Harvest of Changelings

by Warren Rochelle

  “Tell her I told you to get those nails. Geez, Ben, she’s leaving. You gotta talk to her.”

  I shook my head and asked Danielle, our waitress, for more sweet iced tea. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

  Valeria and I never mentioned the nails.

  Valeria left April 30, Beltaine Eve.

  “Are you just going to draw a pentagram on the floor at midnight and step through it?” Ben asked a few days before. He wasn’t angry; he was just sad; they both were. They were in the bedroom and Valeria had just put Malachi to bed. They stood by the crib and watched as he dreamed, his breathing slow, easy, the sheet rising, falling, his fists by his face. The floor was still speckled with the black soot. Ben had tried every cleanser he could think of—Murphy’s Oil Soap, Pinesol, Formula 409—nothing had worked. Valeria had finally made him stop: the soot had bonded with the wood. He would have to replace the entire floor, she had told him, and destroy the wood. She had given him instructions how. Floors made of oak, holly, elder, thorn, ash, hawthorn, and apple wood were going to take some doing.

  “No, I have to go to the nearest gate,” Valeria said and made some imperceptible adjustment to Malachi’s covers. “I’ll take a taxi. Let’s go in the living room or we will wake him up.”

  “Take a taxi? You can fly, or teleport, can’t you?” Ben asked, following her down the hall. He would have to replace the floor in the hall, too, and the living room. The embedded black spots were everywhere. Valeria had told him the longer they remained in the wood, the weaker it would be until the floors just collapsed. And that sometimes the black spots could make anyone that walked on them for too long sick of heart, and eventually, of the body. They sat down on the couch, and Valeria leaned into Ben, her head on his shoulder.

  “I don’t have the strength for it, not so soon after delivery. Ben, I really don’t want to go. You know, if the Fomorii hadn’t found me, tried to kill me—I would have stayed, Dodecagon or no. But there is just too much at stake, and I need you both to be safe. Without me, you’re safe. With me, you’re not.”

  “Can’t I go with you to the gate?”

  No, she told him, it wouldn’t be safe. She didn’t even want him to know where it was. Besides, it would make leaving all the harder.

  I needed to hear that: she would have stayed. She had forgiven me the nails.

  I said I told my son almost nothing about his mother until he was ten. I think now I was wrong to do that. He needed to know who and what she was, if for no other reason, to know who and what he was and was becoming. If I had, I think it would have made the first part of his puberty, when his fairyness started to manifest, so much more bearable for the both of us—much less scary for him. But I would have denied him that, if I could. That was wrong, too, I know. But I was so afraid of losing him as I lost her.

  Now, I know there are worst things to be scared of than losing someone you love.

  I have told him this story now I don’t know how many times. Malachi knows it by heart. And no matter how many times I tell it, the ending is always the hardest: I have to tell him how his mother died and that there was nothing I could have done to save her and that she died so that he and I would not die, that she loved us that much. I do not tell him that there seems to be no limit on how many times a heart can break, or that when I grieved for his mother, I grieved again for Emma, for loose flagstones, for human weakness, for not being enough, for feeling that I had failed again. I do not tell him I was angry with both women, with myself.

  It hurt to watch the taxi turn into the driveway, Val gather her things, kiss and hug Malachi. When she turned to kiss Ben, they were both crying. Neither of them could say anything. Valeria touched Ben one more time, lightly, just the tip of her glowing fingers on his cheek, and turned to go down the front steps onto the flagstone path to the waiting red taxi.

  Valeria was halfway between the steps and the car when the air shimmered, broke, falling in a rain of broken light, freeing the other Fomorii. It snapped its fire whip when its foot touched the earth, a snap so hard the whip broke, releasing a huge fireball, a miniature comet, with a tail of flames. The fireball was aimed at Ben. He could see it coming, smell and feel the approaching heat, and he knew there was no time and nowhere to go. Then Valeria threw herself in front of the fireball. Ben screamed: Noooo, don’t, don’t, nooo. The fireball exploded on impact.

