I set out to learn everything that could be known about the other Henry Day. My lifes story and its telling are bound to his, and only by understanding what had happened to him would I know all that I had missed. My friends agreed to help me, for by our nature we are spooks and secret agents. Because their skills had lain dormant since the botched change with Oscar Love, the faeries took special delight in spying on Henry Day. Once upon a time, he was one of them.
Luchóg, Smaolach, and Chavisory tracked him to an older neighborhood on the far side of town where he circled round the streets as if lost. He stopped and talked to two adorable young girls playing with their dollies in their front yard. After watching him drive off, Chavisory approached the girls, thinking they might be Kivi and Blomma in human form. The sisters guessed Chavisory was a faery right away, and she ran, laughing and shrieking, to our hiding place in a crown of blackberry stalks. A short time later, our spies spotted Henry Day talking to a woman who seemed to have upset him. When he left her old house, Henry looked haunted, and he sat in his car for the longest time, head bent to the steering wheel, shoulders heaving as he sobbed.
"He looked knackered, as if the woman sapped his spirit," Smaolach told us afterward.
"I noticed as well," said Luchóg, "that he has changed of late, as if he is guilty of the past and worried of the future."
I asked them if they thought the older woman had been my mother, but they assured me she was somebody elses.
Luchóg rolled himself a smoke. "He walked in one man, came out another."
Chavisory poked at the campfire. "Maybe there are two of him."
Onions agreed, "Or hes only half a man."
Luchóg lit the cigarette, let it dangle from his lower lip. "Hes a puzzle with one piece missing. Hes a tockless clock."
"Well pick the lock of his brain," Smaolach said.
"Have you been able to find out more about his past?" I asked them.
"Not much," said Luchóg. "He lived in your house with your mother and father, and your two little sisters."
"Our Chopin won lots of prizes for playing music," said Chavisory. "Theres a tiny shiny piano on the mantel, or at least there was." She reached behind her back and held out the trophy for us to admire, its facade reflecting the firelight.
"I followed him to school one day," said Smaolach. "He teaches children how to play music, but if their performance is any indication, hes not very good. The winds blow harsh and the fiddlers cannot fiddle."
We all laughed. In time, they told me many more stories of the man, but large gaps existed in the tale, and singular questions arose. Was my mother living still, or had she joined my father under the earth? I knew nothing about my sisters and wondered how they had grown. They could be mothers themselves by now, but are forever babies in my imagination.
"Did I tell you he saw us?" Luchóg asked. "We were at our old stomping grounds by his house, and I am sure that he looked right at Chavisory and me. Hes not the handsomest thing in the world."
"Tell the truth," Chavisory added, "hes rather fearsome. Like when he lived with us."
"And old."
"And wearing out," said Smaolach. "Youre better off with us. Young always."
The fire crackled and embers popped, floating up in the darkness. I pictured him snug in his bed with his woman, and the thought reminded me of Speck. I trudged back to my burrow, trying to find comfort in the hard ground.
In my sleep, I climbed a staircase of a thousand steps carved into the side of a mountain. The dizzy view below took my breath away, and my heart hammered against my bones. Only blue skies and a few more steps lay in front of me. I labored on and reached the top, and the stairs continued down the other side of the mountain, impossibly steep, even more frightening than the way up. Paralyzed, I could not go back and could not go on. From the side, from nowhere, Speck appeared, joining me on the summit. She had been transformed. Her eyes sparked with life; she grinned at me as if no time had passed.
"Shall we roll down the hill together? Like Jack and Jill?"
I could not say a word. If I moved, blinked, opened my mouth, she would disappear and I would fall.
"It isnt as difficult or dangerous as it appears."
She wrapped me in her arms and, next thing, we were safe at the bottom. The dreamscape shifts when she closes her eyes, and I fall deep into a well. I sit alone waiting for something to happen above my head. A door opens, light floods the space. I look up to find Henry Day looking down at me. At first he appears as my father, and then becomes himself. He shouts at me and shakes his fist. The door slams shut, erasing the light. From beneath my feet, the well begins to fill with water flowing in like a river. I kick in panic and realize a strong gossamer rope binds my limbs. Rising to my chest, to my chin, the waters wash over me, and I am under. Unable to hold my breath any longer, I open my mouth and fill my lungs.
I woke gasping for breath. A few seconds passed before the stars came into view, the reaching branches, the lips of my burrow an inch or two above my face. Throwing off the blanket, I rose and stepped out of that space onto the surface. Everyone else was asleep in their dens. Where the fire had been, I faint orange glow was visible beneath the black kindling. The starlit woods were so quiet that I could hear the steady breathing of the few faeries left in this place. The chilly air robbed me of my bed-warmth, and a film perspiration dried and evaporated off my skin. How long I stood still, I do not know, but I half expected someone to materialize from the darkness either to take me or to embrace me.
