"Four thirty," he said at last.
"I've got four thirty-five," said George.
And almost simultaneously, I said, "Twenty after."
"Twenty-five of five," said Jimmy.
Lewis shook his wrist, removed his watch, and held the timepiece to his ear. "That's funny—my watch has stopped." He stared at its face. "Seven thirty. That's right around when I saw him last."
Each of us looked at the others for the way out of this temporal confusion. Oscar resumed his clock watching.
"Okay, okay, on my signal, set your watches. It is now four thirty-five."
We fiddled with the stems and dials. I wondered if the time was such an issue after all.
"Here's the plan. Lewis and I will go this way. Henry, you go in the opposite direction. George and Jimmy, you head off opposite to each other." He indicated by means of hand signals the four points of the compass. "Mark your trail to find your way back. Every couple hundred feet, break a branch on the name side of your path, and let's meet back here at nine. It'll be getting dark by then. Of course, if you find him before that, go back to the fire truck."
We went our separate ways, and the sound of my friends tramping through the brush receded. I had not dared enter the woods since changing lives with Henry Day. The tall trees hemmed in the pathway, and the humid air felt like a blanket that smelled of rot and decay. With each step I took, cracking twigs and crunching leaves, my sound reinforced my solitude. When I stopped, the noise ceased. I'd call for the boy, but halfheartedly, not expecting a reply. The stillness brought back a forgotten sensation, the memory of my wildness, and with it the ache of being trapped, timeless, in this perilous world. Twenty minutes into my search, I sat down on the fallen trunk of a scrub pine. My shirt, damp with perspiration, clung to my skin, and I took out a handkerchief to mop my brow. Far away, a woodpecker hammered on a tree, and nuthatches scrabbled down tree trunks, pipping their staccato signals. Along one limb of the dead pine, a file of ants raced back and forth, carrying a mysterious cargo in one direction as others headed back to the food source. Amid the litter of fallen leaves, small red flowers poked their pin-size heads from clusters of silvery moss. I lifted a log, and a rotting wetness lay beneath it, pill bugs curled into balls and long-legged spiders maddened at the sudden disruption of their lives. Fat, glistening worms burrowed into holes on the bottom of the log, and I tried to imagine what hidden chambers existed in the decay, what life was going on unbeknownst to me. I lost track of the time. A glance at my watch startled me, for nearly two hours had wasted away. I stood up, called out the boy's name once, and, hearing no reply, resumed my hunt. Moving deeper into the darkness, I was entranced by the random arrangement of trunks and limbs, green leaves as plentiful as raindrops. My every step was new yet familiar, and I expected to be startled by something sudden, but it was as quiet as a deep sleep. There was nothing in the woods, no sign of my past, scant life beyond the growing trees and plants, the occasional stir of the inscrutable tiny animals hidden in the rot and decay. I stumbled upon a small creek gurgling over stones, meandering nowhere. Suddenly very thirsty, I dipped my hands into the water and drank.
The current rolled over a bed dotted with stones and rocks. On the surface, the stones were dry, dull, and impenetrable, but at the waterline and below, the water changed the stone, revealing facets and extraordinarily rich colors and infinite variety. Millennia of interplay had worn and polished the rocks, made them beautiful, and the stones had changed the water as well, altered its flow and pace, made turbulent its stilled predisposition. Symbiosis made the creek what it was. One without the other would change everything. I had come out of this forest, had been there for a long, long time, but I also lived in the world as a very real person. My life as a human and my life among the changelings made me what I was. Like the water and the rock, I was this and that. Henry Day. As the world knows him, there is no other, and this revelation filled me with warmth and pleasure. The rocks along the bottom of the creek suddenly appeared to me as if a line of notes, and I could hear the pattern in my head. Searching my pockets for a pencil to copy it down before the notes disappeared, I heard a stirring among the trees behind me, footsteps racing through the brush.
"Who's there?" I asked, and whatever it was stopped moving. I tried to make myself short and inconspicuous by crouching in the culvert cut by the creek, but hiding made it impossible to see the source of danger. In the tension of anticipation, sounds that had gone unnoticed became amplified. Crickets sang under rocks. A cicada cried and then went silent. I was at odds whether to run away or stay and capture the notes in the water. A breeze through the leaves, or something breathing? Slowly at first, the footsteps resumed, then the creature bolted, crashing through the leaves, running away from me, the air whispering and falling quiet. When it had departed, I convinced myself that a deer had been startled by my presence, or perhaps a hound that had picked up my scent by mistake. The disturbance unnerved me, so I quickly traced my way back to the clearing. I was the first one there, fifteen minutes ahead of our planned rendezvous.
