The Stolen Child

by Keith Donohue

  “So, Mrs. Ungerland . . .”

  “Call me Eileen. I haven’t been Mrs. Ungerland for years. Not since my first husband passed away. And then the unfortunate Mr. Blake met with his strange accident with the pitchfork. They call me ‘the black widow’ behind my back, those awful children.”

  “A witch, actually . . . I’m so sorry, Eileen. About both your husbands, I mean.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t be. I married Mr. Blake for his money, God rest his soul. And as for Mr. Ungerland, he was much, much older than I, and he was . . .” She pointed to her temple with a long, thin finger.

  “I went to Catholic elementary school and only met Brian in ninth grade. What was he like growing up?”

  Her face brightened, and she stood up so quickly that I thought she would topple over. “Would you like to see pictures?”

  At every stage of his life—from the day he was born through grade school—Brian Ungerland looked as if he could be my son. His resemblance to Edward was uncanny, the same features, posture, even the way they ate corn on the cob or threw a ball. As we paged through the album, my conviction increased with each image.

  “Brian used to tell me pretty wild family stories,” I said. “About the Ungerlands, I mean, the German ones.”

  “Did he tell you about Opa Josef? His grandpa Joe? Of course, Brian was still a baby when he passed away, but I remember him. He was a crazy loon. They all were.”

  “They came over from Germany, right?”

  She sat back in her chair, sorting through her memories. “It is a sad, sad story, that family.”

  “Sad? In what way?”

  “There was Crazy Joe, my father-in-law. He lived with us when we were first married, ages ago. We kept him in a room off the attic. Oh, he must have been ninety, maybe one hundred years old, and he would rant and rave about things that weren’t there. Spooks, things like that, as if something were coming to get him, poor dear. And muttering about his younger brother, Gustav, claiming that he wasn’t really his brother at all and that the real Gustav had been stolen away by der Wechselbalgen. Changelings. My husband said it was because of the sister. If I remember, the sister died on the passage over from Germany, and that plunged the whole family into grief. And they never recovered. Even Josef, still imagining spirits after all those years.”

  The room began to feel unusually warm, and my stomach churned. My head hurt.

  “Let me think, yes, there was the mama, and the papa, another poor man. Abram was his name. And the brothers. I don’t know anything about the older one; he died in the Civil War at Gettysburg. But there was Josef who was a bachelor until he was pushing fifty, and then there’s the idiot brother, the youngest one. Such a sad family.”

  “Idiot? What do you mean, idiot?”

  “That’s not what they call it nowadays, but back then, that’s what they said. They went on and on about how wonderfully he could play the piano, but it was all a trick of the mind. He was what they would call an idiot savant. Gustav was his name, poor child. Could play like Chopin, Josef claimed, but was otherwise quiet and extremely introverted. Maybe he was autistic, if they had such a thing back then.”

  The blood rushed to my head and I began to feel faint.

  “Or maybe highly strung. But after the incident with the so-called changelings, he even stopped playing the piano and completely withdrew, never said another word for the rest of his life, and he lived to be an old man, too. They say the father went mad when Gustav stopped playing the music and started to let the world just drift right by. I went out to see him once or twice at the institution, poor dear. You could tell he was thinking something, but Lord only knows. As if he went off to live in his own little world. He died when I was still a young newlywed. That was about 1934, I think, but he looked older than Moses.”

  She bent over the photo album and flipped through to the front of the book. She pointed to a middle-aged man in a gray fedora. “There’s my husband, Harry—that’s crazy Joe’s son. He was so old when we married, and I was just a girl.” Then she pointed to a wizened figure who looked as if he was the oldest man in the world. “Gustav.” For a brief moment, I thought that would be me, but then I realized the old man in the photograph was no relation at all. Beneath him there was a scratched image of an elderly woman in a high collar. “La belle dame sans merci. Gone well before my time, but were it not for his mother holding things together, that would have been the end of the Ungerlands. And then we wouldn’t be sitting here today, would we?”

