The Stolen Child (30 page)

I was on my way to the library to finish my story. A man stepped out of a car and marched through the front door of the building. He looked old and tired, worn by care. Nothing like me, or how I imagined I would be. He walked with his head down, eyes on the ground, a slight stoop to his shoulders, as if the simplest things gravely distracted him. He dropped an armful of papers and, bending down to gather them, muttered a stream of curses. I considered pouncing out of the woods, but he looked too fragile to spook that night, so instead I squeezed through the crevice to go about my craft.

He had begun frequenting the library that summer, showing up several days in a row, humming snatches of the symphony we had stolen from him. On hot and humid afternoons, when sensible people were swimming or lying in bed with the shades drawn, Henry was often reading alone at a sun-splashed table. I could sense his presence above, separated only by the thin ceiling, and when the library closed for the night, I climbed through the trapdoor and investigated. He had been working in a quiet spot in the back corner. Upon a desk, a stack of books lay undisturbed, with neat slips of paper sticking out like tongues between the leaves. I sat where he had sat and looked at the mishmash of titles on everything from imps and demons to a thick book on “idiots savants.” Nothing connected these titles, but he had scribbled diminutive notes to himself on bookmarks:

Not fairy but hobgoblin.

Gustav—savant?

Ruined my life.

Find Henry Day.

The phrases were discarded pieces to different puzzles, and I pocketed the notes. In the morning, the sounds of his dismay penetrated the floor. Henry muttered about the missing bookmarks, and I felt a guilty pleasure at having nipped them. He ranted at the librarians, but eventually he collected himself and went about his work. I welcomed the peace, which gave me the time to finish writing my book in the quiet hours. Soon I would be free of Henry Day. That evening, I packed the sheets in a cardboard box, placing a few old drawings on top of the manuscript, and then folded Speck’s letter carefully and tucked the pages in my pocket. After a quick trip home, I planned on returning one last time to collect my belongings and say my final goodbyes to the dear old space. In my haste, I neglected to think of the time. The last hour of daylight held sway when I pushed out into the open. Considering the risk, I should not have chanced it, but I stepped away from the back staircase and began to walk home.

Henry Day stood not a dozen feet ahead, looking directly at me and the crack beneath the library. Like a cornered hare, I reacted instinctively, running straight at him and then veering off sharply into the street. He moved not a single step. His dulled reflexes failed him. I ran through town with complete disregard for any people, crossed lawns with sprinklers spritzing the dry grass, leapt chainlink fences, tore in front of a moving car or two. I did not stop until deep in the woods, then collapsed on the ground, panting, laughing until tears fell. The look of surprise, anger, and fear on his face. He had no idea who I was. All I had to do was go back later for the book, and that would be the end of the story.

•                    CHAPTER 35                    •

T
he monster never breathes,” the composer Berlioz supposedly said about the organ, but I found the opposite to be true. When I played, I felt alive and at one with the machine, as if exhaling the music. Tess and Edward visited the studio to hear the lengthening shape of my composition, and at the end of the performance my son said, “You were moving the same as I was breathing.” Over the course of a year, I worked on the symphony during what hours I could steal, regenerating it constantly from the desire to confess, seeking to craft a texture that would allow me to explain. I felt that if she could but hear my story in the music, Tess would surely understand and forgive. In my studio, I could take refuge at the keyboard. Lock the door and draw the curtains to feel safe and whole again. Lose myself, find myself, in the music.

By the springtime, I had secured a small orchestra—a wind ensemble from Duquesne, timpani from Carnegie-Mellon, a few local musicians—to perform the piece when it was completed. After Edward had finished first grade in June, Tess took him for a two-week visit to her cousin Penny’s to give me time alone in the house to finish my symphony—a work about a child trapped in his silence, how the sounds could never get out of his own imagination, living in two worlds, the internal life locked to all communication with outside reality.

After struggling for years to find the music for that stolen child, I finally finished. The score lay spread out across the organ, the scrawled notes on the staves a marvel of mathematical beauty and precision. Two stories told at the same time—the inner life and the outer world in counterpoint. My method was not to juxtapose each chord with its double, for that is not reality. Sometimes our thoughts and dreams are more real than the rest of our experience, and at other moments that which happens to us overshadows anything we might imagine. I had not been able to write fast enough to capture the sounds in my head, notes that flowed from deep within, as if half of me had been composing, and the other half acting as amanuensis. I had yet to fully transcribe the musical shorthand and to assign all of the instrumentation—tasks that might take months of rehearsal to perfect—but the initial process of setting down the bones of the symphony had made me giddy and exhausted, as if in a waking dream. Its relentless logic, strange to the ordinary rules of language, seemed to me what I had been hoping to write all along.

