The Changeling

by Victor Lavalle

  He set the head on the serving tray and covered it. Jorgen said he brought meals to Emma, whether Starbucks or homemade, as a kind of offering. Would Apollo have to do the same? Would this sheep’s head be enough? There was just so much Apollo still didn’t know. He shouldn’t have killed the old man until he’d learned all the steps, but he hadn’t been able to help himself once Jorgen explained how he’d played Apollo and why. It’s what any good father would do. Kinder Garten had been living in this home; maybe he’d even come to the front door, seen his dad’s signal, and escaped. And while that happened, Apollo had been in the windowless den, talking about the past at the expense of the present.

  Apollo washed his face and his neck in the sink. It hardly cleaned him off. On the second floor he found a bathroom that had a large, claw-foot tub. He showered himself clean. He went upstairs and found Jorgen’s bedroom. Or was this Kinder Garten’s room? In a dresser he found slacks and a shirt, socks and a tee. He dressed himself and came back down to the kitchen. He hadn’t been wearing his coat and cap when he killed Jorgen Knudsen, so those were still clean.

  He covered the sheep’s head with the lid. He took the bottle of Brennivín and swigged it. Three gulps, and he felt steadier. Took it with him, jutting out of his coat pocket, the serving tray carried with two hands. Out back he found his suitcase. He’d forgotten it was even there. He set the tray on the top of the suitcase and pulled the suitcase along by its handle.

  Apollo returned to the staircase by the park, where Jorgen had set out the bags of food the night before. He climbed to the top and set down the serving plate, lid on. He thought better of crossing the street and trying to hide in the shadows there. Whoever had called the police on him might just do it again. This time he figured it was better to walk into the park.

  He lifted the suitcase and led with it, using it to push at the wall of brush. Just three feet into the wooded area, the streets of Queens were scrubbed away. The sudden quiet overwhelmed him like a rogue wave. Not silence, but quiet. The limber creak of trees bending in strong wind, the dried leaves underfoot making a sound like crackers being chewed, the smell of winter air, which is expansive, it hollows out the nostrils. He touched at the red string as a Catholic might caress a rosary. He turned it around and around on his ring finger.

  Then the last sound, playing at a register below the others, so regular Apollo mistook it for running water, a babbling brook. But they were words. The woods themselves seemed to be whispering. Not to him, not for him, but all around him. He had entered the woods of a witch and made an offering.

  And now the witch appeared.

  APOLLO SEEMED TO be standing inside a thunderstorm. He shielded his eyes. He had stumbled into view of a blue cosmos between the rows of winter trees. He saw his wife—she appeared at the center of the rippling lights, the clouds of cobalt smoke, but the distance between him and her appeared insurmountable. Freezing wind pulled at his coat. His ears rang louder than when Cal had fired shots from her gun. The air itself smelled burned, and the scorch of lightning strikes dazzled his eyes. Emma Valentine wore this terrible weather like a cloak.

  Then she moved toward the staircase landing and the trees parted before her. She didn’t raise her arms and move the branches; they parted for her. Apollo witnessed this. She stepped onto the landing and hardly seemed to bend. The serving plate, lid still on, rose into the air and landed on her outstretched hand.

  He heard the words from the children’s book. They played on her lips but hardly seemed to come from her. He heard it in echo, sound bouncing across the dirt and up the tree limbs and even pebbling against the concrete staircase, swirling in the night sky.

  She stepped back between the trees and turned in the direction she’d come from, her back to him. The metal lid scraped faintly as it trembled with movement. She moved away from him. She was leaving. She hadn’t even noticed him.

  “Em,” he said.

  His throat hurt, dried out. The air burned the inside of his mouth.

  “Emma,” he tried again. “It’s me.”

  She walked away. Not a moment’s hesitation. A path led deeper into the Northern Forest, and she seemed to glide upon it. He followed her, trying to think of what else he could say. The only reason he held on to the suitcase—dragging it behind him in the dirt—was because his right hand had stiffened so badly that he couldn’t let it go.

