Blair’s Nightmare

by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  As soon as the decision was made, everyone swung into action. David went looking for a padlock, Amanda rounded up some old blankets to make a dog bed, and the rest of them went along as Blair coaxed Nightmare into the tool shed. He wouldn’t go in at first, even when Blair told him to, and it all took quite a bit of time. They’d barely gotten everyone back into the house and the little kids upstairs to bed, when they heard Dad’s car in the driveway.

  Dad and Molly looked surprised to find Pete Garvey there at that hour of the night; but before they had time to say anything, David and Amanda started telling them about the prisoners and how they hadn’t left the area after all.

  Molly said, “Oh no,” in a very upset tone of voice, and Dad looked worried and asked some questions about exactly what the announcement had said.

  “Well, that is discouraging,” he said at last. “I’d thought that was one problem we didn’t have hanging over us any longer.”

  “I thought so too,” Pete said. “I thought those guys were long gone or I sure wouldn’t have come all the way over here alone in the dark.”

  So then Dad offered to drive Pete home, and Pete accepted very quickly, and everyone else went to bed.

  David wondered about that for a few minutes—about Pete being nervous about riding home on the motorcycle. It was an interesting thought. It hadn’t occurred to him before that a six-foot guy on a cycle could be nervous about anything.

  He didn’t think about it for long however. What he went to sleep thinking about was the fact that a fantastically enormous dog was actually hidden in the Stanley tool shed. It didn’t seem possible. As he got sleepier, it seemed more and more like the whole thing had been a Blair-type fantasy and when he woke up in the morning the dog would be gone.

  Actually, it was.

  Chapter Eleven

  THE PLAN WAS FOR DAVID and Blair to get up early and let Nightmare out of the tool shed. They were to feed him and let him exercise—out behind the garage where they couldn’t be seen from the house—and then shut him back up. The only trouble was, Blair wouldn’t wake up. If Blair had some kind of internal alarm system that went off when Nightmare needed attention, it apparently didn’t function at six o’clock in the morning. Finally David gave up and went by himself.

  In the kitchen he tiptoed around fixing a pan of leftovers and bread and milk. Outside, the wind had died down to a weak whisper, but the yard was full of reminders of its former power. Dead leaves, twigs and small branches were scattered everywhere. On the way out to the tool shed David wondered what kind of a reception he would get when he opened the door—without Blair there to tell Nightmare that everything was all right. But he wasn’t too worried. Dogs usually liked him, and the pan of food ought to make a good peace offering.

  No sound came from the tool shed. Putting the pan on the ground, he took out the key and unlocked the padlock. Then he picked up the food, and holding it out in front of him, he slowly opened the door, while he said, “Good dog. Good dog, Nightmare,” in a calm soothing voice. The shed was empty.

  For just a moment he was seized by a weird dreamlike idea that something entirely supernatural had happened. That Nightmare hadn’t been a real dog after all—that he’d somehow dematerialized or turned into something entirely different. Or that the whole thing had been an incredibly vivid dream, or some kind of crazy vision. But then he noticed the broken plank.

  The tool shed, like all the buildings on the property, was very old, and the wood was possibly a little deteriorated, but still it must have taken a lot of force to tear the plank loose. On closer inspection, it was apparent that the loose plank, as well as the one next to it, had been scratched until they resembled some kind of wide-ribbed wooden corduroy—and until the nails holding them had pulled free from the flooring.

  After he’d pushed the plank back more or less in place and pulled the lawn mower and a five-gallon gasoline can over in front of the scratched places, David went out and searched the yard. There was no sign of Nightmare anywhere.

  Every one else was waking up when he got back in the house. As David tiptoed down the upstairs hall, Amanda popped out of her room, and a moment later Janie and Esther appeared. They all followed David into his room, where Blair was just climbing out of bed.

  The little kids took the news calmly. “He’ll come back tonight,” Esther said, and Blair nodded. “He doesn’t like to be shut up.”

  “But what if he doesn’t?” Amanda said. “What if he goes back to wherever he came from?”

