The Changeling

by Victor Lavalle

“He’s here,” another said. “I think he expects us to applaud.”

  How far had they come from the courtyard, from the little colony in the woods? The wild growth surrounded them, but the women walked him on a well-worn path. The kudzu and porcelain berry had been stamped down not cut.

  “I’m here,” Apollo said again, “for my wife.”

  “Are you here to apologize and beg forgiveness?” a third woman asked, sounding slightly winded and clearly sarcastic.

  “Or did you mean to kill her?” asked the fourth, and when she said the words, his whole body tensed, and the women laughed together like people long hardened from a war.

  “I want my revenge!” shouted the first.

  “She took my child!” added the second.

  “She made me suffer!” hissed the third.

  “Her blood is owed to me!” came the fourth.

  Now they didn’t laugh but clucked their tongues. They seemed so unsurprised. Apollo wondered how many times these four women had made the same journey with a man who’d appeared on the island. Maybe this was how the path beneath them had come to be beaten down so well; back and forth with the bodies of the men. And where would this path end?

  He tried to throw himself off the stretcher. The wooden beams were digging into his chest and stomach. A new sound came to him, the splash of the women’s feet as they entered water. Cold water slapped his face and neck.

  “Where are you taking me!” he shouted.

  “We’re here,” one of them said matter-of-factly.

  “Who was the last one?” another asked. “I forget.”

  “Kauffman?” said another, but she didn’t sound entirely sure.

  “Yeah. He’s at the bottom of the East River with General Slocum’s Gold.”

  They laughed together, as if they were discussing an old friend.

  Before Apollo could really piece together the change from wilderness to water’s edge, he felt his body being lowered, submerged; two hands on the back of his head pushed his face underwater, the cold another kind of attack. The water was even darker than the night sky had been. He felt the wooden clubs slip away, and his whole body went under. They were drowning him. He opened his mouth involuntarily and swallowed and, surprisingly, that saved his life.

  His reaction to swallowing the water was so violent that it revitalized his entire body. He had no idea what he was doing, but he had the power of ten men with which to do it. Drowning someone is even tougher than knocking them out. He thrashed and flailed, and despite their best efforts, he struggled himself free. The pressure on the back of his head slipped away. He gasped and gasped. He shouted something, not words. He caught two breaths, and the women were on him again. They pushed him back under, but now he faced them, so he grabbed at two and dragged them down into the water as well. They surfaced, and he never let go. By saving themselves, they saved him. He didn’t fight them, not really, but he clung to them ferociously. Apollo got his feet under him, felt cool air on his head and rushed for land.

  They tackled him before he’d made it three feet, but it didn’t matter. He’d made it far enough to grasp at gnarled roots in the dirt, and he wouldn’t let go. The women’s clothing had served as camouflage in the woods, but now the robes were wet and weighed the women down. Finally they just piled on top of him. Five people heaving and wheezing in the sand.

  “How could you protect her?” Apollo asked when he had enough breath to speak. “Emma killed my baby! And you protect her!”

  The pressure against his legs and back became lighter, little by little, as each woman rose. They turned him over. One of his hands stayed gripping a root in case they tried to pull him back into the water again. He looked up at them. They watched him silently. He couldn’t make out their faces because the moonlight was behind them. Four faceless figures loomed over him in the dark.

  “You’re Emma’s,” one of them said.

  A second looked up at the sky and groaned. “Of course he is. She was a pain in the ass. Why wouldn’t her husband be one, too?”

  “Quiet with that,” the first one said sharply.

  One of the others leaned close and pawed through Apollo’s pockets. She came out with his keys. She turned and stepped into the water. The sounds of faint splashing could be heard, and then she returned.

  “His wallet fell out in the river. Just a bunch of cards and stuff floating around.”

  “Bury them,” the first one said. “What about his cellphone?”

  “I didn’t see it in the water.”

  “Check him again.”