  The path wound first up a low slope of tulip trees and red oaks, a handful of black walnut. As the climb became steeper, the hills taller, there were tall black oak, black birch, and pignut hickory trees. The black birch gave off the smell of wintergreen. The witch led him deeper into her forest. He followed her blue light.

  The path became less and less clear. The trodden dirt gave way to grass and moss and fungi underfoot. Earthworms, millipedes, and sow bugs lived below the forest floor. Apollo could almost sense them down there, feel them far underfoot. The Northern Forest was home to moles and shrews, gray squirrels and cottontail rabbits, chipmunks and raccoons. The moles and shrews survived the winters in the subsurface tunnels that ran throughout the park. Worlds upon worlds upon worlds hid here.

  As Emma reached the top of a sharp slope Apollo called out again. “You were right all along, Emma.”

  No response. No acknowledgment.

  “It wasn’t a baby.”

  Just like that she turned to him for the first time, looking down the sloping hill. Her eyes appeared so dark, she actually looked blind, blinded. She didn’t open her mouth, but around them the entire Northern Forest rose into a shout.

  “The goblins were real!” Apollo shouted. “I couldn’t see them.”

  In that moment the cloud of energy, electricity, that surrounded her parted, and she became a thin woman wearing a ragged maroon puffer coat holding a pewter serving tray. In the moonlight he saw her cracked lips and puffy, yellowing eyes. She became a portrait of anguish.

  The forest fell into true silence.

  “Emma,” Apollo said.

  She looked down at her hands and marveled at the serving plate she carried, as if this was the first time she’d even noticed it there. She went down into a crouch and set it on the forest floor, its thin layer of snow. She pawed at the ground, hands grubbing through the leaves.

  “It’s Apollo.”

  Emma Valentine stood. She had something in her right hand. She cocked her arm back, grunted once, and threw a stone the size of a softball. It hit Apollo right above the knee. A cold, sharp stab ran up his thigh. He went down like a chopped tree.

  She lifted the tray.

  She turned away.

  She went over the other side of the hill.

  Apollo lay in the dirt looking up at the canopy of trees. His leg throbbed so badly, he felt as if it would swell and burst through his pants. He lay there gasping, then pushed himself over onto his stomach. He couldn’t stand, not yet, but he could crawl, drag himself through the underbrush and snow. He left the suitcase where it had fallen beside him and mounted the top of the hill.

  The hill fell sharply, and the forest became even denser down below. Apollo crawled until he could walk. When he could walk, he rose again. In the Northern Forest there were two layers of trees, the tallest and oldest, and below that the second canopy of newer growth, younger trees. Even though their branches were bare, they crowded together and blocked out the moonlight. He was on the path, faint as it was, but couldn’t be sure to stay on it in the dark. The solution waited in his coat pocket. His cellphone. It held a full charge. The small screen glowed. No signal, but what did that matter? The only person he needed to reach was already here. He held the phone out in front of him like a torch. He found Emma’s footprints in the snow.

  Apollo followed the path.

  THE LAND FLATTENED again, and the trees spread out slightly, and the undergrowth became more tamped down. He’d reached a clearing, the forest floor so trampled it had gone smooth. The trees that ringed the clearing tilted at angles as if they’d been bumped aside by something
as large as a truck or a tank.

  “Jotunn.” Apollo remembered Jorgen’s voice. “Trolde. That’s how we say it in Norwegian.”

  Apollo stood in the clearing, under the moonlight. He could see clearly so he turned off his phone. Emma’s footsteps continued back into the woods, so he went that way, too.

  Onward like that for another fifteen minutes that felt like two hours because of the cold and the ache above his knee. She’d pegged him hard and hadn’t hesitated. What had he been expecting, hugs and heartfelt kisses? Maybe so. Maybe so. But reconciliation never came easy, not with the things that mattered.

