The next day, Béka announced he had found our new home, "a place inaccessible to all but the most intrepid humans, a shelter where we would be safe." He led us up a steep and desolate hill, scrabbling slate and shale from its loose, decaying face, as inhospitable a heap as you'd like to find. No sign of life, no trees or plants of any kind other than a few noxious weeds poking through the rubble. No bird landed there, not even for a moment's rest, nor any flying insect of any sort, though we would soon find out about the bats. No footprints except our leader's. Scant purchase for anything larger than our weary band. As we climbed, I wondered what had possessed Béka to scout out this place, let alone proclaim it home. Anyone else would have taken one look at such devastation and passed by with a shudder. Barren as the moon, the landscape lacked all feeling, and I did not see, until we were nearly upon it, the fissure in the rock. One by one, my cohorts squeezed through the crack and were swallowed up in stone. Moving from the bright heat of Indian summer into the dankness of the entranceway felt as sudden as a dive into a cold pool. A. my pupils dilated in the dimness, I did not even realize to whom I addressed my question: "Where are we?"
"It's a mine," Speck said. "An old abandoned mineshaft where they dug for coal."
A pale glow sparked forth from a newly lit torch. His face a grimace of odd, unnatural shadows, Béka grinned and croaked to us all, "Welcome home."
CHAPTER 23
I should have confessed to Tess at the start, but who knows when love begins? Two contrary impulses pulled at me. I did not want to scare her away with the changeling story, yet I longed to entrust all my secrets to her. But it was as if a demon shadowed me everywhere and clamped shut my mouth to hold in the truth. She gave me many opportunities to open my heart and tell her, and I came close once or twice, but each time I hesitated and stopped.
On Labor Day we were at the baseball stadium in the city, watching the home team take on Chicago. I was distracted by the enemy runner at second base.
"So, what's the plan for The Coverboys?"
"Plan? What plan?"
"You really should record an album. You're that good." She attacked a hot dog thick with relish. Our pitcher struck out their batter, and she let out a whoop. Tess loved the game, and I endured it for her sake.
"What kind of album? Covers of other people's songs? Do you really think anybody would buy a copy when they can have the original?"
"You're right," she said between bites. "Maybe you could do something new and different. Write your own songs."
"Tess, the songs we sing are not the kind of songs I would write."
"Okay, if you could write any music in the world, what kind would you write?"
I turned to her. She had a speck of relish at the corner of her mouth that I wished to nibble away. "I'd write you a symphony, if I could."
Out flicked her tongue to clean her lips. "What's stopping you, Henry?
I'd love a symphony of my own."
"Maybe if I had stayed serious about piano, or if I had finished music school."
"What's stopping you from going back to college?"
Nothing at all. The twins had finished high school and were working. My mother certainly did not need the few dollars I brought in, and Uncle Charlie from Philadelphia had begun to call her nearly every day, expressing an interest in retiring here. The Coverboys were going nowhere as a band. I searched for a plausible excuse. "I'm too old to go back now. I'll be twenty-six next April, and the rest of the students are a bunch of eighteen-year-olds. They're into a totally different scene."
"You're only as old as you feel."
At the moment, I felt 125 years old. She settled back into her seat and watched the rest of the ballgame without another word on the subject. On the way home that afternoon, she switched the car radio over from the rock station to classical, and as the orchestra played Mahler, she laid her head against my shoulder and closed her eyes, listening.
Tess and I went out to the porch and sat on the swing, quiet for a long time, sharing a bottle of peach wine. She liked to hear me sing, so I sang for her, and then we could find nothing else to say. Her breathing presence beside me, the moon and the stars, the singing crickets, the moths clinging to the porch light, the breeze cutting through the humid air—the moment had a curious pull on me, as if recalling distant dreams, not of this life, nor of the forest, but of life before the change. As if neglected destiny or desire threatened the illusion I had struggled to create. To be fully human, I had to give in to my true nature, the first impulse.