  “He’s come back a lot of times before,” David reminded her.

  “Yeah, but he might stop. Or something might happen to him. Like what if he meets those prisoners out there, and they shoot him or something. We’ve got to find a better way to keep him here.”

  David shook his head. “I don’t think it’s going to be easy.”

  “We could keep him in the house,” Esther said.

  Blair looked delighted. “He could sleep with me.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” David said.

  “Who’s being ridiculous now?” It was Molly, standing in the doorway. Everyone whirled around and stared at her, and then they all started talking at once.

  “The Bleep was,” Amanda said.

  “Tesser was,” Janie said.

  “I was not,” Esther said.

  “Everybody shut up,” David said. “Did you want something, Molly?”

  Molly laughed. “Not me. I just wondered if anybody else did. Like breakfast, for instance.”

  It was Saturday. The longest Saturday in the history of civilization. All day long David tried to get interested in things he usually looked forward to doing on weekends, with no luck at all. He wound up spending most of the day prowling restlessly around the house and yard, running into other members of the family who seemed to be prowling around, too. Where the kids were concerned, the reason was obvious, but they weren’t the only ones. Jeff and Molly also seemed to be restless, and they didn’t even know about Nightmare.

  Right after lunch Pete showed up briefly. One of his older brothers had dropped him off to pick up the motorcycle, but he had to get right back to the farm.

  “I got work to do,” he told David. “My old man said he’d have my hide if I didn’t come right back.” He leaned forward suddenly and David stiffened, but Pete only whispered hoarsely. “How’s the mutt?”

  When David explained, he shook his head. “Hey, that’s too bad. But maybe the kid’s right. Maybe he’ll show up again.”

  David said he hoped so, and Pete nodded and then stood there for a while, astraddle the motorcycle, but not making any move to start it up. “How about Amanda?” he said at last.

  David was puzzled. “What about Amanda?” he asked.

  “What does she think—about the mutt?”

  “She thinks he’ll come back tonight, I guess,” David said. “At least she hopes he will.”

  “Yeah. Well-uh-where is she?”

  “Oh, she’s around,” David said quickly. “She was out here just a few minutes ago.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, I got to be going, I guess,” Pete said, but he didn’t. At least not for several more minutes. He got off the motorcycle and started fiddling around with it—checking the oil and looking in the gas tank in between looking around the yard and up at the windows of the house. But at last he climbed on the bike and roared off down the road.

  An hour or two later David was sitting on the back steps looking toward the hills and thinking, when Janie suddenly came out and banged the door behind her. Then she stomped across the porch and sat down beside him with her chin on her fists.

  “What’s the matter?” David asked.

  Janie sighed. “I don’t get any allowance tomorrow.”

  He tried to keep from grinning. Janie lost her allowance more often than any kid in the family, in spite of the fact that she really liked money a lot. “What’ve you been up to this time?”

  “Nothing.” Janie’s voice squeaked with indignation. �
�But I said I was.” Suddenly she raised her head. Her eyes lit up, and the frown wrinkles disappeared from her forehead. “It was a sacrifice. A noble sacrifice just like in Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates. I sacrificed my allowance for Nightmare.”

  “What are you talking about?” David said.

  “Dad heard me talking to Blair about Nightmare.”

  “Janie!”

  “It’s all right. He didn’t hear very much—just something about Blair talking dog language. But then he made me come in his study, and he scolded me about playing imaginary-dog with Blair. So I had to confess and say I was sorry and everything. And he said didn’t I remember that I’d promised not to, and so I said yes, and then he said I don’t get any allowance this week. But I didn’t squeal.”

  So David congratulated her on her noble sacrifice and promised to give her part of his allowance. That really cheered her up a lot. After a while she said, “Could you tell Amanda and the twins about it? About how I had to sacrifice my allowance? And tell them to give me some of theirs, too. Okay?”

  Then David said didn’t she think her sacrifice would be a lot less noble that way, and she said she’d rather be unnoble than broke. So he agreed to ask Amanda and the twins, and Janie got up off the steps and skipped across the yard to the swing tree and started swinging.

