The Stolen Child (13 page)

•                    CHAPTER 14                    •

         
L
ooking far ahead on the path, I spied her returning to camp, which set my mind at ease. She appeared between the trees, moving like a deer along the ridgeline. The incident at the library had left me eager to apologize, so I took a shortcut through the forest that would allow me to cut her off along her route. My mind buzzed with the story of the man in the yard. I hoped to tell her before the important parts vanished in the confusion. Speck would be mad, rightfully so, but her compassion would mollify any anger. As I drew near, she must have spotted me, for she took off in a sprint. Had I not hesitated before giving chase, perhaps I would have caught her, but the rough terrain defeated speed. In my haste, I snagged my toe on a fallen branch and landed facedown in the dirt. Spitting leaves and twigs, I looked up to see Speck had already made it into camp and was talking with Béka.

“She doesn’t want to speak with you,” the old toad said upon my arrival, and clamped his hand on my shoulder. A few of the elders—Igel, Ragno, Zanzara, and Blomma—had sidled next to him, forming a wall.

“But I need to talk to her.”

Luchóg and Kivi joined the others. Smaolach walked toward the group from my right, his hands clenched and shaking. Onions approached from my left, a menacing toothsome smile on her face. Nine of them encircled me. Igel stepped inside the ring and jabbed a finger at my chest.

“You have violated our trust.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She followed you, Aniday. She saw you with the man. You were to avoid any contact with them, yet there you were, trying to communicate with one of them.” Igel pushed me to the ground, kicking up a cloud of rotten leaves. Humiliated, I quickly sprang back to my feet. My fear grew as the others hollered invectives.

“Do you know how dangerous that was?”

“Teach him a lesson.”

“Do you understand we cannot be discovered?”

“So he won’t forget again.”

“They could come and capture us, and then we will never be free.”

“Punish him.”

Igel did not strike the first blow. From behind, a fist or a club smashed into my kidneys, and I arched my back. With my body thus exposed, Igel punched me squarely in the solar plexus, and I hunched forward. A line of drool spilled from my open mouth. They were all upon me at once like a pack of wild dogs bringing down wounded prey. The blows came from all directions, and initial shock gave way to pain. They scraped my face with their nails, ripped hunks of hair from my scalp, sank their teeth into my shoulder, drawing blood. A ropy arm choked my neck, shutting off the flow of air. I gagged and felt my gorge rise. Amid the fury, their eyes blazed with frenzy, and sheer hatred twisted their features. One by one, they peeled off, sated, and the pressure lessened, but those who remained kicked at my ribs, taunting me to get up, snarling and growling at me to fight back. I could not muster the strength. Before walking away, Béka stomped on my fingers, and Igel delivered a kick with each word of his final admonition: “Do not talk to people again.”

I closed my eyes and stayed still. The sun shone down through the branches of the trees, warming my body. My joints ached from the fall, and my fingers swelled and throbbed. One eye was painted black and blue, and blood oozed from cuts and pooled beneath plum bruises. My mouth tasted of vomit and dirt, and I passed out in a rumpled heap.

Cool water on my cuts and bruises startled me awake, and my first vision was of Speck bent over me, wiping the blood from my face. Directly behind her stood Smaolach and Luchóg, their faces pinched with concern. Drops of my blood left a red patch on Speck’s white sweater. When I tried to speak, she pressed the wet cloth to my lips.

“Aniday, I am so sorry. I did not want this to happen.”

“We’re sorry, too,” Smaolach said. “But the law has a ruthless logic.”

Chavisory poked out her head from behind Speck’s shoulder. “I took no part in it.”

“You should not have left me, Aniday. You should have trusted me.”

I sat up slowly and faced my tormentors. “Why did you let them?”

“I took no part,” Chavisory said.

Luchóg knelt beside Speck and spoke for all. “We had to do it, so that you will not ever forget. You spoke to the human, and if he caught you, you would be gone forever.”

“Suppose I want to go back.”

