The Stolen Child (29 page)

“But,” I stammered, “but how did they manage to go on after so much misfortune?”

“The same way that all of us do. The same way that I went on after losing two husbands and Lord knows all that’s happened. At some point, you have to let go of the past, son. Be open to life to come. Back in the sixties, when everybody was lost, Brian used to talk about going off to find himself. He used to say, ‘Will I ever know the real me? Will I ever know who I am supposed to be?’ Such foolish questions beg straight answers, don’t you think, Henry Day?”

I felt faint, paralyzed, destroyed. I crawled off the sofa, out the front door, all the way home and into bed. If we made our good-byes, they evaporated quickly in the residual shock of her story.

To rouse me from deep slumber the next morning, Tess fixed a pot of hot coffee and a late breakfast of eggs and biscuits, which I devoured like a famished child. I was sapped of all strength and will, confounded by the news of Gustav as an idiot savant. Too many ghosts in the attic. We sat on the veranda in the cool morning, swapping sections of the Sunday newspaper. I pretended to read, but my mind was elsewhere, desperately trying to sort through the possibilities, when a ruckus arose in the neighborhood. Dogs started howling one by one as something passed in front of their homes, a chain reaction of maddening intensity.

Tess stood and peered down the street both ways but saw nothing. “I can’t stand it,” she said. “I’m going inside until they knock it off. Can I freshen your coffee?”

“Always.” I smiled and handed her my cup. The second she vanished, I saw what had driven the animals mad. There on the street, in the broad light of Sunday morning, two of the devils zigzagged across the neighborhood lawns. One of them limped along as she ran, and the other, a mouselike monster, beckoned her to hurry. The pair stopped when they saw me on the porch, two houses away, and stared directly at me for an instant. Wretched creatures with hideous holes for eyes, bulbous heads on their ruined bodies. Caked with dirt and sweat. From downwind, I could smell the feral odor of decay and musk. The one with the limp pointed a bony finger right at me, and the other quickly led her away through the gap between houses. Tess returned with the coffee too late to see them go, and once the creatures disappeared, the dogs quieted, settled back in their kennels, and relaxed their chains.

“Did you figure out what all the commotion was about?”

“Two things running through the neighborhood.”

“Things?”

“I don’t know.” I took a sip. “Little monsters.”

“Monsters?”

“Can’t you smell their awful odor? Like someone just ran over a skunk.”

“Henry, what are you talking about? I don’t smell a thing.”

“I don’t know what set those dogs off. Mass hysteria, a figment of their doggy brains? A mouse and a bat? A couple of kids.”

She put her cool hand on my forehead. “Are you feeling okay, Henry? You don’t seem yourself today.”

“I’m not,” I said. “Maybe I should go back to bed.”

As I drifted off to sleep, the changelings haunted my dreams. A dozen crept out of the woods, stepping out from behind each tree. They kept on coming, a band of hollow children, surrounding my home, advancing toward the doors and windows. Trapped inside, I raced from floor to floor and looked out through peepholes and from behind curtains as they silently marched and assembled in a ring. I ran down the hall to Eddie’s room, and he was a baby again, curled up in a ball in his crib. I shook him to wake him up and run away with me, but when the child rolled over, he had the face of a grown man. I screamed and locked myself in the bathroom. From the tiny window I could see the monsters begin to climb up the porch rails, scale the walls like spiders, their evil faces turned to me, menace and hatred in their glowing eyes. Windows were shattered in other rooms; the glass exploding and hitting the floor in an oddly gentle crescendo. I looked into the mirror, saw my reflection morph into my father, my son, Gustav. Behind me in the mirror, one of the creatures rose and reached out its claws to wrap around my neck.

Tess sat on the edge of the bed, shaking my shoulder. I was drenched with sweat, and though I felt hotter than hell, she said I was clammy and cold. “You’ve had a bad dream. It’s okay, it’s okay.” I buried my face on her breast and she stroked my hair and rocked me until I gained my full senses. For a moment, I did not know where I was, did not know who I was now or ever.

“Where’s Edward?”

She looked perplexed by my question. “At my mother’s, don’t you remember? He’s spending the weekend. What’s wrong with you?”

I shivered in her embrace.

“Was it that mean old Mrs. Ungerland? You need to concentrate on what’s important and stop chasing after what’s past. Don’t you know, it’s you I love. And always have.”