"Do you think I'm crazy," I asked, "to want to be a composer in this day and age? I mean, who would actually listen to your symphony?"
"Dreams are, Henry, and you cannot will them away, any more than you can call them into being. You have to decide whether to act upon them or let them vanish."
"I suppose if I don't make it, I could come back home. Find a job. Buy a house. Live a life."
She held my hand in hers. "If you don't come with me, I'll miss seeing you every day."
"What do you mean, come with you?"
"I was waiting for the right time to tell you, but I've enrolled. Classes start in two weeks, and I've decided to get my master's degree. Before it's too late. I don't want to end up an old maid who never went after what she wanted."
I wanted to tell her age didn't matter, that I loved her then and would love her in two or twenty or two hundred years, but I did not say a word. She patted me on the knee and nestled close, and I breathed in the scent of her hair. We let the night pass. An airplane crossed the visual field between us and the moon, creating the momentary illusion that it was pasted on the lunar surface. She dozed in my arms and awoke with a start past eleven.
"I've got to go," Tess said. She kissed me on the forehead, and we strolled down to the car. The walk seemed to snap her out of the wine-induced stupor.
"Hey, when are your classes? I could drive you in sometimes if it's during the day."
"That's a good idea. Maybe you'll get inspired to go back yourself."
She blew me a kiss, then vanished behind the steering wheel and drove away. The old house stared at me, and in the yard the trees reached out to the yellow moon. I walked upstairs, wrapped up in the music in my head, and went to sleep in Henry's bed, in Henry's room.
What possessed Tess to choose infanticide were a mystery to me. There were other options: sibling rivalry, the burden of the firstborn, the oedipal son, the disappearing father, and so on. But she picked infanticide as her thesis topic for her seminar in Sociology of the Family. And, of course, since I had nothing to do most days but wait around campus or drive around the city while she was in classes, I volunteered to help with the research. After her last class, she and I went out for coffee or drinks, at first to plot out how to tackle the project on infanticide, but as the meetings went on, the conversations swung around to returning to school and my unstarted symphony.
"You know what your problem is?" Tess asked. "No discipline. You want to be a great composer, but you never write a song. Henry, true art is less about all the wanting-to-be bullshit, and more about practice. Just play the music, baby."
I fiddled with the porcelain ear of my coffee cup.
"It's time to get started, Chopin, or to stop kidding yourself and grow up. Get out from behind the bar and come back to school with me."
I attempted not to let my frustration and resentment show, but she had me culled like a lame animal from the main herd. She pounced.
"I know all about you. Your mother is very insightful about the real Henry Day."
"You talked to my mother about me?"
"She said you went from being a carefree little boy to a serious old man overnight. Sweetheart, you need to stop living in your head and live in the world as it is."
I lifted myself out of my chair and leaned across the table to kiss her. "Now, tell me your theory on why parents kill their children."
We worked for weeks on her project, meeting in the library or carrying on about the subject when we went out dancing or to the movies or dinner. More than once, we drew a startled stare from nearby strangers when we argued about killing children. Tess took care of the historical framework of the problem and delved into the available statistics. I tried to help by digging up a plausible theory. In certain societies, boys were favored over girls, to work on the farm or to pass on wealth, and as a matter of course, many females were murdered because they were unwanted. But in less patriarchal cultures, infanticide stemmed from a family's inability to care for another child in an age of large families and few resources—a brutal method of population control. For weeks, Tess and I puzzled over how parents decided which child to spare and which to abandon. Dr. Laurel, who taught the seminar, suggested that myth and folklore might provide interesting answers, and that's how I stumbled across the article.
Prowling the stacks late one evening, I found our library's sole copy of the Journal of Myth and Society, a fairly recent publication which had lasted a grand total of three issues. I flipped through the pages of this journal, rather casually standing there by my lonesome, when the name sprang from the page and grabbed me by the throat. Thomas McInnes. And then the title of his article was like a knife to the heart: "The Stolen Child."
