CHAPTER 35
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"The monster never breathes," the poser Berlioz supposedly laid about the an, but I found the opposite to be true. When I played I felt alive and at oh the mae, as if exhaling the music. Tess and Edward visited the studio to hear the lengthening shape of my position and at the end of the performance my son said, "You were moving the same as I was breathing." Over the course of a year, I worked on the symphony during what hours I could steal, regeing it stantly from the desire to fess, seeking to craft a texture that would allow me to explain. I felt that if she could but hear my story in the music, Tess would surely uand and five. In my studio, I could take refuge at the keyboard. Lock the door and draw the curtains to feel safe and whole again. Lose myself, find myself, in the music.By the springtime, I had secured a small orchestra—a wind ensemble from Duquesimpani from egie-Mellon, a few local musis—to perform the piece when it was pleted. After Edward had finished first grade in Juess took him for a two-week visit to her cousin Pennys to give me time alone in the house to finish my symphony—a work about a child trapped in his silence, how the sounds could never get out of his own imagination, living in two worlds, the internal life locked to all unication with outside reality.
After struggling for years to find the music for that stolen child, I finally fihe score lay spread out across the an, the scrawled notes oaves a marvel of mathematical beauty and precision. Two stories told at the same time—the inner life and the outer world in terpoint. My method was not to juxtapose each chord with its double, for that is not reality. Sometimes our thoughts and dreams are more real than the rest of our experience, and at other moments that which happens to us overshadows anything we might imagine. I had not been able to write fast enough to capture the sounds in my head, hat flowed from deep within, as if half of me had been posing, and the other half ag as amanuensis. I had yet to fully transcribe the musical shorthand and to assign all of the instrumentation—tasks that might take months of rehearsal to perfect—but the initial process of setting down the bones of the symphony had made me giddy and exhausted, as if in a waking dream. Its relentless logic, strao the ordinary rules of language, seemed to me what I had been hoping to write all along.
At five oclock that afternoon, hot and wrung-out, I went to the kit for a bottle of beer, and drank it on the stairs. My plan was a shower, another beer with dinner, and then back to work. In the bedroom closet, the empty spaces where her clothes had been reminded me of Tess, and I wished she had beeo share the sudden burst of creativity and aplishment. Moments after stepping into the hot shower, I heard a loud crash downstairs. Without turning off the water, I stepped out, ed a towel around my waist, and hurried to iigate. One of the windows in the living room had been broken, and glass lay all over the rug. A breeze flapped the curtains. Half naked and drippi, I stood there puzzled, until a sudden discordant hammering of the piano keys frightened me, as if a cat had walked across it, but the studio was empty and silent. I took a long look around.
The score was go oable where I had left it, not fallen to the floor, not anywhere. The windoed open, and I ran to look at the lawn. A solitary page fluttered across the grass, pushed along by a thin breeze, but there was nothing else to see. Howling with anger and pag the room, I stubbed my toe on the piano leg and began hopping up and down across the rug, nearly impaling my foot on a piece of glass, when another crash sounded upstairs. Foot throbbing, I climbed the steps to the landing, afraid of what might be in my house, worried about my manuscript. My bedroom was empty. In our sons room another window had been broken, but no glass littered the floor. Shards on the roof meant the window had been shattered from the i. To clear my head, I sat for a moment on the edge of his bed. His room looked the same as the day hed left for the vacation, and thoughts of Edward and Tess filled me with sudden sorrow. How would I explain the missing symphony? Without it, how could I fess my true nature? I pulled at my wet hair till my scalp ached. In my mind, my wife, my son, and my music were wound together in a braided that now threateo unravel.
Ihroom, the shower ran and ran. A cloud of steam billowed out into the hallway, and I stumbled through the fog to shut off the w<bdi></bdi>ater. On the et mirror, someone had fingered words on the fogged surface: We No Your Secret. Copied above, note for note, was the first measure of my score.
"You little fuckers," I said to myself as the message vanished from the mirror.
