C H A P T E R 1
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Dont call me a fairy. We dont like to be called fairies anymore. Once upon a time, fairy erfectly acceptable catchall for a variety of creatures, but now it has taken on too many associatioymologically speaking, a fairy is something quite particular, related in kind to the na-iads, or water nymphs, and while of the genus, we are sui generis. The word fairy is drawn from fay (Old French fee), which itself es from the Latin Fata, the goddess of fate. The fay lived in groups called the faerie, between the heavenly ahly realms.There exist in this world a range of sublunary spirits that carminibus coelo possunt deducere lunam, and they have been divided sint times into six kinds: fiery, aerial, terrestrial, watery, subterranean, and the whole class of fair-ies and nymphs. Of the sprites of fire, water, and air, I know o nothing. But the terrestrial and underground devils I know all too well, and of these, there is infinite variety and attendant myth about their behavior, , and culture. Known around the world by many different names—Lares, genii, fauns, satyrs, foliots, Robin Goodfellows, pucks, lepres, pukas, sidhe, trolls—the few that remain live hidden in the woods and are rarely seen or entered by human beings. If you must give me a name, call me hobgob-lin.
Or better yet, I am a geling—a word that describes within its own name what we are bound and inteo do. We kidnap a human child and replace him or her with one of our own. The hobgoblin bees the child, and the child bees a hobgoblin. Not any birl will do, but only those rare souls baffled by their young lives or attuo the weeping troubles of this world. The gelings select carefully, for such opportunities might e along only once a decade or so. A child who bees part of our soci-ety might have to wait a tury before his turn in the cycle arrives, when he bee a geling aer the human world.
Preparation is tedious, involving close surveillance of the child, and of his friends and family. This must be done unobserved, of course, and its best to select the child before he begins school, because it bees more pli-cated by then, having to memorize and process a great deal of information beyond the intimate family, and being able to mimic his personality and his-tory as clearly as mirr his physique aures. Infants are the easiest, but g for them is a problem for the gelings. Age six or seven is best. Anyone much older is bound to have a more highly developed sense of self. No matter how old or young, the object is to deceive the parents into think-ing that this geling is actually their child. More easily dohan most people imagine.
No, the difficulty lies not in assuming a childs history but in the painful physical act of the ge itself. First, start with the bones and skin, stret<strike></strike>g until one shudders and nearly snaps into the right size and body shape. Thehers begin work on ones new head and face, which require the skills of a sculptor. Theres siderable pushing and pulling at the cartilage, as if the skull were a soft wad of clay or taffy, and then the malicious business with the teeth, the removal of the hair, and the tedious re-weaving. The entire process occurs without a gram of painkiller, although a few imbibe a noxious alade from the fermented mash of as. A nasty uaking, but well worth it, although I could do without the rather plicated rearra of the genitals. In the end, one is a copy of a child. Thirty years ago, in 1949, I was a geling who became a human again.
I ged lives with Henry Day, a boy born on a farm outside of town.
On a late summers afternoon, when he was seven, Henry ran away from home and hid in a hollow chestnut tree. Our geling spies followed him and raised the alarm, and I transformed myself into his perfect facsimile. We grabbed him, and I slipped into the hollowed space to switch my life for his. When the search party fouhat night, they were happy, relieved, and proud—not angry, as I had expected. "Henry," a red-haired man in a firemans suit said to me as I preteo sleep in the hiding place. I opened my eyes and gave him a bright smile. The man ed me in a thin bla and carried me out of the woods to a paved road, where a fire truck stood waiting, its red light pulsing like a heartbeat. The firemen took me home to Henrys parents, to my new father and mother. As we drove along the road that night, I kept thinking that if that first test could be passed, the world would once again be mine.
It is a only held myth that, among the birds and the beasts, the mother reizes her young as her own and will refuse a strahrust into the den or the . This is not so. In fact, the cumonly lays its eggs in other birds s, ae its extraordinary size and voracious appetite, the cuckoo chick receives as much, indeed more, maternal care, often to the point of driving the other chicks from their lofty home. Sometimes the mother bird starves her own offspring because of the cuckoos incessant de-mands. My first task was to create the fi that I was the real Henry Day. Unfortunately, humans are more suspicious aolerant of intruders in the .
The rescuers knew only that they were looking for a young boy lost in the woods, and I could remain mute. After all, they had found someone aherefore tent. As the fire truck lurched up the driveway to the Days home, I vomited against the bright red door, a vivid mess of aash, wa-tercress, and the exoskeletons of a number of small is. The fireman patted me on the head and scooped me up, bla and all, as if I were of no more sequehan a rescued kitten or an abandoned baby. Henrys father leapt from the porch to gather me in his arms, and with a strong embrad warm kisses reeking of smoke and alcohol, he weled me home as his only son. The mother would be much harder to fool.
Her face betrayed her every emotion: blotchy skin, chapped with salty tears, her pale blue eyes rimmed in red, her hair matted and disheveled. She reached out for me with trembling hands aed a small sharp cry, the kind a rabbit makes when in the distress of the snare. She wiped her eyes on her shirtsleeve and ed me in the wrag shudder of a woman in love. Then she began laughing in that deep coloratura.
