Harvest of Changelings Read online

  Gates, Jeffrey Arthur, age 10 ... aggravated and protracted sexual abuse . . .

  Now the boy was sitting three feet away and it was obvious he thought she was just one more person he had to tell his story to. About the right size for a ten-year-old, black hair that fell over his hazel eyes, slight body. Bored and detached? Yes, that was it, not quite present.

  ... father Perpetrator . . . abuse began when Jeffrey was six years old, with mother’s tacit consent . . . mother deserted family, has had no contact with Jeffrey for a year and seven months ...

  Detachment made perfect sense—how else would Jeff had gotten through four years of—what had the father said? Servicing his sexual needs. God. And the mother—the father blamed her, of course, after throwing him out of her bedroom. All her fault. In the next bedroom for three years, knowing what her husband was doing to their son. She had left a year ago, without warning. Fixed the boy’s breakfast, got him ready for school, then drove away. No contact with the boy since. Camille felt like throwing her pencil across the room, followed by her stapler, coffee cup, and whatever else was within reach. She never got used to it—each time, each new case, she hurt all over. Now she wanted to take this little boy in her lap and rock him, tell him to cry, it wasn’t his fault. Camille closed the file. Jeff had been told, she was sure, over and over and over, that it wasn’t his fault, that he had done nothing wrong. Now she had to make him believe it. Those eyes—in a certain light, Jeffs eyes almost seem to be glowing, like two green fires.

  Mrs. Bondurant’s office was like most of the rooms Jeff had been in with adults who wrote things down and read folders and nodded and tapped their pencils. This one was a little different: there was an open chest in one corner and blocks, stuffed animals, plastic dinosaurs, and Transformers spilled out onto the floor, in an untidy heap. The floor was covered with a bright patchwork of carpet squares, reds, greens, yellows, blues, browns, whites.

  “I hear you collect dinosaurs. See anything over there you like?” the woman asked, between sips of her tea. The tea bag label dangled out of her mug.

  Jeff jumped, startled. The woman laughed. “Go on. Go on over and poke through the toys. They’re for the kids who come here. Let me show you some of my favorites,” she said and to add to Jeffs surprise, got up and walked over to the toy chest and started poking around herself. “Here, have you seen this one before?” she asked and held up a large, blue one with three horns.

  “That’s a triceratops. Everybody knows what they are,” Jeff said. For a minute, he had thought she actually knew something about dinosaurs. But she was like all the others who had tried the same tricks to get him to talk.

  The woman looked at him and laughed. “Yeah, you’re right. I did know that. I bet you’ve had a whole bunch of people talk to you about dinosaurs, haven’t you? And probably not a one knew a whole lot, did they? All right, I won’t ask you about dinosaurs. You probably know more about them than I do, even if I did go to the library last night. Let’s talk about something else.”

  Jeff nodded. He had to be careful. This woman was different.

  “Mrs. Clark said you had a bad dream last night. Do you want to talk about it?” she asked and sat down on an old couch that was between the toy chest and her desk.

  Jeff shook his hand. Not that dream, when he was trapped and it was dark and he couldn’t move and there was nowhere to go. He had woken himself screaming and there, standing half in the yellow light of his lamp and half in shadow, had been a strange woman, her dark hair trailing down her back. Behind her was a man, hurriedly tying a knot in his white bathrobe. Jeff could see the man’s hairy chest, a dark V between the white. Who were they and where was he? The wide bed wasn’t his, nor were the sheets, decorated with Snoopy and Woodstock. His sheets were plain white. The dresser wasn’t his. And what was in the strange darkness that he couldn’t see? He was breathing hard, panting, his fists gripping the sheets. He had pushed away from the strangers, back against the wall—

  “Jeff? What’s the matter? Bad dream?”

  Jeff looked at her, still breathing hard, pulling the sheet up to his neck. “You aren’t my mother. You aren’t my father,” he had added to the man who was yawning as he sat down in a chair by the door.