  Or did she explode? Ben was never sure. The resulting white fire burned away the night, the dark, the stars, the Fomorii, and the fire whip, Valeria, and part of the yard, the flagstones, the shrubbery. The shock wave, a sudden rippling, an airborne tide, hit Ben in the chest, throwing him back, into the flowerbeds, into the pansies and daffodils. The living room windows all shattered, the taxi flipped over, once, twice, three times, slamming into the fence. Ben never knew what happened to the driver; he was gone when Ben, some time later, remembered to check. The flagstones melted, as did a good part of the asphalt, driveway. And there was nothing left, except the melted glassy earth, the burnt grass, and a fine ash, of either Valeria or the Fomorii. The police and fire department arrived to find Ben still lying in the flowerbed, the grass still on fire, the gravel and asphalt, molten. At least, Ben thought, they had something to do. A paramedic helped him up into a barrage of questions. All he could think to say, since the taxi hadn’t been considerate enough to explode, was ball lightning. The police, at least, kept the neighbors at bay.

  “There’s not a cloud in the sky. Ball lightning?” a sergeant asked, one eyebrow raised.

  Ben nodded, and repeated his story and told them again and again he had no idea where the taxi driver had gone. Finally they left, and Ben repeated his story to the handful of neighbors still up, and then, shaking his head, no more, enough, went back into the house, and sat down on the couch. He couldn’t do anything else. He couldn’t think, talk; he could barely breath. When Malachi started crying, he was finally able to move. The clock on the dresser said three-thirty. He didn’t turn on a light; he didn’t need to. The baby glowed. Something new hung from the crib mobile Jack had given them, a slender, silver-grey necklace with one dangling charm. Putting Malachi on his shoulder, Ben held the charm in his hand. It was also silver-grey, heavy, and shaped like a star, a small star with twelve points.

  By then Malachi was yelling so loud, Ben could have used him to guide in airplanes at RDU. Leaving the charm to dangle on the mobile and rubbing the boy’s back, Ben went into the kitchen. There, on the table, inside what looked like a nest of light, was a bottle. Ben carefully put his hand through the light-nest and it faded away, as if someone had blown it out, as he pricked up the still-warm bottle. He knew it was Valeria’s own milk—one from the precious few bottles she had left. He went back into the bedroom to the rocking chair and sat down, yawning, with Malachi in the crook of his arm. He looked up at Ben as he sucked noisily, with golden eyes, from her mother’s family, Valeria had said.

  “I think you have my nose,” Ben whispered.

  Ben knew that eventually he would have to cry. He knew it wasn’t going to be easy to raise an infant alone. For the first time he was glad Emma had left him money. Mrs. Carmichael was going to be shocked when he asked for paternity leave.

  Father Mark would help; so would Jack.

  Malachi was asleep. Ben gently slid the nipple out of his mouth and wiped the milk off his chin. He stood up very slowly and carried the baby back to the crib. He put him down and, after covering him, stepped back, and in the early morning shadows of the room, Ben watched his son sleep. As Malachi breathed, the light around him vibrated, contracting and expanding. Ben moved closer and put his hand on the baby’s head and curled his golden hair around his fingers: warm ribbons of light. In a month or so, Valeria had told him, Malachi would stop glowing. He would be like any human baby then, at least until puberty. Ben wished then that he had thought to have a family picture made, to put on his desk, where Emma’s had sat. With his free hand, he flipped his fingers at the charm and started it swinging back
and forth over his son’s head.

  Ben did weep, eventually.

  And Ben raised his son as best he knew how, with the help of those friends who loved him, and Malachi, who was always small, was a good boy, and he and his father lived happily together for ten years.

  Then everything changed.

  I

  Tuesday, May Eve, 3D April-Wednesday, Beltaine 1 May 1991

  Malachi Lucius Tyson

  MALACHI CLOSED HIS EYES. MISS WINDLEMERE read the poem, surely the most boring poem in the English language, in her clear and precise and completely flat voice, draining any and all feeling out of the words, if there had been any in the first place, until only the moral was left. Malachi was convinced Miss Windlemere believed the only good stories or poems had to be little homilies, tiny sermons. It wasn’t that Miss Windlemere was opposed to fun in school—after all, Malachi thought, she had put up a May Pole just outside the classroom. Tomorrow they were all supposed to do some sort of dorky dance with crepe paper streamers around the pole and the boy and girl with the highest grades in spelling would be crowned May King and Queen. Just like the little statue of Mary at church, with her floral coronet that Mrs. Nowalski made every week out of the flowers in her garden: pansies, petunias, tiny yellow buttercups, daffodils, paperwhite narcissi. Malachi had asked if the girl had to be like the Virgin but Miss Windlemere didn’t think it was funny.

