The Stolen Child

by Keith Donohue

  “Do you understand, Oscar?” Igel taunted him, standing nose-to-nose. “I am you and will take your place, and you will stay here with them.”

  The child stared at him, as if looking in the mirror yet not recognizing his own reflection. I fought back the urge to go to Oscar, to offer kindness and reassurance. Speck sidled up to me and spat out, “This is cruel.”

  Stepping away from his victim, Igel addressed us: “Boys and girls. I have been with you for too long and now take my leave. My time in this hell is done, and you may have it. Your paradise is vanishing. Every morning, I hear the encroaching roar of cars, feel the shudder of planes overhead. There’s soot in the air, dirt in the water, and all the birds fly away and never come back. The world is changing, and you must go while you can. I am not pleased to be trading places with this imbecile, but better that than to remain here.” He swept his arms to the trees and the star-filled skies. “For this will soon be gone.”

  Igel walked over to Oscar and untied him and held his hand. They were identical; it was impossible to tell who was real and who was the spit and image. “I’m going down below to the tunnel now to tell a story to this poor idiot. I’ll take his clothes and those disgusting shoes, then you may perform the ablution. He could do with a bath. I will crawl out on the other side. Adieu. Come away, human child.”

  As he was being led off, Oscar looked back once more, his gaze disguising all emotion. Soon after, the faeries went to the tunnel entry to pluck out Oscar’s naked body. They wrapped him in a caul of spider’s silk and vines. He remained placid during the process, but his eyes appeared more alert, as if he deliberately was trying to be calm. Hoisting him atop our shoulders, we ran, crashing through the undergrowth toward the river. Until we reached the edge of the water, I did not notice that Speck had stayed behind. Béka, our new leader, proclaimed the incantation as we lifted our package high into the air and threw it. In midair, the body jack-knifed and fell headfirst into the water. Half of the group split off to chase and retrieve the body, as the ceremony required. They were expected to pull it ashore, as they had done with me years before, as had been done with us all. I stood there, determined to be helpful to the boy, to be understanding and patient as he made the transition.

  All such hopes were washed away. The retrievers waited ashore, ready to fish the body from the water, but it never floated to the surface. Despite their severe fear of drowning, Smaolach and Chavisory waded into the river. Soon all of the faeries were in waist-deep, frantically searching for our bundle. Onions dived again and again, until, exhausted and gasping for breath, she could barely climb to the riverbank. Béka charged downstream to a ford where the body would most likely be snagged in the shallows. But Oscar could not be found. We kept vigil there all night and well into the morning, examining the stones and tree limbs where his body might have been caught, looking for any sign, but the water did not yield its secrets. The boy was gone. Around midday, below in the valley, a dog yowled with excitement. Kivi and Blomma were sent to look out for the intruders. Red-faced and panting, they came back a half hour later, collecting us from our scattered posts along the riverbank.

  “They’re coming,” said Blomma, “with a pair of bloodhounds.”

  “The firemen and policemen,” said Kivi.

  “They’ll find our camp.”

  “Igel brought the boy’s scent to our home.”

  The sound of baying dogs echoed in the hills. The rescuers drew near. In his first crisis as our new leader, Béka commanded our attention. “Quick, back to camp. Hide everything. We’ll stay in the tunnels until they leave.”

  Kivi spoke sharply to the rest of us. “There’s too many coming.”

  “The dogs,” Blomma added. “They’ve gone to ground and won’t be tricked by a few sticks of brush thrown over the tunnels’ entrances.”

  Béka looked perplexed and began to pace, fists clenched behind his back, a vein of anger throbbing on his forehead. “I say we hide and wait.”

  “We need to run.” Smaolach spoke with quiet authority. Most of us fell in behind him. “They have never been this close in all my years.”

  Luchóg stepped up and confronted Béka. “That mob is already deeper into the woods than any human has come. You’re wrong to think—”

  Béka raised his arm to strike him, but Onions grabbed his hand. “But what about the boy?”

