The Stolen Child(109)

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 re-member? 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 ex-ists.

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 remem-bered 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 ap-peared 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. An-other 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.

• C H A P T E R 3 4 •

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 neighbor-hood 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 spot-ted Henry Day talking to a woman who seemed to have upset him. When he left her