E
veryone has an unnameable secret too dire to confess to friend or lover, priest or psychiatrist, too entwined at the core to excise without harm. Some people choose to ignore it; others bury it deep and lug it unspoken to the grave. We mask it so well that even the body sometimes forgets the secret exists. I do not want to lose our child, and I do not want to lose Tess. My fear of being found out as a changeling and rejected by Tess has made a secret of the rest of my life.

After hearing the true story of Gustav, it is no wonder that I remembered so little from those days. I had been locked inside my own mind with music as my only means of self-expression. Had I not been stolen, I would never have lived among the changelings, never had the chance to become Henry Day. And had I not changed places with the boy, I would never have known Tess, never had a child of my own, and never found my way back to this world. In a way, the changelings gave me a second chance, and their
reappearance—the break-in at our home, the encounter in California with Edward, the pair dashing across the lawn—was both a threat and a reminder of all that was at stake.

When I had first started seeing the changelings again, I attributed it to the stress of discovering my past. They seemed hallucinations, nightmares, or no more than a figment of my imagination, but then the real creatures showed up and left their signs behind. They were taunting me: an orange peel on the middle of the dining room table; an open bottle of beer on top of the television; cigarette butts burning in the garden. Or things went missing. My chrome-plated piano trophy from the statewide competition. Photographs, letters, books. I once heard the fridge door slam shut at two in the morning when we were all asleep, went downstairs and found a baked ham half-eaten on the countertop. Furniture that hadn’t been moved in ages suddenly appeared next to open windows. On Christmas Eve, at my mother’s house, the younger children thought they heard reindeer tramping on the roof, and they went outside to investigate. Twenty minutes later, the breathless kids came back in, swearing they had seen two elves hopping away into the woods. Another time, one of them crawled through a gap no bigger than a rabbit hole under a gate in our backyard. When I went outside to catch it, the creature was gone. They were becoming brazen and relentless, and I wanted only for them to go away and leave me at peace.

Something had to be done about my old friends.

•                    CHAPTER 34                    •

         
I
set out to learn everything that could be known about the other Henry Day. My life’s story and its telling are bound to his, and only by understanding what had happened to him would I know all that I had missed. My friends agreed to help me, for by our nature we are spooks and secret agents. Because their skills had lain dormant since the botched change with Oscar Love, the faeries took special delight in spying on Henry Day. Once upon a time, he was one of them.

Luchóg, Smaolach, and Chavisory tracked him to an older neighborhood on the far side of town where he circled round the streets as if lost. He stopped and talked to two adorable young girls playing with their dollies in their front yard. After watching him drive off, Chavisory approached the girls, thinking they might be Kivi and Blomma in human form. The sisters guessed Chavisory was a faery right away, and she ran, laughing and shrieking, to our hiding place in a crown of blackberry stalks. A short time later, our spies spotted Henry Day talking to a woman who seemed to have upset him. When he left her old house, Henry looked haunted, and he sat in his car for the longest time, head bent to the steering wheel, shoulders heaving as he sobbed.

“He looked knackered, as if the woman sapped his spirit,” Smaolach told us afterward.

“I noticed as well,” said Luchóg, “that he has changed of late, as if he is guilty of the past and worried of the future.”

I asked them if they thought the older woman had been my mother, but they assured me she was somebody else’s.

Luchóg rolled himself a smoke. “He walked in one man, came out another.”

Chavisory poked at the campfire. “Maybe there are two of him.”

Onions agreed, “Or he’s only half a man.”

Luchóg lit the cigarette, let it dangle from his lower lip. “He’s a puzzle with one piece missing. He’s a tockless clock.”

“We’ll pick the lock of his brain,” Smaolach said.

“Have you been able to find out more about his past?” I asked them.

“Not much,” said Luchóg. “He lived in your house with your mother and father, and your two little sisters.”

“Our Chopin won lots of prizes for playing music,” said Chavisory. “There’s a tiny shiny piano on the mantel, or at least there was.” She reached behind her back and held out the trophy for us to admire, its facade reflecting the firelight.

“I followed him to school one day,” said Smaolach. “He teaches children how to play music, but if their performance is any indication, he’s not very good. The winds blow harsh and the fiddlers cannot fiddle.”

We all laughed. In time, they told me many more stories of the man, but large gaps existed in the tale, and singular questions arose. Was my mother living still, or had she joined my father under the earth? I knew nothing about my sisters and wondered how they had grown. They could be mothers themselves by now, but are forever babies in my imagination.