I went back to work on my book, stuck mid sentence at the point where Igel is about to switch with little Oscar Love. During my first visit beneath the library, I re-read the pages in light of what we had discovered about Henry Day, and all that had been revealed to me through the other clan members about my former life and circumstances. Needless to say, my first story reeked of false impressions. I gathered my papers and the error-riddled manuscript and thought through the problem. In my original version, I had assumed that my parents lived still and that they had spent their lives missing their only son. Of the few chance encounters with my natural father, only one could possibly be true. And, of course, the first story had been written with no real knowledge of the fraud and imposter who had taken my place.
We started watching him again and found a troubled man. He carried on conversations with himself, his lips mouthing a violent argument. Ages ago, hed had a number of other friends as well, but as his strangeness increased, they vanished from the story. Henry spent most of his time locked away in a room, reading books or playing a booming organ, scrawling notes on lined paper. His wife lived in the margins, working on her home, every day driving away and returning hours later. Onions thought that a telltale unhappiness weighed heavily on the womans mind, for when she was alone, she often stared into the distance, as if to extract from the air the answer to her unuttered questions. The boy, Edward, was ideal for the change, alone and distanced from the rise and fall of life, caught up in his own thoughts, and wandering through his parents house as if looking for a friend.
Waking in the middle of a full-moon night, I overheard Béka and Onions whispering about the boy. Cozy in their den, they expected a degree of privacy, but their conspiracy hummed along the ground like the faraway sound of an approaching train.
"Do you think wed be able to, ourselves alone?" Onions asked.
"If we can catch him at the right moment. Perhaps when the father is distracted or drowning out every known sound on that infernal organ."
"But if you change with Edward Day, what will happen to me?" Onions said, never more plaintive. I coughed to alert them to my presence and walked over to where they huddled, feigning sleep, innocent as two newborn kits. They might be brazen enough to try, and I resolved to keep closer watch and crack any plots before one might hatch.
In the past, the faeries refused to spy on one who had quit the tribe. The changeling was left alone, forgotten, and given a chance to live out his human life. The danger of being exposed by such a person is great, for after they make the change, they grow to resent their time among us and fear that other humans will discover their dark secret. But such concerns, once great, became less important to us. We were disappearing. Our number had diminished from a dozen to a mere six. We decided to make our own rules.
I asked them to find my mother and sisters, and at Christmas they were discovered at last. While the rest of us dozed, Chavisory and Luchóg stole away to town, which glowed with blinking lights as carolers sang in the streets. As a gift to me, they decided to explore my boyhood home, hoping to find missing clues that might give my past more meaning. The old house stood in the clearing, not as solitary as it had once been. Nearby farms had been sold off one by one, and the skeletons of new houses rose in all directions. A handful of cars parked in the drive led them to believe that a celebration was taking place at my former house, so they crept to the windows to see the assembled crowd. Henry Day, his wife, and their son were there. And Mary and Elizabeth. At the center of the festivities, a gray-haired woman sat in an easy chair by a sparkling fir tree. Her mannerisms reminded Luchóg of my mother, upon whom he had spied many years ago. He climbed a nearby oak and leapt from its outstretched limbs to the rooftop, scrambling over to the chimney, its bricks I still warm to the touch. The fire below had gone out, making it easier for him to eavesdrop. My mother, he said, was singing to the children in the old style, without instrumentation. How I would have loved to hear her again.
"Give us a song, Henry," she said when they were through, "like you used to do."
"Christmas is a busmans holiday if you play the piano," he said." What’ll it be, Mom? Christmas in Killarney or some other blather?"
"Henry, you shouldnt make fun," said one of the daughters.
"Angels We Have Heard on High," said an unfamiliar, older man who rested his hand on her shoulder.
Henry played the song, began another. When Luchóg had heard enough, he jumped back to the oak and climbed down to rejoin Chavisory. They stole one last look at the party, studied the characters and scene for me, then returned home. When they told the story the next day, I was deeply pleased to hear about my mother, as puzzling as the details might be. Who was this old man? Who were all these other children? Even the tiniest scrap of news brought back that past. I hid in a hollow tree. She was angry with me, and I would run away and never come back. Where are your sisters? Where are my babies? I remembered that I had sat in the V made by her legs, listening to the story of the wanderings of Oisín in Tír na n?g. It is not fair to have to miss someone for so many years.