  The dark-haired woman had sat down very carefully and slowly in another chair by the strange bed. Jeff pressed back even harder against the wall, although he knew it wouldn’t do any good. No matter how hard he had tried to get away, to push himself through the wall, it had never been enough. And sometimes he hadn’t tried to escape through the wall. Sometimes he has just moved over and let his father slip into his bed. Sometimes Jeff would reach over and touch his father first. Things would hurt less, and would be over sooner.

  That meant I wanted him to do it, doesn’t it, he had once said to one of the adults with the pencils and the folders. Doesn’t it?

  No, no, no. You were just surviving, coping . . . That’s what they all said.

  “No, I’m not your mother and Fred isn’t your father. Count to ten, think. Take a deep breath. I’m Ellen, and Fred, and this is our house. You live here now, remember?”

  Jeff had nodded his head, slowly, his breathing slowing down. He had remembered everything.

  Not that dream, he thought, and looked back at Mrs. Bondurant. He shook his head again. “Not that dream—that’s the bad one.”

  “Well, do you have any dreams you can tell me about?”

  “Well,” Jeff said slowly, “I have been having other dreams, about another place.”

  “Tell me,” Mrs. Bondurant said and leaned back on the couch, the triceratops still in her hand.

  “Sometimes I dream about the same boys and the same girl. One boy has red hair and the other’s hair is blond. The girl’s hair is brown. And when I see them, I always see a blue fire around them. Sometimes I dream my dinosaurs, the ones at Mrs. Clark’s house, are flying and leaving trails in the air, like a jet does, except blue. Last night I dreamed about the sea again.”

  He had stood alone on a sand dune, with a huge cliff at his back. Two moons shone in a starry sky. Someone, something, had called his name, and he had ran toward the voice, which came from the water.

  “It was a dolphin calling my name. I woke up before I could get out to him.”

  “You’ve had this dream before—have you ever gotten to the dolphin?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What do you think he wants? To play in the water?”

  “Well,” Jeff said, “I think he wants me. He wants me to come and be where he is, to his place.”

  As Jeff told me his sea-dream, his eyes seemed to become even greener and brighter. Alone, safe, the sea, the womb, the dolphin an animal guide, a protector—not too sure about the twin moons and the cliff And the other dream—a reenactment of the abuse, no doubt, a return to the dark where he was hurt. But in his sea dream the dark is safe and wonderful and inviting and he isn’t alone, the dolphin is there to help him, be his friend. Jeff also dreams of flying. The escape motif is dominant, couplet with the desire for safety . . . Funny, when he left, I would have sworn I smelled the ocean ...

  Benjamin Paul Tyson’s journal, Monday night, August 26, 1991

  The ceiling fan is beating down over my head. Outside I hear crickets and cicadas, cranking, cranking, cranking, their screeches reaching a crescendo, then gone. And again, and ebb and flow of noise. It’s hot. Even with the fan on, I am sweating. I guess the computer generates more heat than I thought. At least the window units in the bedrooms are cranking right along with the insects.

  Maybe I’ll give in tomorrow and call the local AC boys and order central air. I can certainly afford it. Well, not tomorrow, since tomorrow is the first day of school and I am afraid for my son. He hasn’t been fairy-sick since the first of the month, since Lughnasad, but I am certain there will be other bouts. What happens if he gets sick at school? Will his teacher whack out or call 911 or Dorothea Dix and have him taken away in a straitjacket?

  I have
been to Nottingham Heights, talked with the principal, a Miss Hallie Bigelow. A bit rough around the edges, but she cares passionately for her school, the children, education—a good woman. His teacher, Charlotte Collins, seemed a bit cold, but all right. Probably distracted, the first day and all.

  Maybe I should put him in a private school. Ravenscroft is supposed to be one of the best. I can certainly afford that, too—I have barely touched the money Emma left me in her will. New cars every few years, yes. But mostly I have spent it on Malachi. To arrange for his forged birth certificate, immunization records, doctor’s records, fake physicals.

  And all the books and art prints. His mother loved art museums.

