The Stolen Child

by Keith Donohue

  “I am sorry they hurt you.”

  “It doesn’t hurt,” I whispered, stiff and sore.

  “Life here has its compensations. Listen.”

  Low in a flyway, an owl swept between the trees, unrolling its wings on the hunt. Speck tensed, the fine hairs on her arms bristling.

  “You will never get old,” she said. “You won’t have to worry about getting married or having babies or finding a job. No gray hair and wrinkles, no teeth falling out. You won’t need a cane or a crutch.”

  We heard the owl descend and strike. The mouse screamed once; then life left it.

  “Like children who never grow up,” I said.

  “ ‘The indifferent children of the earth.’ ” She let her sentence linger in the air. I fixed my eye upon a single star, hoping to sense the earth or see the heavens move. This trick of staring and drifting with the sky has cured my insomnia many times over the years, but not that night. Those stars were fixed and this globe creaked as if stuck in its rotation. Eyes lifted, chin pointing to the moon, Speck considered the night, though I had no idea what she was thinking.

  “Was he my father, Speck?”

  “I cannot tell you. Let go of the past, Aniday. It’s like holding dandelions to the wind. Wait for the right moment, and the seeds will scatter away.” She looked at me. “You should rest.”

  “I can’t. My mind is filled with noises.”

  She pressed her fingers to my lips. “Listen.”

  Nothing stirred. Her presence, my own. “I can’t hear a thing.”

  But she could hear a distant sound, and her gaze turned inward, as if transported to its source.

  • CHAPTER 15 •

  Moving back home from college brought a kind of stupor to my daily life, and my nights became a waking dread. If I wasn’t pounding out yet another imitation on the piano, I was behind the bar, tending to the usual crowd with demons of their own. I had fallen into a routine at Oscar’s when the strangest of them all arrived and ordered a shot of whiskey. He slid the glass against the rail and stared at it. I went on to the next customer, poured a beer, sliced a lemon, and came back to the guy, and the drink was sitting undisturbed. He was a pixy fellow, clean, sober, in a cheap suit and tie, and as far as I could tell, he hadn’t lifted his hands from his lap.

  “What’s the matter, mister? You haven’t touched your drink.”

  “Would you give it to me on the house if I can make that glass move without touching it?”

  “What do you mean, ‘move’? How far?”

  “How far would it have to move for you to believe?”

  “Not far.” I was hooked. “Move it at all, and you have a deal.”

  He reached out his right hand to shake on it, and beneath him, the glass started sliding slowly down the bar until it came to a halt about five inches to his left. “A magician never reveals the secret to the trick. Tom McInnes.”

  “Henry Day,” I said. “A lot of guys come in here with all sorts of tricks, but that’s the best I ever saw.”

  “I’ll pay for this,” McInnes said, putting a dollar on the bar. “But you owe me another. In a fresh glass, if you please, Mr. Day.”

  He gulped the second shot and pulled the original glass back in front of him. Over the next several hours, he suckered four people with that same trick. Yet he never touched the first glass of whiskey. He drank for free all night. Around eleven, McInnes stood up to go home, leaving the shot on the bar.

  “Hey, Mac, your drink,” I called after him.

  “Never touch the stuff,” he said, slipping into a raincoat. “And I highly advise you not to drink it, either.”

  I lifted the glass to my nose for a smell.

  “Leaded.” He held up a small magnet he had concealed in his left hand. “But you knew that, right?”

  Swirling the glass in my hand, I could now see the iron filings at the bottom.

  “Part of my study of mankind,” he said, “and our willingness to believe in what cannot be seen.”