  Would she ever finish? Malachi opened his eyes to look at the clock and its too slow second hand over the blackboard: 2:05. Another entire hour, sixty more minutes, three thousand six hundred seconds, before school was out for the day. And after that: four more weeks, four more weeks of Miss Windlemere and her flat voice and this classroom and Vandora Springs Elementary. Twenty days. Never mind the number of hours; it was too many. On the last day of school Malachi would walk out, never to come back. Fifth grade was going to be in a new school: Nottingham Heights Elementary. Malachi wondered if his next teacher would have the same posters placed neatly above each window: Truth is Beauty, Knowledge is Power, The Early Bird Gets The Worm, Variety is The Spice of Life. Posters, Malachi was sure, that had been up on the wall since the school was built, as Knowledge is Power and Truth is Beauty were getting frayed around the edges. Someone had left a spitball on the worm.

  “Now, class, take out a piece of paper—don’t rip it out, Ellen, how many times do I have to tell you that?-name and date in the upper right hand corner. Danny, stop staring out the window. Thank you. Now, class, I want you to write your own May poem using your spelling words . . .”

  Geez, another spelling word poem. Danny had the right idea—if Malachi could just get outside. He sniffed the breeze that had found its way into the classroom: warm, light, laced with the faint, faint fragrance of nameless flowers. And was that a cardinal—that flash of red taking flight? If he could just follow that bird—go whenever, wherever—Malachi sighed and got out a piece of paper and watched as the minute hand moved to 2:09. Could he? His wrist on his desk, Malachi raised his hand. His pencil slowly rolled out of its groove and up against his wrist. He had never tried a trick like this before, though. It had only been in the past month, since Malachi’s tenth birthday in March, that he had found out he could do these tricks on a regular basis. Pencils, though, were one thing, clocks were another. But still, if he could move the clock hands to 3:05 and trip the bell in the office, he’d be out of here. The very first trick, back in October, had been an accident. Malachi had dropped the kaleidoscope Uncle Jack had given him under his bed and it had rolled out of reach. Even lying flat on his stomach and stretching his arm as far as he could, Malachi had not been able to reach the metal tube, and there just wasn’t enough space between bed and floor for him to crawl under. Moving the bed wasn’t an option, as it folded out of the wall—the previous owners liked boats, his dad had explained once. He had closed his eyes and imagined the kaleidoscope rolling to him, and it did. Just a few inches, but the kaleidoscope had moved.

  He pinched himself: yes, he was awake. Just because he was on the floor, dust bunnies around his ears, with his eyes closed, didn’t mean he was asleep. Maybe the floor was curved, or maybe the house was really a boat and had hit a big wave. Maybe there had been an earthquake. The second time Malachi tried, the kaleidoscope skittered across the floor into his hand, leaving a very faint, blue trail behind it. It had happened again, a few days later, on Halloween. Miss Windlemere, to everyone’s surprise, had worn a black witch’s dress and hat to school. She had even cackled a few times. Wasn’t she supposed to keep her true identity secret? She had just about been ready to sit down at reading group when Malachi pushed the chair back. Miss Windlemere had dropped straight to the floor, collapsing just like the Wicked Witch of the West.

  But only in the past few weeks, since his birthday, had Malachi been able to count on the tricks. Kaleidoscopes, toy cars and trucks, stuffed animals, balled-up paper, pencils, books—all of them had flown about his bedroom, leaving fading smoke-blue trails in the air. And if he could move all those things, how hard could the clock hands and the office bell be? I can do this. Malachi bent low over his desk, so Miss Windlemere couldn’t see he was only pretending to write. He clenched his fist and tightened his chest. Focus, see the bell, the clock . . . There. The afternoon bell rang, shattering the class’s sleepy silence into a rush of voices and moving bodies. Miss Windlemere jumped up from her desk, looking first at the clock and then at the class as it surged up and out, moving around her like she was more furniture.

