The Stolen Child (21 page)

•                    CHAPTER 24                    •

         
W
e lived in the dark hole, and the abandoned mine on the hillside proved to be a very bad home indeed. That first winter, I went into a deeper hibernation than ever before, waking only every few days to eat or drink a few mouthfuls, then back to bed. Most of the others dwelt in the narcoleptic state, a haze that lasted from December through March. The darkness enfolded us in its moist embrace, and for many weeks not a peep of sun reached us. Snowfalls almost sealed us in, but the porous entrance allowed the cold to penetrate. The walls wept and froze into slick crusts that shattered under pressure.

In the springtime we slipped into the green world, hungry and thin. In the unfamiliar territory, looking for food became a daily preoccupation. The hillside itself was all slag and shale, and even in high season, only the hardiest grasses and moss clung to a tenuous hold. No animals bothered to forage there. Béka cautioned us not to roam too far, so we made do with what we could scavenge nearby—grasshoppers and grubs, tea made out of bark, robin’s breast, a roast skunk. We imagined all we missed by not visiting town.

“I would give my eyetooth for a taste of ice cream,” Smaolach said at the conclusion to a mean supper. “Or a nice yellow banana.”

“Raspberry jam,” said Speck, “on warm, crunchy toast.”

Onions chimed in: “Sauerkraut and pigs’ feet.”

“Spaghetti,” Zanzara began, and Ragno finished, “with Parmesan.”

“A Coke and a smoke.” Luchóg patted his empty pouch.

“Why don’t you let us go?” asked Chavisory. “It’s been so long, Béka.”

The gangly despot sat above us on a throne made from an empty dynamite crate. He had resisted granting liberties every time we had asked, but perhaps he, too, was brightening as the days were on the mend. “Onions, take Blomma and Kivi with you tonight, but be back before dawn. Stay off the roads and take no chances.” He smiled at his own benevolence. “And bring me back a bottle of beer.”

The three girls rose as one and left without delay. Béka should have read the signs and felt the coming change in his bones, but perhaps his thirst outweighed his judgment. A cold snap rolled over the western hills to meet the warm May air, and within hours a thick fog settled into the woods and clung to the darkness like the skin of a peach. We could see no farther than one giant step ahead, and the invisible cloak stretched between the trees created a general sense of unease about our absent friends.

After the others crawled into the darkness to sleep, Luchóg kept me company at the mine’s entrance in a quiet vigil. “Don’t worry, little treasure. While they cannot see, they cannot be seen. They’ll find a careful hiding place till the sun cuts through this gloom.”

We watched and became one with nothing. In the dead of it, a crashing through the trees awakened us. The noise rose in a single frantic wave. Branches snapped and broke, and an inhuman cry resounded and was swiftly extinguished. We peered into the mist, strained in the direction of the commotion. Luchóg struck a match and lit the torch kept at the mine’s entrance. The twigs sputtered in the damp, caught hold, and burst into light. Emboldened by the fire, we stepped carefully toward the memory of the noise and the faint scent of blood on the ground. Ahead through the mist, two eyes mirrored our torchlight, and their glowing halted our progress. A fox snapped its jaws and carried away its prey, and we walked over to the killing spot. Fanned out like glass in a kaleidoscope, black-and-white-banded feathers lay strewn on the fallen leaves. Struggling with the heavy turkey, the fox bumbled off into the distance, and above us in the trees, the surviving birds huddled together, churring a comfort to one another.

Onions, Kivi, and Blomma still had not returned when I showed Speck the place where the fox had caught the tom. She chose a pair of the larger feathers and knitted them into her hair. “Last of the Mohicans,” she said, and ran whooping into the lightening morn as I gave chase, and so we played away the day. When Speck and I returned late that afternoon, we found Béka angry and pacing. The girls had not come home, and he was torn between sending out a search party or waiting inside the mineshaft.

