The Changeling

by Victor Lavalle

  PATRICE CARRIED THE flat blade shovel, the crowbar, and the ax. Apollo had taken only one tool from the maintenance building, a mattock, heavy as the shovel and ax combined. A four-foot wooden handle topped by a two-headed metal device. One end sharp like a pick, and the other was called an adze. The adze looked like an ax head but instead of being vertical, it was horizontal, like a weapon out of the Dark Ages, something for smashing through armor. It was made to dig through hard-packed dirt like the kind they were likely to find here in winter. Apollo had the iPad tucked under his free arm.

  Apollo scanned the rows of gravesites as they moved. Brian Kagwa had a grave marker instead of a tombstone. Twelfth row, and nine grave markers in. There it was. He felt compressed, all out of breath, seeing the name. Brian.

  Brian.

  “Are we really going to do this?”

  Apollo didn’t understand it had been him asking the question until Patrice responded. “We don’t have to, my man. We can get back in the whip right now.”

  Apollo nodded absently. That’s what they should do. Sure. Right. He stared at the plot and practically heard his nerves playing like cello strings in the night. “You gotta give me a little help,” he whispered. He wasn’t sure what he was asking for.

  Patrice dropped the tools and slipped the iPad free. After a few taps, he read from the screen. “I found instructions. Okay, remove the sod using a flat blade shovel.” He looked at Apollo. “I don’t know how to do some shit like that. Maybe I can find a video.”

  “Military man,” Apollo said.

  “I could defuse a roadside bomb if you had one,” he offered.

  Apollo dropped the mattock and pulled the shovel from Patrice. He placed the thin edge of the shovel to the ground, then pressed down with his right foot until it sank into the dirt. After the head of the shovel went about two-thirds deep, he pulled the handle back, causing a crunching noise like a paper bag being crumpled. He slipped the shovel out, moved one step to the right, and did the same again. Within twenty minutes he’d pulled up the whole top layer of sod over the grave. It was easy to pick up the clumps and toss them aside—they looked like used tea bags in the dark. By the time he’d finished, his arms pulsed with fire. Too cold out to really sweat, but his face went clammy. His breathing had grown so loud, he sounded like a panting dog. When he finished, he found Patrice gawking.

  “Where’d you learn to do that shit, city boy?” Patrice asked.

  “Me and Emma used to watch those home improvement shows,” Apollo explained between gasps.

  Patrice nodded. “Me and Dana watch those, too.”

  Apollo tossed the shovel away. “Now hand me that thing.”

  Patrice gave Apollo the mattock. Neither of them knew what it was called. It certainly had never been used on the home improvement shows, but Apollo intuited its method. He turned the adze end of the head so it faced the rectangle of dirt he’d uncovered, the soil so dark, it looked like a pool of black water. When Apollo stepped in, Patrice expected him to sink.

  Apollo raised the mattock and brought it down hard into the earth.

  “We can take turns,” Patrice offered.

  Apollo nodded. “When I can’t lift my arms anymore, we’ll switch.”

  “You need light?” Patrice asked. “I got this app. One of mine. I mean I wrote it myself. It’s called Daylight.”

  “Maybe you could save it till we get deeper down,” Apollo said. He didn’t notice the pride in Patrice’s voice. He had his own work to do. Patrice nodded softly, embarrassed by how much he’d been fishing for praise.

  Apollo brought the mattock down. The adze sank into the dirt, satisfyingly deep, but it sent an electric shock up through Apollo’s arms, right into his shoulders. Hard earth. He’d be tired sooner than he thought. He looked at Patrice and felt so grateful for his friend. This feeling was followed by the desire—the need—to ask Patrice why he started that Facebook page. And why he didn’t tell Apollo.

  For a moment he had the worst thought of all: What if Patrice was on Kinder Garten’s side? What if he was one of those ten thousand men? It seemed impossible—he knew Patrice, didn’t he?—but by now he also knew he couldn’t trust his own judgment. Maybe the man driving that car had made plans with Patrice and right now Apollo was digging his own grave. Patrice, or someone else, might just shoot him in the head and leave his body in the hole he’d dug. Nothing for it, though. If Patrice was going to betray him, he’d just have to deal with it then. For now he raised the mattock and brought it down again. Dirt sprayed back up into his face, coating his skin, causing an itch along his neck.