“Did I tell you he saw us?” Luchóg asked. “We were at our old stomping grounds by his house, and I am sure that he looked right at Chavisory and me. He’s not the handsomest thing in the world.”

“Tell the truth,” Chavisory added, “he’s rather fearsome. Like when he lived with us.”

“And old.”

“And wearing out,” said Smaolach. “You’re better off with us. Young always.”

The fire crackled and embers popped, floating up in the darkness. I pictured him snug in his bed with his woman, and the thought reminded me of Speck. I trudged back to my burrow, trying to find comfort in the hard ground.

In my sleep, I climbed a staircase of a thousand steps carved into the side of a mountain. The dizzy view below took my breath away, and my heart hammered against my bones. Only blue skies and a few more steps lay in front of me. I labored on and reached the top, and the stairs continued down the other side of the mountain, impossibly steep, even more frightening than the way up. Paralyzed, I could not go back and could not go on. From the side, from nowhere, Speck appeared, joining me on the summit. She had been transformed. Her eyes sparked with life; she grinned at me as if no time had passed.

“Shall we roll down the hill together? Like Jack and Jill?”

I could not say a word. If I moved, blinked, opened my mouth, she would disappear and I would fall.

“It isn’t as difficult or dangerous as it appears.”

She wrapped me in her arms and, next thing, we were safe at the bottom. The dreamscape shifts when she closes her eyes, and I fall deep into a well. I sit alone waiting for something to happen above my head. A door opens, light floods the space. I look up to find Henry Day looking down at me. At first he appears as my father, and then becomes himself. He shouts at me and shakes his fist. The door slams shut, erasing the light. From beneath my feet, the well begins to fill with water flowing in like a river. I kick in panic and realize a strong gossamer rope binds my limbs. Rising to my chest, to my chin, the waters wash over me, and I am under. Unable to hold my breath any longer, I open my mouth and fill my lungs.

I woke gasping for breath. A few seconds passed before the stars came into view, the reaching branches, the lips of my burrow an inch or two above my face. Throwing off the blanket, I rose and stepped out of that space onto the surface. Everyone else was asleep in their dens. Where the fire had been, a faint orange glow was visible beneath the black kindling. The starlit woods were so quiet that I could hear the steady breathing of the few faeries left in this place. The chilly air robbed me of my bed-warmth, and a film of nervous perspiration dried and evaporated off my skin. How long I stood still, I do not know, but I half expected someone to materialize from the darkness either to take me or to embrace me.

I
went back to work on my book, stuck mid sentence at the point where Igel is about to switch with little Oscar Love. During my first visit beneath the library, I re-read the pages in light of what we had discovered about Henry Day, and all that had been revealed to me through the other clan members about my former life and circumstances. Needless to say, my first story reeked of false impressions. I gathered my papers and the error-riddled manuscript and thought through the problem. In my original version, I had assumed that my parents lived still and that they had spent their lives missing their only son. Of the few chance encounters with my natural father, only one could possibly be true. And, of course, the first story had been written with no real knowledge of the fraud and imposter who had taken my place.

We started watching him again and found a troubled man. He carried on conversations with himself, his lips mouthing a violent argument. Ages ago, he’d had a number of other friends as well, but as his strangeness increased, they vanished from the story. Henry spent most of his time locked away in a room, reading books or playing a booming organ, scrawling notes on lined paper. His wife lived in the margins, working on her home, every day driving away and returning hours later. Onions thought that a telltale unhappiness weighed heavily on the woman’s mind, for when she was alone, she often stared into the distance, as if to extract from the air the answer to her unuttered questions. The boy, Edward, was ideal for the change, alone and distanced from the rise and fall of life, caught up in his own thoughts, and wandering through his parents’ house as if looking for a friend.

Waking in the middle of a full-moon night, I overheard Béka and Onions whispering about the boy. Cozy in their den, they expected a degree of privacy, but their conspiracy hummed along the ground like the faraway sound of an approaching train.

“Do you think we’d be able to, ourselves alone?” Onions asked.

“If we can catch him at the right moment. Perhaps when the father is distracted or drowning out every known sound on that infernal organ.”

“But if you change with Edward Day, what will happen to me?” Onions said, never more plaintive. I coughed to alert them to my presence and walked over to where they huddled, feigning sleep, innocent as two newborn kits. They might be brazen enough to try, and I resolved to keep closer watch and crack any plots before one might hatch.