  It was just a little later that David heard Dad and Molly quarreling. He’d decided to do a little reading, and he was on his way to his room to get a book when he heard voices coming out of Dad’s study.

  “Lots of children have imaginary friends when they’re little,” Molly was saying, “and I don’t think it hurts them a bit. I think it’s an indication of a rich inner life.”

  “I agree.” Dad was using the super calm voice he used when he was arguing. “Lots of children of three or four. But Blair is six. And Mrs. Bowen sees it as part of a larger pattern—a pattern of failure to deal with reality. Of his lack of ability to hear and follow instructions, for instance.”

  “That woman!” Molly’s voice was angry. “If I were Blair’s teacher, I’d make a big thing about Blair’s dog. I’d help him write stories about it, and I’d have the whole class draw pictures of it.”

  “But you’re not his teacher,” Dad said.

  “I know, but I am his mother—all right, stepmother—but I feel like his mother. And I’m not going to stop him if he wants to tell me about his dog. Not even if you take away my allowance, too, like poor little Janie.”

  David didn’t want to listen. It was a lot like the way you crane your neck to stare at accidents on the highway, knowing you’ll hate it if you see anything and yet not able to stop. So he went on listening, and hating it, until he heard someone on the stairs. Then he hurried on to his own room.

  On the window seat with a good book, he couldn’t keep his mind on what he was reading. Even though he kept reminding himself that Dad and Molly got along great most of the time, and that a little argument now and then didn’t necessarily mean divorce or any thing like that, he couldn’t seem to relax and forget about what he’d overheard. It was as if the quarrel about Blair’s dog kept getting mixed up with other more distant memories—memories of losing one mother already, and the fact that Molly had already gotten one divorce.

  He went on sitting there, staring at his book, until Blair came in and got Rolor out of his cage and started playing with him on the floor. Blair was trying to teach the crow how to play checkers. So far Rolor had learned to wait for his turn and then to hop over and pick up a red checker. What he did with the checker didn’t usually make a whole lot of sense, but still it was a pretty good start—for a crow. On about his fourth move he actually jumped one of Blair’s checkers, and David got really excited; but after that things started going downhill. On his next turn Rolor flew back to his cage with the checker and put it in his water dish. The whole scene wasn’t too enlightening, but it was a lot more entertaining than reading the same paragraph over six times and worrying.

  It wasn’t exactly what you would call relaxed at dinner that night. In fact, if the dinner table and everyone around it had been balanced on a high wire over the Grand Canyon, there couldn’t have been more careful consideration of every move. It figured. The kids were all keyed up about Nightmare—worrying if he would be back tonight as well as worrying that somebody was going to get careless and give away the whole secret. And it was pretty obvious that Dad and Molly were hiding something, too.

  Actually they were smiling a lot and being super polite and thoughtful to each other—answering very quickly when the other one spoke and passing each other things they already had a plate full of. If you didn’t know, you might think they were a couple of very nice people—who just happened to make everyone around them want to scream. But of course David knew. They hadn’t finished quarrelling yet.

  As usual, Blair went to sleep almost immediately after dinner. Watching him conking out right in the middle of a story Molly was reading to him and Esther, David remembered wondering why Blair’s tendency to sleep a lot seemed to be getting worse. He’d worried about it, and he knew Molly and Dad had, too. It was too bad they couldn’t be told that there was a perfectly logical reason for it. It was too bad he couldn’t say, “It’s nothing to worry about, Molly. It’s just that he spends a couple of hours every night playing with his dog.” That would really fix things up. Or—he suppressed a grin—he might say, “It’s just that he has a Nightmare that wakes him up every night.”

  Bedtime came at last, but David didn’t sleep. Or at least he didn’t plan to. But he was doing something very like it when he heard Blair calling him. He immediately leaped out of bed and staggered to the window where Blair was looking out into a still dark night.