After a restless and lonesome night, I drove to my mothers house as a new day began. When she did not immediately answer my knock, I thought she might still be asleep, a over to the window to look in. From the kit, she saw me standing there, smiled, and waved me to her.
"Doors never locked," she said. "What brings you here in the middle of the week?"
"Good m. t a guy e and see his best girl?"
"Oh, youre su awful liar. Would you like a cup of coffee? How about I fry you a couple of eggs?" She busied herself at the stove, and I sat at the kit table, its surface pocked with marks left from dropped pots and pans, nicked by knives, and lined with faint impressions of letters written there. The m light stirred memories of our first breakfast together.
"Sorry I was so long in answering the door," she said above the sizzle. "I was on the phoh Charlie. Hes off in Philadelphia, tying up loose ends. Is everything all right with you?"
I was tempted to tell her everything, beginning with the night we took away her son, going back further to a little German boy snatched away by gelings, and ending with the tale of the stolen score. But she looked too careworn for such fessions. Tess might be able to ha, but the story would break my mothers heart. heless, I o tell someo least provisionally, of my past errors and the sins I was about to it.
"Ive been under a lot of pressure lately. Seeing things, not truly myself. Like Im being followed by a bad dream."
"Followed by troubles is the sign of a guilty sce."
"Haunted. And Ive got to sort it out."
"When you were a baby, you were the ao my prayers. And when you were a little boy, remember, I used to sing you to sleep every night. You were the sweetest thing, trying to sing along with me, but you could never carry a tuhat certainly ged. And so did you. As if something happeo you that night you ran away."
"It is like the devils are watg me."
"Dont believe in fairy tales. The trouble is inside, Henry, with you. Living in your own head." She patted my hand. "A mother knows her own son."
"Have I been a good son, Mom?"
"Henry." She rested her palm against my cheek, a gesture from my childhood days, and the grief over losing my score abated. "You are who you are, food or ill, and no use t yourself with your owions. Little devils." She smiled as if a fresh thought had entered her mind. "Have you ever thought whether youre real to them? Put those nightmares out of your head."
I stood to go, the and kissed her good-bye. She had treated me kindly over the years, as if I had been her own son.
"Ive known all along, Henry," she said.
I left the house without asking.
I resolved to front them and find out why they were tormentio flush out those monsters, I would go bato the woods. The Forest Service provided topographical maps of the region, the areas in green indig woodland, the roads drawn iiculous detail, and I laid a grid over the likely areas, dividing the wilderness into manageable plats. For two days, despite my loathing for the forest and my aversion to nature, I explored a few of those squares, looking for their lair. The woods were emptier than when I lived there—the occasional hammering of a woodpecker, skinks sunning themselves on rocks, the raised white flag of one deer running away, and the lonesome hum of greenbottle flies. Not much life, but plenty of junk—a swollen copy of Playboy; a four-of-hearts playing card; a tattered white sweater; a small mound of empty cigarette packages; a teen; a tortoiseshell neckla a pile of stones; a stopped watch; and a book stamped Property Of ty Library.
Aside from the dirt on its cover and the slight musty odor to its pages, the book was intact. Through the mildewed pages, the story revolved around a religious fanatiamed Tarwater or Tearwater. I gave up reading novels in childhood, for their artificial worlds mask rather than reveal the truth. s struct elaborate lies to throw off readers from disc the meaning behind the words and symbols, as if it could be known. But the book I found might be just the thing for a fourteen-year-old hellion or sious misfit, so I took it back to the library. Virtually nobody was there on that midsummer day, except for a cute girl behind the ter.
"I found this in the woods. It belongs to you."
She looked at the novel as if it were a lost treasure, brushed off the grime, and opehe back cover. "Just a minute." She leafed through a stack of stamped cards. "Thank you, but this has not been checked out at all. Did you fet?"
"No," I explained. "I found it, and wao return it to the rightful owners. I was looking for something else."
"Maybe I help you?" Her smile reminded me of so many other librarians, and a small twinge of guilt poked me in the ribs.
