The Changeling

by Victor Lavalle

  “Let me ask you something,” William said. Wind made his hair fly back from his face, so Apollo could see his bright eyes. “Did you tell anyone we were coming here?”

  “I told Patrice you were getting us a boat,” Apollo admitted.

  “You need to see something then,” he said.

  Still holding the steering wheel with one hand, William tapped at the iPad again. The server loaded slowly. Understandable since there wasn’t much coverage on the East River. Eventually the Facebook app opened, right to the Baby Brian page.

  So William did know about it. When had he found out?

  William scrolled down. “There,” he said, pointing to a new post.

  Stay safe on them open waters! Our wish is that you come home safe.

  The post had been left by Green Hair Harry.

  “Patrice?” Apollo whispered.

  “And then there’s this,” William said.

  No words, just an image. A picture of a big ship sinking into the sea. The Titanic. This post left by Kinder Garten.

  “You share some information with your friend,” William said, pointing back at the Green Hair Harry post. “Then some stranger sees it, and he trolls you. I’m sure Mr. Green meant to show you support, but anyone on the page gets to see his post.” He tapped at Kinder Garten’s image of the sinking ship. “I’m out here with you, so I have a selfish reason for showing you this. We have to be careful. There are no secrets anymore. Vampires can’t come into your house unless you invite them. Posting online is like leaving your front door open and telling any creature of the night it can enter.”

  —

  Rikers Island is beautiful after the sun goes down. New York City’s 413-acre jail complex, home to an inmate population of about twelve thousand prisoners, goes almost entirely dark at night. Only one building remains open for late-night intake, and all the rest of the island seems to shut down. Apollo remembered the lights out at nine o’clock. The prisoners sent to bed, but nobody sleeping. He expected the place to see him, sense him somehow, a dog sniffing out its old prey. Apollo watched the silhouette of the island as they passed. He might’ve missed it if the one building weren’t lit up. It cast a weak, misty glow across the island. So strange to see it from here and know that only two weeks ago he’d been inside. As they moved closer, Apollo heard the shouts and cries of the inmates. The men were too far off for the words to be intelligible, so only a phantom howl carried across the water.

  Now the surface of the water looked as supple as sculpted ice. Cold wind skipped across the river, and there was nothing in the boat to protect them. They were on the water for a while, but Apollo lost his sense of time. Apollo drew his hat low and hunched down in the stern of the boat where he could watch William, who stayed at the console.

  Patrice Green was Green Hair Harry. He’d admitted to being a fan of the damn page but never mentioned he’d started it. No doubt he’d have some elaborate explanation as to why he’d kept this secret, but what did Apollo care? Everyone had a reason. Everyone had a disguise.

  “There’s an island,” William shouted over the sound of the motor. He lowered the engine. “I did some research, but I don’t think I read about this one.”

  Strange to call this an island, no more than one hundred feet by, maybe, two hundred. A pile of rocks with two or three bushes and what looked like a modest metal radio tower.

  William leaned close to the iPad. “This must be U Thant Island. It’s an artificial island. Well, how do you like that, it’s named after a Burmese secretary general of the United Nations. Let me see what else it says here.”

  Apollo didn’t want to listen to William reading some Wikipedia entry aloud. The only thing that mattered was that Emma wasn’t there. Even in the deep of night, it was easy to tell. There was literally nowhere to hide but those two scraggly bushes.

  “Let’s move on,” Apollo said.

  “What’s that?” William asked. “Oh, right. Right.”

  He powered the engine up, slightly, and they puttered off.

  “There’s not that many islands out here,” William said. “Rikers we passed. U Thant, too. Roosevelt Island is residential, Randalls and Wards Islands are state parks, people use them all the time. I don’t know if she’d hide out in any of them. Too risky.”

  “There,” Apollo said. He spoke so softly William didn’t hear him.

