Robots swarmed over the field, prepping the rockets for takeoff or unloading cargo from those that had recently landed.

 

* * *

 

That night, I ran into Essie in my dream, but her great-grandfather wasn’t around. I was browsing an enormous, labyrinthine bookstore where the titles and bindings of the books kept changing every time I looked at them, and found Essie reading in what seemed to be the children’s book section.

“This doesn’t make sense, Ms. Brand,” she said.

“That’s because we’re dreaming,” I said. “Books in dreams are always changing what they say, and none of it makes much sense.”

“Oh, of course,” she said. Then she looked around at the other customers, and heaved a sigh of relief when none of them seemed to be her great-grandfather. “This is pretty, but it’s not as cool as a real bookstore. Do you want to go somewhere else?”

“Maybe a water-park?”

“Yay!”

So we changed the bookstore to a water-park and our clothes to swimsuits, and had fun on the waterslides for a while. Some of them were hundreds of feet high and made vertical loops on the way down, like a roller-coaster. While we were floating in the pool at the bottom of one of the slides, I told her a little about my conversation with her mother the evening before.

“So I know he’s a ghost, and that’s how he keeps getting into our dreams, and I know about your magic. And your mother and I thought that maybe you could use lucid dreaming to get rid of him permanently, next time he shows up.”

“But I already tried, and he keeps coming back.”

“It’s okay if it doesn’t work, or if you can’t figure it out. Your mother has a backup plan. But all we’ve tried so far is just skipping from one dream-place to another until he can’t follow us, right? That worked, at least for the rest of the night, so we didn’t try anything else.”

“Yeah. What else should I try?”

“Maybe next time he shows up, you can imagine a prison around him that he can’t break out of? See if that holds him. Or maybe imagine him strapped to a rocket, and fire it off into space.”

She giggled. “That sounds like fun!”

We brainstormed silly and serious ideas for dreaming him away until we woke up.

 

* * *

 

The next day, after a morning spent on multiplication and an afternoon on the history of China, I sat in with Patience and Essie for the first time on their “family history” lessons — actually magic lessons. It wasn’t much to look at — basically similar to guided meditation, with Patience trying to help Essie sense her magic clearly and understand what she was feeling from it. She didn’t go anywhere near actually casting a spell, or whatever one does. Essie several times expressed frustration at not getting anywhere, and Patience, true to her name, calmly let her brief tantrum wash over her and spoke calmly and soothingly until Essie returned to her meditation. I wondered why Essie was having such success with lucid dreaming and so little with this magical meditation. Was it simply the difference between sleeping and being awake?

After the meditation session, we all talked about the possibility of using lucid dreaming to banish Patience’s grandfather. Patience told Essie that she didn’t know whether my idea would work, but it was worth a try. “If it doesn’t work, don’t worry. We can do it with a ritual once you’ve learned enough magic.”

“But it’s taking forever!” Essie said with a groan.

“It’s only been four months since you started,” Patience said. “It took me longer than that to get full control of mine, and I was older than you when I first got my magic.”

Essie seemed deeply relieved not to have to keep her magic and her great-grandfather’s ghost secret from me anymore. She was cheerful and excited all that day, and several times we digressed from the lessons to talk about our plans for our next shared lucid dream and how we would trap or banish her great-grandfather.

But he didn’t show that night, or the next.

 

* * *

 

The following evening, after Essie went to bed, I asked Patience a few more questions that had occurred to me about the ghost and her family’s magic.

“Do you know if your grandfather is haunting you and Essie, or the house itself?” I asked. “Have you considered moving?”

She shook her head. “He followed us to North Carolina when we went to ask our relatives for help. He didn’t appear when we were awake, but he haunted Essie’s dreams two or three times, and mine once. And I don’t want to give up the house I grew up in, the only home Essie’s ever known, just because he won’t let go. It’s just a matter of time before we’re rid of him, once Essie’s old enough to work the ritual.”

“You said something about your relatives not wanting to help banish the ghost without strings attached. Is it okay if I ask what the strings were?”

She looked angry, but a moment later I realized she wasn’t angry at me. “Eunice, she’s the best spirit-wrangler in the North Carolina branch, wanted me to marry her grandson Gilbert. And let her daughter Augusta change Essie back into a boy. Not happening. Most of the others wanted something similar. Alan and Luella in Tennessee wanted a couple of houses for their kids, too — I considered giving them that, but they wouldn’t just take a couple of the other houses on the property, they wanted me to marry one of their sons, or promise that Essie would marry one of their grandkids when she grew up.”

