Compass of Dreams

by Pierdomenico Baccalario

  My dad rolled his eyes. “Why do we need a vet? To tell us that our sheep are missing?”

  “A vet won’t be any help figuring out who destroyed my nets,” a fisherman said. “We need a detective.”

  “What if we organized some sort of night watch?”

  “That would cost less than hiring a cop or detective.”

  Everyone agreed with that. We Scottish love the idea of saving money.

  “We could have groups of two or three villagers, with rifles, patrol the fences of the farms were the sheep disappeared.”

  “Yes! That way we’ll catch them — sooner or later.”

  The men talked for a few more minutes, eventually deciding to meet up that evening at the pub to sort out the details. Then most of the villagers departed, leaving my dad, Barragh, and the reverend. I joined them, pretending to have just arrived.

  When my dad saw me approach, he pointed in my direction. “We could ask the Lilys for help,” he said. “My son says they’re intelligent people who have traveled all over the world. Perhaps an outside opinion would be useful to us . . .”

  Reverend Prospero nodded in agreement, but Barragh grunted. “Do you know what I think, Camas?” he asked.

  Barragh had used my father’s first name. Whenever I heard it spoken, I swelled with pride, for Camas McPhee was a great name — just trust me on that one.

  “I’m no psychic, McBlack,” my father said through clenched teeth.

  That’s why he looks familiar! I realized. The McBlacks were the crankiest family in the county. They lived in a lonely little house nicknamed Scary Villa on an island across the bay. Nearly no one in Applecross went there, and the McBlacks almost never came down to the village.

  “I don’t trust the Lilys at all,” Barragh McBlack said. “Not one bit.”

  My dad snorted. “That doesn’t surprise me. Does your family trust anybody?”

  “I’m not joking around here,” Barragh said. “We can’t underestimate the danger we’re facing.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” my dad said. “This is nothing supernatural or strange. We’ll figure it out if we work together.”

  For a few long moments, no one said anything.

  “She registered for the marathon, you know,” Reverend Prospero said, breaking the silence.

  My dad raised an eyebrow and Barragh tilted his head. “Who?” my dad asked.

  “Old lady Cumai,” the reverend said. “She was very sporty, you know. You see, she was training for the Loch Ness marathon in September.”

  “So she was fit? Then it’s even more suspicious that she died of a heart attack,” McBlack said. “Something strange is going on . . .”

  For the first time that night, I agreed with Barragh McBlack: it was pretty weird for an eighty-year-old woman to be training for a marathon.

  Later that evening, Dad ate dinner by himself, then told my mom he was leaving again to go check on the Mulligans’ place with the rest of the night watch. My mom asked him if he was sure that was a good idea, but he left without answering her.

  Outside, I heard the truck’s engine struggle to turn over before it started. As Dad pulled away, Doug told me that our sheep had been acting really weird lately. Instead of grazing out in the fields, they huddled together near the farm — far away from the woods.

  Dad stayed out past midnight. When he finally got home, even from my bedroom I could tell he was exhausted. I heard him shuffle his feet, throw his boots on the floor, and stomp up the stairs like his legs were cinder blocks. Whatever he and the other watch members had been looking for, they hadn’t found it.

  Meanwhile, I couldn’t sleep. I admit, I was scared. Scared of whatever it was that broke the nets in the bay and stole the sheep. I could tell Patches was nervous, too, by the way he flailed his paws in the air while he slept like he was trying to run away from a nightmare.

  I sighed. “There’s no way I’m getting any sleep tonight.”

  I jumped out of bed and glanced out the window. There were countless shining stars in the sky. For some reason, their cold and distant twinkling made me feel like my problems weren’t a really big deal.

  Aiby and Doug, sheep thieves, tattered fishnets . . . none of it was really worth worrying about, though old lady Cumai’s death was a real bummer. After all, she would’ve been the perfect person to help me solve all the odd mysteries that were happening in town. She seemed to know everything — lots of weird stories about things like magical creatures of the sea. For a while now, I’d been meaning to visit her and ask her to tell me some of them again. But I kept postponing the trip, and now it was too late.

  I glanced out at the pasture. I saw a man. He was standing in the field near the edge of the woods.

  And he was staring right at my house.

  I was paralyzed. I couldn’t look away. The man was draped in shadow, but something sparkled in his face. It reminded me of the light in the rearview mirror of my dad’s van whenever he drove away from me.

  He was a big guy and wore a long cape that looked like it was made from many different pieces of fabric. His hands were in front of his chest, and he kept repeating this weird gesture, almost as if he was praying, then stopping, then praying again.

  I narrowed my eyes. There was no doubt about it: he was looking right at me.

  “Patches!” I whispered in the dark.

  My friend leaped to my side. Together, we snuck downstairs without making a peep. When I pushed the screen door open, I felt shivers run down my spine and through my bare feet.

  I slowly left the house. Patches sniffed the air.

  The man was gone.

  “He was just there,” I said, pointing at the end of the grass and the fence. “Right over there by the edge of the woods.”

