The Stolen Child(51)

and gave myself away? What if he tried to blackmail me or threatened to expose me to the authorities?

The thought crossed my mind: I could kill him, and nobody would even know he was gone. For the first

time in years, I felt myself reverting to something wild, an animal, all instinct. But the moment he began,

panic subsided.

In the dark and empty bar, we sat across from each other at a small table and listening as McInnes

droned on, I felt made of stone. His voice came from a distance above and beyond me, and he

controlled my actions and feelings with his words, which shaped my very existence. Giving in to the voice

was a bit like falling in love. Submit, let go. My limbs were pulled by tremendous gravity, as if being

sucked out of space and time. Light disappeared, re-placed by the sudden snap of a projected beam. A

movie had begun on the white wall of my mind. The film itself, however, lacked both a narrative and any

distinct visual style that would allow one to draw conclusions or make inferences. No story, no plot, just

character and sensation. A face appears, speaks, and I am scared. A cold hand wraps around my ankle.

A shout is followed by discordant notes from the piano. My cheek pressed against a chest, a hand

hugging my head close to the breast. At some conscious level, I glimpsed a boy, who quickly turned his

face from me. Whatever happened next resulted from the clash of inertia and chaos. The major chords

were altogether ignored.

The first thing I did when McInnes snapped me out of the trance was to look at the clock—four in

the morning. As Cummings had described the sensation, I, too, felt curiously refreshed, as if I had slept

for eight hours, yet my sticky shirt and the matted hair at my temples belied that possibility. McInnes

seemed totally worn and wrung-out. He pulled himself a draft and drank it down like a man home from

the desert. In the dim light of the empty bar, he eyed me with incredulity and fascination. I offered him a

Camel, and we sat smoking in the dead of morning.

"Did I say anything revealing?" I asked at last.

"Do you know any German?"

"A smattering," I replied. "Two years in high school."

"You were speaking German like the Brothers Grimm."

"What did I say? What did you make of it?"

"I'm not sure. What's a Wechselbalg?"

"I never heard of the word."

"You cried out as if something terrible was happening to you. Something about der Teufel. The

devil, right?"

"I never met the man."

"And the Feen. Is that a fiend?"

"Maybe."

"Der Kobolden? You shrieked when you saw them, whatever they are. Any ideas?"

"None."

"Entführend?"

"Sorry."

"I could not tell what you were trying to say. It was a mash of languages. You were with your

parents, I think, or calling out for your parents, and it was all in German, something about mit, mit

—that's 'with,' right? You wanted to go with them?"

"But my parents aren't German."

"The ones you were remembering are. Someone came along, the fiends or the devils or der

Kobolden, and they wanted to take you away."

I swallowed. The scene was coming back to me.

"Whoever or whatever it was grabbed you, and you were crying out for Mama and Papa and das

Klavier."

"The piano."

"I never heard anything like it, and you said you were stolen away. And I asked, 'When?' and you

said something in German I could not understand, so I asked you again, and you said, 'Fifty-nine,' and I

said, 'That can't be. That's only six years ago. 'And you said, clear as a bell, 'No ... 1859.' "

McInnes blinked his eyes and looked closely at me. I was shaking, so I lit another cigarette. We

stared at the smoke, not saying a word. He finished first and ground out the butt so hard that he nearly

broke the ashtray.

"I don't know what to say."

"Know what I think?" McInnes asked. "I think you were remembering a past life. I think you may

have once upon a time been a German boy."

"I find that hard to believe."

"Have you ever heard of the changeling myth?"

"I don't believe in fairy tales."

"Well ... when I asked you about your father, all you said was, 'He knows.'" McInnes yawned.

Morning was quite nearly upon us. "What do you think he knew, Henry? Do you think he knew about

the past?"

I knew, but I did not say. There was coffee at the bar and eggs in a miniature refrigerator. Using the

hot plate in the back, I made us breakfast, settling my wayward thoughts by concentrating on simple

tasks. A kind of hazy, dirty light seeped in through the windows at dawn. I stood behind the counter; he