  McInnes became a regular at Oscar’s, coming in four or five times a week over the next few years, curiously intent on fooling the patrons with new tricks or puzzles. Sometimes a riddle or complicated math game involving picking a number, doubling it, adding seven, subtracting one’s age and so forth, until the victim was right back where he’d started. Or a game involving matches, a deck of cards, a sleight of hand. The drinks he won were of small consequence, for his pleasure resulted from the gullibility of his neighbors. And he was mysterious in other ways. On those nights The Coverboys performed, McInnes sat close to the door. Sometimes between sets he’d come up to chat with the boys, and he hit it off with Jimmy Cummings, of all people, a fine example of the artless thinker. But if we played the wrong song, McInnes could be guaranteed to vanish. When we started covering The Beatles in ’63 or ’64, he would walk out each time at the opening bars of “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” Like a lot of drunks, McInnes became more himself after he’d had a few. He never acted soused. Not more loquacious or morose, merely more relaxed in his skin, and sharper around the edges. And he could consume mass quantities of alcohol at a sitting, more than anyone I have ever known. Oscar asked him one night about his strange capacity for drink.

  “It’s a matter of mind over matter. A cheap trick hinged upon a small secret.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “I don’t honestly know. It’s a gift, really, and at the same time a curse. But I’ll tell you, in order to drink so much, there has to be something behind the thirst.”

  “So what makes you thirsty, you old camel?” Cummings laughed.

  “The insufferable impudence of today’s youth. I would have tenure now were it not for callow freshmen and the slippery matter of publication.”

  “You were a professor?” I asked.

  “Anthropology. My specialization was the use of mythology and theology as cultural rituals.”

  Cummings interrupted: “Slow down, Mac. I never went to college.”

  “How people use myth and superstition to explain the human condition. I was particularly interested in the pre-psychology of parenting and once started a book about rural practices in the British Isles, Scandinavia, and Germany.”

  “So you drink because of some old flame, then?” Oscar asked, turning the conversation back to its origins.

  “I wish to God it was a woman.” He spied the one or two females in the bar and lowered his voice. “No, women have been very good to me. It’s the mind, boys. The relentless thinking machine. The incessant demands of tomorrow and the yesterdays piled up like a heap of corpses. It’s this life and all those before it.”

  Oscar chewed on a reed. “Life before life?”

  “Like reincarnation?” Cummings asked.

  “I don’t know about that, but I do know that a few special people remember events from the past, events from too long ago. Put them under a spell, and you’d be amazed at the stories that come out from deep within. What happened a century ago, they talk about as if it were just yesterday. Or today.”

  “ ‘Under a spell’?” I asked.

  “Hypnosis, the curse of Mesmer, the waking sleep. The transcendent trance.”

  Oscar looked suspicious. “Hypnosis. Another one of your party tricks.”

  “I’ve been known to put a few people under,” said McInnes. “They’ve told tales from their own dreaming minds too incredible to believe, but with such feeling and authority that one is convinced that they were telling the truth. People do and see strange things when they’re under.”

  Cummings jumped in. “I’d like to be hypnotized.”

  “Stay behind after the bar is closed, and I’ll do it.”

  At two in the morning after the crowd left, McInnes ordered Oscar to dim the lights and asked George and me to stay absolutely quiet. He sat next to Jimmy and told him to close his eyes; then McInnes started speaking to him in a low, modulated voice, describing restful places and peaceful circumstances in such vivid detail that
I’m surprised we all didn’t fall asleep. McInnes ran a few tests, checking on whether Jimmy was under.

  “Raise your right arm straight out in front of you. It’s made of the world’s strongest steel, and no matter how hard you try, you cannot bend it.”

  Cummings stuck out his right arm and could not flex it; nor, for that matter, could Oscar or George or I when we tried, for it felt like a real iron bar. McInnes ran through a few more tests, then he started asking questions to which Cummings replied in a dead monotone. “Who’s your favorite musician, Jimmy?”

  “Louis Armstrong.”

  We laughed at the secret admission. In his waking life, he would have claimed some rock drummer like Charlie Watts of the Stones, but never Satchmo.

  “Good. When I touch your eyes, you’ll open them, and for the next few minutes you’ll be Louis Armstrong.”

