The sill of a baku's window is always damp and faintly sweet, like the rim of a cup that held pear cider. Anyone who runs a thumb along it comes away tasting the dream that was eaten there. The baku itself is a patchwork animal, an elephant's trunk and tusks on a tiger's striped forelegs, an ox's thick tail, a rhinoceros's creased hide at the haunches. It stands about four feet at the shoulder and moves without scuffing the floorboards.
Its inventory begins with the nose. The trunk is lipped like a ladle and wet to the tip. It hovers a hand's width above a sleeper's brow and draws in the night's pictures one at a time, the way a clerk lifts coins from a tray. Sleepers wake with a dry mouth and a clean head. In Jorsveld, a mill town of brick lanes on the Lek canal, nobody can recall a nightmare older than a week. The second item is the stomach, which does not digest. A baku keeps what it takes. By autumn the belly is tight as a drum and gives off a low hum, and it must be emptied. It does this by walking to the reed flats beyond Eekhoorn Wiel and standing in the shallows for a full night, yawning at the water. By morning the reeds are bent flat and silvered, and fish will not rise there for three days.
The third item is a rule. In Jorsveld no one speaks a bad dream aloud inside a house where a baku is known to feed. Children whisper theirs into a jar of dry barley and seal it. The household then does not sell, lend or mention that barley, and the baku takes the jar from the sill before dawn. Said aloud, a nightmare hangs in the room like smoke and the baku will not touch it. It leaves instead, and the house sleeps badly until it returns.
The fourth is a trade. Olaf Brinkhuis keeps a cart of sheepskin mats, and he sells them to families who want to know whether a baku has visited. The mats are laid under a window. A baku's tread presses the wool into small neat crescents, always facing the bed. Olaf charges by the mat and says the crescents tell him more than any neighbor. The last item is plain routine. Every evening before feeding, the baku scratches its flank against the doorpost, left side first, then right, until the paint wears through to bare wood. It does this without hurry, the way a cow does. The exception is the empty house at Eekhoorn Wiel, whose sill stays dry. The baku crosses its threshold only to stand in the hall and look up the stair. It has never taken a single dream there.
- Classification
- Chimeric dream-eating beast
- Habitat
- Sleeping houses, canal towns, reed flats
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- 4 ft at the shoulder
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Eastern Legends
- Binomial
- Tapirus somnivorax
- Diet
- Nightmares, unspoken ones only
- Temperament
- Placid, fastidious, easily offended