  Without thinking, I began sprinting across the grass toward the woods. As I ran barefoot in the moonlight in pursuit of the shadow of a man I saw from the window of my house, I began to worry that I’d lost my mind. At the same time, I had this weird sensation that I was exactly where I was supposed be. As if all this madness made perfect sense in some way.

  One thing was for sure: I certainly felt alive.

  So who was that man? And why was he there? I thought as my feet slapped against the grass. And what was he doing with his hands?

  Patches let out little barks as he followed at my heels. His presence gave me comfort. When we reached the point where I’d seen that weird man, Patches nudged his nose into the ground and sniffed.

  “Can you smell him, Patches? Can you?”

  Patches growled. His fur stood up on his neck.

  “Good boy,” I told him, relieved to know I hadn’t lost my mind. “Where did he go, huh? Did he run into the woods, boy?”

  I placed my hands on the fence and traced an imaginary path with my eyes that the man might have taken. Who could he be? I wondered. A cattle thief, a hunter? A homeless person?

  A voice in my head kept telling me to go back inside, but I jumped over the fence and Patches scurried under it. Together, we walked toward the woods.

  The stars above looked particularly bright that night. As we neared the forest, I saw that some leaves on the closest trees were shaking despite the lack of a breeze. I wondered if the man had brushed against them as he’d made his escape.

  The grass was dried out and dead where the man had been standing. Burnt. I kneeled to take a closer look, and Patches nuzzled up next to me. I found myself running my hand through his warm fur.

  Go back inside, a little voice in my head said. Just then, I heard a voice come from the woods. It sounded sweet like honey. I felt strangely compelled to enter the woods.

  As I stepped into the tree line, I heard the sound of grass and branches being crunched underfoot. I tensed my muscles and prepared for the worst.

  “Finley?” someone called out for me.

&
nbsp; I turned to see my dad standing on the other side of the fence. His feet were bare, his hair was a mess, and he didn’t have a shirt on. He held his old rifle in his hands, the barrel sparkling menacingly in the moonlight. “Is that you, Finley?”

  I gulped. Slowly, I walked toward the fence and raised my hand to make sure he knew who I was.

  “Get back to the house! Now!” my dad yelled.

  I glanced at the woods, then down at the footprints in the dead grass. The strange noise I’d heard coming from the woods was gone now. Once again, I wondered if I’d imagined everything.

  I jumped back over the fence and followed my dad to the house. Patches followed me. Both of us glanced back at the woods every few steps.

  “What were you doing over there?” my dad asked. He wasn’t looking at me. Instead, his eyes were focused on his sheep huddling nearby.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I pointed at the place where I saw the man. “I thought I saw someone standing by the edge of the woods.”

  Dad slowly lowered his rifle. “You were probably dreaming,” he suggested.

  “No, Dad, I swear! I saw a man — a really tall guy wearing a long cape. But he didn’t look very dangerous to me.”

  “We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” he said. “Come on inside, we’ll keep watch for the rest of the night from the kitchen.”

  As we entered the house, we closed the windows and our old front door. Dad made some coffee while I leaned against the counter. We stared out the window, neither of us saying a single word.

  Then, when the morning light crept over the horizon, we finally went to bed.

  I felt really weird the next day, and it wasn’t because I was exhausted from the lack of sleep. Every single noise and every little breeze gave me goose bumps. Every sudden movement made me shiver.

  “Is everything okay, Fin?” my mom asked, noticing I wasn’t eating my breakfast.

  “Yes.” Her voice was irritating to me, like the sound of white noise.

  Dad was already gone when I’d woken up. I asked Mom where he went.

  “He took the van somewhere,” she said. “To town, I think.”

  I grabbed my mug of coffee and left the kitchen. As I stepped outside, the daylight made the field look much smaller than the previous night. That was confusing because it felt like I’d run for quite some time in the dark.

  I walked toward the fence. Patches followed by my side. When we reached it, he jumped backward and barked at the woods. The grass seemed normal now. There weren’t any dark or burnt spots visible.

  I shrugged and headed back toward the farm. I spotted my brother moving some bags of animal feed. “Hey, Doug,” I said.

  “What’s up?” he said without stopping.

  “Have you ever heard anything about men living in the woods?”

  He looked at me in surprise. “What do you mean?”

  “Men living in the woods,” I repeated. “Ever heard of anything like that?”

  “Why would men live in the woods?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “That’s why I was asking.”

  Doug shrugged and kept working, so I left before he could ask me to help him.

  I brought the mug back inside the house, devoured a slice of warm pie that my mom had just baked, and hopped on my bike. I had the beach testing notebook with me, but I didn’t feel like working. I had too much on my mind. Instead, I biked the coastal road along the river, the mill, and the cliffs, heading toward Reginald Bay. Toward the Enchanted Emporium.

  I jumped off my bike as soon as I got to the weird sign with the arrow. Together, Patches and I crossed through the woods to the road on the small bay. Patches immediately began to chase the many seagulls in the area.

  Moments later, we were in front of a familiar red building. The Enchanted Emporium’s front door was open.

  “Aiby!” I called. “Are you home?”