  Two of the women lifted him, and a third checked every pocket and ran her hands along his legs, inside the waistband. No phone. Now the women let the chair legs dangle down from their wrists, gripped the handles, and stepped four paces back from him. He stood, at risk of tipping over, but they didn’t help him.

  “Cal will want to see you,” one woman said. She pointed to the path they’d just come down. “You know the way.”

  Apollo wobbled as he walked, but none of them offered support. It was only on the trek back that he had the presence of mind, the calm, to look around and realize he was alone with these women. They’d caught him but not William. He felt as if he had one last card lying facedown on the table. One last card to play. What would William Wheeler do?

  THEY LED APOLLO back but it took awhile. You don’t just rebound from the kind of beating he’d taken. He looked as if he’d been flogged, which, in fact, he had. When they reached the courtyard, a deep silence met them. The fire that had been burning was extinguished; only the electric light in the School remained on. Apollo had the feeling that the entire Nurses’ Residence had been emptied. The same with the Doctor’s Cottage. He imagined the entire population had been ferried out while they’d been trying to murder him at the river. Maybe they had bomb shelter protocols, tornado basement procedures, places they went when a force of great destruction arrived. He imagined all those women and children tucked into some dark, airless bunker and wondered at the idea that they’d fled because of him. This didn’t make him feel powerful. Instead it gave him a different perspective on what had just happened. A strange man showed up in the middle of the night screaming that he was a god, demanding vengeance on his wife. Why wouldn’t these women and children be terrified?

  Two of the women took him by the arms and guided him toward the School. The lighted room on the second floor looked even brighter now that there were no other signs of the living. Two of the women walked through the front entryway ahead of him, and the other two followed. They moved down a long hall whose walls slumped distinctly to the left. The walls and the ceiling showed decaying, flaking white paint and underneath that graying drywall. The floors were covered in a layer of dust that showed their footprints as they moved. There were half a dozen rooms on this floor. Most of them looked like small, long-defunct offices. The sounds of their feet scuffing through the dust echoed up to the ceiling. As they climbed the stairs, the shuffling echoed, too.

  Cal told me what to do. But I don’t know if I can do it.

  Apollo heard the woman from the church basement now, just as clearly as he had then. Maybe he reacted in some way to the memory, made some kind of sharp movement on the stairs, because one of the women behind him snapped him with her club on the right shoulder. He had to stop and catch his breath. The pain returned him to the moment and reminded him the guards were there.

  At the top of the stairs they found another hallway that led off into another series of long-unused rooms. A bright light shone out of a room halfway down. The women led him to the room. This one had a door. Two words were stenciled there.

  PRINCIPAL’S

  OFFICE

  A woman stood alone inside, her back to Apollo as he entered. She stooped over a long table covered with materials, varied blocks and shapes he couldn’t make out. There was another desk, clearly salvaged, stacked high with papers and a very old word processor, a gray block that took up a third of the desktop. The plug for th
e processor ran down to a red 3,000-watt Honda Super Quiet Generator. The generator sat tucked up against one wall that had a large hole in it, and it chugged its exhaust out into the night air. Apollo hadn’t heard the generator even when he’d been in the hallway. In here it sounded as if someone was running a small lawnmower far out in the courtyard.

  Two standing lamps flanked the table where the woman stood, still with her back to him. Two of the corners of the room were left in darkness, but compared to the rest of the island, this might as well have been the Eiffel Tower lit up at night.

  Apollo stepped into the room.

  One of the women who’d led him here entered quickly, gingerly, and dropped his keys on the desk with the word processor. His cellphone lay on the table. Someone else had found it.

  “How?”

  The woman spoke without turning. “It fell in the courtyard when you caught him. One of the children found it and brought it to me. I thought I trained you to be careful.”

  “You did. I’m sorry.”

  “Sloppy,” the woman replied.

  The guard nodded, then returned to the others at the doorway. She left a faint trail of water dripping from her cloak. The four women who’d tried to drown him turned and left.