  “We could try Mill Rock,” William continued. “It’s unpopulated, but the Parks Department uses it for events sometimes so I don’t know. I think we must’ve been going up and down this river for longer than I realized. I’m pretty much lost, Apollo.”

  “There!” Apollo said, louder this time, standing despite the cold wind.

  An island, draped in a shroud. Not fog but a shadow darker than even the night sky cloaked the land. No lights anywhere on the rock, hard to see more than the suggestion of a tree line even while staring directly at it.

  “Oh my,” William said, already lowering the engine. “I would’ve gone right past it. It’s like it was hiding. Or hidden. How did you catch it, Apollo?”

  “I wasn’t staring at an iPad.”

  “I’ll beach us,” William said, sounding hurt but trying to hide it.

  He brought the boat within ten feet of the beachhead, then cut the engine completely. The bow slowed as it lodged in the sand below the waterline. Apollo and William both crouched so they wouldn’t fall overboard. With the boat beached, the engine off, Apollo heard the river dappling at the hull.

  “I think I was supposed to stop farther out and pull the boat in the last few feet,” William said. He walked to the front of the boat and hopped out. The water came up to his thigh. He walked backward until he was out of the water and stood on the small beach.

  Behind him Apollo could now see clearly that the island thrived with plant life, a chaos of shrubs and trees. Apollo climbed down from the boat and waded into the cold water.

  “Ready?” William asked, but his voice hardly reached a whisper.

  “You don’t have to come along,” Apollo told him. “You’ve already done more for me than…anyone.”

  “Honestly,” William said with a soft laugh. “I’m more scared of waiting out here on the boat alone.”

  “Okay,” Apollo said. “All right then.” He looked down at his left hand. The moonlight caught the red string. It seemed to throb against his skin, or maybe that was only his flushing blood. “Let’s roll.”

  “I GREW UP WITH a guy who grew up to be a detective,” William said.

  Nighttime, Apollo and William were hardly a dozen steps into the fringe of the bush. Apollo could still hear the East River slapping at the hull of the sloop, though the brush was so tall he couldn’t see the vessel anymore.

  William moved as slowly as Apollo, no more sure of where to plant his feet, where to set his hands. The underbrush had grown so high, it looked as if they were wading. The trees huddled so close, William had to turn sideways and shuffle between them.

  Then the trees cleared, as if they’d passed a fence line, and now William pointed at something growing about three feet out of the ground. In the starlight the thing looked like a giant mushroom covered in kudzu. If a caterpillar had been perched on it puffing a hookah, it wouldn’t have seemed impossible. William pulled out his phone, adjusted his glasses, and found a flashlight app. He crouched and tapped the phone against the mushroom. There was a faint metallic clunk.

  Apollo knelt beside William. “That’s a fire hydrant,” he said.

  “I know where we are,” William said. “This must be North Brother Island.”

  William didn’t consult his device this time. He could recite the history from memory.

  “North Brother Island remained uninhabited until 1885, when Riverside Hospital was established to treat victims of smallpox. In time the hospital treated victims of other quarantinable diseases. After World War II, the island became housing for war veterans. And in the fifties it became a treatment center for drug addicts, though it eventua
lly closed because of corruption among the staff.”

  William moved the phone’s spotlight over the hydrant.

  “In that time the hospital grew to include the original treatment center, a library, dorms for the staff, a chapel, a foundry, a stockhouse and a coal storage house, a doctor’s cottage, a recreation center, and a morgue. It even had sidewalks and roads.”

  Apollo and William didn’t realize it, but they were already walking on concrete, only inches below the overgrowth. North Brother Island housed a small town that had been reclaimed by the earth. If it had been daylight, they would’ve already spotted a few of the larger derelict buildings, but for now those were camouflaged by the night and vegetation. So they stayed by the fire hydrant, marveling at it as if they’d unearthed a spaceship.

  William’s phone beeped twice, faintly, and the flashlight app winked out to save power.

  “You really did do your research,” Apollo whispered in the dark.