  A seagull flew over my head, let out a cry, then disappeared over the sea.

  I waited. “Aiby?”

  I felt like I’d gone back in time to when I’d first stood in front of that door with my mailbag and a strange letter in my hands.

  Finally, Aiby leaned out the window on the second floor. She wore her usual, brilliant smile that I liked so much. You know, the kind of smile that means someone is happy to see you.

  “So you saved yourself from your pants!” she said.

  “You mean your dad’s pants,” I said.

  She leaned further out the window and smiled sweetly. In that moment, I heard every sound in the entire bay: the waves, the seagulls, and most of all, my rapid heartbeat.

  “Are you coming down?” I asked.

  “Do you have mail for me?”

  “No. But we have to talk.”

  “Someone strange is in Applecross,” I said as soon as she appeared in the doorway.

  She had a cup of milk and a box with her. The label read:

  Dark Chocolate

  Grimm Cookies

  “Just one strange person?” she said, gesturing for me to follow her. We stopped at the edge of the cliffs. I saw that the steps on the staircase leading down to the water had been repaired.

  “My dad wants to build a small dock for himself,” Aiby said. “It’d be nice to have a boat, don’t you think?”

  “Sure,” I said, but all I could think about was Doug’s boating adventure with her.

  “He went to town to buy some wood for the steps,” she said.

  We sat down and glanced out at the sea far below us. “So, who’s this strange someone?” Aiby asked.

  “Actually, I don’t really know,” I said. “I saw him last night — well, actually this morning, from my bedroom window about an hour or two before sunrise. He was across the field, near the woods. And . . . he was staring at me.”

  Aiby opened the box. I saw there were two cookies inside. She grabbed one. I tried to grab the last one but she stopped me. “Wait,” she said, and closed the box. She dunked her cookie in the cup of milk and then ate it. “Welcome to the cookie challenge! See, you have to dunk the cookie in the milk as far as you can without the cookie breaking,” she said while chewing. “If the cookie breaks and falls in, you lose.”

  When she opened the box again, there were two cookies inside. “Whoa!” I said. “Are these . . . magic cookies?”

  “The box is getting old, I think,” she said. “Not that long ago, it became filled with cookies every time you closed it, but I think it got damaged when we moved. You have to remember to leave at least one in the box before closing it, or it won’t refill.”

  I frowned at her. “Aiby, did you hear what I told you?”

  “Did you hear what I told you?” she asked.

  I grabbed a cookie and put it inside the milk. “Yes,” I said. “But what I’m talking about is serious.”

  “Everything is serious,” she said.

  I dunked the cookie about halfway into her milk. Immediately, it split in two and the bottom half fell into the milk.

  “Like I said, everything is serious,” she said. “But it’s difficult to determine the right moment to discuss something in particular.”

  I grunted, stood, and walked a few steps away from her. Sitting there in the sun, Aiby’s skin gleamed like bronze, and her dark freckles made her eyes look even greener than normal.

  “You’re going to make me ask, aren’t you?” I said.

  Aiby closed and reopened the box. “Ask me what?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I do?” she asked. Her cookie crumbled onto her weird, multicolored t-shirt. Whenever she wore it, she reminded me of an ancient princess.

  I sighed, realizing I’d have to say the words. “When are you going to tell me the truth about . . . you and Doug?”

  Aiby’s eyes opened wide. “Huh? Me a
nd Doug?”

  “The truth, Aiby. I can handle it.”

  Aiby laughed her musical laugh. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  It seemed like she was making fun of me, so I started to walk away.

  “Finley?” she called after me, but I didn’t stop.

  “I get it,” I said over my shoulder. “I mean, there’s nothing wrong with going on a boat trip with Doug, but why do it without telling me? There’s nothing more selfish than —”

  “Boredom,” Aiby said.

  I stopped. A nearby seagull was staring at me like it was interested in whether I was going to stay or leave. “What did you say?” I asked without turning around.

  “I said that I went with Doug to look for the Flowers of Boredom. You know, for Adele Babele’s order.”

  I blinked a few times, unsure what to say next. “And how does one find Flowers of Boredom?” I asked.

  Aiby chuckled. “How do you think, Mr. Smarty-pants?” Aiby teased. I heard the box close and then reopen.

  “You know,” I said. “Eating all those cookies can’t be good for you.”

  “Are you worried about me, Finley?” she said.

  More teasing, I thought.

  I sighed and started walking away. Just then, the seagull flew into the sky. A moment later, Aiby’s hand spun me around to face her. I found myself embraced in a hug. The tip of my nose rested on her neck, and her long hair brushed against my face.

  “Finley,” she said, holding me tight. “Now that I’ve had my breakfast, how about you tell me why you really came here?”

  I couldn’t remember why I’d come to see her, but I didn’t really care. In that moment, all I wanted was to stay right there in her arms forever.

  Gently, she pulled away from me. “Well?” she said, smiling warmly.

  I felt warm and woozy, but I managed to say, “A strange man came from the woods and stared at my house last night,” I said quietly. “I’ve never seen him before.”

  “A strange man?” she asked.