St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

by Karen Russell

  “Look, Emma, I’ve got you. I’ve got you, okay? Just relax—” And lengthen.

  This night is the culmination of weeks of practice. Oglivy has been tutoring me in smooth rock-a-bye technique. I hum a lullaby into her ear, one that Ogli says is guaranteed to make the ladies go limp. She throws her head back in an exaggerated, feline yawn, which I take to be a good sign. I hum louder.

  “Are you sleeping?”

  “Oh!” she breathes. “Yes!” She makes some theatrical breathing noises that I guess must be Emma’s approximations of what a deeply sleeping girl would sound like, but actually make her sound like her trachea is obstructed by a golf ball. I try humming a little more softly.

  And then, just when she’s started mumbling in that softly demented voice that precedes sleep, Oglivy comes crashing out of the woods, staggering into trees and generally destroying the ambience. Emma bolts upright. “Who’s there?” She wriggles away from me and tugs the balloon back on. The light startles her sleep-blurred face back into sociable lines. Damn. All my progress, erased.

  “Oh, crap, sorry, guys.” Ogli whistles. “I didn’t, uh, mean to wake you….” He gives me a big, shit-eating grin.

  “Ogli!” Emma looks relieved to see him. She claps a hand over her mouth, but not before she lets out a coy yawn in Ogli’s direction. I wish she’d save that stuff for me.

  “Annie’s giving her Inspiration Assembly.” He coughs, averting his gaze with a showy gallantry while Emma rubs her eyelids back to their sentient position. “I thought we could all walk over together. Not that I care, but we’re gonna be late, Elijah.”

  “We’ll be there in a second—” But Emma’s already clambering out of the wicker basket, tilting the hot yellow bulb. Shadows go spidering out across the clearing.

  “Thanks, Oglivy.” She smiles. Her curly hair has a rosy glow in the balloon’s light. She looks all mussed up and livid and adorably mortal, these violet half-moons under her eyes. “You’re right, we’d better get there on time. I heard that last year one of the Incubi—”

  “Incubuses,” we correct.

  “Incubi”—she frowns—“was late, and Zorba put her on laundry duty for a week.”

  We all shudder. Laundry duty means you have to wash the acrid bed linens for Cabin 5, the Incontinents.

  We walk towards the main cabin in silence. It’s no easy hike. Sweat and mosquitoes and a purple ambush of nettles. Our bare toes sink into the oxblood clumps of mud.

  “Sorry, dude,” Ogli says under his breath. “I thought you were ballooning solo. I didn’t mean to wake you….”

  “’S okay,” I sigh. “She was faking, anyways.”

  When the trail opens onto the lake, I see that Oglivy’s timing was off, as usual. No way are we late. A few Somnambulists are still turning dreamy circles in the poppy pasture, tangling their sleep leashes in the furrows.

  “Wait up, Ogli,” I wheeze. “We can’t all be late, retard.”

  We’re all late. The camp director’s wife, Annie, is wrapping up her annual talk.

  “…And now, I’m proud to say, my dream contagion has gone into remission, and I’ve been dreaming my own dreams for nearly three years.”

  Scattered applause. Somebody bites into an apple. Oglivy and I exchange a bored glance. We have been coming to Z.Z.’s for so long that we’re practically de facto junior counselors. We know Annie’s spiel verbatim:

  “Sleep is the heat that melts time, children. It’s a trick that you will practice here. But! We don’t expect to cure you of your sleep disorders in these few short weeks.”

  Oglivy mouths along with Annie, fluttering his eyelids. He has Emma and me laughing with a hot-faced, helpless surrender that has nothing to do with the joke itself. After the white noise of school-year loneliness, I am so happy to be sitting with Ogli and Emma on this pulpy cedar floor again, making the same old jokes.

  “That’s not why your parents send you here,” Annie continues, glaring in our direction. “We just want to provide you with a safe place to lie awake together. And maybe even,” she beams at the crowd, “to dream.”

  “And,” I elbow Ogli, “to scream.” A veteran Narco sitting near us snickers. They never warn the new fish about all the midnight noises.

