The Everlasting Story of Nory

28. Problems with Rabbits

So at night you could read Garfield or think about something happy-making, like a plan of having a fake-food museum, and arranging the fake loaves of bread on tiny plates, in order to try to be sure not to have a bad dream. But still they sometimes happened, and there was nothing you could do. Clang! Bad image. Fright. Run, wake up, lie in bed, panting. Nory’s latest bad dream came after they went for a walk one day and saw hundreds of rabbits poking their heads out of holes. How could you get a bad dream out of something nice like that? And also, why would you want to? It had to do with the place that was just grass now, near the Cathedral, that said ‘Monk’s Burial Ground’ on the map. So the monks were probably still under there even though their gravestones were totally and completely gone. In the dream she was a monk at first, who went out every day to feed the rabbits, wearing her hood. She fed them celery from a big white barrel. They were quite happy. But then a disease hit the rabbit families, a bilbonic plague with sores around their eyes. They started dying, even though Nory tried to care for them. She found the antidote, some yellow flowers in the forest, but then she died and was buried as a monk, in the monk’s cemetery, under the grass. The rabbits got better and grew back after some time and they started digging tunnels. Nory was a rabbit in this part of the dream, nibbling her way through the ground. All of a sudden she came to a different kind of thing she nibbled through. What is this white crumbly stuff? Ugh! Bone is what it was. The earth trickled away and she was in a humongous underground tomb, where she saw that she’d just nibbled straight through the chest bones of a dead body that turned out to be the corpse of the monk. They had to cover over the corpse, because it was shrunken and awful to the eye. Plus it was starting to shiver or tremble. Then Nory was flying overhead in an airplane, but the airplane ran out of gas, and she couldn’t find northeast. It went into a spiral, and she jumped out in a parachute and fell and was knocked out. The rabbits saw the parachute spread itself out on the ground and thought, ‘Aha! Perfect material for covering the corpse of the dead monk!’ So they took hold of the parachute in their teeth and started pulling it down, down, which of course dragged Nory down, too, into the hole, since all the parachute strings were still harnessed to her, and she woke up underground, with rabbits all bustled around her and with something lumpy and unnerving next to her hidden under her parachute. She pulled the parachute away and there was a dead shrivelly face whose eyes and mouth immediately opened, all together, and a tongue popped out that was totally black. That was where she woke up in real life.

Now that was not a particularly good spot to be in when you wake up from a dream and Nory was not in the least bit happy. She got up, tottled to the bathroom, which was also not a perfect experience because the lightbulb that was usually on over the mirror had burned out, so the only light was from the streetlight, and then she went into her mother and father’s room and said: ‘I had a frightening dream.’ Her mother reached her hand out and squeezed her arm and hand and said in her murmury sleepy voice, ‘I’m so sorry, my baby girl, try not to think about it, everything is all right, goodnight, my baby, love you.’ She made kissing sounds with her lips.

‘Goodnight, love you,’ said Nory, and she stumbled back to her room, but she still had the fright living in her chest and when she saw the covers of her bed she thought, ‘No, I definitely can’t get back in there by myself,’ and she turned around and went back to her parents’ room and said: ‘Can I sleep in your bed? I’m still scared.’ But her parents almost never let her sleep in their bed, although they used to let Littleguy sleep in their bed until he was over two, which wasn’t totally fair. Sometimes they let Nory come in in the morning and snuggle in, however. ‘Tuck in, tuck in,’ her mother would say then, lifting a corner of blanket, and that made her feel so happy.

Her father got up and said, ‘I’ll tuck you in.’ He tucked her in her bed and stroked her head and said, ‘Nothing is bad, everything’s okay, pick something to think about with bright sunlight in it, Splash Mountain or having tea at the museum with the fan room or looking out from Oxburgh Hall over the fields. Or playing in the sprinkler with Debbie.’

‘But I’m still quite scared,’ Nory said. ‘Can I read?’

‘It’s the middle of the night,’ said her father. ‘If you absolutely have to read to get your mind going in a different direction, go ahead and read. Goodnight, sweetie pie.’

‘Goodnight,’ said Nory. She clicked her light on and read a tiny amount of a book she was reading for the Readathon, which was a competition at the Junior School that gave money to leukemia depending on how many books you read. She was reading a book she liked about a hen who went on different vehicles, and with each vehicle she went on there was some disaster, and then the disaster was solved. For instance, the hen got stuck in a new road of tar and was almost rolled over by one of machines that press it flat. And whenever a person rescued her, the hen politely laid an egg for them, to say thank you. One time she laid an egg in someone’s crash helmet. The book was called The Hen Who Wouldn’t Give Up.

Nory was so frazzledly tired that she didn’t want to read, even about this friendly hen, but she had to read, because she had to stay awake, since the thing was that if you wake up in the middle of an awful dream that is quite powerful and you go back to sleep too soon, the dream will heal over the cut you made in it and will finish itself. If you are very, very, very, very, very capable, and very determined, you’ll be able to stay awake, just twelve, thirteen more minutes, and the bad dream will melt away, and you will have somewhat of a good dream instead, because the brain forgets and says, ‘Hmm, that file is taking forever to finish, let’s go on to the next file, ah, yes, fake food, very interesting, let’s think about fake food.’

Nory struggled, but finally she couldn’t read for one more second — couldn’t read, and couldn’t go to sleep. So what she decided to herself was: ‘I won’t read, and I won’t go to sleep, I’ll just think, because in reading you think and in dreaming you think, so that’s exactly what I’ll do — I’ll think. And if the scary things come into my thoughts, fine, I’ll change them.’ What a bad dream does is turn something nice in your life, a simple plain event, like seeing some rabbits (including one dead one that was lying on the grass), or seeing a map of the Cathedral, into something dreadful. So all you have to do in going against the bad dream is turn it back into something nice again, since that’s what it began from anyway. So she started up with her thinking, and of course, presto, the dead person from the dream came into her mind, but she said to herself, ‘Stay calm, stay seated, let’s figure this out.’

She went back into the dream a little bit and looked around. Ah, yes, she saw her mistake. It turned out that the dead monk was not really dead — it was just sleeping deeply, wearing a frightening mask. Really the monk was a girl, a princess of some kind, with skin as white as cream and lips as bright as boysenberries and long flowing golden hair, and she had only worn the frightening mask and the awful raggedy rotten clothes so that everyone would be scared away while she slept — everyone, that is, except for Nory who was brave enough to come and help her take off her mask. Nory turned the mask over and saw that it was molded plastic. The black tongue was made of paper mâché and had a little spring that made it pop out. The princess had waited there all those centuries until Nory came down, so that together they could help sick animals. ‘I’m sorry for frightening you, my child,’ the princess said. ‘It was the only way.’ Out of the rabbits’ tunnel they climbed together, and over the next few months Nory learned many things about caring for animals from the princess. There was a dog with a broken leg, but they wrapped its leg in a special white cloth, and the next morning it was completely healed. There are three kinds of broken bones — simple, compound, and green stick. The princess knew all about them, because she was an expert in first aid. A green-stick fracture is when it bends like a flexible stick and makes a smuggled noise but doesn’t break apart. A simple break is when it breaks in two, so that you can see two ends of bone if you look on an X-ray. A compound fracture is when some of the bone tears out of the skin. Compound is really bad, and grotesque to look at even for a doctor, probably. Jason from Nory’s old school had gotten a simple fracture from jumping off one of the climbing structures. Flying squirels jump from the climbing structures, but Raccoon is more careful.

Somewhere along the way of these ideas, luckily, Nory’s thinking turned into good-dreaming.