The Changeling

by Victor LaValle

“It’s business,” Apollo said. “I’m just doing business here.” “The devil likes to hide behind a cross,” Igor said, then shut the front door.

And then the wheels of the train creaked as the train suddenly slowed. No problem at all, a common occurrence. The motorman had been chugging at high speeds, and it was normal for the train to start coasting. This way they’d simply glide into the 125th Street station. Totally normal. Then the squeal of the train’s brakes as they came to a full stop. Apollo looked out the car’s windows but couldn’t see anything out there in the dark. A squawk played over the car’s speakers, just a stab of feedback. The speakers went silent again. And a moment after that, the lights in all the cars of the A train went out. Apollo and Emma and the mother and her kids and the four dancers sat in total darkness.

Patrice Green, big man and expert bookseller, counter-IED specialist and child raised in the roughest part of Roxbury, did not like basements. He’d returned from Iskandariyah uninjured but not unharmed. He had never explained his fear, but Apollo intuited it and, most importantly, never asked about it directly. A fair number of estate sales in New York City took place in the basements of various apartment buildings, and Patrice Green never set foot in one of them.

“Just…” he groaned. Just what? What sentence was he trying to shape? Just leave? Just let me free? No. Just let my son go. That’s what he was trying to say. And even he was surprised to realize those were the words he meant. Surprised because a person never really knows how he or she will react at those worst moments, do they? Each of us hopes to be brave, to be kind, to be heroic. But how often do we get the chance to find out which it’ll be? But in this moment the thing he was willing to beg for was the life of his son. He would’ve done it for Emma, too.

Apollo’s body seemed to lose all shape. He felt larger, like the size of a star, the sun. A burning gaseous form. Too enormous for the small kitchen of a two-bedroom apartment. Why weren’t walls disintegrating? How soon before the floor and ceiling singed into dust? Why hadn’t the world been burned to ashes instantly? His terror flared hotter than the star at the center of our solar system. I am the god, Apollo! I am the god, Apollo! He rose in his chair. If the bike lock choked him, he couldn’t feel it.

Every sense became more finely tuned as he approached the threshold of the kitchen. Emma would be in there reenacting her crime, and this time he would find her, and they wouldn’t speak with each other. They would tear each other apart, down to the atomic level, a little nuclear fission in the kitchen, nothing left of them but the silhouettes of who they used to be burned into the wall.

When Fabian entered the bedroom, after he’d seen the baby but before he called the police, he’d found the security gate open and this window smashed. The glass had been on the sill and the fire escape, not inside the room. Emma had escaped this way. No one had been able to explain how—without keys, with the front door locked—Emma Valentine had gotten in that morning.

That slow time when their child had existed in two worlds at once—reality and eternity—and because Apollo and Emma were both in contact with the boy right then, they too, in a sense, had slipped between the two. The entire family had been Here and There. Together. A fairy tale moment, the old kind, when such stories were meant for adults, not kids.

Her face wasn’t aged but agonized. As she spoke, she turned to Apollo. “But who took the picture?” She seemed to be asking him directly.

“I had to find my own help,” she said. “No surprise, I found it with the mothers. The wise ones. Cal told me how to get my daughter back. Cal told me what to do.”

Maybe this was what Patrice meant when he said he liked Apollo because he didn’t give a damn about his military service. Every human being is a series of stories; it’s nice when someone wants to hear a new one.

Apollo stared at the screen and read the words again. “Wise Ones.” Witches.

But when he looked around, he could still see the old platforms, and down on the street level, the old Jamaica, Queens. If his mother had been with him, would she have seen a third Jamaica, the one she first encountered when she was a young immigrant in the United States? How many Jamaicas might there be? If you were a thousand years old, you’d remember when all this was marshland, and Jamaica Avenue was the Old Rockaway Trail used by the Rockaway and Canarsie Indians. And before that? In the 1800s city workers dredging the bottom of nearby Baisley Pond found the remains of an American mastodon. A mastodon sculpture had been raised in Sutphin Playground. All those tales were told right here, one after the next, each informing the one that came after. History isn’t a tale told once, it’s a series of revisions. Would it be so surprising if once there had been witches here, too?