  At Z.Z.’s, our nights echo with weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Popularity is determined according to an unspoken algorithm that averages the length and volume of your sleep-yodeled terror. Even at a place like Zorba’s, there’s still a clearly delineated social hierarchy:

  Cabin 2: Sleep Apneics

  Cabin 3: Somnambulists

  Cabin 6: Somniloquists

  Cabin 8: Headbangers

  Cabin 11: Night Eaters

  Cabin 7: Gnashers

  Cabin 13: Night Terrors

  Cabin 9: Insomniacs

  Cabin 1: Narcoleptics

  Cabin 10: Incubuses

  Cabin 5: Incontinents

  And then there’s us. Cabin 4: Miscellaneous. The ones whose parents checked the box marked “Other.” Our illnesses do not match any diagnostic criteria. That means that we’re considered anomalies by Gnasher dudes who have ground their pearly whites down to nubbins, by Incubus girls who think that demon jockeys are riding them in their sleep.

  Oglivy is my Other brother, the only other person I have ever met who shares my same disorder. We’ve been bunk mates for the past three years. Annie calls us her twin boys with this syrupy, slightly unnerving tenderness. She doesn’t mean that we look alike. Oglivy is basketball-tall, with these small, pistachio-colored eyes and a pleasantly dopey face. I’m small and dark and inexpertly put together, all knees and elbows and face bones. My mom says I’m destined to be the sort of man who uses big words but pronounces them incorrectly. It’s not even like we have that much in common in our waking lives, although we get a lot of mileage out of our few points of intersection—our moonball fanaticism, our mutual abhorrence of grandmothers and cats, our worshipful respect for the hobo. But we are sleep twins, phobically linked by our identical dreams. He is the first and only person I have ever met who is also a prophet of the past.

  We would have been friends regardless, even if we weren’t the only two prophets in the whole camp. With all due respect to our Other brothers and sisters, Cabin 4 is creepy as hell.

  There’s Espalda and Espina, the reverend’s adopted daughters. They are hunchback twins who giggle at everything and rub their humps together in their sleep.

  There’s Felipe, a parasomniac with a co-incidence of spirit possession. He caught his ghost after stealing a guanabana from a roadside tree, unaware that its roots had wound around a mass grave of Moncada revolutionaries. He’s been possessed by Francisco Pais ever since. This causes him to sleep-detonate imaginary grenades and sleep-yell “Viva la Revolución!” while sleep-pumping his fist in the air. He is a deceptively apolitical boy by day.

  This year, we’ve got a New Kid, this Eastern European lycanthrope. He is redolent of tubers and Old World damp. New Kid’s face is a pituitary horror, a patchwork of runny sores and sebaceous dips. Ginger fur sprouts from weird places, his chin, his ears. You intuit some horror story—homeschooled, his mother’s in a coven, he eats rancid cabbage out of a trough, that sort of thing. His sleep cycles with the moon.

  Emma used to be a textbook Somnambulist. She says after her mother died they would find her walking up and down the empty gutters at the Bowl-a-Bed Hotel, her eyes wide open. But her ailment must have mutated into some Other form, because she recently got the wire restraints taken off her bed. It was right around the time when I started noticing that Emma was, in addition to being short and a serviceable moonball shortstop, a girl. She has this amazing tracery of veins around her eyes, like a leaf pressed between the pages of a book. She’s the only unknown ailment in the camp. I don’t know how exactly I got it into my head that I could save her, or that we could save each other. But now I have this secret fantasy where we sleep together and dream about…whatever ordinary kids dream about. And then we w
ake up together in the morning, in the same bed that we started out in, rested and cured.

  And then there’s Ogli. I’ll never forget the night Ogli and I figured out we had the same disorder. It was the first week of camp, a time when everyone was still skittish and uncertain and we resisted sleep for as long as possible, not wanting to give ourselves away too soon. I hid my ration of soporific dough in a sock under my pillow. Oglivy was sleeping in the bunk facing mine, and I watched him do the same thing. We lay sideways in the dark, eyeing each other like desperadoes in a predawn stalemate. Eventually, we both must have succumbed, because at precisely 4:47, we woke up screaming, staring straight at each other. Oglivy’s hair was sticking straight up, his white eyes goggling out in the dark, the mirror image of my terror. Our screams gave way into giggles.

  “What did you dream?” he wheezed.

