Kneeling on the bed, she listened to the thing creeping around the room. Judging by the way it thumped and scraped and squished, she decided it was even slower and clumsier than it had first appeared to be. There was no magic in it. Maybe it was blind. It seemed unable to scream or speak, so possibly it couldn’t hear, either. Or smell. If the only thing it could do was fumble along the baseboard, it could only find her by chance. If it wanted to find her at all. Maybe it didn’t have a brain. Maybe it wasn’t able to want anything, just a stupid lump of twitching stuff.
Although her heart raced as fast as ever and seemed to pinball off her ribs even as it jumped into her throat, Bibi told herself that if she had wished the creature to come out of the book, she could wish it away just as easily. In fact that was what she had to do. Dispatching it was her duty. Her responsibility.
She slid under the covers once more, half sitting up against the pile of pillows, and she thought hard about the not-Cookie, picturing it crawling back to the book on the floor, slithering in among the pages, melting away into the illustration from which it had arisen. For almost an hour, there were silences periodically broken by new spasms from the creature. She was dry-mouthed and dizzy with wishing, with imagining. When eventually the horrid thing fell into a longer silence, she assumed that she had at last succeeded. She lay stone-still, listening. Second by second, minute by minute, she became more encouraged, though if her heart thumped not quite so fast as before, it beat harder.
Yet again the quiet ended. The thing scrabbled along a nearby wall. The lamp cord rattled against the back of the nightstand. If not by any of the usual five senses, the grisly little beast seemed to be finding its way to her by a sixth. She expected it to ascend to the top of the nightstand, two feet from her face. Then it moved under the bed and became quiet once more.
She had been wrong about it being brainless. It could think, all right. Think and know and want and seek. In the silence of the room, the only sound was within Bibi, the frantic pump in her breast, which beat her into a strange submission, into a kind of paralysis. But she could almost hear, too, the creature scheming in the darkness under the box spring.
She would never know how it progressed from beneath the bed and under the covers without her hearing it or sensing its movement. When it touched her bare foot, she threw aside the blanket and the top sheet, her scream no more than a dry whistle in her throat.
So it came to this. The confrontation of creator and created. In the dim light of the five-watt Mickey lamp, Bibi bending forward, seizing the thing with both hands, peeling it off her ankle. Cold but not slimy. Throbbing irregularly. Torsional. Difficult to hold. Her heart booming, quaking her entire body, breath fast and shallow and ragged, she wished it away, wished so hard that a headache split her skull, her ears popped as though from a change in air pressure, and a capillary burst in her nose, unraveling a thread of blood out of her left nostril. Yet the would-be best friend escaped her grip, twisting and flopping up her chest, toward her head. They were face-to-face when she seized it again, and the chocolate-drop eyes were not gentle or kind or chocolate, but wet holes in which pooled some thick, oily substance that she thought must be all the hatred in the world boiled down to just two spoonfuls. Openmouthed, the thing bent its flat face closer, closer, as if to suck out her breath of life. Migraine sawing through her skull, a blood haze tinting her vision, Bibi dug her fingers into the creature’s yielding flesh and did not wish it away anymore, but commanded it to be gone, this abomination that she had imagined into existence. To emphasize her authority, she punctuated her command by spitting upon the thing. It relented, and as it stopped struggling and diminished in her hands, she heard the pages of the book thrashing somewhere in the gloom, as the thing that was not Cookie nevertheless returned to Cookie’s world. When Bibi’s hands were empty, the book gave out one last rustle, and a hush fell upon the room.
When she could find the strength to reach toward the nightstand lamp, she switched it on. The light was glorious. She wished morning would come to the window hours ahead of schedule. Just then, there could not be too much light. She leaned back against the pillows and the headboard. Blood trickled from one nostril, tears from both eyes. She thought she would throw up. She didn’t. She thought her heart would never stop sledgehammering, but it returned slowly to a more gentle beat. For a long time she sat in a kind of catatonia, not because she couldn’t move or speak, but because she didn’t want to move or speak, wondering—worrying about—what new thing might be called into the world by a thoughtless gesture or one wrong word.
In time she slept.
Morning came.
She woke. She showered. She ate breakfast.
She was quieter than usual, which her parents noted, but her mind was racing as always, bobbin and spindle and flyer working at high speed, spinning wooly thoughts into taut threads, into ideas and speculations. Before her sixth birthday, her life had changed dramatically, irrevocably, and there was nothing to be done other than to accept what she was now. And be cautious. Never again wish into the world something that was not natural to it. Stories were good. They made life better, happier. But stories should remain between the covers of a book.