  “Wait, that can’t be right, it’s not 3:05, wait, good-bye, good-bye. . .”

  I did it, I did it, I did it. Okay, careful, don’t push them out of the way, but I bet I could; it wouldn’t take much. Blow them away, like the Big Bad Wolf. Just huff and puff, and blow them all down. Serve ’em right. Not now. Walk, run, shove, like everybody else. Maybe I ought to give Miss Windlemere another surprise—yeah, move her chair out, there, until it is right behind her and when she steps back—Yeessss. Malachi stopped at the door and looked back. He had never seen anybody so surprised in their life. He blew. Miss Windlemere took a quick step back, her hair suddenly loose about her head, and dropped heavily into her chair. When the chair started spinning in circles around the room, she froze, her hands in the air, her mouth open.

  “Good-bye,” Malachi yelled and left, as the chair began to slow down. He didn’t want to hurt her, just shake the old lady up a little. If Miss Windlemere even suspected Malachi had anything to do with the moving chair and the early dismissal, she’d kill him. Then the principal would kill him. And after that, his dad.

  Sailing paper airplanes around the classroom had been the last time they had called his dad. “You had everybody making planes?” his dad had asked, shaking his head. They were walking home from school after meeting with the principal. “Everybody? Why do you do this stuff? How do you think I feel when I get these calls from your teacher and the principal? Malachi? Are you listening to me? Look at me, Malachi.” His dad stopped walking and squatted down to face Malachi. They were a block from home on Vandora Springs Road, right in front of the Easy Eye Optometrist. A big eye stared down at them from the roof of the low, brick building. For a long moment his father said nothing, until Malachi finally looked away. He hated it when his dad did this. Go ahead and yell, get mad, not this. “I want you to be happy, son, and you have just gotten more and more miserable this entire year, doing more and more stupid stuff like this. Maybe asking you to tough out the teasing was a bad idea. Maybe that new school we talked about is the answer. I met the principal; she’s a really nice lady. What do you think? Can you hang on until school is out?”

  That had surprised Malachi: he had been sure his dad wasn’t seeing him anymore, wasn’t seeing what was happening, didn’t want to see.

  Once outside the classroom, he scooted, keeping close to the wall, and just beneath a row of crayon drawings of spring flowers hanging from a cork strip. The drawings brushed his head as he ran, heading for the exit as fast as he
could. He didn’t want the principal to catch on that something wasn’t right—which wouldn’t take long, since there weren’t any buses outside, none being due for another hour.

  The front door of Vandora Springs Elementary burst open, throwing out a crowd of ten or twelve boys and Malachi, all hooting and hollering. Keep going, just keep going, once I make those pine trees on the other side of the parking lot, I’m home free. Heck, there’s the principal. Go, go, go. The other boys ran out into the bus parking lot into a bigger crowd of kids, all looking for buses and parents’ cars that weren’t there. Malachi ran with them and then kept on running, even though a few other kids called after him. For a moment he thought he heard an adult voice calling him as well, but he kept running. He ran until he was inside the trees’ shadows and didn’t stop until all the voices faded and grew faint. It wasn’t much of a woods, just sort of a cul de sac between the school and a subdivision, mostly pines and cedars, some scraggly maples and sweetgums, a handful of big old oaks, honeysuckle and blackberry thickets. Too overgrown really, but it was sanctuary and Malachi was sure nobody would follow him. He rubbed his back against a thick pine and slowly slumped down to the pine needle-covered ground. There were bits of spider webs stuck to his face and his chest. Malachi kicked a few pinecones out of his way.

  He shook his head. Dad was going to be furious. One of those kids would tell on him to the principal; they always did. The phone was probably already ringing at the public library. He could hear his father’s slow, careful, at-work voice: “Reference?” Then there would be the shift and his father would start talking faster, his words tumbling together. That was when his father changed from Benjamin P. Tyson, Head of Reference and Assistant Branch Librarian at the Southeast Regional Branch of the Wake County Public Library System to Malachi’s dad, Ben Tyson.