  “I dreamed,” I gasped, still laughing, “that there was this silver rocket, burning and burning.”

  He stopped laughing abruptly. “Me too.”

  I appreciate Ogli’s pragmatism about our dreams. He refuses to try to interpret them with me. Like the time last summer when we predicted the St. Louis Zoo Cataclysm of ’49: “Who cares what it means, bro!” he sighs. “I’m too busy trying to outrun the lions so they don’t eat my shins.”

  “Why don’t we get the joyful portents,” I want to know, “doves and olives, the Emancipation Proclamation, former paralytics winning Olympic gold? Why?”

  Ogli just shrugs. “Look on the bright side, Elijah. At least we don’t dream the future.”

  Oglivy and I have remarkably similar medical histories. For years, we were misdiagnosed as conventional Night Terrors. It’s hard to explain your symptoms to adults:

  “Mom, I dreamed that fire was falling from outer space. And the fire was headed straight for these long-necked monsters. And oh, Mom, then the whole world was cratered and dark, and there were only these stooped, hairy creatures stealing eggs, and no more monsters. We have to save them!”

  “Mom, I dreamed that lava came bubbling out of the ground like blood from a cut. And the townspeople below were just picking tomatoes and singing oblivious Italian folk songs, Mom. We have to warn them!”

  “Mom, I dreamed that an 804-foot hydrogen dirigible full of Germans was about to burst into flames. We have to—”

  It’s just a dream, son, my mother would snap, turning on the scolding overhead light. Just a bad dream. We don’t have to do anything. Go back to sleep.

  Then I got to school and started to piece things together. I remember flipping through Our Storied Past!, eyes agog. The table of contents was like an index to my dreams. Mount Vesuvius, the Bubonic Plague, Tropical Storm Vita—I was a prophet. Annie calls them my postmonitions. Sometimes I think Ogli and I must be like imperfect antennae, the distress signals traveling like light from dead stars.

  I guess it wouldn’t be so bad, if the dreams didn’t have the fated, crimson-tinged horror of prophecy. Or if I could forget them before waking. It’s that dread, half-second lapse in the morning that gets me, when time’s still just a jumble of tenses at the foot of the bed. I start awake with the certainty that I can actually do something to prevent disaster. Strengthen the scaffolding, batten down the hatches, don’t drink the water, quarantine the sallow man, stay docked in the harbor, wear nonflammable apparel on the subway, avoid the Imperial City today, steer clear of glaciers! Between the dying echo of a dream explosion and my conscious brain reassuring me, like an alarm bell ringing in a pile of rubble. Too late: too late.

  Don’t get me wrong, there are some perks. I get to go to sleep disorder camp, after all. And I’ve been runner-up in the history bee for four consecutive years.

  It turns out that our tardiness is not a problem, because Zorba himself has yet to show. Annie keeps glancing from her watch to the door. We are just picking teams for the inaugural game of moonball when Zorba bursts into the cabin. He is sweating profusely. His face bulges like an eggplant, shiny and distended.

  “Here he is,” Annie sighs. “Campers, I’d like to present you with our founder and director, my husband, Zorba Zoulekevis….”

  “Heimdall is missing!” he thunders in his Mount Olympus baritone. A ripple goes through the crowd. Heimdall is a woolly Houdini, escaping his pen at least once a day. But the campgrounds are small, and walled in by trees. If Heimdall’s gone missing, that means he’s wandered into the marshy woods, towards the sinkhole.

  All the color drains out of Annie’s face. “Oh no. Oh, Zorba. What if the dogs are back?” Her voice drops to a whisper. “We musn’t panic the children.”

  The microphone is still on. The cabin echoes with the whine of feedback. Dozens of eyes dart around, searching for unseen dogs.

  “Dorry worry,” I whisper to one of the new campers. “There aren’t any dogs around here. Not that we can see, anyways. Annie’s a little, you know…” Ogli points at his temple and twirls his index finger like an unraveling kite string so as to indicate nuts. Ogli and I know that Annie’s just flashing back to her dream contagion again. Annie, prior to her recovery, caught a virulent strand of nightmare from somebody. For years, she dreamed of black dogs, wild dogs, a shadow pack running behind the green screen of trees and killing her lambs. In a separate assembly, Zorba warns us to avoid all mention of our canine pets in Annie’s presence.