  “But,” I stammered, “but how did they manage to go on after so much misfortune?”

  “The same way that all of us do. The same way that I went on after losing two husbands and Lord knows all that’s happened. At some point, you have to let go of the past, son. Be open to life to come. Back in the sixties, when everybody was lost, Brian used to talk about going off to find himself. He used to say, ‘Will I ever know the real me? Will I ever know who I am supposed to be?’ Such foolish questions beg straight answers, don’t you think, Henry Day?”

  I felt faint, paralyzed, destroyed. I crawled off the sofa, out the front door, all the way home and into bed. If we made our good-byes, they evaporated quickly in the residual shock of her story.

  To rouse me from deep slumber the next morning, Tess fixed a pot of hot coffee and a late breakfast of eggs and biscuits, which I devoured like a famished child. I was sapped of all strength and will, confounded by the news of Gustav as an idiot savant. Too many ghosts in the attic. We sat on the veranda in the cool morning, swapping sections of the Sunday newspaper. I pretended to read, but my mind was elsewhere, desperately trying to sort through the possibilities, when a ruckus arose in the neighborhood. Dogs started howling one by one as something passed in front of their homes, a chain reaction of maddening intensity.

  Tess stood and peered down the street both ways but saw nothing. “I can’t stand it,” she said. “I’m going inside until they knock it off. Can I freshen your coffee?”

  “Always.” I smiled and handed her my cup. The second she vanished, I saw what had driven the animals mad. There on the street, in the broad light of Sunday morning, two of the devils zigzagged across the neighborhood lawns. One of them limped along as she ran, and the other, a mouselike monster, beckoned her to hurry. The pair stopped when they saw me on the porch, two houses away, and stared directly at me for an instant. Wretched creatures with hideous holes for eyes, bulbous heads on their ruined bodies. Caked with dirt and sweat. From downwind, I could smell the feral odor of decay and musk. The one with the limp pointed a bony finger right at me, and the other quickly led her away through the gap between houses. Tess returned with the coffee too late to see them go, and once the creatures disappeared, the dogs quieted, settled back in their kennels, and relaxed their chains.

  “Did you figure out what all the commotion was about?”

  “Two things running through the neighborhood.”

  “Things?”

  “I don’t know.” I took a sip. “Little monsters.”

  “Monsters?”

  “Can’t you smell their awful odor? Like someone just ran over a skunk.”

  “Henry, what are you talking about? I don’t smell a thing.”

  “I don’t know what set those dogs off. Mass hysteria, a figment of their doggy brains? A mouse and a bat? A couple of kids.”

  She put her cool hand on my forehead. “Are you feeling okay, Henry? You don’t seem yourself today.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “Maybe I should go back to bed.”

  As I drifted off to sleep, the changelings haunted my dreams. A dozen crept out of the woods, stepping out from behind each tree. They kept on coming, a band of hollow children, surrounding my home, advancing toward the doors and windows. Trapped inside, I raced from floor to floor and looked out through peepholes and from behind curtains as they silently marched and assembled in a ring. I ran down the hall to Eddie’s room, and he was a baby again, curled up in a ball in his crib. I shook him to
wake him up and run away with me, but when the child rolled over, he had the face of a grown man. I screamed and locked myself in the bathroom. From the tiny window I could see the monsters begin to climb up the porch rails, scale the walls like spiders, their evil faces turned to me, menace and hatred in their glowing eyes. Windows were shattered in other rooms; the glass exploding and hitting the floor in an oddly gentle crescendo. I looked into the mirror, saw my reflection morph into my father, my son, Gustav. Behind me in the mirror, one of the creatures rose and reached out its claws to wrap around my neck.

  Tess sat on the edge of the bed, shaking my shoulder. I was drenched with sweat, and though I felt hotter than hell, she said I was clammy and cold. “You’ve had a bad dream. It’s okay, it’s okay.” I buried my face on her breast and she stroked my hair and rocked me until I gained my full senses. For a moment, I did not know where I was, did not know who I was now or ever.

