The Stolen Child(65)

"All the kids ran away, except for one girl, who said she would help him home. But when she heard

a dog barking, she ran away too. When nobody came for him in the morning, he was scared and all

freaked out, and that's when he heard me. I don't believe a word of it, but it does explain a lot of things.

Like the children's old clothes."

"And that boy they found in the river," Mom said.

"Maybe that's what he thought he saw," Elizabeth said. "Maybe that boy kinda looked like him, and

that's why Oscar thought he was wearing a mask."

Mary put forward her own theory. "Maybe it was his double. Daddy used to say that everybody

has one."

Mom had the last word on the subject. "Sounds like the fairies to me."

They all laughed, but I knew better. I pressed my forehead against the cool windowpane and

searched the landscape for those I have tried to forget. The puddles in the yard were sinking slowly into

the earth.

• C H A P T E R 2 0 •

We lost our home and never went back. Trackers and dogs arrived first, poking about the camp,

uncovering what we had left behind in our evacuation. Then men in black suits came to take photographs

of the holes and our footprints left in the dirt. A helicopter hovered over the site, filming the oval

perimeter and well-trod pathways into the woods. Dozens of soldiers in green uniforms col-lected every

discarded possession and carted them off in boxes and bags. A few souls shinnied underground, crawled

through the network of burrows and emerged blinking at the sky as if they had been beneath the sea.

Weeks later, another crew arrived, their heavy machinery rumbling up the hill, cutting a swath through the

old trees to collapse the tunnels, dig them up, and bury them again, turning the earth over and over until

the top ran orange with thick wet clay. Then they doused the ring with gasoline and set the field afire. By

the end of that summer, nothing remained but ashes and the blackened skeletons of a few trees.

Such destruction did not temper the urge to return home. I could not sleep without the familiar

pattern of stars and sky framed by branches over-head. Every night-sound—a snapped twig or a

woodrat scrabbling through the brush—disturbed my rest, and in the mornings my head and neck ached.

I heard, too, the others moaning in their dreams or straining behind the bushes to relieve the growing

pressure in their guts. Smaolach looked over his shoul-der a dozen times each hour. Onions chewed her

nails and braided intricate chains of grass. Each swell of restlessness was followed by a swale of

listlessness. Knowing our home was gone, we kept looking for it still, as if hope alone could restore our

lives. When hope faded, a morbid curiosity set in. We would go back time and again to worry over the

bones.

Hidden in the top of tall oaks or scattered in pockets along the ridge, we'd witness and whisper

among ourselves, descrying the loss and ruin. The raspberries crushed under the backhoe, the

chokecherry felled by a bulldozer, the paths and lanes of our carousals and mad ecstasies erased as one

might rub away a drawing or tear up a page. That campsite had existed since the arrival of the first

French fur traders, who had encountered the tribes at their ances-tral territory. Homesick, we drifted

away, huddling in makeshift shelters, lost for good.

We wandered rough country into early autumn. The influx of men, dogs, and machines made

moving about difficult and unsafe, so we spent hard days and nights together, bored and hungry.

Whenever someone roamed too far from the group, we ran into danger. Ragno and Zanzara were

spotted by a surveyor when they crossed in front of his spyglass. The man hollered and gave chase, but

my friends were too fast. Dump trucks brought in loads of gravel to line the dirt road carved from the

highway to our old clearing. Chavisory and Onions made a game of finding gems among the rubble; any

unusual stone would do. By moonlight, they picked over each newly spread load, until the night when

they were discovered by a driver sleeping in his rig. He sneaked up on them and grabbed the girls by

their collars. They would have been caught if Onions hadn't snapped free and bitten him hard enough to

draw blood. That driver may be the only man alive with a faery's scars lined up like beads in the web of

skin between his thumb and finger.

On the construction site where the men dug cellars, Luchóg spotted an open pack of cigarettes

resting on the front seat of an empty truck. Quiet as a mouse, he skittered over, and as he reached inside

to steal the smokes, his knee hit the horn. He grabbed the Lucky Strikes as the door to a nearby

outhouse burst open, and the man, tugging up his trousers, swore and cursed as he came looking about

for the trespasser. He hustled over to the truck, searched about i he cab, and then ducked his head