  “It’s one in the morning,” Patrice said. “This better be over by five.”

  Apollo wiped at his face, scratched his neck, put both hands on the mattock’s handle, and raised it again.

  FOUR FEET DOESN’T seem deep, but it took them one and a half hours to clear half that much. Patrice and Apollo had changed places twice already. As one broke up dirt with the mattock, the other, standing outside the hole, used the shovel to clear the soil. Both of them looked as if they’d run a marathon inside a coal chute, dirt on their clothes, on their hands, in their hair, in their ears. Each man alternated between digging with his jacket on until he was so sweaty his shirt stuck to his skin, then slipping the coat off in order to dry out and within minutes getting the shivers all over.

  By three in the morning, they were three and a half feet down. Patrice sat on the rim of the grave. Apollo remained in the hole. He couldn’t lift the mattock again, so he dropped it. His stomach shrank with hunger, and his rib cage burned from his heavy breathing.

  “I know,” Apollo said. “I know about you and the Baby Brian page.”

  Patrice shifted where he sat. Dirt fell from his perch down into the hole. “I told you I joined it when we took the train out to Long Island. I didn’t hide that from you, not on purpose.”

  “But you didn’t tell me the rest,” Apollo said, leaning back against the dirt for fear he’d collapse. “You didn’t tell me you’d started the page. Why would you do that? If you’re my boy, why would you?”

  “Start it? You mean like I’m the administrator for that shit? I wouldn’t do you like that. I wouldn’t.”

  “The day I went out to the island, you left a message on the board. Green Hair Harry, that’s you.”

  Patrice opened the iPad, shaking his head as he did it. He opened the Facebook app. Apollo watched him as he tapped his way toward the tribute page.

  “Why keep playing?” Apollo asked. “Just say fuck it, let’s have it out.”

  Patrice’s eyes scanned left to right. Apollo watched him reading, then a second later Patrice’s eyes grew wider as reading turned to deeper comprehension.

  “That’s not me,” Patrice said. “That’s not. When you left our place, me and Dana just sat there in straight-up shock for like half an hour. I couldn’t believe Kim would do you like that. My dude, I’m telling you this, we went straight to bed like we were holing up in a cave or something. Couldn’t fall asleep for hours. And I damn sure didn’t get on the computer to type you messages.”

  Patrice looked both angry and panicked. He looked at the screen again.

  “Just check out the time when the post went up. It’s like ten minutes after you left. I swear to you, on my moms, I did not get on that computer for the rest of the night.”

  Apollo bent and gripped the mattock. He hardly had the strength to stand up again, but somehow he found the power to heft the tool. “Who else could know I was going?”

  “This dude knew,” Patrice said, eyes on the mattock’s blade. “William knew.”

  “It was you and me and Dana in that basement. He didn’t know I was coming, not for sure, until I showed up in the Bronx.”

  Apollo and Patrice remained in this standoff for thirty seconds that felt like three years.

  Then Patrice sat up straight as if he’d been stabbed, shut off the iPad, and closed the cover. “What if he was there too?” he said softly.
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br />   “How?”

  “Titan,” Patrice whispered. “If he hacked Titan, he could turn on my camera, my mic, control all of it remotely if he wanted. He could’ve been watching us the whole time.” He set the iPad down in the dirt and watched it cautiously.

  “But how would he do that?” Apollo asked. “How would he even find your computer out of all the computers in the world?”

  Patrice pointed at Apollo’s pocket. “He sent you that video of Emma. You sent it to me. I ran it on my computer. It would be that easy for him to hop from your phone to my computer. I gotta warn Dana,” he said, taking out his phone. But before dialing, he froze up and turned it off. He opened the back of the phone and slipped its SIM card out. For good measure, he crushed it with the bottom of the ax.

  “My phone and computer are synced,” Patrice said. “He knows exactly where we are right now.”