  “Where’s Edward?”

  She looked perplexed by my question. “At my mother’s, don’t you remember? He’s spending the weekend. What’s wrong with you?”

  I shivered in her embrace.

  “Was it that mean old Mrs. Ungerland? You need to concentrate on what’s important and stop chasing after what’s past. Don’t you know, it’s you I love. And always have.”

  Everyone has an unnameable secret too dire to confess to friend or lover, priest or psychiatrist, too entwined at the core to excise without harm. Some people choose to ignore it; others bury it deep and lug it unspoken to the grave. We mask it so well that even the body sometimes forgets the secret exists. I do not want to lose our child, and I do not want to lose Tess. My fear of being found out as a changeling and rejected by Tess has made a secret of the rest of my life.

  After hearing the true story of Gustav, it is no wonder that I remembered so little from those days. I had been locked inside my own mind with music as my only means of self-expression. Had I not been stolen, I would never have lived among the changelings, never had the chance to become Henry Day. And had I not changed places with the boy, I would never have known Tess, never had a child of my own, and never found my way back to this world. In a way, the changelings gave me a second chance, and their reappearance—the break-in at our home, the encounter in California with Edward, the pair dashing across the lawn—was both a threat and a reminder of all that was at stake.

  When I had first started seeing the changelings again, I attributed it to the stress of discovering my past. They seemed hallucinations, nightmares, or no more than a figment of my imagination, but then the real creatures showed up and left their signs behind. They were taunting me: an orange peel on the middle of the dining room table; an open bottle of beer on top of the television; cigarette butts burning in the garden. Or things went missing. My chrome-plated piano trophy from the statewide competition. Photographs, letters, books. I once heard the fridge door slam shut at two in the morning when we were all asleep, went downstairs and found a baked ham half-eaten on the countertop. Furniture that hadn’t been moved in ages suddenly appeared next to open windows. On Christmas Eve, at my mother’s house, the younger children thought they heard reindeer tramping on the roof, and they went outside to investigate. Twenty minutes later, the breathless kids came back in, swearing they had seen two elves hopping away into the woods. Another time, one of them crawled through a gap no bigger than a rabbit hole under a gate in our backyard. When I went outside to catch it, the creature was gone. They were becoming brazen and relentless, and I wanted only for them to go away and leave me at peace.

  Something had to be done about my old friends.

  • CHAPTER 34 •

  I set out to learn everything that could be known about the other Henry Day. My life’s story and its telling are bound to his, and only by understanding what had happened to him would I know all that I had missed. My friends agreed to help me, for by our nature we are spooks and secret agents. Because their skills had lain dormant since the botched change with Oscar Love, the faeries took special delight in spying on Henry Day. Once upon a time, he was one of them.

  Luchóg, Smaolach, and Chavisory tracked him to an older neighborhood on the far side of town where he circled round the streets as if lost. He stopped and talked to two adorable young girls playing with their dollies in their front yard. After watching him drive off, Chavisory approached the girls, thinking they might be Kivi and Blomma in human form. The sisters guessed Chavisory was a faery right away, and she ran, laughing and shrieking, to our hiding place in a crown of blackberry stalks. A short time later, our spies spotted Henry Day talking to a woman who seemed to have upset him. When he left her old house, Henry looked haunted, and he sat in his car for the longest time, head bent to the steering wheel, shoulders heaving as he sobbed.

  “He looked knackered, as if the woman sapped his spirit,” Smaolach told us afterward.

  “I noticed as well,” said Luchóg, “that he has changed of late, as if he is guilty of the past and worried of the future.”

  I asked them if they thought the older woman had been my mother, but they assured me she was somebody else’s.

  Luchóg rolled himself a smoke. “He walked in one man, came out another.”

  Chavisory poked at the campfire. “Maybe there are two of him.”

  Onions agreed, “Or he’s only half a man.”

  Luchóg lit the cigarette, let it dangle from his lower lip. “He’s a puzzle with one piece missing. He’s a tockless clock.”