I leaned close and smiled at her. "Do you have any books on hobgoblins?"
She skipped a beat. "Hobgoblins?"
"Or fairies. Imps, trolls, sprites, gelings, that sort of thing?"
The girl looked at me as if I were speaking a fn language. "You shouldnt lean on the desk like that. Theres a card catalht ov9９ｌiｂ?here. Alphabetical by subject, title, or author."
Rather than providing shortcuts to useful information, one search begat another, and the curiouser and curiot, the more rabbit holes popped open. My search for fairies resulted in forty-two titles, of which a dozen or so might be useful, but that search branched off into goblins and hobgoblins, whi turn branched off to abnormal psychology, child prodigies, and autism. Lunchtime had e and gone, and I felt lightheaded and in need of some air. At a nearby venieore I bought a sandwid a bottle of pop, and I sat on a bench by the empty playground, plating the task before me. There was so much to know, so much already fotten. In the relentless sunshine I fell asleep, waking up three hours later with a nasty sunburn on one arm and the left side of my face. From the librarys bathroom mirror stared a person divided in two, half of my face pale, the other half crimsoing past the young librarian, I tried to keep my profile two-dimensional.
My dream returned in full detail that night. Tess and I spoke quietly on the deck of a local pool. A few other people milled about in the background, sunning themselves or diving into the cool water. As wallflowers: Jimmy Cummings, Oscar Love, Uncle Charlie, Brian Ungerland. All the librarians in bikinis.
"How have you been, my love?" she teased. "Still chased by monsters?"
"Tess, its not funny."
"Im sorry, but no one else see them, sweetheart. Only you."
"But theyre as real as you and me. What if they e for Edward?"
"They dont want Eddie. They want you." She stood up, tugged at the bottom of her suit, and jumped in the pool. I plunged in after her, shocked by how cold the water felt, and frog-kicked my way to the middle. Tess swam to me, her body ></a>being more streamlined and graceful, and wheop of her head broke the surface, her hair lastered against her scalp. As she stopped and stood, the film of water ran off her face, parting like a curtain to reveal not her face at all, but a hobgoblins face, horrid and frightening. I blanched and hollered involuntarily; then she ged right back again to her familiar self. "Whats the matter, love? Dont you know I know who you are? Tell me."
I went back to the library, hunted for a few of my titles, and sat down at a er table. The research, especially on hobgoblins, was wrong in virtually every particular and er than myth or fi. Nobody wrote accurately about their habits and s, how they lived in darkness, spying on human children, looking for the right person with whom to make the ge. There was not one single word about how to get rid of unwanted visitors. Or how to protect your child from every d danger. Lost in these fairy tales, I became hypersensitive to the stillness of my surroundings, jarred by the sounds I that peed the sile first the noises appeared to be the random shufflings of another patron languidly turning pages, or one of the librarians, bored out of her mind, pag the corridors or sneaking outside for a smoke. Soon every minute sound intensified in the mind-numbing quiet.
Someone breathed deeply and regularly, as if asleep, the noise emanating from an ierminate dire. Later I heard a rasping in the walls, and when I asked the cute librarian, she said it was only mice, but the scrabbling was scratchier, like a fountain pen rag across a pad of paper. That evening, someone began singing tunelessly to himself from the lower depths. I followed the melody to a spot in the childreion. Not a soul around, I lay down, pressed my ear to the floor, and ran my fingers along the a carpet, catg my thumb on a hard bump, like a hinge or a bent nail. Carefully cut and nearly indisible, a carpet square had been glued to the spot, c a panel or hatch below, and I would have pried it open, but the passing librarian startled me by clearihroat. With a sheepish grin, I stood up, mumbled an apology, a bay er. vihat something lived beh the building, I brooded over how to catch him and make him talk.
m, my books were in disarray, titles scrambled out of alphabetical order and all my bookmarks missing. They had been spying on me again. For the rest of the day I preteo read, while actually listening for any noises from below, and once I wandered back to the childreion. The carpet square had been slightly raised above the surfay hands and knees, I tapped on the panel and realized that a hollow space existed beh the floorboards. Maybe one or more of the fiends toiled below, hatg plots and tricks to further savage my life. A slight red-haired boy whistled behind my back, and I quickly stood, stamped down on the lid, a away without a word.
