know there was this weird dislike in the family. Horty? Don’t I call him Uncle Horty? I think I’ve only met him a couple times before. What could he have possibly done to Dad?”

  “He’s not truly ‘in the family,’ though, is he? He’s Mom’s brother’s wife’s father. He’s not blood, and there’s no reason for you to ever see each other, really.”

  “Do you think he’s got a door on Loved Ones’ Lane?

  She considered it for a moment. “If you can’t think of any happy memories or significant moments with him, then I doubt it.”

  “Rats,” I said. “I can’t even do some reconnaissance work ahead of time.”

  “Well,” she said, “not that I support your continued dreamwalking, but if you’re going to do it anyway, tonight would be a good time to drop in on Mom and Dad. Maybe you’ll see something there?”

  I smiled. “Nice one. Maybe you should join me tonight.”

  She shook her head. “If they saw the two of us together, they would for sure know it was me, and not just some weird futuristic Ella.”

  I shrugged. “They don’t know I can dreamwalk, though. They’ll just think it’s some weird dream if they spot us.” I looked at the portrait of Kristina hanging on the wall above the TV, next to the school pictures featuring me, Jack, and Ella. “And now that they have the picture of you, it’d make sense if they started incorporating the two of us together in their dreams.”

  I’d made some friends at the police station after the whole Rosalie/Sheet Man debacle, and they’d hooked me up with a sketch artist who helped put together a solid composite of Kristina. It was only fair for Mom and Dad to have a reference point of what their long-lost daughter looked like.

  “That’s not the dumbest thing you’ve ever said, Baylor,” she said. “I’ll think about it.”

  Kristina was the kind of person—well, ghost—who complimented me via positive negatives, so I took her words as the highest form of praise.

  I was feeling pretty good about myself and grabbed the remote to put on something funny, but when I looked at the screen, my heart nearly rocketed up my esophagus and out my mouth.

  “The search-and-rescue mission for Helena Papadopoulos and Archie Perceval stretches into day five as the coast guard expands its search after weather experts say the volatile storm cells off the eastern seaboard may have carried any boat wreckage south . . . .”

  The image on the screen flashed from the stormy waters off the coast of Florida to school pictures of Helena and Archie. Chills washed over my body.

  “Kristina,” I said, my voice suddenly hoarse, “that’s them. That’s who I saw in my dream on the ocean.”

  TIP

  11

  There’s definitely such a thing as bad publicity.

  SHE LOOKED AT THE TV and listened to the rest of the report. They lived on the east coast of Florida. They’d been missing since Friday afternoon. They’d taken Archie’s dad’s boat without permission. Not a single person had seen them since. The parents were asking for anyone with a plane or a boat to volunteer their time to look for their kids.

  “That’s who you saw in your dreams?” she asked. Her voice was sharp and steely.

  I nodded. “Archie. I talked to him. He seemed delirious.”

  “I need to go.” She disappeared in a flash of blue light, leaving me alone in the family room as Archie and Helena smiled at me from the TV.

  The screen switched to footage of two sobbing women, one of whom was holding a little girl a year or two older than Ella.

  “Please . . . please . . . if anyone knows anything, call the hotline,” the one with the daughter said, her voice tinged with a Haitian accent. “We’re desperate. We miss our babies.” She broke into more heaving sobs as her daughter stared at her in confusion. I couldn’t believe they were using this footage on TV.

  The other woman was too distraught to say anything, and a big burly hand, its owner off-screen, was massaging one of her shoulders.

  “How is this happening?” the first woman continued. “I never thought anything like this would happen to me.”

  “Baylor, what is that?” my mom asked, suddenly appearing in the family room. “Oh, turn that off! It’s devastating.” I flipped the TV off, trying to process what I was feeling. It was pure shock.

  “That poor woman,” my mom continued, sitting down next to me on the couch, gazing at me with wide eyes. “I can’t imagine what she must be going through. She must feel like her soul’s been torn into pieces.” She shook her head. “Just horrible.”

  The words from the mother’s interview’s repeated themselves over and over in my head.

  If anyone knows anything, call the hotline. We’re desperate. We miss our babies.

  I swallowed down vomit. I had to call that number immediately. Really, I had to head straight to Florida so I could help the parents figure out whether their kids were still alive or not. I needed to be in their proximity so the kids’ ghosts could appear; that’d at least give them some kind of closure. But it was the day before Thanksgiving. What could I really do?

  And . . . weren’t they alive? Hadn’t I seen them? Could what I’d experienced really have been a dream? It didn’t make sense, though. If they were alive, then Kristina was right—I shouldn’t have been able to access living people’s dreams. What was the logic there? And if they were dead, I was too far from any of their loved ones for me to channel them.

  They couldn’t just show up whenever they pleased. That was one of the main rules Kristina had established with the other side. Otherwise billions upon billions of ghosts would try to access me all the time, trying to get me to deliver messages to the seven billion people scattered around the planet.

  But the fact remained: I’d seen them somehow. And for all I knew, they were still alive. If they were dead, they wouldn’t have been lying on the boat so helplessly. Unless Kristina was right about the oceans—what if they were worried about getting sucked away into the vastness of the sea, and they clung to the boat because it was the last vestiges of humanity they had left?

  My head was throbbing. My heart was pounding. Why did Kristina have to leave so suddenly? I needed her help.

  “Baylor?” my mom said cautiously. “Are you okay? You don’t look so good.”

  “I . . . I, uh, I think I needed to lie down,” I stammered.

  “Oh no,” she said. “Are you feeling sick?”

  “No. I mean, y
es, sort of, but don’t worry, I’ll be fine tomorrow,” I managed to blurt.

  “Baylor,” she said, the caution in her voice replaced by suspicion, “is this a ghost thing?”

  I nodded slowly.

  “Got it,” she said. She reached for the double-wick candle on the table and lit it up. “Do you need me to say anything or can you handle it?”

  “I’ve got it,” I said, and I imagined the light surrounding my body. It wasn’t a necessary protection at the moment, but I was impressed my mom was trying to help in the first place, so I decided to go along with it.

  “Let’s get you upstairs,” she said, putting my arm around her shoulders and grabbing me by the waist. “There we go. One step at a time.”

  We managed to get upstairs, and after I crawled into bed, she lit candles and placed them around the perimeter of my room.

  “Thanks, Mom,” I said as she tiptoed out.

  “You’re welcome, sweetie. Get some rest.”

  But I couldn’t rest just yet. I needed to call the hotline. I found the number online and it went straight to a voice mail instructing me to leave a detailed message with my name and phone number.

  “Uh, hi. My name is Baylor Bosco, and I can communicate with people who have crossed over. Except, sorry, no, I shouldn’t have said that because I don’t think your kids have crossed over. I guess I found another way to communicate with them, and I just wanted to tell you that they’re both still alive and definitely lost at sea. They’re lying on part of a shiny white boat. You need to find them soon, though, so please keep looking. Don’t give up. Sorry. I wish I could be of more help.” I left my phone number in case they wanted to call back, and I hung up.

  I sighed with relief. I did my best to help, and now I could rest easy.

  UPDATE: BAYLOR BOSCO’S DEVILISH DEEDS

  It seems like a week can’t go by without Keene’s resident nuisance, Baylor Bosco, meddling in the lives of innocent people. After my special report from last week, I’m saddened to bring more news of Bosco’s devilish exploits.

  I’m told that Bosco attacked a group of second-graders shortly after purposely disrupting Keene’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on Saturday morning.