In the light Apollo saw, deep inside the little form, something moving. He watched the face, or the place where the face should’ve been. There were two concave grooves, like eye sockets smoothed into soft clay. Below that a thin line ran, a mouth.
A mouth.
And below that, where the chest would be, deeper inside, Apollo saw a small mass, a lump. A heart? Faintly, it beat.
He watched in quiet terror. He wished to unsee this. He shivered and felt his legs going weak. And then, to make it worse, the heart did more than beat—it moved. The lump shuttled, faintly, higher. And then again. It was climbing, wriggling like a maggot. It reached the thin line of the mouth, and then the mouth parted. There was no other way to say it; the thing bucked, one grand exhalation, as if unearthing it finally allowed it to breathe.
But it hadn’t been a heart he’d seen inside the little body. Instead that inhuman mouth spewed a mass of water bugs, at least a dozen, each one as big as a silver dollar. They wiggled across the blanket and reached Apollo’s arms. They crawled up his arms, scrambling toward his neck, his face.
Apollo howled. The sound of an animal, not a man. He dropped the body. The blue blanket floated to the far end of the grave, draped back over the casket. He slapped at the roaches on his arms. One made it to his neck. He felt its bristled legs skitter as it reached his cheek. He nearly tore his own skin away just to get it off.
Meanwhile the body, the baby, landed at an angle. It seemed to be sitting up, watching him. He still felt the bug on his skin. Overwhelming disgust filled him with the instinct to destroy. Apollo found the mattock and brought it down on the casket. It sounded like he was chopping wood.
In minutes he’d destroyed the casket and turned the rest of the sectional liner to dust. At a quarter past five in the morning, an early sun rose in an especially clear morning sky. Birds chirped. The night had fallen away, and down in the grave Apollo raised the mattock one last time, aiming for the creature.
But something about its posture was so unsettling to him. Or to be more precise, so familiar. At this angle it might’ve been a child strapped into a booster seat and pulled up to the kitchen table. In fact, it had been that child, and Apollo had fed him—fed it—spoonful after spoonful of applesauce or yogurt or sweet potatoes he’d roasted and pureed.
He set the mattock back down. Despite the revulsion he felt, he picked the thing up again. Without the blanket, the rough surface of the body threatened to cut him again so he was forced to hold it tenderly.
He focused on its face, the sunken suggestion of its eyes, the thin line of the mouth that hadn’t quite closed again. This gave it the suggestion of a sleeping child, and Apollo couldn’t stop himself from wanting to soothe it. Not a conscious reaction but something primal. He cradled the figure with one forearm and gently held the back of the head with his right hand. With his left, he touched the spot where the eyebrows would’ve been.
He traced his finger down. Once he had seen his son’s face here. He tapped the place where the nose would’ve been, where it had been. A nose he’d loved. How many times had he kissed it? A thousand times a week. He brought his finger to the mouth. He used to tap Brian’s lips trying to predict when the teeth would appear. He rested his fingers there.
And the body moved again. The mouth. The maw. It opened and closed, opened and closed stiffly, like a puppet’s jaw. Then he heard a straining sound, like an empty Styrofoam cup being squeezed and released, the hinges of the dry jaw creaking. Apollo feared more roaches would stream out, but that didn’t happen, so he held on to the body. The mouth stretched and shut. Not hard to see what it was doing. It was trying to feed.
Drops of his blood quivered on those inhuman lips, the blood from his cut finger.
Nothing else about the body suggested life. Only the mouth became animated. Not really alive, but impossible to think of it as truly dead. An automaton. Fueled by blood and belief.
As it suckled blood from his finger, the creaking sound came in a rhythm, squeeze and release, squeeze and release. Apollo pulled his finger from the mouth, and in an instant the jaw stopped working. It lay as still as before.
“Something made you and then left you behind,” he whispered.
Patrice’s voice came to him from outside the grave. “This is way past late, Apollo. We have to go.”