Son of a bitch.
McInnes's theory was that in medieval Europe, parents who gave birth to a sickly child made a conscious decision to "reclassify" their infant as something other than human. They could claim that demons or "goblins" had come in the middle of the night and stolen their true baby and left behind one of their own sickly, misshapen, or crippled offspring, leaving the parents to abandon or raise the devil. Called "fairy children" or changelings in England, "enfants changes" in France, and "Wechselbalgen" in Germany, these devil children were fictions and rationalizations for a baby's failure to thrive, or for some other physical or mental birth defect. If one had a changeling in the home, one would not be expected to keep and raise it as one's own. Parents would have the right to be rid of the deformed creature, and they could take the child and leave it outside in the forest overnight. If the goblins refused to retrieve it, then the poor unfortunate would die from exposure or might be carried off by a wild thing.
The article recounted several versions of the legend, including the twelfth-century French cult of the Holy Greyhound. One day, a man comes home and finds blood on the muzzle of the hound trusted to guard his child, enraged, the man beats the dog to death, only later to find his baby unharmed, with a viper dead on the floor by the crib. Realizing his error, the man erects a shrine to the "holy greyhound" that protected his son from the poisonous snake. Around this story grew the legend that mothers could take those babies with "child sickness" to such shrines in the forest and leave them with a note to the patron saint and protector of children: "A Saint Guinefort, pour la vie ou pour la mort."
"This form of infanticide, the deliberate killing of a child based on its slim probability of survival," wrote McInnes,
became part of the myth and folklore that endured well into the nineteenth century in Germany, the British Isles, and other European countries, and the superstition traveled with emigrants to the New World. In the 1850s, a small mining community in western Pennsylvania reported the disappearance of one dozen children from different families into the surrounding hills. And in pockets of Appalachia, from New York to Tennessee, local legend fostered a folk belief that these children still roam the forests.
A contemporary case that illustrates the psychological roots of the legend concerns a young man, "Andrew," who claimed under hypnosis to have been abducted by "hobgoblins." The recent unexplained discovery of an unidentified child, found drowned in a nearby river, was credited as the work of these ghouls. He reported that many of the missing children from the area were stolen by the goblins and lived unharmed in the woods nearby, while a changeling took each child's place and lived out that child's life in the community. Such delusions, like the rise of the changeling myth, are obvious social protections for the sad problem of missing or stolen children.
Not only had he gotten the story wrong, but he had used my own words against me. A superscript notation by "Andrew" directed the readers to the fine print of the footnote:
Andrew (not his real name) reeled off an elaborate story of a hobgoblin subculture that, he claimed, lived in a nearby wooded area, preying on the children of the town for over a century. He asserted also that he had once been a human child named Gustav Ungerland, who had arrived in the area as the son of German immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century. More incredibly, Andrew claims to have been a musical prodigy in his other life, a skill restored to him when he changed back in the late 1940s. His elaborate tale, sadly, indicates deep pathological developmental problems, possibly covering some early childhood abuse, trauma, or neglect.
I had to read the last sentence several times before it became clear. I wanted to howl, to track him down and cram his words into his mouth. I ripped the pages from the journal and threw the ruined magazine into the trash. "Liar, faker, thief," I muttered over and over as I paced back and forth among the stacks. Thankfully I encountered no one, for who knows how I might have vented my rage. Failure to thrive. Pathological problems. Abandoned children. He gave us changelings no credit at all and had the whole story backward. We went and snatched them from their beds. We were as real as nightmares.
The ping of the elevator chimes sounded like a gunshot, and through the open door appeared the librarian, a slight woman in cats-eye glasses, hair drawn back in a bun. She froze when she saw me, rather savagely disheveled, hut she tamed me when she spoke. "We're closing," she called out. "You'll have to go."