  Now he was alone with her. She moved two steps to the right, picking up something from the table. She had the short, no-fuss haircut of many older women, and her hair was so gray, it looked nearly white. She wore slightly loose black leggings with an overlarge gray sweater that draped, elegantly, down to her thighs. She looked like an Eileen Fisher model. When she turned, the effect became even stranger. She wore a sock puppet on either hand.

  “Which one’s scarier?” she asked.

  She smiled impishly, she knew exactly the wild effect she had, and this made her seem playful and powerful at once. Here she was alone with him, and it didn’t seem to worry her one iota. He wasn’t in any shape to do her harm—he couldn’t lift his arms; and he felt his legs only because of the constant throbbing in his thighs.

  “Hello?” she said, raising both hands higher. “They didn’t cut out your tongue, did they?” She squinted at him. “No, they would’ve given it to me.”

  The puppet on her right hand was made of a dark green sock with a pair of googly eyes attached. It had a rainbow-colored horn for a nose. If not for the horn, it would’ve looked just like Kermit the Frog. The other sock was orange with three eyes spaced far apart; this made it look wall-eyed. Its nose was a sunflower decal.

  “Neither one is scary,” Apollo finally said.

  The woman turned her hands so it looked as if she and the puppets were staring at one another. “I was afraid of that,” she said.

  “You’re Cal.”

  She nodded and sighed as she watched the puppets a little longer. “That’s me. It’s short for Callisto. Come closer.”

  Apollo limped halfway across the room but still must’ve gone a little too fast for comfort. From the edge of his vision, he saw movement. The two darkened corners of the room seemed to shiver, tremble, then out from the darkness came two women draped in the familiar dark green robes. The shadows had hidden them, but now they wanted to be seen. Each was armed with a club, just like the women in the courtyard, except the tips of these clubs jutted with nails. Makeshift maces. Surprised, terrified of another beating, Apollo stumbled backward. He would’ve fallen except Cal was there and caught him.

  “It’s all right,” Cal said. Apollo couldn’t tell if she was talking to the guards or to him. She’d taken off the sock puppets, and her nails scraped his jacket. “They’re very protective of me. But you’re not going to do anything bad, are you?”

  “No,” Apollo said.

  He felt the firmness of Cal’s grip and realized she was actually holding his arms down by his side. If he’d fought back just then, he couldn’t have broken free before those two imperial guards got close enough to drive a nail through his brain.

  “I’m putting on a show for the kids tomorrow night,” Cal said. “Why don’t you help me make a good puppet?”

  Cal walked back to the table, and from here Apollo could see the kinds of materials that were laid out. Bags of socks in every color, sticks of glue and a glue gun, piles and piles of felt in different colors, lengths of string in black, blue, red, yellow, and green, multicolored bundles of pipe cleaners, two adult scissors and a dozen smaller safety scissors, tiny hair ribbons and clip-on bows, miniature bow ties. There were two small “sets” on the table, too. A cardboard box that had been made into a cottage, and another, this one standing upright, with a single window cut out at the top.

  “Can you guess which story I’m going to tell?” Cal asked, pointing to the shoeboxes.

  Apollo watched the guards, who hadn’t moved back into the shadows yet. Each clutched her mace in her left hand. Their narrow faces and high-set eyes made them look like a pair of pharaoh hounds, elegant but wary. They were quite tall, Patrice’s height, and slim—this was clear even under their cloaks. Their stances were the same. They were twins. She waved them back. They moved three steps, and Cal waved them back farther. Finally they returned to the shadows, but Apollo could never unsee them.

  “How about now?” Cal asked, pointing to the cardboard sets again. “Can you guess?”

  She moved behind the upright box, pulled a new puppet onto one hand, and slipped it through the tower window. A pair of rough, raggedy orange braids fell from the scalp, so long they reached the table.

  “Rapunzel,” Apollo said.