  Jimmy was a skinny white boy, but when he popped open those baby blues, the transformation came instantaneously. His mouth twisted into Armstrong’s famous wide smile, which he wiped from time to time with an imaginary handkerchief, and he spoke in a gravelly skat voice. Even though Jimmy never sang on any of our numbers, he did a passing fair rendition of some old thing called “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You,” and then, using his thumb as a mouthpiece and his fingers as the horn, blatted out a jazz bridge. Normally Cummings hid behind his drums, but he jumped up on a table and would be entertaining the room still, had he not slipped on a slick of beer and fallen to the floor.

  McInnes raced to him. “When I count to three and snap my fingers,” he said to the slouching body, “you’ll wake up, feeling refreshed as if you have slept soundly each night this week. I want you to remember, Jimmy, that when you hear someone say Satchmo, you’ll have the uncontrollable urge to sing out a few bars as Louis Armstrong. Can you remember that?”

  “Uh-huh,” Cummings said from his trance.

  “Good, but you won’t remember anything else except this dream. Now, I’m going to snap my fingers, and you’ll wake up, happy and refreshed.”

  A goofy grin smeared on his face, he woke and blinked at each one of us, as if he could not imagine why we were all staring at him. Upon serial questioning, he recalled nothing about the past half-hour.

  “And you don’t remember,” Oscar asked, “Satchmo?”

  Cummings began singing “Hello, Dolly!” and suddenly stopped himself.

  “Mr. Jimmy Cummings, the hippest man alive,” George laughed.

  We all gassed Cummings over the next few days, working in “Satchmo” now and again until the magic words wore off. But the events of that night played over in my imagination. For weeks afterward, I pestered McInnes for more information on how hypnosis worked, but all he could say was that “the subconscious rises to the surface and allows repressed inclinations and memories free play.” Dissatisfied with his answers, I drove over to the library in town on my days off and submerged myself in research. From the sleep temples of ancient Egypt through Mesmer and on to Freud, hypnosis has been around in one form or another for millennia, with philosophers and scientists arguing over its validity. A piece from The International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis settled the debate for me: “It is the patient, not the therapist, who is in control of the depth to which the imagination reaches the subconscious.” I tore the quote from the page and tucked it into my wallet, reading the words now and again as if repeating a mantra.

  Convinced that I could manage my own imagination and subconscious, I finally asked McInnes to hypnotize me. As if he knew the way back to a forgotten land, McInnes could tap into my repressed life and tell me who I was, where I came from. And if it was merely truthful and revealed my German roots, the story would be derided by anyone who heard it as a fantastical delusion. We had all heard it before: In a former life, I was Cleopatra, Shakespeare, the Genghis Khan.

  What would be harder to laugh off or explain was my life as a hobgoblin in the forest—especially that awful August night when I became a changeling and stole the boy away. Ever since my time with the Days, I had been carefully erasing every vestige of the changeling life. It could be dangerous if, under hypnosis, I would not be able to recall anything about Henry Day’s childhood prior to age seven. My mother’s tales of Henry’s childhood had been so often repeated that I not only believed she was talking about me, but at times thought I remembered that life. Such created memories are made of glass.

  McInnes knew my half-story, what he had gathered from hanging around the bar. He had heard me talk about my mother and sisters, my aborted college career. I even confessed to him my crush on Tess Wodehouse one night when she came round with her boyfriend. But he had no clue about the other side of my tale. Anything I accidentally divulged would have to be rationalized away. My desire for the truth about the German boy trumped my fear of being unmasked as a changeling.

  The last drunk staggered away for the night, and Oscar closed the cash register and hung up his apron. On his way out, he threw me the keys to lock the doors while McInnes turned off all the lights except for a lamp at the end of the bar. The boys said their good-byes, and McInnes and I were alone in the room. Panic and apprehension clawed at me. Suppose I said something about the real Henry Day 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, replaced 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 wit
h 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.”