In the past, the faeries refused to spy on one who had quit the tribe. The changeling was left alone, forgotten, and given a chance to live out his human life. The danger of being exposed by such a person is great, for after they make the change, they grow to resent their time among us and fear that other humans will discover their dark secret. But such concerns, once great, became less important to us. We were disappearing. Our number had diminished from a dozen to a mere six. We decided to make our own rules.

I asked them to find my mother and sisters, and at Christmas they were discovered at last. While the rest of us dozed, Chavisory and Luchóg stole away to town, which glowed with blinking lights as carolers sang in the streets. As a gift to me, they decided to explore my boyhood home, hoping to find missing clues that might give my past more meaning. The old house stood in the clearing, not as solitary as it had once been. Nearby farms had been sold off one by one, and the skeletons of new houses rose in all directions. A handful of cars parked in the drive led them to believe that a celebration was taking place at my former house, so they crept to the windows to see the assembled crowd. Henry Day, his wife, and their son were there. And Mary and Elizabeth. At the center of the festivities, a gray-haired woman sat in an easy chair by a sparkling fir tree. Her mannerisms reminded Luchóg of my mother, upon whom he had spied many years ago. He climbed a nearby oak and leapt from its outstretched limbs to the rooftop, scrambling over to the chimney, its bricks still warm to the touch. The fire below had gone out, making it easier for him to eavesdrop. My mother, he said, was singing to the children in the old style, without instrumentation. How I would have loved to hear her again.

“Give us a song, Henry,” she said when they were through, “like you used to do.”

“Christmas is a busman’s holiday if you play the piano,” he said. “What’ll it be, Mom? ‘Christmas in Killarney’ or some other blather?”

“Henry, you shouldn’t make fun,” said one of the daughters.

“ ‘Angels We Have Heard on High,’ ” said an unfamiliar, older man who rested his hand on her shoulder.

Henry played the song, began another. When Luchóg had heard enough, he jumped back to the oak and climbed down to rejoin Chavisory. They stole one last look at the party, studied the characters and scene for me, then returned home. When they told the story the next day, I was deeply pleased to hear about my mother, as puzzling as the details might be. Who was this old man? Who were all these other children? Even the tiniest scrap of news brought back that past. I hid in a hollow tree. She was angry with me, and I would run away and never come back. Where are your sisters? Where are my babies? I remembered that I had sat in the V made by her legs, listening to the story of the wanderings of Oisín in Tír na nÓg. It is not fair to have to miss someone for so many years.

But this is a double life. I sat down to work on the true story of my world and the world of Henry Day. The words flowed slowly, painfully, sometimes letter by letter. Whole mornings escaped without a single sentence worth saving. I crumpled and threw away so many pages that I was forever popping up into the library to steal more paper, and the pile of trash in the corner threatened to consume the whole room. In assembling my tale, I found myself tiring easily, early in the day, so that if I could string together five hundred words, writing had triumphed over uncertainty and procrastination.

At times I questioned my reasons for written proof of my own existence. When I was a boy, stories were as real as any other part of life. I’d hear Jack climb the beanstalk, and later wonder how to climb the tall poplars outside my window. Hansel and Gretel were brave heroes, and I shuddered at the thought of the witch in her oven. In my daydreams, I fought dragons and rescued the girl trapped in her tower. When I could not sleep for the wild doings and extravagant deeds of my own imagination, I’d wake my father, who would invariably say, “It’s only a story.” As if such words made it less real. But I did not believe him even then, for stories were written down, and the words on the page were proof enough. Fixed and permanent in time, the words, if anything, made the people and places more real than the ever-changing world. My life with the faeries is more real to me than my life as Henry Day. And I wrote it down to show that we are more than a myth, a tale for children, a nightmare or daydream. Just as we need their stories to exist, so do the humans need us to give shape to their lives. I wrote it to create meaning for my change, for what happened with Speck. By saying
this
instead of
that
, I could control what mattered. And show the truth that lies below the surface life.

I
finally decided to meet the man face-to-face. I had seen Henry Day years before, but I now knew that he had once been a changeling who had kidnapped me when I was a boy of seven. We had uncovered him, followed him everywhere, and learned the outlines of his daily routine. The faeries had been to his house, taken a random score of the music he wrote, and left him with a sign of their mischief. But I wanted to confront him, if only to say goodbye, through him, to my mother and sisters.