"Henry? Henry?" She pushed me away and held on to my shoulders at arms length. "Let me look at you. Is it really you?"
"Im sorry, Mom."
She brushed away the bangs hiding my eyes and then pulled me against her breast. Her heart beat against the side of my face, and I felt hot and un-fortable.
"You worry, my little treasure. Youre home and safe and sound, and thats all that matters. Youve e bae."
Dad cupped the bay head with his large hand, and I thought this homeing tableau might go on forever. I squirmed free and dug out the handkerchief from Henrys pocket, crumbs spilling to the floor.
"Im sorry I stole the biscuit, Mom."
She laughed, and a shadow passed behind her eyes. Maybe she had been w up to that point if I was indeed her flesh and blood, but mention-ing the biscuit did the trick. Henry had stolen one from the table when he ran away from home, and while the others took him to the river, I stole and pock-eted it. The crumbs proved that I was hers.
Well after midnight, they p<footer>藏书网</footer>ut me to bed, and such a ay be the greatest iion of mankind. In any case, it tops sleeping in a hole in the cold ground, a moldy rabbit skin for your pillow, and the grunts and sighs of a dozen gelings anxious in their dreams. I stretched out like a stick be-tween the crisp sheets and pondered my good fortune. Many tales exist of failed gelings who are uncovered by their presumptive families. One child who showed up in a Nova Scotia fishing village shtened his poor parents that they fled their own home in the middle of a snowstorm and were later found frozen and bobbing in the frigid harbor. A geling girl, age six, so shocked her new parents when she opened her mouth to speak that, thus frightehey poured hot wax into each others ears and never heard an-other sound. Other parents, upon learning that their child had been replaced by gelings, had their hair turn white ht, were stunned into cata-tonia, heart attacks, or suddeh. Worse yet, though rare, other families drive out the creature through exorcism, banishment, abando, murder. Seventy years ago, I lost a good friend after he fot to make himself look older as he aged. vinced he was a devil, his parents tied him up like an unwanted kitten in a gunnysad threw him down a well. Most of the time, though, the parents are founded by the sudden ge of their son or daughter, or one spouse blames the other for their queer fortu is a risky endeavor and not for the faied.
That I had e this far ued caused me no small satisfa, but I was not pletely at ease. A half hour after I had goo bed, the door to my room swung open slowly. Framed against the hallway light, Mr. and Mrs. Day stuck their heads through the opening. I shut my eyes to mere slits and preteo be sleeping. Softly, but persistently, she was sobbing. None could cry with such dexterity as Ruth Day. "We have to mend our ways, Billy. You have to make sure this never happens again."
"I know, I promise," he whispered. "Look at him sleeping, though. The i sleep that knits up the ravelld sleeve of care."
He pulled shut the door a me in the darkness. My fellow gelings and I had been spying on the boy for months, so I khe tours of my new home at the edge of the forest. Henrys view of their few acres and the world beyond was magical. Outside, the stars shohrough the window above a jagged row of firs. Through the open windows, a breeze blew across the top of the sheets, and moths beat their wings ireat from their perches on the window s. The nearly full moon reflected enough light into the space to reveal the dim pattern on the aper, the crucifix above my head, pages torn from magazines and neers tacked along the wall. A baseball mitt and ball rested on top of the bureau, and on the washstand a pitcher and bowl glowed as white as phosphorous. A short stack of books lay propped against the bowl, and I could barely tain my excitement at the prospect of reading .<cite></cite>
The twins began bawling at the break of day. I padded down the hallast my new parents room, following the sound. The babies hushed the mo-ment they saw me, and I am sure that had they the gifts of reason and speech, Mary and Elizabeth would have said "Youre not Henry" the moment I walked into the room. But they were mere tots, with more teeth thaences, and could not articulate the mysteries of their young minds. With their clear wide eyes, they regarded my every move with quiet attentiveness. I tried smiling, but no smiles were returned. I tried making funny faces, tig them uheir fat s, dang like a puppet, and whistling like a mogb<a>.99lｉｂ.</a>ird, but they simply watched, passive and i as two dumb toads. Rag my brain to find a way to get through to them, I recalled other occasions when I had entered something in the forest as helpless and dangerous as these two human children. Walking along in a lonesome glen, I had e across a bear cub separated from its mother. The frightened animal let out such a godforsaken scream that I half expected to be surrounded by every bear in the mountains. Despite my powers with animals, there was nothing to be doh a mohat could have ripped me open with a single swat. By -ing to the beast, I soothed it, and remembering this, I did so with my new-found sisters. They were ented by the sound of my void began at oo coo and clap their chubby hands while long strings of drool ran down their s. "Twiwinkle" and "Bye, Baby Bunting" reassured or -vihem that I was close enough to be their brother, or preferable to their brother, but who knows for certain what thoughts flitted through their simple minds. They gurgled, and they gooed. Iween songs, for terpoint, I would talk to them in Henrys voice, and gradually they came to believe—or abandon their sense of disbelief.