That boy made me anxious, so I went out and stayed on the playground until the library closed. The young librarian noticed me on the swi, but she turned aretended not to care. Alone again, I searched the grounds for evidence. If they had followed me to the library, they must have dug a hole or found a secret entranceway into the building. On my third trip around the building, in the shadows of the sun, I saw him. Behind the back stairs, he squeezed out through a cra the foundation like a baby being born and stood there for a moment, blinking in the fading light. Afraid that he might attack me, I looked left and right for an escape route. He ran directly at me, as if to seize my throat in his jaws, and then darted away as quickly as a bird in flight, too fast for me to see him clearly, but there is no doubt who it was. A hobgoblin. When the danger passed, I could not keep from laughing.
Nervous for hours, I drove around and found myself at my mother’s plaear midnight. While she slept upstairs, I crept through the house gathering supplies: a carpet knife, an iron crowbar, and a coil of strong rope. From the old barn, I stole my fathers a kerosene camping lamp, its wire handle dusty and cold to the touch. The wick sputtered when I tried to light the lamp, but it came to life and suffused the long-ed er with ahly glow.
Insomnia gripped me those last few hours, my mind and body p fusi until the deed was done. In the predawn gloom, I went bad memorized the layout of the building, figuring out step by step what I was going to do. Patienearly deserted me. The goblin might have been spooked, so I went about my business as if nothing had ever happened. I spent the day reading a book about remarkable children, gifted savants whose minds were damaged in such a way that they could see the world only through a sole window of sound or mathematics or another abstract system. I would press the hobgoblin for the story of what had really happeo Gustav Ungerland and to me.
But more than any explanation, I simply and desperately wanted my symphony back, for I could not write a note knowing it was gone. Nothing would stop me from making him return the score. I would reason if I could beg if I must, or steal it back if need be. By now, I was no longer something wild and dangerous, but I was itted to rest my life.
Unmistakable irred beh the floor all day. He was back. As the library emptied, I napped in the fro of my car. Sultry August heat poured in through the windows, and I dozed off lohan intehe stars had risen, and that short nap had energized me. I slung the rope around me like a bandolier, took out the tools, and skulked over to the side window. There was no telling how far below lay their underworld. ing my fist in a towel, I puhrough the glass, unlocked the window, and crawled through the opening. The stacks loomed like a maze of tunnels, the books watg my every movement through the darkness as I crept to the childreion. Anxious, I spent three wooden matches attempting to light the kerosene lantern. The oily wick smoked and at last caught flame. My shirt g to my sweaty back, and the heavy air made breathing difficult. With the knife, I cut away the carpet square and saw that it had been glued atop a small trapdoor, easily pried open with the crowbar. A perfect square separated our two worlds.
Light filtered up from below and revealed a cramped room strewn with blas and books, bottles and dishes. I bent down for a closer look and stuck my head through the hatchway. As quick as a striking snake, his face appeared in front of mine, not inches from my nose. I reized him at once, for he looked exactly as I had as a young boy. My refle in an old mirror. His eyes unmasked him, all soul but no substance, and he did not move but stared back silently without blinking, his breath mingling with mine. He expressed ion, as if he, too, had been waiting for this moment and for it all to be over.
This child and I were bound together. As boys dream of growing into men, and men dream of the boys they once were, we eaeasure of the other half. He reminded me of that nightmare long ago when I was taken, and all at once my long-held fears and anger broke through the surface. The lantern ring bit into my fingers, and my left eye twitched with tension. The boy read my fad flinched. He was afraid of me, and for the first time I regretted what I had taken from him and realized that, in feeling sorry for him, I grieved for my own stolen life. Fustav. For the real Henry Day. His unknowable life. For all I could have with Tess and with Edward. My dream of musid who was I in this equation but the produy own division? What a terrible thing to have happeo such a boy.