  “He’s not the NSA,” Apollo said.

  “Could’ve fooled me,” Patrice said. He gestured for the mattock now and slid into the hole. “I want to get back to my wife. Let’s hurry.”

  Apollo climbed out, barely strong enough to make it that far. He pulled the mattock up with him. Patrice clutched the shovel. So little light fell in the open grave that its bottom couldn’t be seen. They might as well have been digging into the underworld.

  BY FOUR-THIRTY, APOLLO took over again. Patrice lay by the open grave, so exhausted he looked as if he’d fallen asleep. The dirt was down to inches. Though Patrice offered to switch with Apollo, Apollo didn’t reply. His body hurt so badly, it had gone cold. The aches in his arms and shoulders, his lower back and his knees—he would pay for all of them later, but he’d become exhausted in a way that made him invulnerable. Willpower was all he used to dig now.

  Then to Apollo’s great surprise, the sun rose behind him. But it came much too quickly and in the wrong place. From the west a blinding light appeared, so powerful Apollo dropped his shovel and covered his eyes.

  Patrice said, “I thought you needed help seeing.”

  The beam of brightness came from Patrice’s iPad. The screen glowed like molten gold. Apollo couldn’t even make out Patrice behind the pad, so his voice became disembodied and divine.

  “I bring you Daylight,” Patrice said.

  Apollo looked back down into the grave. He could see everything now. The shovel had fallen at an angle; his shoes and pants were so matted with dirt, they looked soggy. And below him, he clearly saw a shape, an outline. The casket? Could he really have reached it? He’d started to fear there would be no end to the dig. Apollo went down on one knee and patted the earth.

  Then Patrice’s iPad beeped three times, and right after that, the light died out.

  “Eats up a lot of battery power,” Patrice said. “Even a full charge only gets you four minutes. It works on tablets and phones.”

  “It helped,” Apollo said. He tapped the head of the shovel against the dirt. Almost there.

  The shovel dug into the dirt, and a dull thump played in the graveyard. Apollo brought the shovel down again. Once more a solid thump.

  Apollo bent forward and brushed at the dirt until a flat gray surface appeared.

  Beside him, above him, Patrice perked up. Apollo went to his knees, wildly brushing with his hands. But then this horrible choking noise rose out from the hole, a sob of turmoil. Apollo raised a hand and slapped at the buried thing.

  “It’s not the casket,” Apollo said. He sounded undone, almost unraveling.

  “Tell me what you see,” Patrice said.

  “It’s concrete!” Apollo pushed himself onto his knees and cleared more of the dirt. A flat block of concrete, like a panel of sidewalk.

  “That’s the grave liner,” Patrice said. “There’s two kinds, solid concrete and sectional panels. The panels are cheaper, easier to break through. Which one do you think your mom paid for?”

  How early would the Nassau Knolls maintenance crews arrive? This was the question. How long before the sun rose just enough for a neighbor to open her second-floor bedroom curtains, peer out at the day, and see two black men at an open grave?

  Apollo used the shovel to push himself onto his feet. How long would it take to chop through it? And how loud would that noise be?

  “Drop me down that thing,” Apollo said to Patrice. “The one I was using.”

  A large silhouette moved, and a moment later the mattock fell into the grave. Its head landed on the sharper end, the one shaped like a pick. The thing made a loud popping noise when it landed and sank right into the concrete, like a thumbtack going into a bulletin board. Apollo pulled at the mattock, but it was stuck. He crouched and leaned back and wrenched the tool out, and when he did, a sound like ice cubes being cracked out of a tray played in the hole.

  Apollo tamped at the concrete liner with one foot and felt it waver. He brought the mattock down to another terrific chorus of cracking concrete.

  Four blows with the mattock, and the sectional liner turned to dust. And there lay a child’s casket. White. The decorative hardware—handle rod brackets, caps, stamped metal corners—all antique nickel.