  The tree cover here became sparse, and moonlight made the snow on the ground glow. The path grew wider and split in two. Two paths curled away from each other in either direction like a pair of enormous ram’s horns. Easy to see which one Emma had taken. Partway down the path to the left, the pewter lid lay on its side. In the dark, under the moonlight, it looked like polished silver. When Apollo reached it, he picked it up. Instinctively he held it in front of him like a shield, scant protection. And on he went, around the curve.

  The cleared land opened even wider, like marching into a bowl. The word that came to him right away was quarry though really the space wasn’t quite that huge or deep. Still, compared to the rest of the densely packed Northern Forest, this pit of stones seemed as wide as the Grand Canyon. There were rings and rings of gray stone and rubble leading toward the bottom of the pit. At the very bottom he saw a gaping black cave opening. Emma Valentine sat at the lip of the pit, peering down at the cave, her back to him.

  Apollo stopped moving and watched the cave, too. He’d been cold for a while now, but a new kind of frigidness froze him at the core. It had been one thing to hear Jorgen spin a story but was another to see the cave, for the tale to turn true.

  “Agnes,” he whispered.

  “You’re supposed to save the eye for last,” Emma said.

  She didn’t look up at him, but her words drew his attention back. Apollo waited there with the serving lid still in front of him. What would stop Emma from picking up another one of the thousands of stones all around her and strafing it at him? Her aim had been excellent. Maybe this time she’d get him in the head. He moved toward her cautiously even though no storm of blue magic swirled around her now. He moved closer.

  Emma watched the cave. She sat hunched forward there on the stones. She creaked forward and back faintly. Apollo realized she was eating. The serving plate with the sheep’s head balanced on her lap. He reached her side. He stood, and she stayed cross-legged on the ground.

  “The old man once said the eye is like the dessert,” Emma whispered. “Or maybe I heard him think it. Anyway, he told me to save the eye for last. But I don’t take orders from him.”

  Emma stiffened her thumb and pointer finger and dug them into the sheep’s eye socket with expertise. The eyeball plucked out without a sound. Apollo reached out to stop her hand, but when he moved, he dropped the domed lid, and it bashed to the ground, then went end over end down the sloping curve of the pit, and the clangs echoed in the darkness. He scrambled two steps down the slope to catch the lid, but the stones were loose so he only slipped and fell on his side. The bottle of Brennivín in his coat pocket made a dull thump, then its shape went flatter, and he knew it had broken open. The fumes rose and overwhelmed him, he swam in a cloud of spiced gasoline. He got on his feet to escape the odor, but it had soaked into his coat and his pants so he carried it with him.

  Meanwhile, casually, Emma tossed the first of the sheep’s eyes into her mouth. It looked as if she was sucking on an enormous lozenge. She closed her lips and pursed them. She didn’t stop staring at the cave opening even as Apollo caused all this chaos. Apollo gagged as he watched Emma eat the eye. And finally she pursed her lips and spat out a small stone bit, like an olive pit, and it plinked across the rocks below her. The last of the eye went downhill as Apollo scrambled back up.

  Emma dug two fingers into the meat around the now-empty eye socket and pulled at a hunk of flesh. She slipped it into her mouth. She swallowed, almost without chewing. She remained vigilant in her view of the cave.

  Apollo looked down into the pit. The serving lid had come to a stop not twenty feet from the cave mouth. He crawled up until he could sit next to Emma. She didn’t seem bothered by the Brennivín stink. Perhaps she was beyond caring.

  “I’ve been searching for you,” Apollo said.

  She took up another portion of meat, swallowed it without expression. “Well, this is where I’ve been.”

  “Not the only place you’ve been,” Apollo said. “I’ve been to the island. I met Cal.”

  Apollo watched his wife’s profile. Her eyes were glassy with weariness. Her hair had grown tangled and long.

  “When’s the last time you had any rest?” he asked. “Where do you sleep?”

  She reached for one last pull of meat that remained around the eye socket, but Apollo touched the back of her hand, and she dropped the meat and pulled her hand back to her lap. She looked up at her husband.

  “I never sleep,” she said. “Sleep is the cousin of death.” She pointed at the mouth of the cave. “I keep watch through the night so Brian will stay safe.”