  Zorba eases the microphone out of her hands. “We must find the missing sheep!” he intones. His voice booms through the mess hall with a messianic thunder. Annie passes out flashlights, and we all file out of the main cabin. We split off in pairs to comb the shallow end of the woods. I grab Emma’s wrist and drag her towards the shoreline. It’s a clear night, and the lake glints mirror-bright in the darkness. I steer her towards our reflection in the water. If I can just get her to see how right we look together, I think, see it the way I do, rising out of the lake with the eidetic, rippled force of dreams.

  “Emma…”

  A high, piercing shriek erupts from behind the trees. Emma and I exchange glances. Zorba has found the sheep.

  We keep a fuzzy flock of sheep, mostly as a testament to Zorba’s melancholy sense of humor. They huddle together in a pen down by the lake, next to the red turkey coop where Zorba fattens the Tryptophan Flock. There are only three sheep, so you can’t exactly induce sleep by counting them: Heimdall, Mouflon, and Merino. Even so, they still follow herd logic. Heimdall is our outlier. He was the brazen ram, pushing past the known limits of his grazing world. Mouflon was the bellwether sheep. If Mouflon decided it was safe to follow, then and only then would the rest of the herd, Merino and the occasional disoriented turkey, come trotting over.

  We all run to the source of the screaming. And there’s poor Heimdall, splayed out like a murdered cloud. He’s lying facedown in a puddle of tadpoles and woodsy murk. “His throat is slit!” someone shrieks, but I don’t even register this. Somehow, I just keep staring at Heimdall’s pink ears. They’ve flopped inside out, and I have to resist a powerful urge to flop them right side in. They look sad and veiny and indecent. Zorba kneels in the dirt and holds Heimdall’s head in his lap, sobbing with an island abandon, a salt-buoyed, voluptuous grief that no Mainland man would permit himself. Staring at Heimdall’s furry, triangular face, I feel a pulsing flood of adrenaline. I have never felt more awake than I do right now. Finally, “before” and “after” in their proper order.

  “Oglivy,” I whisper excitedly. “Something is killing the sheep. Do you know what this means?”

  “Gee-ros for lunch tomorrow?”

  I point back towards the pen. “It means we have to sneak out and stand watch tonight.”

  Oglivy frowns. “Couldn’t we commemorate the dead sheep my way? With pita, and Annie’s moussaka?”

  “Ogli, this is serious! Don’t you see how great this is? This isn’t like the dreams—this is a real tragedy! This is happening right now, in real time. And we can stop it.”

  I break off abruptly. Zorba comes lumbering out of the crowd, sweep
ing Annie into an ursine embrace. He buries his curly head into her shoulder. “Oh, Annie, our only ram!” The wiry hairs on his knuckles are flecked with blood.

  “My children,” he bellows, gathering himself up to his full height of five feet four inches. “Be not afraid. We will sleep through this!” But his roar is all volume and no conviction, the tinderless fire of a faithless preacher. “To your cabins! Lights out!”

  “The poor children,” we hear Annie sigh, “must be lidless with terror!”

  Heimdall’s death is the best thing that’s ever happened to us here at Z.Z.’s. All night, the air is charged with a giddy, carnival air of terror. The Insomniacs have a reason for their involuntary vigil. The Night Terrors feel justified in their fear. And we Others have another mystery to focus on besides our own disorders. Now that there’s an outside threat to unify us, the regular social hierarchy has been suspended. Apneics, Others, and Narcos all gossip merrily on the walk back to our cabins. I’m lucky, because I have Oglivy, so I’m never really alone at night. But you can see how for the other kids, Heimdall’s death is a real treat. It’s a bridge between our private terrors, this killer skulking around in our woods. Finally, the whole camp has a nightmare in common. It’s something to celebrate, like Christmas.

  “Who do you think did it, Elijah?” Ogli’s ruddy face is hanging upside down in front of me, his tall body arcing over the top bunk.

  Lights out was announced over an hour ago. Outside, rain drums down in silvery curtains, pasting the purple ferns against the screen. The walls bulge with it; you can almost hear it humming, the drowned sound of swollen wood. Bullfrogs chorus below our windowsill.