Apollo crouched and found the blue blanket. He wrapped the body in it again. He’d done a lot of damage to the casket, but—best he could—he returned the body to its resting place. Once it was in the shattered remains of the casket, once it had been returned to the shadows of the grave, its glamour returned. It appeared to be a child again. His child again. In the dark it became Brian Kagwa.
He checked to see if the red string had been cut loose by the thorns, but its knot held.
“You deserved better than you got,” Apollo said. “I’m sorry if you felt any pain.”
Apollo closed the lid of the coffin as best it would go. He tossed the mattock out of the grave, then the flat head shovel. Patrice extended a hand, and Apollo took it. Apollo climbed out of the grave. He went into a pocket and gave the Zipcar card to Patrice. He told Patrice to go on and get the minivan, he’d be out soon.
Apollo used the shovel to throw dirt down onto the casket. He couldn’t fill the grave—he didn’t have the time, and his body didn’t have the power—but he wouldn’t leave the grave with the body exposed.
After that Apollo took up the mattock and moved to the brass grave marker. He brought the adze down into the dirt, and it sank deep with the first blow. He used the handle like a lever and pulled back until the grave marker buckled. He moved six inches and did the same again. When he wrenched back, this time the top half of the grave marker lifted from the dirt.
The marker had been attached to a granite block, common practice. In order to remove the marker, Apollo would have to take the block as well. Since this had been a baby’s grave, the block was small. In three minutes Apollo pulled it free. The sounds of roots tearing loose and soil cracking played alongside his labored grunting. He dropped the mattock. So close to collapse, it seemed impossible to do anything more than breathe. And yet with a stoop, he lifted the grave marker with its granite backing. It must’ve weighed thirty pounds. His body didn’t know how it could handle the weight, but there was no room for discussion. This wasn’t the grave of Brian Kagwa, so why would his father leave the marker there?
Apollo moved toward the fence. He hefted the grave marker under one arm and dragged the mattock behind him with the other. The Odyssey idled in the street, Patrice at the wheel. When Apollo appeared at the fence, Patrice startled as if he was seeing Death by daylight. Apollo opened the side door of the car and plopped the grave marker down as if it was a bag of fertilizer. He dropped the mattock onto the floor. Then he got in. Patrice looked back at the marker and the mattock.
“We can’t explain that stuff if we get pulled over,” Patrice said. “You understand that, right?”
“Then don’t get pulled over,” Apollo said.
Patrice put the car in motion.
Port Washington became Munsey Park, then Manhasset, then Great Neck and onward in the journey out of Long Island and back to New York City. Apollo felt a kind of calm that might also be called certainty. The magic of the world had been revealed. All the deceptions were gone. To believe in only the practical, the rational, the realistic was a kind of glamour as well. But he couldn’t enjoy the illusion of order anymore. Monsters aren’t real until you meet one.
Well, Apollo had met a monster. He and Emma and Brian, they’d all met it. Apollo wasn’t thinking about the thing in the grave. Or even the thing that spawned it. He meant the man who’d pretended to be his friend, the former William Wheeler. He’d met his enemy. He knew its true name.
BRIAN WEST WAS at the front door.
Apollo reached his hand in the air and turned all three locks.
It wasn’t Brian West yet.
The man knelt and pulled off his blue skin.
<
br /> Brian West called Lillian Kagwa’s name.
Gargamel and Azrael wanted to destroy the Smurfs.
Hot water ran in the bathroom, and the apartment filled with steam.
Gargamel and Azrael hid in the woods.
The Smurfs suspected nothing.
Brian West picked up his son.
Brian West carried Apollo into the bathroom.
“You’re coming with me,” he said.
He took off Apollo’s clothes.
APOLLO SLEPT, ON and off, for two days and two nights. It might be a stretch to call it sleep. More like a little coma. He woke in starts but couldn’t muster the mindfulness to do more than roll over and fall back asleep again. He felt so groggy, it seemed like he’d been dosed. The last two days had been an uncut drug, an overdose of the improbable.