“Ick.”

“Yeah.”

I asked a few more questions about her magic and whether she’d ever met any other ghosts besides her grandfather’s, but the answers aren’t really relevant here. We talked for another hour or two before I went to bed.

 

* * *

 

Three nights later, I dreamed of shopping for clothes in a store where nothing fit me and nothing would have looked good on me if it did. I was getting increasingly frustrated when suddenly Essie was there, tugging on my skirt and saying urgently, “He’s right behind me! We’ve got to go!”

“Come on,” I said, realizing I was dreaming. I took her hand and we ran through the endless racks of clothes, not risking a glance over our shoulders just yet. “Remember what we planned — one, two, three and go!”

The store around us changed. We were at the edge of a barren island, next to a dock with a small motorboat. As we scrambled into the boat, we saw Essie’s great-grandfather approaching at that sort of fast, implacable walk that you see in horror movies.

“Okay, now let’s surround him with a prison, like we practiced,” I said. “You focus on that while I get the boat started.”

I tried to split my focus between starting the boat (I had no experience with actual motorboats in real life, but that didn’t matter) and helping Essie visualize a doorless, windowless prison springing up around her great-grandfather. It wasn’t long before the prison walls started growing out of the rocky ground. But the wall directly in front of him wasn’t as sturdy as the others, and collapsed in a heap of stones as he reached it. He scrambled over it like a man half his age and continued his implacable walk toward us.

“Time to try the next thing,” I said, laying a comforting hand on Essie’s. I took the boat out to sea and we jumped to the next place we’d planned.

A spaceport, based loosely on Cape Canaveral but a good deal more futuristic-looking, with tall curvilinear buildings surrounding a vast field of Destination Moon-style rockets. Robots swarmed over the field, prepping the rockets for takeoff or unloading cargo from those that had recently landed. Essie and I stood near the edge of the field, by the security office.

When her great-grandfather arrived a few moments later, Essie and I shouted “Get him!” On command, the security guards and the maintenance robots both swarmed him, overpowering him and forcing him into the cargo hold of one of the rockets, and then shutting him in so they could prep it for launch. The launch was a hundred times quicker than any real rocket launch, and soon the rocket was rising into the air. I heaved a sigh of relief.

“I think we did it,” I said.

“I hope so,” Essie said.

The rocket blew up. That wasn’t as planned. We made a glass dome appear over us to shield us from the falling wreckage, though the bulk of it fell a few hundred feet away. And out of the wreckage, the old man kept walking.

He was on fire, but it didn’t seem to slow him down.

“Okay, third backup plan,” I said. “One, two, three, go.”

We were standing in a little park in a big city. Overhead, patrolling superheroes flew or swung from building to building, desperate for a supervillain to validate their questionable lifestyles. We were about to give them one.

Moments after we arrived, Essie’s great-grandfather appeared a dozen yards away from us. He was still on fire. As soon as he arrived, we shouted “Supervillain!” and pointed at him. The heroes descended on him en masse.

While they were pummeling him and shooting energy blasts at him and binding him with nets and fast-drying chemicals, Essie pulled off her dress, revealing the superhero costume beneath. She looked up at me. “You’ve got this,” I encouraged her. “Go ahead.”

She held up her hands and a portal opened between us and the melee with the still-burning ghost. It opened wider and wider, and when it was big enough to swallow the old man, I stepped beside it, where I could see the fight, and shouted: “Throw him in here!”

It took a moment for the heroes to shift gears. One of the stronger ones managed to lift him for a moment, but his flames flared up higher than ever and the hero dropped him and staggered back. Another, more flameproof hero grabbed him and tried to do a judo throw into the portal. He fell short, landing a couple of feet away from the portal. Before the other heroes could react, he was on his feet and lunging toward me.

I tried to dodge, but before I knew it, I was burning and choking as he clasped his flaming hands around my neck and squeezed.

“Wake up!” Essie screamed. “Get Mommy!”

A moment before I woke up, I saw the portal turning and starting to move toward the burning ghost.

I sat up, gasping for breath. I touched the skin of my neck for a moment — it wasn’t really burned, thankfully. It had felt so real I was afraid... But then I remembered Essie’s injunction and jumped out of bed, stumbling toward the door in the dark, then down the hall to the stairs. I hadn’t wanted to wake up, I’d wanted to stay and help Essie, but her command had thrown me out of the dream and out of sleep entirely.