  “We’ll pick the lock of his brain,” Smaolach said.

  “Have you been able to find out more about his past?” I asked them.

  “Not much,” said Luchóg. “He lived in your house with your mother and father, and your two little sisters.”

  “Our Chopin won lots of prizes for playing music,” said Chavisory. “There’s a tiny shiny piano on the mantel, or at least there was.” She reached behind her back and held out the trophy for us to admire, its facade reflecting the firelight.

  “I followed him to school one day,” said Smaolach. “He teaches children how to play music, but if their performance is any indication, he’s not very good. The winds blow harsh and the fiddlers cannot fiddle.”

  We all laughed. In time, they told me many more stories of the man, but large gaps existed in the tale, and singular questions arose. Was my mother living still, or had she joined my father under the earth? I knew nothing about my sisters and wondered how they had grown. They could be mothers themselves by now, but are forever babies in my imagination.

  “Did I tell you he saw us?” Luchóg asked. “We were at our old stomping grounds by his house, and I am sure that he looked right at Chavisory and me. He’s not the handsomest thing in the world.”

  “Tell the truth,” Chavisory added, “he’s rather fearsome. Like when he lived with us.”

  “And old.”

  “And wearing out,” said Smaolach. “You’re better off with us. Young always.”

  The fire crackled and embers popped, floating up in the darkness. I pictured him snug in his bed with his woman, and the thought reminded me of Speck. I trudged back to my burrow, trying to find comfort in the hard ground.

  In my sleep, I climbed a staircase of a thousand steps carved into the side of a mountain. The dizzy view below took my breath away, and my heart hammered against my bones. Only blue skies and a few more steps lay in front of me. I labored on and reached the top, and the stairs continued down the other side of the mountain, impossibly steep, even more frightening than the way up. Paralyzed, I could not go back and could not go on. From the side, from nowhere, Speck appeared, joining me on the summit. She had been transformed. Her eyes sparked with life; she grinned at me as if no time had passed.

  “Shall we roll down the hill together? Like Jack and Jill?”

  I could not say a word. If I moved, blinked, opened my mouth, she would disappear and I would fall.

  “It isn’t as difficult or dangerous as it appears.”

  She wrap
ped me in her arms and, next thing, we were safe at the bottom. The dreamscape shifts when she closes her eyes, and I fall deep into a well. I sit alone waiting for something to happen above my head. A door opens, light floods the space. I look up to find Henry Day looking down at me. At first he appears as my father, and then becomes himself. He shouts at me and shakes his fist. The door slams shut, erasing the light. From beneath my feet, the well begins to fill with water flowing in like a river. I kick in panic and realize a strong gossamer rope binds my limbs. Rising to my chest, to my chin, the waters wash over me, and I am under. Unable to hold my breath any longer, I open my mouth and fill my lungs.

  I woke gasping for breath. A few seconds passed before the stars came into view, the reaching branches, the lips of my burrow an inch or two above my face. Throwing off the blanket, I rose and stepped out of that space onto the surface. Everyone else was asleep in their dens. Where the fire had been, a faint orange glow was visible beneath the black kindling. The starlit woods were so quiet that I could hear the steady breathing of the few faeries left in this place. The chilly air robbed me of my bed-warmth, and a film of nervous perspiration dried and evaporated off my skin. How long I stood still, I do not know, but I half expected someone to materialize from the darkness either to take me or to embrace me.

  I went back to work on my book, stuck mid sentence at the point where Igel is about to switch with little Oscar Love. During my first visit beneath the library, I re-read the pages in light of what we had discovered about Henry Day, and all that had been revealed to me through the other clan members about my former life and circumstances. Needless to say, my first story reeked of false impressions. I gathered my papers and the error-riddled manuscript and thought through the problem. In my original version, I had assumed that my parents lived still and that they had spent their lives missing their only son. Of the few chance encounters with my natural father, only one could possibly be true. And, of course, the first story had been written with no real knowledge of the fraud and imposter who had taken my place.