  “That’s it,” she said. “You probably think you know the fairy tale, but I’ll bet you don’t remember all of it. Can I practice it on you, before I do it for the kids?”

  “AN OLD MAN and woman had long wished to have a child, but they had no luck. Every night they prayed and prayed for a change. One day the woman looked out her window into the garden nearby. There she saw a field of rapunzel, and she longed for it. She told her husband what she craved, and he wished to see her happy, so he decided to go and steal some rapunzel, even though that garden was the property of an enchantress, known and feared throughout the town.

  “Nevertheless, he climbed into the garden and stole the rapunzel and made his wife a meal, and she enjoyed it. But because she was now with child, her cravings didn’t go away, so her husband climbed into the garden a second time. This time when he plucked the rapunzel, the enchantress appeared.

  “ ‘How dare you!’ she shouted. ‘Thief! I will make you pay!’

  “The old man pleaded for his life. He explained he stole only to feed his beloved wife, and this answer moved the enchantress. She agreed she wouldn’t curse him and he could take as much rapunzel as he liked, but when the baby was born, he had to give it to her. The old man felt so terrified, he’d agree to anything just to save his life. And on that day when the baby came, the enchantress appeared and took the child and named it Rapunzel.

  “The girl grew healthy and strong, but when she turned twelve, the enchantress took the girl and hid her away inside a tower that had no doors and only one window. The enchantress visited every morning and got in by calling, ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.’ The girl would drop her long braids through the window, and the enchantress would climb up.

  “One day a prince rode by on his horse. He heard Rapunzel singing in her tower, and her voice was the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard. He found the tower but couldn’t guess how to get in. He returned many times until one day he saw the enchantress call out, and the braids came down, and up the old woman went.

  “The prince waited until the enchantress left at night. Then he went and called out, ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.’ When the hair came down, he climbed up, and Rapunzel was quite scared. He explained he’d heard her voice and had fallen in love with her. With time he soothed Rapunzel’s fears. He returned to her each night after the enchantress had gone. When he asked her to marry him, she came up with a plan. Return each night with a handkerchief. When they had enough, she wou
ld make a rope and climb down with him, and they would run away.

  “But one day while the enchantress was there, young, naïve Rapunzel asked why the enchantress had such a hard time climbing her hair when the young prince climbed up so easily. ‘Ah-ha!’ the enchantress shouted. ‘You conniving girl!’ She grabbed Rapunzel’s braids and wrapped them around one hand, and with a pair of scissors she cut them off! Then she took Rapunzel from the tower and exiled her in the desert, where she would never be found.

  “That night when the prince arrived, the enchantress let down the hair when he called. But when he climbed up, he found only the enchantress. ‘The treasure you seek is gone! Now come so I can destroy you!’ The prince, terrified, jumped from the tower to save his life. He landed in thorns at the bottom, and they gouged out his eyes. Blinded, he ran off and wandered the land for years.

  “One day the prince heard a sound in the distance. A song he had not heard in a lifetime. He followed it until he stumbled before Rapunzel where she lived now, in the desert, with their two children. Rapunzel was so shocked to see him that she grabbed him and held him close. Her tears fell across his eyes and healed them. Now he could see! He led Rapunzel and their boy and girl back to his kingdom, where they lived happily ever after.”

  “YOU’RE GOING TO tell that story to little children?”

  They were still in the principal’s office. Apollo remained standing and Cal behind the table, the Rapunzel puppet on her hand. She hadn’t used it the whole time. Instead she’d become lost in the telling itself, as had Apollo. Even the guards had stepped out from the corners, hands down by their sides and heads tilted as they listened.

  Cal pointed at Apollo. “Bingo! Fairy tales are not for children. They didn’t used to be anyway. These were the stories peasants told to each other around the fire after a long day, not to their kids. This was how adults talked with each other. Fairy tales became stories for kids in the seventeen-hundreds. Around that time this weird new group started appearing in parts of Europe. The merchant class.