  “He’s there,” Blair said. “Nightmare’s down there. I’ll go tell Janie and Tesser.” A few minutes later they were all out in the garden gathered around Nightmare as he wolfed down a big panful of food.

  He didn’t growl at all that night. He sniffed at each of them in turn before he started eating; and when he finished, he went around again sniffing and licking their hands as if he were saying thanks. The little kids all patted him, so when he came to David, he tried it too; and the dog didn’t seem to mind. Pretty soon they were all patting him at once.

  It was a strange sensation, patting a dog whose head was almost as high as your chin. There was a heavy choke collar on the strong, thick neck, but no license or identification tags. The rough shaggy coat felt softer than it looked, but under the hair the bones were very close to the surface. Each knob on the backbone was clear and distinct, as were the huge arching bones of the ribcage. It seemed that, in spite of all the food scrounging Janie and the twins had been doing, Nightmare hadn’t really been getting enough to eat.

  “Poor old boy,” David said. “Poor dog.” And Nightmare did something mournful-looking with his shaggy eyebrows and drooped his ears flat against his head. He looked so sorry for himself that they all laughed, and he liked that. He bounced around bumping into people and licking their faces—and when a dog as tall as Nightmare wanted to lick your face, there wasn’t much you could do about it, except let him.

  David was scratching the side of Nightmare’s head just above his eye when his fingers hit a lump. Under the shaggy hair was a long rough welt that ran for several inches along the side of the huge head. “Hey, Blair,” David said. “What’s this?”

  “Somebody hurt him,” Blair said. “It’s almost well now.”

  Amanda and David examined the almost healed wound and then stared at each other. “Somebody shot him,” Amanda whispered.

  David nodded.

  Chapter Twelve

  SOMEONE HAD SHOT NIGHTMARE AND almost killed him. David felt a rush of anger, and then a fierce determination to keep it from happening again. To somehow find a way to keep Nightmare from wandering around where somebody might take another shot at him.

  “I bet those prisoners shot him,” Janie said.

  For once one of Janie’s theories mad
e some sense. The prisoners supposedly had a gun, and they were out there somewhere in the same area where Nightmare had been living. “Could be,” David said.

  “I’ll bet it was that troll, Golanski,” Amanda said.

  “No, Golanski has a shotgun,” David reminded her. “This wasn’t done by bird shot. It was a big bullet.”

  “Well, I bet somebody shot him when he was prowling around trying to find food in their yard. We just have to find some way to keep him here—in our own yard.”

  Which was exactly what David had been thinking. The question was how. Where could they put him where he’d be safe and where Dad and Molly wouldn’t find him? There were a couple of other old outbuildings on the Stanley property, but only the tool shed was isolated enough to be fairly safe, and they’d already found out how Nightmare felt about being shut up in the tool shed. There would have to be some other way.

  They stood in a circle with Nightmare in the center for a long time, arguing about how to keep him from wandering around at night and getting shot at. For a while he sat there, looking from one to the other as they talked, as if he were listening carefully to their suggestions. But finally he gave a big sigh and collapsed with his head on his paws. They all laughed. It seemed funny somehow for such a huge animal to act so much like a normal dog.

  There didn’t seem to be any possible solution. Even if they could find a place to shut him up at night, he would probably have to be released during the day when they were all away at school. It was beginning to seem hopeless. The suggestions got more and more ridiculous, and meanwhile, the temperature in the garden seemed to get colder and colder. At last they decided they would just have to go on doing exactly what Blair had been doing—feed Nightmare every night and then let him go back to wherever he went—and hope for the best.

  “Maybe if we buy some real dog food and feed him all he can possibly eat, he’ll at least stay out of other people’s yards and spring houses,” David said through chattering teeth. “Come on, kids. We’d better go in. There’s nothing more we can do tonight.” He gave Nightmare one last pat and told him good-bye. “I guess you’re on your own until tomorrow, big boy. Same time, same place.” It wasn’t good enough, but there didn’t seem to be any other solution. One at a time the others hugged or patted Nightmare, and slowly and reluctantly, they all started for the back door. Nightmare trotted along behind.