The Stolen Child (22 page)

•                    CHAPTER 25                    •

I
had a name, although at times Gustav Ungerland was no more real to me than Henry Day. The simple solution would have been to track down Tom McInnes and ask him for more details about what had been said under hypnosis. After finding the article in the library, I tried to locate its author but had no more to go on than the address in the magazine. Several weeks after receiving my letter, the editor of the defunct
Journal of Myth and Society
replied that he would be glad to forward it on to the professor, but nothing came of it. When I called his university, the chairman of the department said McInnes had vanished on a Monday morning, right in the middle of the semester, and left no forwarding address. My attempts at contacting Brian Ungerland proved equally frustrating. I couldn’t very well pester Tess for information about her old boyfriend, and after asking around town, someone told me that Brian was at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, with the U.S. Army, studying how to blow things up. There were no Ungerlands in our local phone book.

Fortunately, other things occupied my thoughts. Tess had talked me into going back to school, and I was to begin in January. She changed when I told her my plans, became more attentive and affectionate. We celebrated registering for classes by splurging on dinner and Christmas shopping in the city. Arm in arm, we walked the sidewalks downtown. In the windows of Kaufmann’s Department Store, miniature animatronic scenes played out in an endless loop. Santa and his elves hammered at the same wooden bicycle. Skaters circled atop an icy mirror for all eternity. We stopped and lingered before one display—a human family, baby in the bassinet, proud parents kissing under the mistletoe. Our own images reflected on and through the glass, superimposed over the mechanicals’ domestic bliss.

“Isn’t that adorable? Look at how lifelike they made the baby. Doesn’t she make you want to have one yourself?”

“Sure, if they were all as quiet as that one.”

We strolled by the park, where a ragtag bunch of children queued up to a stand selling hot chocolate. We bought two cups and sat on a cold park bench. “You do like children, don’t you?”

“Children? I never think about them.”

“But wouldn’t you want a son to take camping or a girl to call your own?”

“Call my own? People don’t belong to other people.”

“You’re a very literal person sometimes.”

“I don’t think—”

“No, you don’t. Most people pick up on subtleties, but you operate in another dimension.”

But I knew what she meant. I did not know if having a real human baby was possible. Or would it be half human, half goblin, a monster? A horrid creature with a huge head and shrunken body, or those dead eyes peering out beneath a sunbonnet. Or a misery that would turn on me and expose my secret. Yet Tess’s warm presence on my arm had a curious tug on my conscience. Part of me desired to unpack the burdens of the past, to tell her all about Gustav Ungerland and my fugitive life in the forest. But so much time had passed since the change that at times I doubted that existence. All of my powers and skills learned a lifetime ago had disappeared, lost while endlessly playing the piano, faded in the comfort of warm beds and cozy living rooms, in the reality of this lovely woman beside me. Is the past as real as the present? Maybe I wish I
had
told everything, and that the truth had revised the course of life. I don’t know. But I do remember the feeling of that night, the mixed sensation of great hope and bottomless foreboding.

Tess watched a group of children skating across a makeshift ice rink. She blew on her drink and sent a fog of steam into the air. “I’ve always wanted a baby of my own.”

For once, I understood what another person was trying to tell me. With the music of a calliope harmonizing with the sound of children laughing under the stars, I asked her to marry me.

W
e waited until the end of spring semester and were married in May 1968 at the same church where Henry Day had been baptized as an infant. Standing at the altar, I felt almost human again, and in our vows existed the possibility for a happy ending. When we marched down the aisle I could see, in the smiling faces of all our friends and family, an unsuspecting joy for Mr. and Mrs. Henry Day. During the ceremony, I half expected that when the double doors opened to the daylight there would be a retinue of changelings waiting to take me away. I did my best to forget my past, to dismiss the thought that I was a fraud.