  “I told you, I was on the boat since noon,” William said, straining a bit as he pushed himself up from a crouch. “I had time to read.”

  They walked again, using the overgrown hydrant as a sightline. In this way, with a fixed point behind him, Apollo hoped to save them from becoming lost.

  Apollo’s footing seemed surer now. He moved closer to William, walking in step but looking ahead.

  “Why are you here really?” Apollo asked. “Don’t give me this ‘I just want to help’ bullshit.”

  They kicked through the underbrush a few minutes more. Apollo felt himself still reeling from the recent revelations. Lillian, Kim, and now Patrice. If William was only tagging along so he could upload a video of his adventures to his YouTube channel, get a billion hits, and start making money from page views, then Apollo would rather just know it now instead of finding out when someone emailed him a link in a few weeks. At this point he felt so exhausted with people that he wouldn’t even be angry about it. William had at least helped him get here.

  “Gretta said no.”

  Apollo stopped moving. “Your wife?”

  A long, deep sigh from William. “Maybe five years ago she might’ve been charmed. Ten years ago. But now? She told me to keep the book. She didn’t want it.” William went quiet. “If I wasn’t here with you on this island, I’d be at home in my basement going nuts. At least this is something. It’s insane, but at least I’m not alone.”

  Apollo stood beside William quietly for a minute or three.

  “So can I come with you?” William asked.

  “I’m going in here to fuck some shit up. You do whatever you want to do.”

  They walked again.

  The immediate dangers they faced now were the little pockets of the modern world that had been introduced on the island. An open utility shaft, for instance, could send them falling twenty feet in the dark. A portion of a brick wall might choose that moment to collapse, hidden within creeping vines right up until it crushed them.

  “You see lights over that way?” Apollo asked.

  Firelight, not electric light. To the south and floating in the air.

  “Will-o’-the-wisp,” William said softly, watching them, too.

  Apollo’s eyes adjusted to the sight, and he realized he was seeing a small fire burning on the second floor of a two-story building. The entire wall facing Apollo had fallen away long ago, so it was like looking inside a diorama. He couldn’t see anyone by the fire, but who else could have set it? Emma. Surviving alone on this island all this time. He never expected he’d actually find her. Nervous electricity shot down the back of his skull. If he was honest, it was the same charge he’d felt before their first date. In a moment William and Apollo were no longer walking together. Apollo Kagwa broke into a run.

  BY 1981 THE smallpox patients had been long gone from North Brother Island. The war veterans evacuated, the drug addicts no longer treated there. The island became known only as a nesting colony for the black-crowned night heron. Smallish, unassuming-looking birds that spend hours and hours clicking at each other, then stumble into asthmatic squawking when the mood hits. The night herons ruled the island for over twenty years, but in the early part of the twenty-first century, they abandoned it. The reason for their departure remained unknown, a bit of birder curiosity at best, nothing news making.

  Tonight Apollo Kagwa discovered why the black-crowned night herons had left. They’d been displaced.

  Women and children had returned to North Brother Island.

  They weren’t in the Tuberculosis Pavilion, the largest and still most structurally sound edifice on the island. Instead they’d moved into the Nurses’ Residence, a four-story U-shaped Gothic Revival building large enough to house 125 nurses when it was completed in 1904. Natural forces destroyed the windows long ago, but the women and children had begun repairs. Apollo could see firelight licking and flickering against the clear plastic that had been thrown up in the window frames. The building he’d seen from a distance still carried that fire on the second floor, but now it looked more like a signal light than a dwelling, a fixed point that would help people make their way back to this place. Base camp.

  Apollo stood at the edge of a cleared courtyard. Across it stood the Nurses’ Residence, next to that the Doctor’s Cottage, the building with a fallen facade. In the near-darkness, Apollo could make out some people. Women moved in pairs or alone between the two buildings. Here and there children peeked out at the night through the clear plastic windowpanes. He might as well have stumbled across a village in the American wilderness back in 1607.