  But Malachi is different enough. Putting him in a private school would mark him as even more set apart from the rest. No thanks.

  Besides, it’s not the school I am worried about so much. Notting - ham Heights feels like a good place. No, it’s not the school—it’s everything else. People are talking and whispering—not about Malachi—but it’s like the very air has become charged, or the atmo - spheric energy has changed its voltage, AC to DC. The list of strangenesses gets longer and longer. Since Lughnasad, in Wake County alone, I have noted the following:

  Man found in tree in Pullen Park, swears he spontaneously levi - tated, placed under observation at Wake County Medical.

  Sixteen sightings of UFOs: mostly balls of green and blue light. Three people claim they saw a dragon in flight; five, a winged horse.

  Ghosts sighted at almost every graveyard in the county.

  St. Raphael’s Catholic Church petitions Archbishop for an exorcism; claims education wing is infested with poltergeists.

  As for poltergeists: incidents in bars, schools, playgrounds, offices, malls. One afternoon at Crabtree Valley Mall, the store security gates kept rising and falling, every five minutes, for two hours.

  Librarians at Cameron Village arrive to find every book off the shelf, stacked in neat piles all over the library. A handful, like birds released from a cage, were flying about the room, hitting against doors as if trying to escape. Two librarians were placed on medical leave.

  Power shortages, blackouts, appliances, cars going dead—repairmen and mechanics swamped with calls.

  In the past two weeks, fifteen people have called in unicorn sightings, in gardens, backyards, front yards, highways.

  And I have seen the Fomorii—or rather their ghosts or shadows or Projections. I’ve felt them: that sense of dread, of evil, of badness. Last week I’d swear one came in the library, looking for Malachi, a dark, scaly creature, those red eyes. Mal was sitting in the children’s section, reading, and the thing was going straight toward him. I ran across the library, yelling.

  Of course there was nothing there. Mrs. Carmichael thinks I need to see a doctor. I don’t know—maybe Jack is right. He thinks I am protecting my own fears, conjuring up my own shadows. Regardless, I won’t let Malachi take off the twelve-pointed star, even to bathe.

  His mother could have blasted the thing with a fireball or something. I don’t know if Malachi could have or not. He is still just a ten-year-old boy, who is half-human as well as half-fairy.

  Malachi continues to change, sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once. His eyes are golden now, and sometimes they glow in the dark. His ears are as pointed as his mother’s, and like hers, nobody but me and Jack notice they are. He seems to have instinctively hidden them with fairy glamour. He can fly. He is psychokinetic and he can manipulate light and he is beginning to see auras. But Malachi can’t count on any of his fairy-powers—his age? His human heritage? And while we have had no more crazy nights with wild lights, I know he doesn’t feel well a lot of the time. He tires easily and his appetite is off; he’s losing weight.

  You know, there must be a lot of fairy DNA in the human genome. There have always been clairvoyants, witches, fortune-tellers, mediums, psychokinetic, levitators and bilocators, telepaths—the paranormal list goes on. Yes, a goodly number of these paranormals were and are fakes, but now, I believe the rest were and are real. All the changeling stories, the incubi and succubae, the pregnancies that “just happened”—they’re true, or a lot are. But, doesn’t this fly in the face of all we know about biology? How can two species, Homo magicus, and Homo sapiens, from two different rooms in the House of Creation, interbreed? Perhaps all we know are the operative words here, but even given that, I think there must be another explanation. I think the answer might be in another old story, one I don’t know that well, and actually haven’t read, but have only heard about. Adam was supposed to have had a first wife, Lilith, according to Jewish folklore. And Lilith, in other Semitic myths, was a demon, or had extraordinary powers. I remember in the Narnia stories Lilith was supposed to be a jinn, and the ancestress of the White Witch. Perhaps God originally had thought to give humankind magic, the paranormal, ESP, as a manifest part of our being. Did He change his mind? Did Lilith succumb to some sort of temptation, as Adam and Eve did? Or did God intend for Homo magicus and Homo sapiens to be separate all along and yet related and connected, cousin species, like dogs and wolves? Lilith left Adam or did he cast her out? I wish I knew the story. What-ever happened, I bet she left pregnant. And she just went next door, so to speak, through a door that has been, apparently, easy to open.