"Im sorry," I said, and he vanished. Years of anger dissipated as I stared at the space where he used to be. He was gone, but in that brief moment we’d faced one another, my past had unspooled deep inside my mind, and I now let it go. A kind of euphoria raced through my blood, and I took a deep breath a myself again.
"Wait," I called out to him, and without thinking I turned and slid feet first through the opening, and landed in the dust. The space below the library was smaller than anticipated, and I bumped my head on the ceiling when I stood. Their grotto was but a murky shadow, so I reached up for the lao better see. Hunched over, I searched with the firelight for the boy, hoping he might answer a few questions. I wanted nothing more than to talk to him, tive and be fiven. "Im not going to hurt you," I cried out in the darkness. Wrestling free of the rope, I laid it and the carpet knife on the ground. The rusty lantern creaked in my hand as the light swept the room.
He crouched in the er, yapping at me like a trapped fox. His face was my own fear. He trembled as I approached, eyes darting, searg for an escape. dlelight illumihe walls, and all around him on the ground lay stacks of paper and books. At his feet, tied in a strand of twine, a thick sheaf of handwritten pages sat o my purloined score. My music had survived.
"t you uand me?" I held out my hand to him. "I want to talk to you."
The boy kept eyeing the opposite er as if someone or something were waiting there, and when I turo look, he rushed past me, knog into the lamp as he ran. The rusted wire snapped, sending the lamp flying, shattering the glass oone wall. The blas and papers ig once, and I snatched my musi the flames, beating it against my leg to extinguish the wisps of fire along the margins. I backed my way to the overhead entrance. As if fixed to the spot, he stood gazing up in amazement, and just before climbing out of the hole, I called for him a final time: "Henry—"
His eyes went wide, searg the ceiling as if disc a new world. He turo me and smiled, then said something that could not be uood. By the time I got upstairs, a fog of smoke rose through the hole below. It followed me through the broken window just as the flames began to lick the stacks of books.
After the fire, Tess saved me. Distraught over the damage I had done, I moped about the house for days. The destru of the childreion was not my fault, although I deeply regretted the loss of all the books. The children will need ories and fairy tales to see them through their nightmares and daydreams, to transfigure their sorrows and fears at not being able to remain children forever.
Tess and Edward arrived home from her cousins just as the police were leaving. It seems I was regarded as a person of suspi, for the librarians had reported my spate of frequent visits and "erratic behavior." The firemen had discovered the lantern in the ashes, but there was no way to link bae what had once been my fathers. Tess accepted my feeble explanations, and when the police came around again, she told them a little white lie, saying that okehe phone on the night of the fire and she remembered quite clearly having woken me from a deep sleep. Without any proof, the matter faded. The arson iigation, as far as I know, proved inclusive, and the blaze passed into local lore, as if the books themselves had suddenly burst into flames.
Having Tess and Edward bae those few weeks before school started was both reassuring and unnerving. Their mere presen the house calmed my fragile psyche after the fire, but there were times when I could barely look Tess in the eye. Burdened with guilt over her plicity, I searched for some way to tell her the truth, and perhaps she guessed the reasons for my growing ay.
"I feel responsible, in part," Tess told me over dinner. "And helpless. As if we should do something about rebuilding." Over our lamb chops, she outlined a plan to raise money for the library. The details arrived in such waves that I kess had been plating the matter sihe day of her return. "Well start a book drive, too, and you make your cert a be for the children."
Stunned and relieved, I could raise no obje, and over the weeks, the bursts of activity overwhelmed my sense of de and privacy. People boxed up their fairy tales and nursery rhymes, and swarmed through the house at all hours with cartons of books, stag them iudio and garage. What had been my hermitage became a beehive for the well-iiohe ph stantly with offers to help. On top of the hubbub over the books, planning for the cert interrupted our peace. An artist came by to show poster designs for the cert. Advaickets were sold from our living room. On a Saturday m, Lewis Love and his teenaged son, Oscar, showed up with a pickup truck, and we loaded the an in the back to install it in the church. Rehearsals were scheduled for three nights a week, and the students and the musis structed it measure by measure. The giddy pad hum of life left me too exhausted to sider my flicted emotions. Swept up iion Tess had created, I could only truly fun by trating on the music as the date for the performance drew near.