  How could all this be happening so close to New York City? Apollo’s apartment lay less than four miles from this exact spot. A short boat ride had landed him on the shores of an island out of a fairy tale. He watched these women and children with a sense of awe that bordered on terror.

  Apollo didn’t bother to consult William about what to do next. He didn’t even consult himself. He walked out of the shadows and into the courtyard. He just stepped out into the open.

  This isn’t to say he was fearless. Actually he could hardly breathe because of the hiccupping breaths rising up in his constricted throat. To calm down, he talked to himself. The mantra. If he said it enough times he might believe it.

  “I am the god, Apollo,” he whispered.

  He spoke so softly he hardly even heard himself.

  “I am the god Apollo,” he said, louder now.

  He couldn’t stop the volume from rising. He felt the wildness, a crazed energy, refusing to be contained. Another term for this is panic.

  He reached the Nurses’ Residence. The building had no front door. He climbed the front steps as quickly as his quaking legs allowed.

  “I am the god Apollo!” he shouted this time. “And I want my revenge!”

  Apollo had been spotted as soon as he stepped out from the overgrown kudzu. Four women appeared in the courtyard. Each one carried a chair leg that had been fashioned into a weapon, a club. The clubs had a leather strap looped through the base and the other end looped around their wrists. The women wore green cloaks that covered their heads and upper bodies like a chador. This camouflaged them perfectly in the green world of North Brother Island. As they moved around Apollo, it looked as if the woods had surrounded him. He didn’t hear them approach, didn’t notice as their clubs raised high.

  Those four women beat the dog shit out of Apollo Kagwa.

  KNOCKING SOMEONE UNCONSCIOUS is incredibly difficult. Apollo wished it was easier. Instead he found himself battered for a two-minute period that felt like twenty years, and he never passed out. The women attacking him were very good at their job. They weren’t hitting him in the head because they didn’t want to knock him out. Instead they were battering his arms and legs so he’d be incapacitated quickly. They didn’t want him swinging wild or kicking at them, getting hold of a baton. If he’d brought a knife or a gun, he couldn’t use it if both arms were numb. They hit him so hard, his arms and legs seemed to freeze, go cold with shock. Before h
e understood he’d been attacked, he’d already been defeated. He went to the ground as if he’d been tasered.

  On his back he saw nothing. His eyes didn’t work. He thought they might’ve beaten him until he’d gone blind. This confused him even more than the pain. He’d been beaten senseless. He was useless now, and the women knew it. He rolled off the stairs and down to the courtyard floor, where they left him on the ground like a rolled-up length of carpet.

  The women set their clubs down on the ground. They brought the table legs together until they were in a rectangle shape, four right angles. The bottom of each leg slipped through the strap of the adjacent one until they formed a makeshift stretcher. They rolled Apollo over so he lay facedown on the stretcher. Then each woman grabbed the end of a chair leg, and with a collective grunt they lifted him. It was as if they were doing a fireman’s carry but using the chair legs in place of their arms.

  The stretcher was just large enough to heft his torso. His arms and head dangled, and his legs dragged behind. The four-woman team took him away from the courtyard. All this took a minute and fifty seconds. They were a well-coordinated crew. The front windows of the Nurses’ Residence filled with children’s faces, and the Doctor’s Cottage showed women watching, too. A third building overlooked the courtyard, a two-story brick building known, plainly, as the School. Only one room was lit in the School, and its glow was supplied by electricity. A figure stood at the windowsill and saw Apollo being carried away. She watched for far longer than anyone else.

  —

  The smell of wet dirt; the sound of insects in the trees; footfalls of the four women carrying him through the underbrush; the taste of blood in his mouth. Before Apollo’s vision returned, his other senses helped him understand his situation.

  “I’m here,” he mumbled.

  “Well, don’t we know it?” one of the women answered. He couldn’t say which one.