The Stolen Child

by Keith Donohue

  Aside from the dirt on its cover and the slight musty odor to its pages, the book was intact. Through the mildewed pages, the story revolved around a religious fanatic named Tarwater or Tearwater. I gave up reading novels in childhood, for their artificial worlds mask rather than reveal the truth. Novelists construct elaborate lies to throw off readers from discovering the meaning behind the words and symbols, as if it could be known. But the book I found might be just the thing for a fourteen-year-old hellion or some religious misfit, so I took it back to the library. Virtually nobody was there on that midsummer day, except for a cute girl behind the counter.

  “I found this in the woods. It belongs to you.”

  She looked at the novel as if it were a lost treasure, brushed off the grime, and opened the back cover. “Just a minute.” She leafed through a stack of stamped cards. “Thank you, but this has not been checked out at all. Did you forget?”

  “No,” I explained. “I found it, and wanted to return it to the rightful owners. I was looking for something else.”

  “Maybe I can help you?” Her smile reminded me of so many other librarians, and a small twinge of guilt poked me in the ribs.

  I leaned close and smiled at her. “Do you have any books on hobgoblins?”

  She skipped a beat. “Hobgoblins?”

  “Or fairies. Imps, trolls, sprites, changelings, that sort of thing?”

  The girl looked at me as if I were speaking a foreign language. “You shouldn’t lean on the desk like that. There’s a card catalog right over there. Alphabetical by subject, title, or author.”

  Rather than providing shortcuts to useful information, one search begat another, and the curiouser and curiouser I got, the more rabbit holes popped open. My search for fairies resulted in forty-two titles, of which a dozen or so might be useful, but that search branched off into goblins and hobgoblins, which in turn branched off to abnormal psychology, child prodigies, and autism. Lunchtime had come and gone, and I felt lightheaded and in need of some air. At a nearby convenience store I bought a sandwich and a bottle of pop, and I sat on a bench by the empty playground, contemplating the task before me. There was so much to know, so much already forgotten. In the relentless sunshine I fell asleep, waking up three hours later with a nasty sunburn on one arm and the left side of my face. From the library’s bathroom mirror stared a person divided in two, half of my face pale, the other half crimson. Exiting past the young librarian, I tried to keep my profile two-dimensional.

  My dream returned in full detail that night. Tess and I spoke quietly on the deck of a local pool. A few other people milled about in the background, sunning themselves or diving into the cool water. As wallflowers: Jimmy Cummings, Oscar Love, Uncle Charlie, Brian Ungerland. All the librarians in bikinis.

  “How have you been, my love?” she teased. “Still chased by monsters?”

  “Tess, it’s not funny.”

  “I’m sorry, but no one else can see them, sweetheart. Only you.”

  “But they’re as real as you and me. What if they come for Edward?”

  “They don’t want Eddie. They want you.” She stood up, tugged at the bottom of her suit, and jumped in the pool. I plunged in after her, shocked by how cold the water felt, and frog-kicked my way to the middle. Tess swam to me, her body becoming more streamlined and graceful, and when the top of her head broke the surface, her hair was plastered against her scalp. As she stopped and stood, the film of water ran off her face, parting like a curtain to reveal not her face at all, but a hobgoblin’s face, horrid and frightening. I blanched and hollered involuntarily; then she changed right back again to her familiar self. “What’s the matter, love? Don’t you know I know who you are? Tell me.”

  I went back to the library, hunted for a few of my titles, and sat down at a corner table. The research, especially on hobgoblins, was wrong in virtually every particular and no better than myth or fiction. Nobody wrote accurately about their habits and customs, how they lived in darkness, spying on human children, looking for the right person with whom to make the change. There was not one single word about how to get rid of unwanted visitors. Or how to protect your child from every chance and danger. Lost in these fairy tales, I became hypersensitive to the stillness of my surroundings, jarred by the sounds that penetrated the silence. At first the noises appeared to be the random shufflings of another patron languidly turning pages, or one of the librarians, bored out of her mind, pacing the corridors or sneaking outside for a smoke. Soon every minute sound intensified in the mind-numbing quiet.