At the reception, my mother and Uncle Charlie were the first to greet us, and they had not only paid for the party but even made us a gift of a honeymoon in Europe. While we were away in Germany, they would elope together, but that afternoon it was passing strange to see him where Bill Day should have been. Nostalgia for my father was fleeting, for we were leaving behind the past and claiming life. So much would change over the next few years. George Knoll would leave town a few weeks after the wedding to wander across the country for a year, and he ended up in San Francisco, running a sidewalk bistro with an older woman from Spain. With no Coverboys, Oscar would buy a jukebox that fall, and the customers would still flock in for drinks and pop music. Jimmy Cummings took my old job behind the bar. Even my baby sisters were growing up.

Mary and Elizabeth brought their latest boyfriends, a couple of long-haired twins, to the reception, and at the center of the party, Uncle Charlie regaled the crowd with his latest scheme. “Those houses up on the ridge are only the beginning. People are not merely going to move out of the cities; they’re going to be moving as far away as they can. My company is sitting on a gold mine in this county.”

My mother sidled up to him, and he put his arm around her waist and rested his hand on her hip.

“When I first heard about the trouble up in the woods and sending in the National Guard, well, my first thought was that when the government was through, land would be dirt cheap.”

She laughed so willingly at his pun that I flinched. Tess squeezed my arm to prevent me from saying what I was thinking.

“Country living. Moderately priced, safe and secure, perfect for young couples looking to start a family.” As if on cue, he and my mother stared right at Tess’s belly. Already they were full of hope.

Feigning innocence, Elizabeth asked, “How about you two, Uncle
Charlie?”

Tess squeezed my bottom, and I let out a tiny whoop just as Jimmy Cummings stepped up to speak. “I wouldn’t want to live up there, man.”

“Of course not, Jimmy,” Mary said. “After all you went through in those woods.”

“There’s something up there,” he told the party. “Did you hear the rumor about those wild little girls they found the other night?”

The guests began to drift off in pairs and start new conversations. Since his rescue of young Oscar Love, Jimmy had acquired a reputation for tiresome repetitions of the story, exaggerating details until it became a tall tale. When he launched into another yarn, he was bound to be dismissed as merely another storyteller, desperate for attention. “No really,” he said to the few of us remaining. “I heard the local fuzz found these two girls, ’bout six or seven, I hear, who had broken into the drugstore in the dead of night and smashed everything in sight. The cops were scared of those girls, said they were spooky as a pair of cats. Man, they could barely speak a word of English or any language known to man. Put two and two together. They were living up in the woods—remember that place I found Oscar? Maybe there are others up there. Put your mind around that. Like a whole lost tribe of wild children. It’s a trip, man.”

Elizabeth was staring at me when she asked him, “What happened to them? Where are those two girls?”

“Can’t confirm or deny a rumor,” he said, “and I didn’t actually see them with my own two eyes, but I don’t have to. Did you know the FBI came and took ’em away? To Washington, D.C., and their secret labs, so they could study them.”

I turned to Oscar, who stood slack-jawed, listening to Jimmy. “Are you sure you want this boy tending bar for you, Oscar? Seems like he’s been hitting the bottle a bit too much.”

Jimmy came right up to my face and said sotto voce, “Know the trouble with you, Henry? You lack imagination. But they’re up there, man. You better freakin’ believe it.”

D
uring the flight to Germany, dreams of changelings interrupted what sleep I could manage on the airplane. When Tess and I landed in damp and overcast Frankfurt, we had two different expectations for our honeymoon. Poor thing, she wanted adventure, excitement, and romance. Two young lovers traveling through Europe. Bistros, wine and cheese, jaunts on motorbikes. I was looking for a ghost and evidence of my past, but all I knew could be written on a cocktail napkin: Gustav Ungerland, 1859, Eger.

Immediately bewildered by the city, we found a small room in a pension on Mendelssohnstrasse. We were dazed by the sooty black elephant of the Hauptbahnhof, disgorging trains by the hour, and behind it the resurrected city, new steel and concrete skyscrapers rising from the ashes of the ruins. Americans were everywhere. Soldiers fortunate enough to have drawn duty guarding against Eastern Europe rather than fighting in Vietnam. Strung-out runaways in the Konstablerwache shooting up in broad daylight or begging for our spare change. Our first week together, we felt out of place between the soldiers and the junkies.