From the wings, I watched the crowd file into the church for the be premiere of The Stolen Child on that night in late October. Since I erf on the an, I had passed the ductors baton to Oscar Love, and our old Coverboys drummer Jimmy Cummings was on timpani. Oscar had rented a tuxedo for the occasion and Jimmy had cut his hair, and we seemed much too respectable versions of our former selves. A few of my fellow teachers from Twain sat together in the back rows, and even one of the last remaining nuns from rade school days attended. Ebullient as ever, my sisters showed up in formal earls at their collars, and they flanked my mother and Charlie, who wi me as if to impart a dose of his abundant fidence. I was most surprised to see Eileen Blake escorted by her son Brian, who was in town for a visit. He gave me a momentary fright when they arrived, but the more I studied him, the less he could be pared rationally with Edward. My son after all, and thank goodness, he takes after his mother in every respect but appearance. With his hair tamed, and dressed up in his first suit and tie, Edward looked like another boy altogether, and seeing the foreshadowing of the man my son will bee one day, I felt both pride a over the brevity of childhood. Tess could not stop grinning that crooked smile of hers, and rightfully so, for the symphony I had promised to write long ago was nearly hers.
To let in some fresh air on the crisp autumn night, the priests had cracked the windows, and a light breeze crossed the altar and the he an had been positio the apse because of the acoustics, and my back was to the audiend the rest of the small orchestra as we took our positions; from the er of my eye, I could see only Oscar as he tapped and tehe baton.
From the very first notes, I was determio tell the story of how the child is stolen and replaced by someone else, a both the child and the geling persist. In place of the usual distand separation from the audience came a sense of e through performahey were stilled, hushed, expet, and I could feel two hundred pairs of eyes watg. I trated to the point where I could let go and play for them rather than satisfy myself. The overture teased out the symphonys four movements: awareness, pursuit, lamentation, and redemption, and at the moment when I lifted my hands from the keys and the strings took up the pizzicato to indicate the arrival of the gelings, I felt his presenearby. The boy I could not save. And as Oscar waved me in for the ans interplay, I saw the child through an open window. He watched me play for him, listeo our music. As the tempo slowed in the seovement, I took more ces to watch him watg us.
He was solemn-eyed, listening ily to the music. During the dance of the third movement, I saw the pouch slung over his shoulder, as if he were preparing for a jourhe only language available to us was the music, so I played for him alone, fot myself in its flow. All through the movement, I wondered if anyone else in the church had seen that strange fa the window, but when I looked for him again, there was nothing but blaight. At the za, I realized he had left me alone in the world and would not return.
The audience rose as one when the last notes of the an expired and they clapped and stomped for us. When I turned from the window to the thundering of friends and family, I sed the faces in the crowd. I was almost one of them. Tess had lifted Edward to her side to join in joyful bravos, and caught off guard by their exuberance, I knew what must be done.
By writing this fession, Tess, I ask for your fiveness so that I might make it all the way back to you. Musie part of the way, but the final step is the truth. I beg you to uand and accept that no matter what name, I am what I am. I should have told you long ago and only hope it’s not too late. My years of struggle to bee human again hinge upon your belief in me and my story. Fag the boy has freed me to face myself. As I let go the past, the past let go of me.
They stole me away, and I lived for a long, long time in the forest among the gelings. When my time to return came at last, I accepted the natural order. We found the boy Day and made the ge. I did my best to ask his fiveness, but perhaps the child and I are tooo reach each other anymore. I am no lohe boy I was once upon a time, and he has bee someone else, someone new. He is gone, and now I am Henry Day.
百度搜索 The stolen Child 天涯 或 The stolen Child 天涯在线书库 即可找到本书最新章节.