The Girl Who Sees Nightmares
They were whispering about her again.
Ix hunched into her long black coat, trying to disappear as she slipped out of the little brick schoolhouse. But there was nowhere to hide. She knew everyone in Brittlewick, and everyone knew her.
Ix Tatterfall. The girl who sees Nightmares.“Ugh. It’s Ick,” a pretty blond girl warned her friend, sneering the nickname Ix had been stuck with since first grade. “Hurry, or the ick will rub off on you.”
The two girls pushed each other out of the schoolhouse, giggling. Ix tried to pretend she couldn’t hear them. Or at least that she didn’t care. There were worse things than getting called names.
The first rustling yellow leaves swirled around Ix as she headed for her aunt’s cottage on the edge of town. It would have been faster to take the big dirt road in the center of Brittlewick, but instead she ducked into the grackleberry bushes, then slipped through a rotted hole in the fence surrounding the overgrown garden of Whitlock Manor. When she came out, she was in an alley behind the cobbler’s shop, which sagged like a rough old boot.
Ix shook old leaves and dust off her purple-striped shirt and black overalls. A stick poked her hand as she ran her palm across her dark hair, plaited into two twiggy braids that everyone said made her look like a raggedy scarecrow.
She knew every secret path and shortcut in Brittlewick. It helped that she wasn’t afraid of most things that other people were. The spider-infested shed behind the school was the perfect place to read, though you had to brush away the cobwebs now and then. Ix didn’t mind the brambly ditches near the Scally Woods where the rats scampered around, either. The smell wasn’t great, but the whiskery rats were actually quite friendly. Most of all, Ix liked the dark: old abandoned buildings, and crawl spaces under the stairs, and especially the dead of night.
Because Ix Tatterfall had a secret.
Ix knelt beside a squashed pumpkin that had rolled off a cart into the alley. She could see something moving inside the broken shell, among all the gooey seeds: a tiny squiggle of black huddled into the hollow. A Nightmare creature.
Ix stretched her hand out toward an Inkling. Inklings were Nightmares, what people called all manner of creatures and maladies that escaped from the Labyrinth of Souls. But these were the harmless kind that mostly just hid in cracks and corners or under beds. They were hard to see because they blended into the dark, but if you caught one, they looked like splotches of ink with long, wiggly arms and legs. They reminded Ix of little stick bugs.
Some Nightmares weren’t so harmless. If you had a sudden dark feeling out of nowhere, or a chill ran up your spine, or you found yourself wide awake in the middle of the night, or experiencing a run of terrible luck, maybe you were just having a bad day. Or maybe you’d run afoul of a Nightmare without even knowing it.
Most people couldn’t see them, just feel their effects. But Ix was different.
Copyright © 2025 by Leslie Vedder. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