George arrived next, face flushed with exertion, his voice less than a rasp from calling for the boy. He collapsed in exhaustion, his jeans emitting puffs of dust.
"No luck?" I asked.
"Do you think? I am dragging and didn't see a damn thing. You don't have a square on you?"
I produced two cigarettes and lit his, then mine. He closed his eyes and smoked. Oscar and Lewis showed up next, similarly defeated. They had run out of ways to say so, but the worry slackened their pace, bowed their heads, clouded their eyes. We waited for another fifteen minutes for Jimmy Cummings, and when he failed to appear, I began to wonder if another search party was in order.
At 9:30, George asked, "Where is Cummings?"
The residual twilight gave way to a starry night. I wished we had thought to bring flashlights. "Maybe we should go back to where the police are."
Oscar refused. "No, someone should wait here for Jimmy. You go, Henry. It's a straight shot, dead on."
"C'mon, George, go with me."
He raised himself to the standing position. "Lead on, Macduff."
Up the trail, we could see red and blue lights flashing against the treetops and bouncing into the night sky. Despite his aching feet, George hurried us along, and when we were nearly there, we could hear the static shout over the walkie-talkies, sense something wrong in the air. We jogged into a surreal scene, the clearing bathed in lights, fire engines idling, dozens of people milling about. A man in a red baseball cap loaded a pair of bloodhounds into the back of his pickup. I was startled to see Tess Wodehouse, her white nurse's uniform glowing in the gloom, embracing another young woman and stroking her hair. Two men lifted a dripping canoe to the roof of a car and strapped it down. Patterns emerged as if time stood still, and all could be seen at once. Firemen and policemen, their backs to us, formed a half ring around the back of the ambulance.
The chief pivoted slowly, as if averting his gaze from the somber paramedics invalidated reality, and told us carefully, "Well ... we have found a body."
CHAPTER 18
Mistakes were made, despite our careful planning. I am troubled to this day by my part, however minor, in the series of misfortunes and errors that led to his death. I am even more sorry about the changes wrought by those two days in June, which consequences confounded us for years. That none of us intended any harm matters not at all. We are responsible for our actions, even when accidents occur, if only for the steps we omitted or neglected. In retrospect, perhaps we overplanned. They could have sneaked into the Loves' house, snatched Oscar while he slept, and innocently tucked Igel under the covers. The boy always was left alone to play for hours at a time. We could have grabbed him in broad daylight and sent in a changed Igel for dinner. Or we could have skipped the purification by water. Who still believes in that old myth? It did not have to end in such a heartbreaking way.
Oscar Love came out to play on a June evening, dressed in blue shorts and a shirt with writing across the chest. He wore sandals, dirt caked between his toes, and kicked a ball back and forth across the lawn. Luchóg and I had climbed a sycamore and sat in the branches for what felt like hours, watching his mindless game and trying to attract him into the woods. We broadcast a menagerie of sounds: a puppy, a mewing kitten, birds in distress, a wise old owl, a cow, a horse, a pig, a chicken, a duck. But he took scant notice of our imitations. Luchóg cried like a baby; I threw my voice, disguised as a girl's, then a boy's. Oscar was deaf to all that, hearing instead the music in his mind. We called out his name, promised him a surprise, pretended to be Santa Claus. Stumped, we descended, and Luchóg had the bright idea to sing, and the boy immediately followed the melody into the forest. As long as the song continued, he sought its source, dazed by curiosity. In my heart, I knew that this is not the way fairytales should be, bound for an unhappy ending.
Hidden behind trees by a creek, the gang lay in ambush, and Luchóg lured the boy deeper into the woods. Oscar stood on the bank considering the water and the stones, and when the music stopped he realized how lost he was, for he began to blink his eyelids, fighting back the urge to weep.
"Look at him, Aniday," Luchóg said from our hideaway. "He reminds me of the last one of us to become a changeling. Something wrong with him."
"What do you mean, 'wrong'?"
"Look in his eyes. It's as if he's not really all there."