Mrs. Day bustled into the babies room, humming and tra-la-la-ing. Her general girth and amplitude amazed me; I had seen her many times before, but not quite at such close quarters. From the safety of the woods, she had seemed more or less the same as all adult humans, but in person, she assumed a singu-lar tenderness, though she smelled faintly sour, a perfume of milk a. She danced across the floor, throwing open curtains, dazzling the room with golden m, and the girls, brightened by her presence, pulled themselves up by the slats of their cribs. I smiled at her, too. It was all I could do to keep from bursting into joyous laughter. She smiled back at me as if I were her only son.
"Help me with your sisters, would you, Henry?"
I picked up the girl and announced very pointedly to my new mother, "Ill take Elizabeth." She was as heavy as a badger. It is a curious feel-ing to hold an infant one is not planning to steal; the very young vey a pleasant softness.
The girls mother stopped and stared at me, and for a beat, she looked puzzled and uain. "How did you know that was Elizabeth? Youve never been able to tell them apart."
"Thats easy, Mom. Elizabeth has two dimples when she smiles and her names longer, and Mary has just one."
"Arent you the clever one?" She picked up Mary and headed off down-stairs.
Elizabeth hid her face against my shoulder as we followed our mother. The kit table groaned with a huge feast—hotcakes and ba, a jug of warm maple syrup, a gleaming pitcher of milk, and a bowls filled with sliced bananas. After a long life in the forest eating what-you--find, this simple fare appeared a smasbord of exotic delicacies, rid ripe, the promise of fullness.
"Look, Henry, I made all your favorites."
I could have kissed her right on the spot. If she leased with herself for taking the trouble to fix Henrys favorite foods, she must have beeremely gratified by how I tucked in and enjoyed br<tt></tt>eakfast. After four hot-cakes, eight strips of ba, and all but two small glassfuls of the pitcher of milk, I plained of hunger, so she made me three eggs and a half loaf of toast from home-baked bread. My metabolism had ged, it seemed. Ruth Day saw my appetite as a sign of love for her, and for the eleven years, until I left for college, she indulged me. In time, she sublimated her own aies and began to eat like me. Decades as a geling had molded my appetites and energies, but she was all too human, growing heavier with each passing season. Over the years, Ive often wondered if she would have ged so much with her real firstborn or whether she filled her gnawing suspi with food.
That first day she kept me ihe house, and after all that had oc-curred, who could blame her? I stuck closer than her own shadow, studying ily, learnier how to be her son, as she dusted and swept, washed the dishes, and ged the babies diapers. The house felt safer than the for-est, but strange and alien. Small surprises lurked. Daylight ahrough the curtained windows, ran along the walls, and cast its patterns across the carpets in airely differery thah the opy of leaves. Of par-ticular i were the small universes prised of specks of dust that make themselves visible only through sunbeams. In trast to the blaze of sunlight outside, the inner light had a soporific effect, especially owins. They tired shortly after lunother fete in my honor—and napped in the early afternoon.
My mother tiptoed from their room to fiiently waiting in the same spot she had left me, standing like a sentinel in the hallway. I was he witched by arical outlet that screamed out to me to sti my little finger. Although their door was closed, the twins rhythmic breathing sounded like a storm rushing through the trees, for I had not yet trained myself not to listen. Mom took me by the hand, and her soft grasp filled me with an abidihy. The womaed a deep peace withih her very touch. I remembered the books on Henrys washstand and asked her if she would read me a story.
We went to my room and clambered into bed together. For the past tury, adults had been total strangers, and life among the gelings had distorted my perspective. More than twice my size, she seemed too solid and stout to be real, especially when pared to the skinny body of the boy I had assumed. My situation seemed fragile and capricious. If she rolled over, she could snap me like a bundle of twigs. Yet her sheer size created a bunker against the outer world. She would protect me against all my foes. As the twins slept, she read to me from the Brrimm—"The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was," "The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids," "Hansel and Gretel," "The Singing Bone," "The Girl Without Hands," and many others, rare or familiar. My favorites were "derella" and "Little Red Riding Hood," which she read with beautiful expression in her mezzo timbre, a singsong much too cheerful for those awful fables. In the music of her voice, an echo sounded from long ago, and as I rested by her side, the decades dissolved.
I had heard these tales before, long ago, but in German, from my real mother (yes, I, too, had a mother, once upon a time), who introduced me to Ashenputtel and Rotk?pp from the Kinder- und Hausm?r. I waet, thought I was fetting, but could hear quite clearly her voi my head.
"Es war einmal im tiefen, tiefen Wald."
Although I quit the society of the gelings long ago, I have remained, in a sense, in those dark woods, hiding my true identity from those I love. Only now, after the stras of this past year, do I have the ce to tell the story. This is my fession, too long delayed, which I have been afraid to make and only now reveal because of the passing dao my own son. We ge. I have ged.
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