On Sunday we strolled over to the Römerberg, a papier-mâché version of the medieval Alstadt that had been mostly bombed out by the Allies in the final months of the war. For the first time on our trip, the weather was bright and sunny, and we enjoyed a springtime street fair. On the carousel in the middle of the festival, Tess rode a zebra and I a griffin; then we held hands after lunch in the café as a strolling quartet played a song for us. As if the honeymoon had finally commenced, when we made love that night, our tiny room became a cozy paradise.

“This is more like it,” she whispered in the dark. “How I imagined we would be together. I wish every day could be like today.”

I sat up and lit a Camel. “I was wondering if maybe tomorrow we could go our own ways for a while. You know, have time to ourselves. Just think how much more we’ll have to talk about when we’re back together. There’s stuff I’d like to do that might not be interesting to you, so I was thinking maybe I could get up a bit earlier and go out, and I’d be back, probably, by the time you woke up. See the National Library. You would be bored to tears.”

“Cool out, Henry.” She rolled over and faced the wall. “That sounds perfect. I’m getting a little tired of spending every minute together.”

It took all morning to find the right train, then the right streets, and the address to the Deutsche Bibliothek, and another hour or so to find the map room. A charming young librarian with workable English helped me with the historical atlas and the seemingly thousands of alterations and border changes brought about by hundreds of years of war and peace, from the final days of the Holy Roman Empire through the Hessian principalities’ Reichstag to the divisions at the end of both world wars. She did not know Eger, could not find anyone in Reference that had heard of the town.

“Do you know,” she finally asked, “if it is East Germany?”

I looked at my watch and discovered it was 4:35 in the afternoon. The library closed at 5:00
P.M.
, and a furious new wife would be waiting for me.

She scoured the map. “Ach, now I see. It’s a river, not a town. Eger on the border.” She pointed to a dot that read
Cheb (Eger)
. “The town you are looking for isn’t called Eger now, and it isn’t in Germany. It’s in Czechoslovakia.” She licked her finger and paged back through the atlas to find another map. “Bohemia. Look here, in 1859 this was all Bohemia, from here to here. And Eger, right there. I have to say I much prefer the old name.” Smiling, she rested her hand on my shoulder. “But we have found it. One place with two names. Eger is Cheb.”

“So, how do I get to Czechoslovakia?”

“Unless you have the right papers, you don’t.” She could read my disappointment. “So, tell me, what is so important about Cheb?”

“I’m looking for my father,” I said. “Gustav Ungerland.”

The radiance melted from her face. She looked at the floor between her feet. “Ungerland. Was he killed in the war? Sent to the camps?”

“No, no. We’re Catholics. He’s from Eger; I mean, Cheb. His family, that is. They emigrated to America in the last century.”

“You might try the church records in Cheb, if you could get in.” She raised one dark eyebrow. “There may be a way.”

We had a few drinks in a café, and she told me how to cross the line without being detected. Making my way back to Mendelssohnstrasse late that evening, I rehearsed a story to explain my long absence. Tess was asleep when I came in after ten, and I slid into bed beside her. She woke with a start, then rolled over and faced me on the pillow.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Lost in the library.”

Lit by the moon, her face looked swollen, as if she had been crying. “I’d like to get out of this gray city and see the countryside. Go hiking, sleep under the stars. Meet some real Germans.”

“I know a place,” I whispered, “filled with old castles and dark woods near the border. Let’s sneak across and discover all their secrets.”

•                    CHAPTER 26                    •

         
T
he morning is perfect in memory, a late-summer day when blue skies foretold the coming autumn crispness. Speck and I had awakened next to each other in a sea of books, then left the library in those magically empty moments between parents going off to work, or children off to school, and the hour when stores and businesses opened their doors. By my stone calendar, five long and miserable years had passed since our diminished tribe took up our new home, and we had grown weary of the dark. Time away from the mine inevitably brightened Speck’s mood, and that morning, when first I saw her peaceful face, I longed to tell her how she made my heart beat. But I never did. In that sense, the day seemed like every other, but it would become a day unto its own.