  Someone breathed deeply and regularly, as if asleep, the noise emanating from an indeterminate direction. Later I heard a rasping in the walls, and when I asked the cute librarian, she said it was only mice, but the scrabbling was scratchier, like a fountain pen racing across a pad of paper. That evening, someone began singing tunelessly to himself from the lower depths. I followed the melody to a spot in the children’s section. Not a soul around, I lay down, pressed my ear to the floor, and ran my fingers along the ancient carpet, catching my thumb on a hard bump, like a hinge or a bent nail. Carefully cut and nearly indiscernible, a carpet square had been glued to the spot, covering a panel or hatch below, and I would have pried it open, but the passing librarian startled me by clearing her throat. With a sheepish grin, I stood up, mumbled an apology, and went back to my corner. Convinced that something lived beneath the building, I brooded over how to catch him and make him talk.

  Next morning, my books were in disarray, titles scrambled out of alphabetical order and all my bookmarks missing. They had been spying on me again. For the rest of the day I pretended to read, while actually listening for any noises from below, and once I wandered back to the children’s section. The carpet square had been slightly raised above the surface. On my hands and knees, I tapped on the panel and realized that a hollow space existed beneath the floorboards. Maybe one or more of the fiends toiled below, hatching plots and tricks to further savage my life. A slight red-haired boy whistled behind my back, and I quickly stood, stamped down on the lid, and went away without a word.

  That boy made me anxious, so I went out and stayed on the playground until the library closed. The young librarian noticed me on the swing set, but she turned away and pretended not to care. Alone again, I searched the grounds for evidence. If they had followed me to the library, they must have dug a hole or found a secret entranceway into the building. On my third trip around the building, in the shadows of the sun, I saw him. Behind the back stairs, he squeezed out through a crack in the foundation like a baby being born and stood there for a moment, blinking in the fading light. Afraid that he might attack me, I looked left and right for an escape route. He ran directly at me, as if to seize my throat in his jaws, and then darted away as quickly as a bird in flight, too fast for me to see him clearly, but there is no doubt who it was. A hobgoblin. When the danger passed, I could not keep from laughing.

  Nervous for hours, I drove around and found myself at my mother’s place near midnight. While she slept upstairs, I crept through the house gathering supplies: a carpet knife, an iron crowbar, and a coil of strong rope. From the old barn, I stole my father’s ancient kerosene camping lamp, its wire handle dusty and cold to the touch. The wick sputtered when I tried to light the lamp, but it came to life and suffused the long-neglected corner with an unearthly glow.

  Insomnia gripped me those last few hours, my mind and body refusing rest until the deed was done. In the predawn gloom, I went back and memorized the layout of the building, figuring out step by step what I was going to do. Patience nearly deserted me. The goblin might have been spooked, so I went about my business as if nothing had ever happened. I spent the day reading a book about remarkable children, gifted savants whose minds were damaged in such a way that they could see the world only through a sole window of sound or mathematics or another abstract system. I would press the hobgoblin for the story of what had really happened to Gustav Ungerland and to me.

  But more than any ex
planation, I simply and desperately wanted my symphony back, for I could not write a note knowing it was gone. Nothing would stop me from making him return the score. I would reason if I could, beg if I must, or steal it back if need be. By now, I was no longer something wild and dangerous, but I was committed to restoring my life.

  Unmistakable noises stirred beneath the floor all day. He was back. As the library emptied, I napped in the front seat of my car. Sultry August heat poured in through the windows, and I dozed off longer than intended. The stars had risen, and that short nap had energized me. I slung the rope around me like a bandolier, took out the tools, and skulked over to the side window. There was no telling how far below lay their underworld. Wrapping my fist in a towel, I punched through the glass, unlocked the window, and crawled through the opening. The stacks loomed like a maze of tunnels, the books watching my every movement through the darkness as I crept to the children’s section. Anxious, I spent three wooden matches attempting to light the kerosene lantern. The oily wick smoked and at last caught flame. My shirt clung to my sweaty back, and the heavy air made breathing difficult. With the knife, I cut away the carpet square and saw that it had been glued atop a small trapdoor, easily pried open with the crowbar. A perfect square separated our two worlds.