No one looked me in the eye. Chavisory hummed to herself while the others kept silent.

“I think that might have been my real father, Speck. From the other world. Or maybe it was a monster and a dream. But it wanted me to come into the house. I have been there before.”

“Doesn’t matter who he was,” said Smaolach. “Father, mother, sister, brother, your Aunt Fanny’s uncle. None of that matters. We’re your family.”

I spat out a mouthful of dirt and blood. “A family doesn’t beat up one of its own, even if they have a good reason.”

Chavisory shouted in my ear, “I didn’t even touch you!” She danced spirals around the others.

“We were following rules,” said Speck.

“I don’t want to stay here. I want to go back to my real family.”

“Aniday, you can’t,” Speck said. “They think you are gone these past ten years. You may look like you’re eight, but you are almost eighteen. We are stuck in time.”

Luchóg added, “You’d be a ghost to them.”

“I want to go home.”

Speck confronted me. “Listen, there are only three possible choices, and going home is not one of them.”

“Right,” Smaolach said. He sat down on a rotting tree stump and counted off the possibilities on his fingers. “One is that while you do not get old here, nor get deathly ill, you can die by accident. I remember one fellow who went a-walking a wintry day. He made a foolish calculation in his leap from the top of the bridge to the edge of the riverbank, and his jump was not jumpy enough. He fell into the river, went right through the ice, and drowned, frozen to death.”

“Accidents happen,” Luchóg added. “Long ago, you could find yourself eaten. Wolves and mountain lions prowled these parts. Did you ever hear of the one from up north who wintered out inside a cave and woke up springtime next to a very hungry grizzly? A man can die by any chance imaginable.”

“Two, you could be rid of us,” Smaolach said, “by simply leaving. Just up and saunter off and go live apart and alone. We discourage that sort of attitude, mind you, for we need you here to help us find the next child. ’Tis harder than you think to pretend to be someone else.”

“Besides, it is a lonesome life,” said Chavisory.

“True,” Speck agreed. “But you can be lonely with a dozen friends beside you.”

“If you go that way, you’re more likely to meet with a singular fate,” Luchóg said. “Suppose you fell in a ditch and couldn’t get up? Then where would you be?”

Said Smaolach, “Them fellows usually succumb, don’t they, to some twist in the road? You lose your way in a blizzard. A black widow nips your thumb as you sleep. And no one to find the anecdote, the cowslip or the boiled frogs’ eggs.”

“Besides, where would you go that’s any better than this?” Luchóg asked.

“I would go crazy being just by myself all the time,” Chavisory added.

“Then,” Luchóg told her, “you would have to make the change.”

Speck looked beyond me, toward the treeline. “That’s the third way. You find the right child on the other side, and you take her place.”

“Now you’re confusing the boy,” said Smaolach. “First, you have to find a child, learn all about him. All of us watch and study him. From a distance, mind.”

“It has to be somebody who isn’t happy,” Chavisory said.

Smaolach scowled at her. “Never mind that. We observe the child in teams. While certain people take down his habits, others study his voice.”

“Start with the name,” said Speck. “Gather all the facts: age, birthday, brothers and sisters.”

Chavisory interrupted her. “I’d stay away from boys with dogs. Dogs are born suspicious.”

“You have to know enough,” Speck said, “so you can make people believe you are one of them. A child of their own.”

Carefully rolling a cigarette, Luchóg said, “I’ve betimes thought that I’d look for a large family, with lots of kids and so on, and then pick the one in the middle that nobody’ll miss or notice they’re gone for a bit. Or if I forget some detail or am slightly off in my imitation, nobody is the wiser. Maybe number six of thirteen, or four of seven. Not as easy as it once was, now that mums and dads aren’t having so many babies.”

“I’d like to be a baby again,” said Chavisory.