  Our new leader turned from the crowd and announced, “Oscar is gone. Igel is gone. What’s done is done, and we must save ourselves. Gather what you can carry and hide the rest. But be quick, for we will have to outrun them.”

  Abandoning Oscar’s body to the waters, we raced home. While others stashed useful items—burying pots or knives, caching food and clothing—I gathered my papers and fashioned a sack to put them in. While a few of my possessions were safe beneath the library, I still had my journal and collection of pencil stubs, my drawing of my family and the dream lady in the red coat, and some treasures—gifts from Speck. I was ready quickly and hurried to find her.

  “Where were you?” I asked. “Why didn’t you come to the river?”

  “What happened?”

  “We never found it. What happened with Igel?”

  “He crawled out and started to cry.”

  “He cried?” I began helping her pile brush over the tunnel openings.

  “Like a baby,” she said. “He crawled out dazed, and when he saw that I had stayed behind, he ran off. He may be hiding nearby still.”

  We gathered our belongings and joined the others, climbing the ridge, now a band of refugees. Below us lay a simple clearing that might fool the men, if not the dogs.

  “We will never come back,” Speck said.

  Béka sniffed the air. “Dogs. Humans. Let’s go.”

  Now eleven in number, we raced away, the mournful bays of the bloodhounds echoing through the hills, drawing nearer and nearer. We could smell them approaching and heard the excited voices of the men. As the sun set bloodred on the horizon, the searchers came close enough for us to make out two burly fellows, straining at the leashes, gasping to keep up with the dogs. Stumbling on the trail, Ragno dropped his pack and scattered his possessions in the leafy debris. I turned to watch him gathering up his garden spade and saw a red cap flash behind him, the man oblivious to our presence. Zanzara reached out and grabbed Ragno by the hand, and off we sped to the others, leaving behind those few clues.

  We ran for hours, crossing a creek like a hunted fox to mask our scent, cloaking ourselves at last behind a tangle of nettles. The sun dipped below the treeline as the sound of the men and dogs faded. They were circling back. We bivouacked there for the night, laying down our burdens, taking up our anxieties. No sooner had I stashed my papers than Béka strode up to me, his chest puffed out, ready to command.

  “Go back to check when it is safe to return.”

  “By myself?”

  “Take someone with you.” He surveyed his charges, then leered at me. “Take Speck.”

  We waded in the winding creek back toward our pursuers, stopping now and then to listen and look ahead for trouble. Halfway to the river, Speck hopped out midstream onto a large rock.

  “Aniday, do you still want to leave?”

  “Leave? Where would I go?”

  “Just leave, right now. We could go. I don’t know. West to California and stare at the deep blue sea.”

  Another noise in the water silenced us. Perhaps a person wading in the stream, or the splashing dogs as they crossed, or perhaps a deer quenching an evening’s thirst.

  “You’re not going to leave, are you, Speck?”

  “Did you hear that?” she asked.

  We froze and listened hard. Creeping along through the brush, we carefully investigated the noise. A few hundred yards downstream, a most peculiar odor—neither human nor animal, but something in between. My stomach pained me as we moved along the banks of the water. Around a bend and in the fading light through the trees, we were nearly upon him before we saw the man. />
  “Who’s there?” the figure said, then ducked down, trying to hide.

  “Speck,” I whispered. “That’s my father.”

  She stood on her tiptoes and peeked at the crouching man; then she held her finger to her lips. Her nostrils flared as she breathed in deeply. Speck grabbed my hand and led us away as quietly as a fog.

  • CHAPTER 19 •

  Despite being underwater for a day, the body was identified as that of young Oscar Love. The sheet pulled back, the shocking bloat of the drowned, and sure enough, it was him, although the truth is, none of us could bear to look closely. Had it not been for the strange netting around the waterlogged corpse, maybe no one would have thought it anything other than a tragic accident. He would have been laid to rest under two yards of good earth, and his parents left to their private grief. But suspicions were raised from the moment that they gaffed him from the river. The corpse was transported twelve miles to the county morgue for a proper autopsy and inquest. The coroners searched for cause but found only strange effects. To all outward appearance he was a young boy, but when they cut him open, the doctors discovered an old man. The weirdness never made the papers, but Oscar later told me about the atrophied internal organs, the necrosis of the heart, the dehydrated lungs, liver, kidneys, spleen, and brain of a death-defying centenarian.