At five o’clock that afternoon, hot and wrung-out, I went to the kitchen for a bottle of beer, and drank it on the way upstairs. My plan was a shower, another beer with dinner, and then back to work. In the bedroom closet, the empty spaces where her clothes had been reminded me of Tess, and I wished she had been there to share the sudden burst of creativity and accomplishment. Moments after stepping into the hot shower, I heard a loud crash downstairs. Without turning off the water, I stepped out, wrapped a towel around my waist, and hurried to investigate. One of the windows in the living room had been broken, and glass lay all over the rug. A breeze flapped the curtains. Half naked and dripping wet, I stood there puzzled, until a sudden discordant hammering of the piano keys frightened me, as if a cat had walked across it, but the studio was empty and silent. I took a long look around.

The score was gone—not on the table where I had left it, not fallen to the floor, not anywhere. The window gaped open, and I ran to look at the lawn. A solitary page fluttered across the grass, pushed along by a thin breeze, but there was nothing else to see. Howling with anger and pacing the room, I stubbed my toe on the piano leg and began hopping up and down across the rug, nearly impaling my foot on a piece of glass, when another crash sounded upstairs. Foot throbbing, I climbed the steps to the landing, afraid of what might be in my house, worried about my manuscript. My bedroom was empty. In our son’s room another window had been broken, but no glass littered the floor. Shards on the roof meant the window had been shattered from the inside out. To clear my head, I sat for a moment on the edge of his bed. His room looked the same as the day he’d left for the vacation, and thoughts of Edward and Tess filled me with sudden sorrow. How would I explain the missing symphony? Without it, how could I confess my true nature? I pulled at my wet hair till my scalp ached. In my mind, my wife, my son, and my music were wound together in a braided chain that now threatened to unravel.

In the bathroom, the shower ran and ran. A cloud of steam billowed out into the hallway, and I stumbled through the fog to shut off the water. On the cabinet mirror, someone had fingered words on the fogged surface:
We No Your Secret
. Copied above, note for note, was the first measure of my score.

“You little fuckers,” I said to myself as the message vanished from the mirror.

A
fter a restless and lonesome night, I drove to my mother’s house as a new day began. When she did not immediately answer my knock, I thought she might still be asleep, and went over to the window to look in. From the kitchen, she saw me standing there, smiled, and waved me to her.

“Door’s never locked,” she said. “What brings you here in the middle of the week?”

“Good morning. Can’t a guy come and see his best girl?”

“Oh, you’re such an awful liar. Would you like a cup of coffee? How about I fry you a couple of eggs?” She busied herself at the stove, and I sat at the kitchen table, its surface pocked with marks left from dropped pots and pans, nicked by knives, and lined with faint impressions of letters written there. The morning light stirred memories of our first breakfast together.

“Sorry I was so long in answering the door,” she said above the sizzle. “I was on the phone with Charlie. He’s off in Philadelphia, tying up loose ends. Is everything all right with you?”

I was tempted to tell her everything, beginning with the night we took away her son, going back further to a little German boy snatched away by changelings, and ending with the tale of the stolen score. But she looked too careworn for such confessions. Tess might be able to handle it, but the story would break my mother’s heart. Nonetheless, I needed to tell someone, at least provisionally, of my past errors and the sins I was about to commit.

“I’ve been under a lot of pressure lately. Seeing things, not truly myself. Like I’m being followed by a bad dream.”

“Followed by troubles is the sign of a guilty conscience.”

“Haunted. And I’ve got to sort it out.”

“When you were a baby, you were the answer to my prayers. And when you were a little boy, remember, I used to sing you to sleep every night. You were the sweetest thing, trying to sing along with me, but you could never carry a tune. That certainly changed. And so did you. As if something happened to you that night you ran away.”

“It is like the devils are watching me.”

“Don’t believe in fairy tales. The trouble is inside, Henry, with you. Living in your own head.” She patted my hand. “A mother knows her own son.”

“Have I been a good son, Mom?”

“Henry.” She rested her palm against my cheek, a gesture from my childhood days, and the grief over losing my score abated. “You are who you are, for good or ill, and no use torturing yourself with your own creations. Little devils.” She smiled as if a fresh thought had entered her mind. “Have you ever thought whether you’re real to them? Put those nightmares out of your head.”

I stood to go, then bent and kissed her good-bye. She had treated me kindly over the years, as if I had been her own son.

“I’ve known all along, Henry,” she said.

I left the house without asking.

I
resolved to confront them and find out why they were tormenting me. To flush out those monsters, I would go back into the woods. The Forest Service provided topographical maps of the region, the areas in green indicating woodland, the roads drawn in meticulous detail, and I laid a grid over the likely areas, dividing the wilderness into manageable plats. For two days, despite my loathing for the forest and my aversion to nature, I explored a few of those squares, looking for their lair. The woods were emptier than when I lived there—the occasional hammering of a woodpecker, skinks sunning themselves on rocks, the raised white flag of one deer running away, and the lonesome hum of greenbottle flies. Not much life, but plenty of junk—a swollen copy of
Playboy
; a four-of-hearts playing card; a tattered white sweater; a small mound of empty cigarette packages; a canteen; a tortoiseshell necklace on a pile of stones; a stopped watch; and a book stamped
Property of County Library
.

