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~

[Transcript]

        Dimitri had been tossing and turning, drifting in and out of fleeting, troubled dreams. He’d caught glimpses, when he’d closed his eyes, of Mayview drowned in bright white fog. Again and again, the town would fade from sight and memory as he watched it shrink in a moving van’s mirror... as if his waking world had been a vivid dream that he’d forgotten in his slumber’s stark reality.

        “Peekaboo!” said Peekaboo, and Dimitri realized that he’d woken up in spirit trance.

        “...Yeah. Peekaboo. Hey, buddy,” he mumbled, blearily rubbing the lingering mist from his eyes. Dimitri squinted at his spirit, which had stretched up beside his bed to bob just inches from his face. “Look, I... I had a long day. It’s bedtime, Peekaboo. Too late to play.”

        “Peekaboo doesn’t want to play,” the sheet ghost said matter-of-factly.

        That’s a first, Dimitri thought, sinking back into his pillow. “All right, then. G’night—”

        “But Peekaboo promised that Peekaboo would,” his spirit added. “Even though it’s not with Didi. Even though the game is boo boo boring.”

        “...Mm,” Dimitri muttered back, unshuttering his eyelids with some effort. What was Peekaboo talking about? Had it had a bad dream, too? Of course his spirit’s worst nightmare was “a game that wasn’t fun.” It must be nice, Dimitri thought, to never have to wake up from the blissful innocence of childhood.

        “Should Peekaboo still Peeka-play?” The spirit’s empty eyes swirled with a darkness darker than the gloom of Dimitri’s Halloween-drenched bedroom. “Peekaboo can break a promise. Peekaboo can break the rules.” Its viscous body tremored slightly. “Peekaboo can break anything, once Peekaboo wakes up.”

        “It’s not time yet, Peekaboo. Go back to sleep.” Dimitri grabbed the covers and cocooned himself with a sigh, turning away to face the empty wall. Truthfully, Dimitri didn’t know if Peekaboo even needed sleep... but HE did, and he wasn’t going to get any if he kept entertaining his spirit and its whims well after midnight.

        “...Okay,” came Peekaboo’s dejected answer seconds later. It was tired of sleeping... but Dimitri was smart. He’d know if it was time to tear the world ajar again.
        
        “You should always keep a promise.” Dimitri, half-asleep, had mumbled out an afterthought, some stray advice he’d only half-considered.

        “...Even if it’s boo boo boring?”

        “Even if it’s boo boo boring,” sighed the spectral. “And follow the rules when you’re playing a game. The space between them is the best part. What would chess be if the pieces moved wherever you decided?”

        “Fun!”

        “No,” Dimitri grumbled, pulling his blankets even higher. “It would be boo boo boring. You can’t always get what you want, Peekaboo.”

        An autumn chill leaked through the walls of the only home that Dimitri had ever known. The spectral shivered.

        “Peekaboo wants what Didi wants.”

        “...Uh-huh.”

        “Peekaboo can still hear Didi’s wish! Peekaboo remembered that tonight it could come true!” Even leadened by its slumber, the mind beneath its sheet was still too vast to be contained within a single mortal moment; its present overflowed to fill the recent past and looming future. “Didi doesn’t want to leave. Didi wants to make everybody happy!”

        Peekaboo smiled. Dimitri was right. The space between... it was the best part. Between the bridges, boats, and buildings. Between the trees, beneath the ocean. A hill away, another set of pitch black eyes surveyed the blueprint set before it. For all its detail, its crafters had neglected to include a single person in their dream. There was still so much to play with, so many questions with their answers still unknown...

        “...You can’t make everybody happy, Peekaboo.”

        The spirit’s vacant gaze fixed on Dimitri’s back, its rise and fall in steady, slowing breaths.

        “Someone always has to lose. Someone out there always wins at their expense.” Dimitri had seen it again and again. Happiness took sacrifice, whether noble or unwilling, on the altar of somebody else’s dream. Life was something whittled down to search for it, day by day and piece by piece, in a death march driven by each pawn’s hope that it would reach the other side. “The world’s not fair. That’s just how it is.”

        Peekaboo considered this. It grew an arm to scratch its chin and then a chin for it to scratch.

        “Didi wants... something impossible?”

        Dimitri didn’t answer.

        “Then how can Peekaboo make Didi happy?”

        In his dawning dreams, Dimitri watched as mist and distance drained the color from his friends. Without them, something else rushed in to fill the void they’d left... a crushing, lonely lack that he could only ever briefly turn away from. He couldn’t fix it. He knew he couldn’t. So, instead, he could at least make sure... that everyone he envied and admired...

        “So long as... Mom and Dad and Dana...” Dimitri’s voice was faint and flickering, the last embers of a candle soon to fade. “So long as... Isabel... and Suzy... all my friends...” He drifted off, snuffed out before the wish was halfway spoken.

        To Peekaboo, however, he still shone with blooming warmth. Hundreds of hearts across the lake were pleading for its power, but Dimitri’s was as bright as all their brightest hopes combined. Peekaboo didn’t understand. It was lost and lonely just like him, but its colossal heart was cold and hollow. If it could make Dimitri’s wish come true, would its heart shine like his did, too? Or would it need a shining heart to ever know how it could grant it?

        The last of the Great Wights watched Dimitri sleep with envy, love, and hunger. It let its puppet sink back down into the floor... and then the floor receded, too, the blocks and toys retreating with it, the walls and ceiling of the playroom it had made for them to share.

        A shifting limb slid back at a sleepwalker’s pace, down a hill and through a forest left distorted by its murmurs, to the fog-enshrouded lake where it was resting like the boy it had befriended. All else was still—its floating heart, its reaching hands, the weeping trees above Dimitri—save for a boat upon the water, the writhing shark beyond its cabin’s open door... and the second, smaller vessel slowly rowing out to meet it.

        Dimitri shivered underneath an eldritch sky. Then he pulled the covers higher, and his spirit trance dissolved back to his bedroom’s peaceful darkness.