I managed to slap the light switch at the bottom of the stairs before I took them two at a time. Essie’s bedroom or her mother’s? Her mother’s, I decided. A moment later I was pounding hard on the door at the end of the hall. “Wake up!” I shouted. “Essie needs us!”

Needed her mom, probably. I didn’t know what I could do now that I wasn’t sharing Essie’s dream anymore. But I kept banging on the door for another thirty seconds or so until Patience opened the door, blinking sleepily.

“What’s wrong?”

“Come on, we’ve got to check on Essie. She told me to wake up and get you.”

She paused to grab something from a shelf, then we hurried down the hall to Essie’s bedroom, Patience outrunning me. She flung the door open and turned on the lamp by the door.

Essie lay thrashing in bed, moaning, the covers having been tossed off onto the floor. Various toys and books were flying around the room, banging into each other and the walls. And hovering over the bed, bending over Essie’s head, was the ghost. Not a translucent version of the creepy old man from my dreams, but a creature of shadow, bigger than life, with no discernible features.

“Turn on the rest of the lights,” Patience commanded me. I hastened to do so while she advanced toward Essie and the shadow-thing and began chanting in a language I didn’t know, brandishing the thing she’d brought with her at it. I didn’t get a good look at it until later, but it was a skewed polyhedron of some dark wood, kind of like a cube but with the facets not parallel.

Essie’s room didn’t have an overhead light, just several lamps. By the time I had turned on all the lamps, dodging the madly hurtling toys, the contrast between the shadow-thing and the rest of the room was stronger than ever. I thought it might have gotten a little smaller, whether because of Patience’s chanting or the additional lamps, but it was just as dark or darker.

I had no idea what to do next. I didn’t want to ask Patience and distract her from whatever spell she was casting. And I didn’t think I wanted to wake Essie up; waking, she had no conscious control of her magic, but dreaming she still had a chance against her great-grandfather, though obviously she hadn’t defeated him yet. Was he being slowly forced toward the portal by a bevy of superheroes, or trying to strangle Essie the way he had me, or what?

Finally I ducked down and crawled to the edge of the bed. The shadow turned toward me for a moment, but didn’t hurt me, not like he had in the dream. Then it turned its attention back to Essie. I took Essie’s hand and held it through her thrashing, and said, “You can do this, Essie. You’re strong, you’re powerful, you’re an amazing girl. Throw him in the portal. You don’t need the superheroes to do it, you can do it yourself. Come on...”

Patience was still chanting when I got to that point, but about then she made a frustrated noise and joined me on the other side of the bed, putting a soothing hand on Essie’s forehead and joined me in encouraging Essie, hoping some of it would get through into her dream and help her.

At that point the shadow started talking, and I faltered, but managed to keep talking to Essie after a moment. I couldn’t make out the individual words, it was all garbled, but I could feel the hate coming through as much as in any of the dreams. Patience flinched, and paused longer than I did before she started stroking Essie’s forehead and talking to her again; I think she heard the shadow’s words more distinctly.

We’d kept that up for another minute or two when the shadow suddenly shrank to a point and vanished, and the room lit up much brighter. The hurtling toys and books slowed down for a moment and then dropped to the floor. And Essie opened her eyes.

“Mommy? Ms. Brand? Oh, thank you! Is he gone?”

“It looks like it,” Patience said, tears in her eyes. “Let’s hope he stays gone.”

Essie was exhausted from her tossing and turning, but she didn’t want to go back to sleep, so we all went downstairs and fixed ourselves some nachos and cheese, and sat around talking manically about the events of the night until the tiredness finally caught up with us. Apparently, after Essie had forced me to wake up, she had retreated from the ghost, pulling the portal with her, and then tried to trap him in it several times as he advanced toward her before turning and running in panic, dropping the portal. She’d changed the scene a couple of times, bringing the superheroes with her to Antarctica, hoping the cold would put out his flames, and then onto the surface of the moon, which did put out his flames, but didn’t slow him down as much as her spacesuit slowed her. Finally she felt a sudden burst of confidence and courage — Patience and I shared a look as she said that — and turned to face him, making the biggest portal yet — one he couldn’t dodge when he pushed it toward him.

“But where was the portal supposed to send him?” Patience asked.

“Nowhere,” I said, Essie echoing me.

 

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