  Light filtered up from below and revealed a cramped room strewn with blankets and books, bottles and dishes. I bent down for a closer look and stuck my head through the hatchway. As quick as a striking snake, his face appeared in front of mine, not inches from my nose. I recognized him at once, for he looked exactly as I had as a young boy. My reflection in an old mirror. His eyes unmasked him, all soul but no substance, and he did not move but stared back silently without blinking, his breath mingling with mine. He expressed no emotion, as if he, too, had been waiting for this moment and for it all to be over.

  This child and I were bound together. As boys dream of growing into men, and men dream of the boys they once were, we each took measure of the other half. He reminded me of that nightmare long ago when I was taken, and all at once my long-held fears and anger broke through the surface. The lantern ring bit into my fingers, and my left eye twitched with tension. The boy read my face and flinched. He was afraid of me, and for the first time I regretted what I had taken from him and realized that, in feeling sorry for him, I grieved for my own stolen life. For Gustav. For the real Henry Day. His unknowable life. For all I could have with Tess and with Edward. My dream of music. And who was I in this equation but the product of my own division? What a terrible thing to have happened to such a boy.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and he vanished. Years of anger dissipated as I stared at the space where he used to be. He was gone, but in that brief moment we’d faced one another, my past had unspooled deep inside my mind, and I now let it go. A kind of euphoria raced through my blood, and I took a deep breath and felt myself again.

  “Wait,” I called out to him, and without thinking I turned and slid feet first through the opening, and landed in the dust. The space below the library was smaller than anticipated, and I bumped my head on the ceiling when I stood. Their grotto was but a murky shadow, so I reached up for the lantern to better see. Hunched over, I searched with the firelight for the boy, hoping he might answer a few questions. I wanted nothing more than to talk to him, to forgive and be forgiven. “I’m not going to hurt you,” I cried out in the darkness. Wrestling free of the rope, I laid it and the carpet knife on the ground. The rusty lantern creaked in my hand as the light swept the room.

  He crouched in the corner, yapping at me like a trapped fox. His face was my own fear. He trembled as I approached, eyes darting, searching for an escape. Candlelight illuminated the walls, and all around him on the ground lay stacks of paper and books. At his feet, tied in a strand of twine, a thick sheaf of handwritten pages sat next to my purloined score. My music had survived.

  “Can’t you understand me?” I held out my hand to him. “I want to talk to you.”

  The boy kept eyeing the opposite corner as if someone or something were waiting there, and when I turned to look, he rushed past me, knocking into the lamp as he ran. The rusted wire snapped, sending the lamp flying, shattering the glass on the stone wall. The blankets and papers ignited at once, and I snatched my music from the flames, beating it against my leg to extinguish the wisps of fire along the margins. I backed my way to the overhead entrance. As if fixed to the spot, he stood gazing up in amazement, and just before climbing out of the hole, I called for him a final time: “Henry—”

  His eyes went wide, searching the ceiling as if discovering a new world. He turned to me and smiled, then said something that could not be understood. By the time I got upstairs, a fog of smoke rose through the hole below. It followed me through the broken window just as the flames began to lick the stacks of books.

  After the fire, Tess saved me. Distraught over the damage I had done, I moped about the house for days. The destruction of the children’s section was not my fault, although I deeply regretted the loss of all the books. The children will need new stories and fairy tales to see them through their nightmares and daydreams, to transfigure their sorrows and fears at not being able to remain children forever.

  Tess and Edward arrived home from her cousin’s just as the police were leaving. It seems I was regarded as a person of suspicion, for the librarians had reported my spate of frequent visits and “erratic behavior.” The firemen had discovered the lantern in the ashes, but there was no way to link back to me what had once been my father’s. Tess accepted my feeble explanations, and when the police came around again, she told them a little white lie, saying that we had spoken over the phone on the night of the fire and she remembered quite clearly having woken me from a deep sleep. Without any proof, the matter faded. The arson investigation, as far as I know, proved inconclusive, and the blaze passed into local lore, as if the books themselves had suddenly burst into flames.