Overhead, a jet trailed a string of smoke, white against the paleness of September. We matched strides and talked of our books. Shadows ahead appeared briefly between the trees, a slender breeze blew, and a few leaves tumbled from the heights. To me, it looked for an instant as if ahead on the path Kivi and Blomma were playing in a patch of sun. The mirage passed too quickly, but the trick of light brought to mind the mystery behind their departure, and I told Speck of my brief vision of our missing friends. I asked her if she ever wondered whether they really wanted to be caught.

Speck stopped at the edge of cover before the exposed land that led to the mine’s entrance. The loose shale at her feet shifted and crunched. A pale moon sat in a cloudless sky, and we were wary of the climb, watching the air for a plane that might discover us. She grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me around so quickly that I feared imminent peril. Her eyes locked on mine.

“You don’t understand, Aniday. Kivi and Blomma could not take it another moment. They were desperate for the other side. To be with those who live in the light and upper world, real family, real friends. Don’t you ever want to run away, go back into the world as somebody’s child? Or come away with me?”

Her questions poured out like sugar from a split sack. The past had eased its claims on me, and my nightmares of that world had stopped. Not until I sat down to write this book did the memories return, dusted and polished new again. But that morning, my life was there. With her. I looked into her eyes, but she seemed far away in thought, as if she could not see me before her but only a distant space and time alive in her imagination. I had fallen in love with her. And that moment, the words came falling, and confession moved to my lips. “Speck, I have something—”

“Wait. Listen.”

The noise surrounded us: a low rumble from inside the hill, zigzagging along the ground to where we two stood, vibrating beneath our feet, then fanning out into the forest. In the next instant, a crack and tumble, muffled by the outer surface. The earth collapsed upon itself with a sigh. She squeezed my hand and dragged me, running at top speed, toward the entrance of the mine. A plume of dirt swirled from the fissure like a chimney gently smoking on a winter’s night. Up close, acrid dust thickened and choked off breathing. We tried to fight through it but had to wait upwind until the fog dissipated. From inside, a reedy sound escaped from the crack to fade in the air. Before the soot settled, the first person emerged. A single hand gripped the rim of rock, then the other, and the head pushed through, the body shouldering into the open. In the wan light, we ran through the cloud to the prostrate body. Speck turned it over with her foot: Béka. Onions soon followed, wheezing and panting, and lay down beside him, her arm roped over his chest.

Speck leaned down to ask, “Is he dead?”

“Cave-in,” Onions whispered.

“Are there any survivors?”

“I don’t know.” She brushed back Béka’s dirty hair, away from his blinking eyes.

We forced ourselves into the mine’s darkness. Speck felt around for the flint, struck it, and sparked the torches. The firelight reflected particles floating in the air, settling like sediment stirred in a glass. I called out to the others, and my heart beat wildly with hope when a voice replied: “Over here, over here.” As if moving through a snowy nightmare, we followed the sound down the main tunnel, turning left into the chamber where most of the clan slept each night. Luchóg stood at the entranceway, fine silt clinging to his hair, skin, and clothes. His eyes shone clear and moist, and on his face tears had left wet trails in the dirt. His fingers, red and raw, shook violently as he waited for us. Ashes floated in the halo created by the torchlight. I could make out the broad back of Smaolach, who was facing a pile of rubble where our sleeping room once stood. At a frantic pace, he tossed stones to the side, trying to move the mountain bit by bit. I saw no one else. We sprang to his aid, lifting debris from the mound that ran to the ceiling.

“What happened?” Speck asked.

“They’re trapped,” Luchóg said. “Smaolach thinks he heard voices on the other side. The roof came down all at once. We’d be under there, too, if I hadn’t the need for a smoke when I woke up this morning.”

“Onions and Béka are already out. We saw them outside,” I said.

“Are you there?” Speck asked the rock. “Hold on, we’ll get you out.”

We dug until there appeared an opening big enough for Smaolach to stick his arm through to the elbow. Energized, we pounced, clawing away stones until Luchóg shinnied through the space and disappeared. The three of us stopped and waited for a sound for what seemed like forever. Finally Speck shouted into the void, “Do you see anything, mouse?”

“Dig,” he called. “I can hear breathing.”