“What do you mean, keeping us here?” Speck demanded. “You told them be back by dawn. Do you think Onions would disobey you? They should have been back hours ago. Why aren’t we out looking for them?” She divided the eight of us into pairs and mapped out four different approaches to town. To keep him calm, she went with Béka on the most direct path. Smaolach and Luchóg circled around our old stomping grounds, and Ragno and Zanzara followed well-worn deerpaths.

Chavisory and I took an ancient artery, blazed by the Indians perhaps, that ran parallel to the river, bending, dipping, and rising as the water twisted in its course. It seemed more likely that Onions, Kivi, and Blomma had taken another trail with better cover, but we stayed vigilant for any movement or other indications they had passed this way—such as fresh footprints or broken branches. The brush sometimes choked off passage, and we stepped out onto the exposed riverbank for short stints. Anyone driving across the high bridge that linked the highway to the town could have spotted us in the half-light, and I often wondered while on this path what we must look like from so far above. Ants, probably, or little children lost. Chavisory sang and hummed to herself a wordless tune at once familiar and strange.

“What is that song?” I asked her when we stopped to get our bearings. Far ahead in the river, a tug pushed a chain of barges toward the city.

“Chopin, I think.”

“What is Chopin?”

She giggled and twisted a strand of hair around two fingers. “Not what, silly. Who. Chopin wrote the music, or at least that’s what he said.”

“Who said? Chopin?”

She laughed loudly, then covered her mouth with her free hand. “Chopin is dead. The boy who taught me the song. He said it is Chopin’s mayonnaise.”

“What boy is that? The one before me?”

Her demeanor changed, and she looked off in the distance at the receding barges. Even in the dim light, I could see she was blushing.

“Why won’t you tell me? Why doesn’t anyone ever talk about him?”

“Aniday, we never talk about changelings once they are gone. We try to forget everything about them. No good to chase after memories.”

A far-off cry went out, a brief alarm that signaled us to make haste and rendezvous. We dropped our conversation and followed the sound. Ragno and Zanzara found her first, alone and crying in an empty glen. She had been wandering half the day, too confused and distraught to find her way home. The other pairs arrived within minutes to hear the news, and Béka sat down beside Onions and draped his arm around her shoulders. Kivi and Blomma were gone.

The three girls had seen the fog roll in and sped their way into town, reaching the lonesome outer streets as the worst weather fell. The streetlamps and storefront signs cast halos through the misted dark, serving as beacons for the faeries to navigate through the neighborhoods. Blomma told the other two not to worry about being seen by people in the houses. “We’re invisible in this fog,” she said, and perhaps her foolhardy confidence was their ruin. From the supermarket, they stole sugar, salt, flour, and a netted sack of oranges, then stashed the loot in an alley outside of the drugstore. Sneaking in through the back, they were surprised by all of the changes since their latest visit.

“Everything is different,” Onions told us. “The soda fountain is gone, the whole counter and all those round chairs that spin you around. And no more booths. No candy counter, and the big tubs of penny candy are gone, too. Instead, there’s more everything. Soap and shampoo, shoelaces, a whole wall of comic books and magazines. And there’s a whole row of things just for babies. Diapers made out of plastic that you throw away, and baby bottles and cans of milk. And hundreds of those tiny jars of food, all gooshed up, and on each one the same picture of the cutest baby in the world. Applesauce and pears and bananas. Spinach and green beans. Sweet potatoes that look like red mud. And smooshed turkey and chicken with rice. Kivi wanted to taste every one, and we were there for hours.”

I could picture the three of them, faces smeared with blueberries, bloated and sprawled in the aisle, dozens of empty jars strewn across the floor.

A car pulled up outside and stopped in front of the picture windows. The flashlight shone through the glass, slowly swept its beam along the interior, and when it neared, the girls leapt to their feet, slipped on the puddles of peas and carrots, and sent the jars spinning and clattering across the linoleum. The front door opened, and two policemen stepped inside. One of the men said to the other, “This is where he said they would be.” Onions shouted for them to run, but Kivi and Blomma did not move. They stood side by side in the middle of the baby food aisle, joined hands, and waited for the men to come and get them.

