her dark hair brightened in the sunshine. During the cold part of the year, she disappeared beneath
layers, so that sometimes all I could see was her wide forehead and dark brows. On winter nights in that
candlelit space, her eyes shone out from the circles be-neath her eyes. Although we had spent twenty
years together, she secreted away the power to shock or surprise, to say a word and break my heart.
• C H A P T E R 2 5 •
I had a name, although at times Gustav Ungerland was no more real to me than Henry Day. The
simple solution would have been to track down Tom McInnes and ask him for more details about what
had been said under hyp-nosis. After finding the article in the library, I tried to locate its author but had
no more to go on than the address in the magazine. Several weeks after receiv-ing my letter, the editor of
the defunct Journal of Myth and Society replied that he would be glad to forward it on to the
professor, but nothing came of it. When I called his university, the chairman of the department said
McInnes had vanished on a Monday morning, right in the middle of the semester, and left no forwarding
address. My attempts at contacting Brian Ungerland proved equally frustrating. I couldn't very well
pester Tess for information about her old boyfriend, and after asking around town, someone told me that
Brian was at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, with the U.S. Army, studying how to blow things up. There were no
Ungerlands in our local phone book.
Fortunately, other things occupied my thoughts. Tess had talked me into going back to school, and
I was to begin in January. She changed when I told her my plans, became more attentive and
affectionate. We celebrated register-ing for classes by splurging on dinner and Christmas shopping in the
city. Arm in arm, we walked the sidewalks downtown. In the windows of Kaufmann's Department
Store, miniature animatronic scenes played out in an endless loop. Santa and his elves hammered at the
same wooden bicycle. Skaters circled atop an icy mirror for all eternity. We stopped and lingered before
one display—a human family, baby in the bassinet, proud parents kissing under the mistletoe. Our own
images reflected on and through the glass, superimposed over the mechanicals' domestic bliss.
"Isn't that adorable? Look at how lifelike they made the baby. Doesn't she make you want to have
one yourself?"
"Sure, if they were all as quiet as that one."
We strolled by the park, where a ragtag bunch of children queued up to a stand selling hot
chocolate. We bought two cups and sat on a cold park bench. "You do like children, don't you?"
"Children? I never think about them."
"But wouldn't you want a son to take camping or a girl to call your own?"
"Call my own? People don't belong to other people."
"You're a very literal person sometimes."
"I don't think—"
"No, you don't. Most people pick up on subtleties, but you operate in another dimension."
But I knew what she meant. I did not know if having a real human baby was possible. Or would it
be half human, half goblin, a monster? A horrid creature with a huge head and shrunken body, or those
dead eyes peering out beneath a sunbonnet. Or a misery that would turn on me and expose my secret.
Yet Tess's warm presence on my arm had a curious tug on my con-science. Part of me desired to
unpack the burdens of the past, to tell her all about Gustav Ungerland and my fugitive life in the forest.
But so much time had passed since the change that at times I doubted that existence. All of my powers
and skills learned a lifetime ago had disappeared, lost while endlessly playing the piano, faded in the
comfort of warm beds and cozy living rooms, in the reality of this lovely woman beside me. Is the past as
real as the present? Maybe I wish I had told everything, and that the truth had revised the course of life.
I don't know. But I do remember the feeling of that night, the mixed sensation of great hope and
bottomless foreboding.
Tess watched a group of children skating across a makeshift ice rink. She blew on her drink and
sent a fog of steam into the air. "I've always wanted a baby of my own."
For once, I understood what another person was trying to tell me. With the music of a calliope
harmonizing with the sound of children laughing un-der the stars, I asked her to marry me.
We waited until the end of spring semester and were married in May 1968 at the same church
where Henry Day had been baptized as an infant. Standing at the altar, I felt almost human again, and in
our vows existed the possibility for a happy ending. When we marched down the aisle I could see, in the
smil-ing faces of all our friends and family, an unsuspecting joy for Mr. and Mrs. Henry Day. During the