  The strangeness and sorrow surrounding this discovery were compounded by the vanishing act of Jimmy Cummings. With the rest of the searchers, he had gone into the woods that night but had not returned. When Jimmy did not show up at the hospital, we all assumed he had gone home early or found another exit, and not until the next evening did George begin to worry. By the third day, the rest of us were all anxious about Jimmy, desperate for any news. We planned to go back to the woods that evening if the weather held, but just as I sat down with my family for dinner, the phone rang in the kitchen. Elizabeth and Mary both sprang from their chairs, hoping a boy might be trying to reach them, but my mother ordered them to sit.

  “I don’t like your friends calling in the middle of meals.” Mom picked up the receiver from its cradle on the wall, and after she said hello, her face was a palette of surprise, shock, disbelief, and amazement. She half turned to finish her discussion, leaving us to stare at the back of her head. As she hung up the phone with her left hand, she crossed herself with her right, then turned to share the news.

  “It’s a miracle. That was Oscar Love. Jimmy Cummings is okay, and he found him alive.”

  My sisters stopped mid-bite, their forks suspended in the air, and stared at her. I asked my mother to repeat the message, and in so doing, she realized the implications of her sentences.

  “They walked out of the woods together. He’s alive. He found him in a hole. Little Oscar Love.”

  Elizabeth’s fork fell and clattered on the plate.

  “You’re kidding. Alive?” Mary said.

  “Far out,” said Elizabeth.

  Distracted, Mom fretted with the bobby pins at her temples. She stood behind her chair, thinking.

  “Isn’t he dead?” I asked.

  “Well . . . there must be a mistake.”

  “That’s a helluva mistake, Mom,” Mary said.

  Elizabeth asked the not-so-rhetorical question we were all wondering about. “So who’s that in the morgue?”

  Mary asked her twin, “There’s another Oscar Love? That’s so cool.”

  My mother sat hard in the chair. Staring at the plate of fried chicken, she seemed lost in abstraction, reconciling what she knew to be true with what she had just heard. The twins one-upped each other with hypotheses too absurd to believe. Too nervous to eat, I retired to the porch for a smoke and contemplation. On my second Camel, I heard the noise of an approaching car. A cherry red Mustang veered off the road and barreled up our drive, kicking up gravel and fishtailing to a stop. The twins rushed out to the porch, the screen door slapping shut twice, before Cummings got out of the car. Hair pulled back into a ponytail, a pair of rose-colored glasses perched on his nose, he flashed the two-finger V and broke into a broad grin. Mary and Elizabeth greeted him with their own peace signs and smiled coyly back at him. Jimmy loped across the yard, took the porch stairs in two bounds, and stood directly in front of me, expecting a hero’s welcome. We shook hands.

  “Welcome back from the dead, man.”

  “Man, you know already? Have you heard the news?” His eyes were bloodshot, and I could not tell if he was drunk or stoned or just worn-out.

  Mom burst through the door and threw her arms around my friend, bear-hugging him until his face turned red. Not able to restrain themselves a moment longer, my sisters joined in, nearly tackling him in their enthusiasm. I watched them unpeel one by one.

  “Tell us all about it,” my mother said. “Would you like a drink? Let me get you an iced tea.”

  While she busied herself in the kitchen, we arranged ourselves on the rattan. Unable to decide upon a sister, Jimmy slumped onto the settee, and the twins bunched together on the porch swing. I kept my post at the railing, and when she returned, Mom sat beside Jimmy, beaming at him as if he were her own son.

  “Have you ever seen anyone come back from the dead, Mrs. Day?”

  “Oh, angels and ministers of grace defend us.”