  Having Tess and Edward back home those few weeks before school started was both reassuring and unnerving. Their mere presence in the house calmed my fragile psyche after the fire, but there were times when I could barely look Tess in the eye. Burdened with guilt over her complicity, I searched for some way to tell her the truth, and perhaps she guessed the reasons for my growing anxiety.

  “I feel responsible, in part,” Tess told me over dinner. “And helpless. As if we should do something about rebuilding.” Over our lamb chops, she outlined a plan to raise money for the library. The details arrived in such waves that I knew Tess had been contemplating the matter since the day of her return. “We’ll start a book drive, too, and you can make your concert a benefit for the children.”

  Stunned and relieved, I could raise no objection, and over the next weeks, the bursts of activity overwhelmed my sense of decorum and privacy. People boxed up their fairy tales and nursery rhymes, and swarmed through the house at all hours with cartons of books, stacking them in the studio and garage. What had been my hermitage became a beehive for the well-intentioned. The phone rang constantly with offers to help. On top of the hubbub over the books, planning for the concert interrupted our peace. An artist came by to show poster designs for the concert. Advance tickets were sold from our living room. On a Saturday morning, Lewis Love and his teenaged son, Oscar, showed up with a pickup truck, and we loaded the organ in the back to install it in the church. Rehearsals were scheduled for three nights a week, and the students and the musicians constructed it measure by measure. The giddy pace and hum of life left me too exhausted to consider my conflicted emotions. Swept up in the motion Tess had created, I could only truly function by concentrating on the music as the date for the performance drew near.

  From the wings, I watched the crowd file into the church for the benefit premiere of The Stolen Child on that night in late October. Since I was performing on the organ, I had passed the conductor’s baton to Oscar Love, and our old Coverboys drummer Jimmy Cummings was on timpani. Oscar had rented a tuxedo for the occasion and Jimmy had c
ut his hair, and we seemed much too respectable versions of our former selves. A few of my fellow teachers from Twain sat together in the back rows, and even one of the last remaining nuns from our grade school days attended. Ebullient as ever, my sisters showed up in formal wear, pearls at their collars, and they flanked my mother and Charlie, who winked at me as if to impart a dose of his abundant confidence. I was most surprised to see Eileen Blake escorted by her son Brian, who was in town for a visit. He gave me a momentary fright when they arrived, but the more I studied him, the less he could be compared rationally with Edward. My son after all, and thank goodness, he takes after his mother in every respect but appearance. With his hair tamed, and dressed up in his first suit and tie, Edward looked like another boy altogether, and seeing the foreshadowing of the man my son will become one day, I felt both pride and regret over the brevity of childhood. Tess could not stop grinning that crooked smile of hers, and rightfully so, for the symphony I had promised to write long ago was nearly hers.

  To let in some fresh air on the crisp autumn night, the priests had cracked the windows, and a light breeze crossed the altar and the nave. The organ had been positioned at the apse because of the acoustics, and my back was to the audience and the rest of the small orchestra as we took our positions; from the corner of my eye, I could see only Oscar as he tapped and tensed the baton.

  From the very first notes, I was determined to tell the story of how the child is stolen and replaced by someone else, and yet both the child and the changeling persist. In place of the usual distance and separation from the audience came a sense of connection through performance. They were stilled, hushed, expectant, and I could feel two hundred pairs of eyes watching. I concentrated to the point where I could let go and play for them rather than satisfy myself. The overture teased out the symphony’s four movements: awareness, pursuit, lamentation, and redemption, and at the moment when I lifted my hands from the keys and the strings took up the pizzicato to indicate the arrival of the changelings, I felt his presence nearby. The boy I could not save. And as Oscar waved me in for the organ’s interplay, I saw the child through an open window. He watched me play for him, listened to our music. As the tempo slowed in the second movement, I took more chances to watch him watching us.