Without a word, Speck left abruptly, and Smaolach and I continued to enlarge the passageway. We could hear Luchóg on the other side, scrabbling through the tunnel like a small creature in the walls of a house. Every few minutes, he would murmur reassurance to someone, then exhort us to keep burrowing, and we desperately worked harder, muscles enflamed, our throats caked with dust. As suddenly as she had disappeared, Speck returned, another torch in hand to throw more light upon our work. Her face taut with anger, she reached up and tore at the stone. “Béka, that bastard,” she said. “They’ve gone. No help to anyone but himself.”

After much digging, we made the hole wide enough for me to crawl through the rubble. I nearly landed on my face, but Luchóg broke my fall. “Down here,” he said softly, and we crouched together over the supine figure. Half buried under the ruins lay Chavisory, still and cold to the touch. Covered by ash, she looked like a ghost and her breath smelled mortally sour.

“She’s alive.” Luchóg spoke in a whisper. “But barely, and I think her legs are broken. I can’t move these heavy ones by myself.” He looked stricken with fear and fatigue. “You’ll have to help me.”

Stone by stone, we unburied her. Straining under the weight of the last debris, I asked him, “Have you seen Ragno and Zanzara? Did they get out okay?”

“Not a trace.” He motioned back toward our sleeping quarters, now buried under a ton of earth. The boys must have been sleeping in when the roof collapsed, and I prayed that they had not stirred and went from sleep to death as easily as turning over in their bed. But we could not stop to think of them. The possibility of another collapse urged us on. Chavisory moaned when we removed the last rock off her left ankle, a greenstick fracture, the bones and skin raw and pulpy. Her foot flopped at a sickening angle when we lifted her, and the blood left a viscous slick on our hands. She cried out with every step and lost consciousness as we struggled up to the tunnel, half pulling, half pushing her through. When he saw her leg, bone piercing the skin, Smaolach turned and threw up into the corner. As we rested there before the final push, Speck asked, “Is anyone else alive?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

She closed her eyes for a moment, then issued orders for our quick escape. The most difficult part involved the exit of the mine itself, and Chavisory awoke and screamed as she was pinched through. At that moment, I wished we had all been inside, asleep next to one another, all of us buried for good and out of our own private miseries. Exhausted, we placed her down gently on the hillside. None of us knew what to do or say or think. Inside another implosion shuddered, and the mine puffed out one last gasp like a dying dragon.

Spent and confused by grief, we waited for nightfall. None of us thought that the collapse might have been heard by the people in town or that it might possibly draw the humans to investigate. Luchóg spotted the dot of light first, a small fire burning down by the treeline. With no hesitation or discussion, the four of us picked up Chavisory, our arms linked in a gurney, and headed toward the light. Although worried that the fire might belong to strangers, we decided it would be better, in the end, to find help. We moved cautiously over the shale, causing more pain for poor Chavisory, yet hopeful that the fire would give us a place to stay out of the creeping cold for the night, somewhere we might tend her wounds.

The wind creaked through the bones of the treetops and shook the upper branches like clacking fingers. The fire had been built by Béka. He offered no apologies or explanations, just grunted like an old bear at our questions before shuffling off to be alone. Onions and Speck crafted a splint for Chavisory’s broken ankle, binding it up with Luchóg’s jacket, and they covered her with fallen leaves and lay next to her all night to share the warmth from their bodies. Smaolach wandered off and returned much later with a gourd filled with water. We sat and stared at the fire, brushing the caked dirt from our hair and clothing, waiting for the sun to rise. In those quiet hours, we mourned the dead. Ragno and Zanzara were as gone as Kivi and Blomma and Igel.

In place of the prior morning’s brilliant glow, a gentle rain crawled in and settled. Only the occasional whistle from a lonesome bird marked the passing time. Around midday, a fierce yell of pain punctuated the stillness. Chavisory awoke to her ordeal and cursed the rock, the mine, Béka, and us all. We could not silence her anguished cries until Speck took her hand and willed her through steadfastness to be quiet. The rest of us looked away from her, stealing glances at one another’s faces, masks of weariness and sorrow. We were now seven. I had to count twice to believe it.