baka baku

“Good man,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on.”
I did. I stuttered a lot. I stammered a lot.
“Wait,” he said. “The thing’s shadow. A lion’s mane and a damned elephant’s trunk?”
I thought of the thrashing tendril in the thing’s shadow. “Yeah, uh, I guess it could have been.”
“And it had blue eyes, didn’t it?” I hadn’t gotten to that part yet.
“Yeah,” I said. “It did. They were crazy.”
“Hell,” he said. “It’s a baka baku.”
“What is that?” I asked. “I’ve never heard of that creature.”
“Because it isn’t real,” he said. “Or it wasn’t, until the nineties. I mean, there was a thing called a baku in Japanese lore, but it wasn’t the same thing at all. Look, some company made a kid’s stuffed toy, called it a dream-eater, said that it was a magical protector that ate bad dreams before children could have them. Came with a little book that explained the whole thing.”
“I’m fighting a stuffed animal?” I asked. My leg pounded. There would be a huge bruise there for weeks where the thing had kicked me.
“Nah,” he said. “Look, they were just making a toy, but they gave it to kids. Kids believing in things has freaking power. It either created the real ones or it gave access to something similar from the Never-never that used that belief to create a place for itself in reality.”
“Then why has it gone all Manson on these people?” I asked.
“Some laws are kind of universal. Like ‘You are what you eat,’ ” the wizard told me. “You eat enough nightmares, sooner or later you turn into one. Now, instead of protecting people from nightmares, it uses them to inflict torment. Probably gets energy from it.”
“Oh, fantastic,” I said. “What can they do?”
“Listen carefully. This thing has laid a fear whammy on you, man.”


Brief Cases, Day One, Page 374-375