  Now, Malachi thinks there is a difference in witches and fairies. Witches do magic, fairies are magic. Valeria never mentioned witches in Faerie—but then, did we talk about everything? Are witches something peculiar to our universe? Did Lilith leave a few of her children here?

  I don’t know.

  Malachi is telepathic now, too. It started a week after Lughnasad. We were going to Jack and Hilda’s for dinner. I was in my bedroom, changing clothes and worrying about Hilda, about what Jack had told her, if he had told her, and how she would behave around Malachi. Some serious fretting.

  Malachi came down the hall. “Dad, Hilda’s okay. Jack hasn’t told her about me yet, but she will be okay. Don’t worry; it will be okay.”

  I stood there half-dressed, in my underwear and a Carolina T-shirt, and stared at him. “How did you know I was worrying about her?”

  “I heard you.”

  “Mal, I wasn’t talking out loud. I was thinking—you heard my thoughts.” I sat down hard on the bed, with my head in my hands. Malachi came and sat down beside me on the bed.

  Dad?

  I looked up. “And you can—what mind-talk, too? Farspeak?”

  “Dad, don’t be mad at me; I didn’t know; I didn’t mean to listen in—”

  He started crying and I hugged him. And we talked. About how people’s thoughts—even his father’s—are private and farspeaking is one thing, but listening in was no better than eavesdropping, and would he want everybody to hear his thoughts?

  Like all his new fairy-senses or abilities, Malachi can’t rely on his telepathy. But he’s learning how to screen out other people—sort of like a background radio or TV, he said—and can really only pick up the thoughts of people really close to him. Mine, Jack’s, mostly. Not Thomas, which surprised me at first, but then Thomas Ruggles is part of the strangeness, too. I don’t want him near my son. Thomas is more than a little creepy and he smells wrong—not BO, really, but like a really old book or corners in deserted houses, an obscure spice. Thomas smells dark. And his eyes: they have become opaque and hard, like cold stones set in his head.

  Thomas and Jack aren’t talking.

  Anyway.

  I have to take him to Faerie; I know that, but I don’t know how. I watch him—he’s not well and he’s not getting well. Being here, being half-fairy and having no real control over his feyness—if I don’t get Malachi to Faerie, he’s going to die.

  I have stacks of books in my office on fairy lore, magic, Wicca, the occult, and I am going through them, painstakingly, looking for clues. In Ireland, there are fairy mounds and fairy rings. And the Cherokee have stories about gates between here and the Otherworld, which are behind waterfalls and under
cliffs and beneath dark pools. To pass through into what sounds like Faerie—a world of little people, giants, humans with super powers, strange animals—one had to fast, bathe, and have a magical guide.

  Which doesn’t help me. Valeria was going to take a taxi to her gate, so it is near Garner and Raleigh. The next day the gates can be opened is Halloween or Samhain. I have two months to find her gate and take my son down the Straight Road to Faerie and save his life. In all the books, so far nothing, except the Cherokee stories, says North Carolina, let alone the eastern Piedmont.

  Two months.

  I lit a candle in church yesterday, after mass at St. Mary’s. One of the tall, two-dollar ones. A new priest, fresh from seminary, Father Jamey Applewhite, gave the homily, on the Catholic perspective of the world as sacramental, as being imbued with the presence of God, and God as an ultimately unknowable mystery expressed in Creation. Accept the mystery, he said. There is no reason to be afraid of what we cannot hope to ever fully understand, at least in this world. The Celts accepted the mystery. They lived in a sacral world, numinous with spirits in trees, lakes, fountains, springs. Like Faerie.

  I am afraid for my son, that his mystery will not be accepted, by the people around him, by the very earth itself.

  Malachi keeps asking me to tell the story about his mother, over and over. Every detail again and again, about her, about Faerie. So I tell him the story over and over and over again ...