But this is a double life. I sat down to work on the true story of my world and the world of Henry Day. The words flowed slowly, painfully, sometimes letter by letter. Whole mornings escaped without a single sentence worth saving. I crumpled and threw away so many pages that I was forever popping up into the library to steal more paper, and the pile of trash in the corner threatened to consume the whole room. In assembling my tale, I found myself tiring easily, early in the day, so that if I could string together five hundred words, writing had triumphed over uncertainty and procrastination.
At times I questioned my reasons for written proof of my own existence. When I was a boy, stories were as real as any other part of life. Id hear Jack climb the beanstalk, and later wonder how to climb the tall poplars outside my window. Hansel and Gretel were brave heroes, and I shuddered at the thought of the witch in her oven. In my daydreams, I fought dragons and rescued the girl trapped in her tower. When I could not sleep for the wild doings and extravagant deeds of my own imagination, Id wake my father, who would invariably say, "Its only a story." As if such words made it less real. But I did not believe him even then, for stories were written down, and the words on the page were proof enough. Fixed and permanent in time, the words, if anything, made the people and places more real than the ever-changing world. My life with the faeries is more real to me than my life as Henry Day. And I wrote it down to show that we are more than a myth, a tale for children, a nightmare or daydream. Just as we need their stories to exist, so do the humans need us to give shape to their lives. I wrote it to create meaning for my change, for what happened with Speck. By saying this instead of that, I could control what mattered. And show the truth that lies below the surface life.
I finally decided to meet the man face-to-face. I had seen Henry Day years before, but I now knew that he had once been a changeling who had kidnapped me when I was a boy of seven. We had uncovered him, followed him everywhere, and learned the outlines of his daily routine. The faeries had been to his house, taken a random score of music he wrote, and left him with a sign of their mischief. But I wanted to confront him, if only to say goodbye, through him, to my mother and sisters.
I was on my way to the library to finish my story. A man stepped out of a car and marched through the front door of the building. He looked old and tired, worn by care. Nothing like me, or how I imagined I would be. Ht walked with his head down, eyes on the ground, a slight stoop to his shoulders, as if the simplest things gravely distracted him. He dropped an armful of papers and, bending down to gather them, muttered a stream of curses I considered pouncing out of the woods, but he looked too fragile to spook that night, so instead I squeezed through the crevice to go about my craft.
He had begun frequenting the library that summer, showing up several days in a row, humming snatches of the symphony we had stolen from him. On hot and humid afternoons, when sensible people were swimming or lying in bed with the shades drawn, Henry was often reading alone at a sun-splashed table. I could sense his presence above, separated only by the thin ceiling, and when the library closed for the night, I climbed through the trapdoor and investigated. He had been working in a quiet spot in the back corner. Upon I desk, a stack of books lay undisturbed, with neat slips of paper sticking out like tongues between the leaves. I sat where he had sat and looked at the mishmash of titles on everything from imps and demons to a thick book on "idiots savants." Nothing connected these titles, but he had scribbled diminutive notes to himself on bookmarks:
Not fairy but hobgoblin.
Gustav—savant?
Ruined my life.
Find Henry Day.
The phrases were discarded pieces to different puzzles, and I pocketed the notes. In the morning, the sounds of his dismay penetrated the floor. Henry muttered about the missing bookmarks, and I felt a guilty pleasure at having nipped them. He ranted at the librarians, but eventually he collected himself and went about his work. I welcomed the peace, which gave me the time to finish writing my book in the quiet hours. Soon I would be free of Henry Day. That evening, I packed the sheets in a cardboard box, placing a few old drawings on top of the manuscript, and then folded Specks letter carefully and tucked the pages in my pocket. After a quick trip home, I planned on returning one last time to collect my belongings and say my final goodbyes to the dear old space. In my haste, I neglected to think of the time. The last hour of daylight held sway when I pushed out into the open. Considering the risk, I should not have chanced it, but I stepped away from the back staircase and began to walk home.
Henry Day stood not a dozen feet ahead, looking directly at me and the crack beneath the library. Like a cornered hare, I reacted instinctively, running straight at him and then veering off sharply into the street. He moved not a single step. His dulled reflexes failed him. I ran through town with complete disregard for any people, crossed lawns with sprinklers spritzing the dry grass, leapt chainlink fences, tore in front of a moving car or two. I did not stop until deep in the woods, then collapsed on the ground, panting, laughing until tears fell. The look of surprise, anger, and fear on his face. He had no idea who I was. All I had to do was go back later for the book, and that would be the end of the story.