“Once you have made the choice,” said Smaolach, “we go in and grab the child. He or she’s got to be alone, or you’ll be found out. Have you ever heard the tale of them ones in Russia or thereabouts, where they caught the lot of them stealing a tiny Cossack lad with pointy teeth, and them Cossacks took all our boys of the woods and burnt them up to a crisp?”

“Fire is a devil of a way to go,” said Luchóg. “Did I ever tell you of the faery changeling caught snooping around the room of a girl she wished to replace? She hears the parents come in, and leaps in the closet, making the change right there in the room. At first, the parents thought nothing of it, when they opened the door and there she was, playing in the dark. Later that day, the real girl comes home, and what do you think? There’s the two of them side by side, and our friend would have made it, but she hadn’t yet learned how to speak like the little girl. So the mother says, ‘Now which one of you is Lucy?’ and the real Lucy says, ‘I am,’ and the other Lucy lets out a squawk to raise the dead. She had to jump out the second-floor window and start all over again.”

Smaolach looked perplexed during his friend’s story, scratching his head as if trying to recall an important detail. “Ah, there’s a bit of magic, of course. We bind up the child in a web and lead him to the water.”

Spinning on her heels, Chavisory shouted, “And there’s the incantation. You mustn’t forget that.”

“In he goes like a baptism,” Smaolach continued. “Out he comes, one of us. Never to leave except by one of three ways, and I would not give you my shoes for the first two.”

Chavisory drew a circle in the dust with her bare toe. “Remember the German boy who played the piano? The one before Aniday.”

With a short hiss, Speck grabbed Chavisory by the hair and pulled the poor creature to her. She sat on her chest and threw her hands upon her face, massaging and kneading Chavisory’s skin like so much dough. The girl screamed and cried like a fox in a steel trap. When she had finished, Speck revealed a reasonable copy of her own sweet face on the visage of Chavisory. They looked like twins.

“You put me back,” Chavisory complained.

“You put me back.” Speck imitated her perfectly.

I could not believe what I was seeing.

“There’s your future, little treasure. Behold the changeling,” said Smaolach. “Going back to the past as yourself is not an option. But when you return as a changed person to their world, you get to stay there, grow up as one of them, live as one of them, more or less, grow old as time allows, and you’ll do that yet, when your turn comes.”

“My turn? I want to go home right now. How do I do it?”

“You don’t,” Luchóg said. “You have to wait until the rest of us have gone. There’s a natural order to our world that mustn’t be disturbed. One child for one changeling. When your time comes, you will find another child from a different family than what you left behind. You cannot go back whence you came.”

“I’m afraid, Aniday, you’re last in the line. You’ll have to be patient.”

Luchóg and Smaolach took Chavisory behind the honeysuckle and began to manipulate her face. The three of them laughed and carried on through the whole process. “Just make me pretty again,” and “Let’s get one of them magazines with the women’s pictures,” and “Hey, she looks like Audrey Hepburn.” Eventually, they fixed her face, and she flew from their clutches like
a bat.

Speck was unusually kind to me for the rest of that day, perhaps out of misplaced guilt for my beating. Her gentleness reminded me of my mother’s touch, or what I thought I remembered. My own mother might as well have been the phantom, or any other fiction to be conjured. I was forgetting again, the distinction between memory and imagination blurring. The man I saw, could he be my father? I wondered. He appeared to have recognized me, but I was not his son, only a shadow from the woods. In the dead of night, I wrote down the story of the three ways in McInnes’s notebook, hoping to understand it all in the future. Speck kept me company while the others slept. In the starlight, her cares had vanished from her face; even her eyes, usually so tired, radiated compassion.

“I am sorry they hurt you.”

“It doesn’t hurt,” I whispered, stiff and sore.

“Life here has its compensations. Listen.”

Low in a flyway, an owl swept between the trees, unrolling its wings on the hunt. Speck tensed, the fine hairs on her arms bristling.

“You will never get old,” she said. “You won’t have to worry about getting married or having babies or finding a job. No gray hair and wrinkles, no teeth falling out. You won’t need a cane or a crutch.”