“I don’t know why,” Onions said. “It was the most horrible thing I have ever seen. I circled around behind the men and could see Kivi and Blomma when the lights hit them right in the face. They looked as if they were waiting for it to happen. The policeman said, ‘He was right. There is someone here.’ And the other said, ‘Freeze.’ Kivi squeezed her eyes shut, and Blomma raised one hand to her forehead, but they didn’t look afraid at all. Like they were happy, almost.”

Onions wriggled through the door and escaped, not bothering with the stolen goods. Instinct set in, and she ran through the empty streets, heedless of all traffic, never looking back. The fog disoriented her, and she ran all the way through town to the other side. Once she had found a hiding place in a yellow barn, she waited nearly all day to return home, taking a route that skirted the streets. When Ragno and Zanzara found her, she was exhausted.

“Why did the man say that?” Béka asked her. “What did he mean, ‘This is where he said they would be’?”

“Somebody must have told the policemen where we were.” Onions shuddered. “Somebody who knows our ways.”

Béka took her by the hands and lifted her up from the ground. “Who else could it be?” He was looking straight at me, as if accusing me of a heinous crime.

“But I didn’t tell—”

“Not you, Aniday,” he spat out. “The one who took your place.”

“Chopin,” said Chavisory, and one or two laughed at the name before catching their emotions. We trudged home in silence, remembering our missing friends Kivi and Blomma. Each of us found a private way to grieve. We took their dolls out of the hole and buried them in a single grave. Smaolach and Luchóg spent two weeks building a cairn, while Chavisory and Speck divided our departed friends’ possessions among the nine of us left behind. Only Ragno and Zanzara remained stoic and impassive, accepting their share of clothing and shoes but saying next to nothing. Through that summer and into the fall, our conversations revolved around finding meaning in the girls’ surrender. Onions did her best to convince us that a betrayal had occurred, and Béka joined in, affirming the conspiracy, arguing that the humans were out to get us and that it was only a matter of time before Kivi and Blomma would fully confess. The men in the black suits would return, the army men, the police and their dogs, and they would hunt us down. Others among us took a more thoughtful view.

Luchóg said, “They wanted to leave, and it was only a matter of time. I only hope that the poor things find home in the world and weren’t sent off to live in a zoo or put under the microscope by a mad scientist.”

We never heard of them again. Vanished, as if an airy nothing.

More than ever, Béka insisted we live in darkness, but he did allow us nights away from the diminished clan. When the chance arose over those next few years, Speck and I would steal away to sleep in relative peace and luxury beneath the library. We threw ourselves into our books and papers. We read the Greeks in translation, Clytemnestra in her grief, Antigone’s honor in a thin coating of earth. Grendel prowling the bleak Danish night. The pilgrims of Canterbury and lives on the road. Maxims of Pope, the rich clot of humanity in all of Shakespeare, Milton’s angels and aurochs, Gulliver big, little, yahoo. Wild ecstasies of Keats. Shelley’s Frankenstein. Rip Van Winkle sleeping it off. Speck insisted on Austen, Eliot, Emerson, Thoreau, the Brontës, Alcott, Nesbitt, Rossetti, both Brownings, and especially Alice down the rabbit hole. We worked our way right up to the present age, chewing through the books like a pair of silverfish.

Sometimes, Speck would read aloud to me. I would hand her a story she had never before seen, and almost without a beat, she made it hers. She frightened me from the word
Once
in Poe’s “The Raven.” She brought me to tears over Ben Jonson’s drowned cat. She made the hooves thunder in “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and the waves roar in Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” I loved the music of her voice and watching her face as she read, season after season. In the summertime her bared skin darkened, and her dark hair brightened in the sunshine. During the cold part of the year, she disappeared beneath layers, so that sometimes all I could see was her wide forehead and dark brows. On winter nights in that candlelit space, her eyes shone out from the circles beneath her eyes. Although we had spent twenty years together, she secreted away the power to shock or surprise, to say a word and break my heart.