Patrice had driven him home, helped him upstairs, where he stumbled and flopped onto the mattress. Apollo remembered none of this. He had sat in the back of the minivan cradling a grave marker bearing his son’s name and awakened in his bed. Outside he saw morning light. He thought he’d only shut his eyes for ten minutes. When he tried to rise, his body still felt sore, so bruised he might’ve turned purple. He staggered to the kitchen. He stood at the sink and stared into the glass-faced kitchen cabinets but could make out only a hazy vision of himself. He and Emma had brought the cabinets home from IKEA by train. Two boxes per trip because that was all he could carry. Akurum wall cabinets in Lidi white. Each cost $115 before taxes. Ridiculous the kind of stuff that comes to mind. Insane to imagine they’d once fought over the choice as if nothing mattered more.
He needed water; he needed food. He filled a glass from the tap, then drank three more. He turned to find the grave marker on the kitchen table, laid out like a placemat. The mattock was propped by the front door. What about the book? He tensed so tightly, he nearly threw his back out. He scanned the kitchen, the living room, went to the front door and opened it. He returned to the bedroom, his bed. No book. No book. He’d had it tucked under one arm, hadn’t he? Had slipped it into the back of his pants while he held Gayl.
The book. He focused on that. He’d lost the one Cal gave him, but he had another one here. His father’s copy. He went into Brian’s room and pulled it from the shelf.
Outside Over There.
He returned to the kitchen and slid the grave marker aside so he’d have room to read. Then, before he sat, he pawed through the pantry and found a box of table crackers. They were stale, but that didn’t matter. He would force himself to eat something.
“ ‘When Papa was away at sea,’ ” Apollo read.
On the next page Apollo stopped to examine the image of Mama, a young white woman with long brown hair. She wore a faded red dress with a white ruffled collar. She stared into the middle distance.
At what?
At nothing. Her look was one of a woman lost. Bereft. Depressed. In this story, the father might’ve been off on a ship, but the mother hardly counted as present either. Apollo brought a finger to the illustration now. Her vacant eyes; her downturned mouth. He traced her slumped shoulders. Hadn’t he looked across his kitchen table at Emma and seen this same woman?
On the next page the scene of Ida playing music for her sister, the goblins sneaking in through the window. Then the goblins made off with the human child, leaving its replacement behind. Next Ida picked up the child and held it, hugged it. The page after that showed the ice child half melted and dropped to the floor. Finally Ida had realized the fraud.
His finger rested on two words. “The changeling.” There it was in the crib, in Ida’s arms, disintegrating on the floor.
The changeling.
Apollo couldn’t keep reading because the words on the page blurred. This happened because his hands were shaking. He had to lay the book flat. He heard the sound of dirt being cleared with shovel and mattock, the hours of night he’d been down in that hole.
“No one was watching the baby,” he said in the empty apartment.
But then he turned and looked at the chair to his right. The one where Emma used to sit. He could almost make out her image, a ghostly silhouette. He touched the ragged red string with his thumb, turned it on his ring finger.
“One person was watching,” Apollo said.
She said Brian is in the forest.
There’s only one forest in all of New York City.
HE PACKED A suitcase because he didn’t know when he would be back. He couldn’t be sure he’d ever be back. He found the small suitcase they’d kept under the bed, the one they’d planned to use if Emma went into labor and the home birth didn’t work. Their hospital bag. Emma had unpacked most of it long ago, of course, the nightgown and extra toiletries, slippers and socks, snacks and drinks, all those things had been returned to their drawers or consumed. The only stuff left in it was a pack of bendy straws for sipping liquids during labor and a bottle of massage oil. To save space, Emma had slipped both into a pouch on the side. Apollo didn’t realize they were there when he pulled it out. So now both the straws and the oil would be making the trip with him.
The only forest in New York City is located in Queens, in the neighborhood of Forest Hills.