  Apollo crouched and ran his hands along either side of the casket, searching for the groove between the lid and the base. He couldn’t bear the idea of chopping through the top of the casket. He just couldn’t do it. He found the space and slipped the pick end of the mattock inside. When he wrenched it open, the locking system groaned and finally came apart with an almost wet snap, like a tooth being torn out of a jaw.

  He pulled at the small lid. Halfway up it caught, and he dropped the mattock, used two hands to pull it the rest of the way. He heaved and bent low in the posture of a supplicant. The dawn light reached along the top of the gravesite though it remained darker down in the hole. And finally, for the first time in four months, Apollo saw his child.

  The mortician had done his best, but Brian Kagwa’s face still bore the burn marks. The skull showed through at the top, gray as grief. His tiny body had been wrapped in a light blue blanket. In the chaos of opening the casket, dirt and stones fell onto the pillow, across the blanket, across the body. Apollo looked down on his son, once sealed away clean but now soiled.

  “Look what I did to my boy,” Apollo whispered.

  He’d been wrong to think Cal and Emma had been anything but insane. They’d convinced him not to follow common sense. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to be sensible. Better to believe in monsters than that your child is dead. He closed the lid of the casket, then opened it once again. He couldn’t bear the thought of his baby boy lying there with dirt on his face, pebbles in his hair. The least he could do—the very least—was to wipe his son’s face clean.

  He touched the baby’s forehead, and with that, he broke the spell.

  THORNS.

  His fingers caught on a knot of them.

  That’s how it felt. Sharp enough to tear skin. So surprising he pulled back, and only after the seconds of shock passed did he realize his ring finger was bleeding. The tip had been cut when he caressed his dead child.

  Apollo steadied himself, and when he clutched at the body again, he made sure to touch only the blue blanket it had been buried in. Inside the grave the world remained lightless, but above him Apollo found the glow of the rising sun. He lifted the body from the casket, lighter than he remembered and smaller, too. Through the fabric of the blanket, he felt a knotty mass, as if he held a wasp’s nest instead of a baby. He’d become so used to the smell of dirt after hours digging this hole that he could smell nothing else.

  Above him, at the surface, Patrice coughed and said, “That’s foul.”

  He looked over his shoulder. Patrice looked more frightened than him. He wondered at the sight he must’ve made just then. His skin dirtied all over—his face and neck, his back and stomach, his hands—everything was coated in earth, entirely soiled. And he was carrying—what? He rose up from his knees and brought the baby higher. And in the dawn light, he saw what he held.

  It looked like clotted hair
. The stuff you’d fish out of the bathtub drain in a house that had been abandoned, overtaken by the elements, matted and gnarled. What made it monstrous was the size, as big as a six-month-old. Pounds and pounds of hair—fur?—looped and twined so tightly, it looked more like barbed wire.

  How had he mistaken this for a child?

  For his child?

  He held it but felt a rising impulse to throw it back down into the dirt, to clean his hands with holy water. He wretched, stooping forward, nearly dropping the thing. He looked down at this bundle and wretched again. Despite the blanket, his skin itched with repulsion.

  “What the fuck.”

  Patrice staggered back from the grave. It was too much to see. Inadvertently he stood on another grave, that of a woman named Catherine Linton.

  The Scottish called it glamer.

  Glamour.

  An illusion to make something appear different than it really is.

  This was what he’d been feeding and changing and hugging and holding? This was what he sang to at night when Emma wouldn’t do it anymore? This was what he took to the park with all the other dads so early in the morning? He thought of Ida, holding her false sister, a child made entirely of ice, loving it as if it was alive.

  He found he couldn’t drop the thing, but at the same time he wanted—he needed—for it to be far from him. He extended his arms. Now the blanket fell away from the body so it draped backward over his hands. Fully exposed, top to bottom, it really did look like a wasp’s nest, gray, and the hair so tightly ground together it looked woven. There was more mingled within the layers of hair. He’d thought he’d cut his finger on a thorn, but that was wrong. Now he could see it. Jutting out, here and there, were fragments of teeth and splinters of bone and shards of fingernails.

  “Emma,” he whispered. “I should have believed.”

  Then he felt something new through the blanket. A tremor.

  Movement.