  “That’s what the Loves thought when they saw him,” Jimmy said. “As if Oscar might have come from the airs of heaven, or been blasted out of hell. They couldn’t believe what their own eyes were telling them. ’Cause they were all set to take the body to the funeral home, thinking Little Oscar was dead and fit to be buried, when I come in with their son, holding his hand. Lewis looked as if he was having a heart attack, man, and Libby walked up and said, ‘Are you real? Can I touch you? What are you? Can you speak to me?’ And the boy ran to her and wrapped his arms around her waist, and she knew he was no ghost.”

  Two identical beings, one dead, the other living—the changeling and the child.

  “All the doctors and nurses freaked out, too. Speaking of nurses, Henry, there’s a nurse there who said she saw you the other night when they brought up that other boy.”

  That was no boy.

  “Lew starts shaking my hand, and Libby says ‘Bless you’ about a thousand times. And Oscar, big Oscar, came in a few minutes later, then he goes through the whole routine with his nephew, and man, is he glad to see me, too. The questions start flying, and of course I already told the whole story to the firemen and the cops. They brought us to the hospital on account of him being out there for three days. Near as they can tell, there isn’t a thing wrong with the boy. A little strung out, like he’d been tripping, and we were pretty tired and dirty and thirsty.”

  A big storm darkened in the western skies. In the forest, the creatures would be scrambling for cover. The hobgoblins had created an underground warren in their ancient campsite, a maze of tunnels that sheltered them from the rough weather.

  “But you had to know, man, so I got in my ride and drove right over here.”

  He drank his iced tea in a single gulp, and my mother refilled his glass at once. She, like the rest of us, grew anxious for the beginning, and I was wondering if his story would beat the rain. No longer able to wait, she asked, “So, how did you find little Oscar?”

  “Hey, Henry, did I tell you that I saw that nurse, Tess Wodehouse? You should give her a call, bro. That night, I got so caught up looking for that kid that I lost track of the time. My watch stopped dead around half past seven. Which freaked me out because it must have been after nine. Not that I believe in ghosts or anything like that, just that it was dark.”

  I checked my watch and studied the approaching storm, trying to calculate its tempo. If one or two of them were away from camp when the rain hit, they would have to look for a cave or a hollow tree to wait out the worst.

  “So I was really, really lost. And at that point, I’m concerned about finding my own way out. I come to this clearing in the woods, and it’s starlit and spooky. There’s these mooshed-down places in the g
rass and leaves, like maybe deer bed down there. Then I see these flat ovals in a ring around the edges of the clearing, and I figure this is where a herd sleeps for the night, right?”

  On fair summer nights, we slept above ground. We read the skies each morning for any hint of foul weather. As Jimmy paused for a breath, I thought I heard the notes from the stones in the river again.

  “There’s this circle of ashes and burnt sticks from a campfire that some freakin’ hunters or backpackers left, and if I have to stay the night in the woods, this might be a good place since, obviously, someone had stayed here before. I made myself a small fire, and the flames hypnotize me, for next thing I know, I’m asleep and having the strangest dreams. Hallucinations. Bad acid. A voice from far away, a little boy calling and calling ‘Mama,’ but I can’t see him, and I’m too tired to get up. You ever have one of those dreams where you think your alarm clock is going off in your dream, but it’s really going off beside your bed? Only you think it’s just a dream, so you don’t get up to shut if off, then you oversleep, and then you remember when you do get up that you had a dream about it ringing?”

  “I think I have that dream every morning,” said Mary.

  “Dig it. I can’t see him, but I can hear little Oscar crying out for his Mama, so I start looking for him. ‘Oscar? Your mama and daddy sent me here to find you.’ So he starts calling out, ‘I’m under here!’ Under where? I can’t see him, and what he’s under? ‘Keep calling me’ . . . and I try to follow the sound of his voice. That’s when I fall into the freakin’ hole. Crashing right through branches and stuff that someone had laid over the opening like it’s a trap. I’m stuck in this hole up to my armpits in the dead dark of night with the boy crying his eyes out nearby. A bad scene, man, a bad scene.”