He went to the closet in Brian’s room, dug through bags and boxes that he and Emma had filled, and found a change of clothes for his wife. He hardly paid attention to the items, just pants, blouse, sweater, panties, socks. He found a pair of pajamas for Brian, a onesie with footies, a red and green holiday-themed kind of thing, baby becomes an elf. But when Apollo held it up, he realized that if Brian was alive, he wouldn’t fit these clothes anymore. He’d be ten months old now. This idea struck him with a cold sadness. So chilling he had to grab some size-one pajamas quickly and jam them into the bottom of the bag and just get out of that room.
In the living room he packed the mattock, then set Emma and Brian’s clothes down on top of it. He closed the lid and lifted it. With the mattock inside, the suitcase felt heavy with violence.
Instinctively he checked his coat for his wallet, but it had been lost. No ATM card, no credit cards, no driver’s license. He had ceased to exist in any modern sense. Or more precisely, he had lost access to nearly his entire modern existence. The only totem left was his phone.
In the kitchen there were cracker crumbs on the bronze grave marker. Beside the grave marker lay his father’s book. Apollo opened the suitcase one more time. He packed the book and the grave marker. For a moment he pawed through the contents: a mattock, some clothes, a children’s book, and a gravestone. This was how you packed for a trip to another world, not another borough.
Off he went.
IT SNOWED IN Queens. Apollo left the train station—Forest Hills–71st Avenue—and as he climbed the stairs to the sidewalk, he felt the flakes against his face. The stairwell was so crowded—rush hour in full effect—that he nearly lost his grip on his suitcase twice just from all the jostling. He stopped at the top of the stairs, his arms tired from hauling the bag, but he wasn’t given any time to get his wind back because there were five hundred more men and women right behind him, and didn’t they all have things to do? Trying to stand in place would’ve been like turning his back on a cyclone. He was tossed and nearly turned over. He scurried against the nearest storefront, a Chase bank. The evening sky turned as dark as shale, and the snow came down. The thick flakes clung to umbrellas and hats, the roofs of cars and buses.
The snow continued to fall and traffic backed up on 71st Avenue. A white family had hailed a livery cab, and now the mother was loading a gaggle of children into the backseat. The father folded the stroller with expertise and walked to the back of the cab, knocking on the trunk. Both mother and father looked haggard and angry, and Apollo felt his throat tighten with envy.
Those crackers hadn’t filled him up much. Neither had four cups of water. Down the block he saw a Starbucks sign. He’d lost his wallet—all his money—but he might still get something in his belly. He had the Starbucks app on his phone. Enough
on his account for a meal he could take with him into the forest. If they had sandwiches, he could even leave a trail of breadcrumbs so he and Emma and Brian might find their way out.
—
It was a cramped little Starbucks branch, long and narrow. The store had the look of a sunken living room. Enter, then climb down three stairs. There were two small tables with two chairs at each. The tables had been pushed together, and somehow nine teenagers had fit themselves into those four seats. Seven o’clock, most people returning home from work, but still a long line.
“Welcome to Starbucks. May I take your order?”
He couldn’t see the barista yet, the line ran that long. He scanned the small fridge unit where they kept sandwiches and salads, juices and milks and waters. He figured he’d clear them out, or at least as much as he could carry. He could also just grab it and run. He was in a fucking hurry, after all. The thought of committing the crime—even one so minor—caused a memory flare. He was on parole. He opened his phone and checked for recent calls. There were a few. He recognized Lillian’s number. There had been six from a 212 caller that could’ve been his PO. None had left messages. What if he swiped those sandwiches and got caught? Hard to flee when you’re hauling a suitcase. And what was inside it? Holy shit, if he was found to be a shoplifting parole violator with a digging tool and a grave marker? Why in holy hell had he brought those things? His rational mind scolded his magical thinking. He resigned himself to wait on line patiently. He’d even say sir or ma’am to the barista just to be safe.
Then this wild-looking old white man, standing five places ahead in line, leaned into the fridge unit and scooped up all the remaining food. Just like that. Those awful prepackaged sandwiches cradled in one arm, and the slightly less awful prepackaged salads in the other. He cleared the damn thing out. The old man reached the register and dropped the gathered food across the counter.
“I better get you a bag or two,” the barista said.
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