I studied the boy's face, and indeed he seemed detached from his situation. He stood motionless, head bowed to the water, as if stunned by his own reflection. A whistle signaled the others, and they rushed from the bushes. Birds, alarmed by the sudden violence, cried out and took wing. Hidden among the ferns, a rabbit panicked and bounded away, cottontail flashing. But Oscar stood impassive and entranced and did not react until the faeries were nearly upon him. He brought his hand up to his mouth to cover his scream, and they pounced on him, tackling him to the ground with swift ferocity. He all but disappeared in the swirl of flailing limbs, wild eyes, and bared teeth. Had the capture not been explained beforehand, I would have thought they were killing him. Igel, in particular, relished the assault, pinning the boy to the ground with his knees and cramming a cloth in his mouth to muffle his cries. With a vine, he cinched the boy around the middle, pinning his arms to his sides. Pulling Oscar down the trail, Igel led us all back to camp.
Years later, Chavisory explained to me how out of the ordinary Igel's behavior had been. The changeling was supposed to model his own body and features to match the child before the kidnapping. But Igel let the boy see him as he was. Rather than making the switch immediately, he taunted the child. Zanzera tied Oscar to a tree and removed the gag from the boy's mouth. Per-haps the shock silenced him, for all Oscar could do was watch in dumb amazement the happening before him, his dark eyes moist yet fixed on his tormentors. Igel tortured his own face into a replica. I could not bear the painful grimaces, could not stomach the cracking cartilage, the wrenching bone. I vomited behind a tree and stayed away until Igel had finished molding himself into a copy of the boy.
"Do you understand, Oscar?" Igel taunted him, standing nose-to-nose. "I am you and will take your place, and you will stay here with them."
The child stared at him, as if looking in the mirror yet not recognizing his own reflection. I fought back the urge to go to Oscar, to offer kindness and reassurance. Speck sidled up to me and spat out, "This is cruel."
Stepping away from his victim, Igel addressed us: "Boys and girls. I have been with you for too long and now take my leave. My time in this hell is done, and you may have it. Your paradise is vanishing. Every morning, I hear the encroaching roar of cars, feel the shudder of planes overhead. There's soot in the air, dirt in the water, and all the birds fly away and never come back. The world is changing, and you must go while you can. I am not pleased to be trading places with this imbecile, but better that than to remain here." He swept his arms to the trees and the star-filled skies. "For this will soon be gone."
Igel walked over to Oscar and untied him and held his hand. They were identical; it was impossible to tell who was real and who was the spit and image. "I'm going down below to the tunnel now to tell a story to this poor idiot. I'll take his clothes and those disgusting shoes, then you may perform the ablution. He could do with a bath. I will crawl out on the other side. Adieu. Come away, human child."
As he was being led off, Oscar looked back once more, his gaze disguising all emotion. Soon after, the faeries went to the tunnel entry to pluck out Oscar's naked body. They wrapped him in a caul of spider's silk and vines. He remained placid during the process, but his eyes appeared more alert, as if he deliberately was trying to be calm. Hoisting him atop our shoulders, we ran, crashing through the undergrowth toward the river. Until we reached the edge of the water, I did not notice that Speck had stayed behind. Béka, our new leader, proclaimed the incantation as we lifted our package high into the air and threw it. In midair, the body jack-knifed and fell headfirst into the water. Half of the group split off to chase and retrieve the body, as the ceremony required. They were expected to pull it ashore, as they had done with me years before, as had been done with us all. I stood there, determined to be helpful to the boy, to be understanding and patient as he made the transition.
All such hopes were washed away. The retrievers waited ashore, ready to fish the body from the water, but it never floated to the surface. Despite their severe fear of drowning, Smaolach and Chavisory waded into the river. Soon all of the faeries were in waist-deep, frantically searching for our bundle. Onions dived again and again, until, exhausted and gasping for breath, she could barely climb to the riverbank. Béka charged downstream to a ford where the body would most likely be snagged in the shallows. But Oscar could not be found. We kept vigil there all night and well into the morning, examining the stones and tree limbs where his body might have been caught, looking for any sign, but the water did not yield its secrets. The boy was gone. Around midday, below in the valley, a dog yowled with excitement. Kivi and Blomma were sent to look out for the intruders. Red-faced and panting, they came back a half hour later, collecting us from our scattered posts along the riverbank.