  He wanted to reach out and hold her hand. More than that, he wanted to cradle her in his lap. Let her rest her heavy head.

  “When I was eight months pregnant,” Emma said, “this woman came up to me on the street. She had this big smile on as soon as she saw me but I didn’t know her. She stopped me and told me once the baby was born, I’d never have a life without stress again. She said I’d never have a good night’s rest once I was a mother. She seemed so happy to say it to me. Like she thought the anxiety was a badge of honor. I wanted to scratch out her eyes.”

  Apollo kept his hands flat on his thighs. No quick movements, voice calm. “When I first saw you in the woods you were glowing,” he said. “You had a blue light all around you. But when I spoke to you, it went away.”

  “Is it still there?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “I can’t see it anymore.”

  “ ‘You’re what’s wrong with our family,’ ” Emma said. “ ‘You. Are. The. Problem. Go take another pill.’ Those were the last words you said to me.”

  Apollo lowered his head. “I—”

  She spoke over him. “That’s the first time you took my light from me.”

  “You could rest tonight,” Apollo said. “I’ll stay awake.”

  She looked at the cave, then at her husband. She brought two fingers to the sheep’s head but didn’t pick at it. Her finger, he noticed, trembled. “You’re sure?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Go down and look at the stones,” she said. “When you’re ready, you go down there and really look.”

  With that Emma’s puffer coat seemed to deflate, as if she’d slipped right out of it. That’s how small she shrank. She brought the arms of the coat together across her belly and lowered her head until the hood covered her face. It was like watching a pill bug curl in on itself.

  “Apollo,” she said, her voice muffled through the material.

  “Yes.”

  “If this turns out to be a trick. If you’re working with those men and try to betray me—”

  “I’m not,” he said. “I won’t.”

  She wasn’t asking for reassurance, though. She spoke almost with nonchalance.

  “If this turns out to be a trick, I will take you with me to hell,” Emma said.

  APOLLO FINALLY BELIEVED Emma had fallen asleep when her wheezing became regular and deep. In sleep she sounded like someone going through a prolonged asthma attack. If she looked exhausted, she sounded truly unhealthy. The fact that she was alive at all seemed like an act of will beyond comprehension.

  Eventually the rhythm of her snoring worked on him like a sleep aid. If he stayed there next to her, listening to her, he might be drawn down into the same deep slumber. So finally he stood and went
down the slope of loose stone. Ten feet down, and he looked back at Emma. He couldn’t see her face, only her shape, but he felt safer knowing she was there. Already he felt a little happier because he wasn’t doing this alone.

  When Apollo turned back toward the bottom, he focused on the domed serving lid rather than the rocks. Twenty feet farther down lay the entrance to the cave. Was this really the same one from Jorgen’s story? Where a baby named Agnes had been abandoned by her own father? Twice. And what of all those other children whose pictures hung on the wall? He felt dizzy at the idea, a soul-deep nausea. To find such a place in the middle of Queens. To find it anywhere on earth.

  In order to avoid the cave and the rocks, Apollo made for the serving lid. He lowered his ass almost to the ground so he could scoot forward without risking another spill. When he reached the lid, it felt like an accomplishment. So much so that he turned and held it up toward Emma, like a child trying to impress. But doing that meant he looked away from the cave, and the sudden feeling of terror that hit him felt hot as sunlight against the back of his head. He looked to the cave mouth and after a moment realized it wasn’t only fear making him feel warm but an actual burst of hot air. It felt as if the cave itself had breathed on him. Or something deeper within it.

  Impossible to move. Impossible to flee. The heat of the hot wind melted the snow around him in a ragged half circle. Farther up the little valley it remained winter, but a warmer season started here. The nearby stones, once lost under a layer of snow, now lay exposed.

  Apollo lifted the serving lid again, like a shield, and now he found a stick partially upright on the ground. This was what had snagged the serving tray. A piece of a tree branch maybe, as close as he could find to a weapon. He pulled it up from the stones and held it out, as high as his makeshift shield.