Aside from the dirt on its cover and the slight musty odor to its pages, the book was intact. Through the mildewed pages, the story revolved around a religious fanatic named Tarwater or Tearwater. I gave up reading novels in childhood, for their artificial worlds mask rather than reveal the truth. Novelists construct elaborate lies to throw off readers from discovering the meaning behind the words and symbols, as if it could be known. But the book I found might be just the thing for a fourteen-year-old hellion or some religious misfit, so I took it back to the library. Virtually nobody was there on that midsummer day, except for a cute girl behind the counter.

“I found this in the woods. It belongs to you.”

She looked at the novel as if it were a lost treasure, brushed off the grime, and opened the back cover. “Just a minute.” She leafed through a stack of stamped cards. “Thank you, but this has not been checked out at all. Did you forget?”

“No,” I explained. “I found it, and wanted to return it to the rightful owners. I was looking for something else.”

“Maybe I can help you?” Her smile reminded me of so many other librarians, and a small twinge of guilt poked me in the ribs.

I leaned close and smiled at her. “Do you have any books on hobgoblins?”

She skipped a beat. “Hobgoblins?”

“Or fairies. Imps, trolls, sprites, changelings, that sort of thing?”

The girl looked at me as if I were speaking a foreign language. “You shouldn’t lean on the desk like that. There’s a card catalog right over there. Alphabetical by subject, title, or author.”

Rather than providing shortcuts to useful information, one search begat another, and the curiouser and curiouser I got, the more rabbit holes popped open. My search for fairies resulted in forty-two titles, of which a dozen or so might be useful, but that search branched off into goblins and hobgoblins, which in turn branched off to abnormal psychology, child prodigies, and autism. Lunchtime had come and gone, and I felt lightheaded and in need of some air. At a nearby convenience store I bought a sandwich and a bottle of pop, and I sat on a bench by the empty playground, contemplating the task before me. There was so much to know, so much already forgotten. In the relentless sunshine I fell asleep, waking up three hours later with a nasty sunburn on one arm and the left side of my face. From the library’s bathroom mirror stared a person divided in two, half of my face pale, the other half crimson. Exiting past the young librarian, I tried to keep my profile two-dimensional.

My dream returned in full detail that night. Tess and I spoke quietly on the deck of a local pool. A few other people milled about in the background, sunning themselves or diving into the cool water. As wallflowers: Jimmy Cummings, Oscar Love, Uncle Charlie, Brian Ungerland. All the librarians in bikinis.

“How have you been, my love?” she teased. “Still chased by monsters?”

“Tess, it’s not funny.”

“I’m sorry, but no one else can see them, sweetheart. Only you.”

“But they’re as real as you and me. What if they come for Edward?”

“They don’t want Eddie. They want you.” She stood up, tugged at the bottom of her suit, and jumped in the pool. I plunged in after her, shocked by how cold the water felt, and frog-kicked my way to the middle. Tess swam to me, her body becoming more streamlined and graceful, and when the top of her head broke the surface, her hair was plastered against her scalp. As she stopped and stood, the film of water ran off her face, parting like a curtain to reveal not her face at all, but a hobgoblin’s face, horrid and frightening. I blanched and hollered involuntarily; then she changed right back again to her familiar self. “What’s the matter, love? Don’t you know I know who you are? Tell me.”

I went back to the library, hunted for a few of my titles, and sat down at a corner table. The research, especially on hobgoblins, was wrong in virtually every particular and no better than myth or fiction. Nobody wrote accurately about their habits and customs, how they lived in darkness, spying on human children, looking for the right person with whom to make the change. There was not one single word about how to get rid of unwanted visitors. Or how to protect your child from every chance and danger. Lost in these fairy tales, I became hypersensitive to the stillness of my surroundings, jarred by the sounds that penetrated the silence. At first the noises appeared to be the random shufflings of another patron languidly turning pages, or one of the librarians, bored out of her mind, pacing the corridors or sneaking outside for a smoke. Soon every minute sound intensified in the mind-numbing quiet.

Someone breathed deeply and regularly, as if asleep, the noise emanating from an indeterminate direction. Later I heard a rasping in the walls, and when I asked the cute librarian, she said it was only mice, but the scrabbling was scratchier, like a fountain pen racing across a pad of paper. That evening, someone began singing tunelessly to himself from the lower depths. I followed the melody to a spot in the children’s section. Not a soul around, I lay down, pressed my ear to the floor, and ran my fingers along the ancient carpet, catching my thumb on a hard bump, like a hinge or a bent nail. Carefully cut and nearly indiscernible, a carpet square had been glued to the spot, covering a panel or hatch below, and I would have pried it open, but the passing librarian startled me by clearing her throat. With a sheepish grin, I stood up, mumbled an apology, and went back to my corner. Convinced that something lived beneath the building, I brooded over how to catch him and make him talk.