Sixteen thousand people had joined that page? For what? As the train sped past these residential homes, Apollo wondered if he might be seeing places where many of them lived. Maybe Green Hair Harry lived in that brick Tudor home right there. Or the next one. Apollo felt his breath leaving him, dizziness so severe he might black out. What had he been worrying about twenty minutes earlier? Fucking witches? Why worry over witches when the Internet could conjure so much worse?

“Apollo,” she said, but then seemed lost for anything more. “I never found out her third wish,” Apollo said, not really speaking to Kim. Kim stepped toward him and put her arms around him. “I think you should know,” she started. Her face stayed pressed close to his neck, and the traffic moved on and off the Manhattan Bridge. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” she said, crying openly now. “But this is how it is.”

After two more steps, the phone vibrated again. He stopped and looked down at the East River below him. For one moment he considered tossing the phone away, but then he succumbed to a much older technology, hardwired into the human brain: curiosity. He swiped his phone and found one new text message. Emma Valentine is alive. I can help you find her.

“The FBI and NYPD couldn’t find her,” Apollo said. The phone in his hand felt as heavy as a brick. William rose from the fence. He looked up and down the block as if scanning for eavesdroppers. “There was a time when the police were your only resource. If they couldn’t find your wife, then no one could. But that’s not true anymore, Apollo. A hundred people with a hundred computers across the country can cover as much ground. And if those hundred people really care about what happens? They’ll work on it day and night. They won’t stop. And that’s what they did when I told them I wanted to help you.” “You told other people about all this?” “Only my friends,” William said. “People I could trust. People who cared.”

Then she reached out and took Apollo’s left hand in hers. “What’s this?” She touched his middle finger. A piece of red string had been tied around it. “It was Emma’s,” Apollo said. “I had time after I called Patrice. I went home. I found this.” “And you put it on?” Dana asked. “I tied it on and made a wish,” Apollo told her. “Just one wish.” Dana scanned up from the finger to Apollo’s eyes. “I don’t want to know what you wished for.” “No,” Apollo said, pulling his hand free. “You don’t.”

Of course, he’d recognized the woman who helped Emma escape. He’d just been with her in Chinatown. That morning he’d given her a check for ten thousand dollars. Patrice and Dana recognized Kim, too. Neither one of them would look at Apollo—they only dropped their heads.

Brian West stood and picked Apollo up. He held the boy tightly. He said, “You’re coming with me.” He walked into the mist.

THE THROGS NECK Bridge lit up like a constellation, it loomed like a god. Both Apollo and William held their breath as they approached it. William cut the motor low. Apollo felt, viscerally, why ancient people stood in awe before mountains and glaciers. To strain your neck, looking up that high, and realize you weren’t seeing all of it, couldn’t see all of it. The instinct to worship overcame him, and he lowered his head until they’d passed under the bridge.

There are no secrets anymore. Vampires can’t come into your house unless you invite them. Posting online is like leaving your front door open and telling any creature of the night it can enter.”

An island, draped in a shroud. Not fog but a shadow darker than even the night sky cloaked the land. No lights anywhere on the rock, hard to see more than the suggestion of a tree line even while staring directly at it. “Oh my,” William said, already lowering the engine. “I would’ve gone right past it. It’s like it was hiding. Or hidden. How did you catch it, Apollo?”

Then the trees cleared, as if they’d passed a fence line, and now William pointed at something growing about three feet out of the ground. In the starlight the thing looked like a giant mushroom covered in kudzu. If a caterpillar had been perched on it puffing a hookah, it wouldn’t have seemed impossible.

“I know where we are,” William said. “This must be North Brother Island.” William didn’t consult his device this time. He could recite the history from memory. “North Brother Island remained uninhabited until 1885, when Riverside Hospital was established to treat victims of smallpox. In time the hospital treated victims of other quarantinable diseases. After World War II, the island became housing for war veterans. And in the fifties it became a treatment center for drug addicts, though it eventually closed because of corruption among the staff.” William moved the phone’s spotlight over the hydrant. “In that time the hospital grew to include the original treatment center, a library, dorms for the staff, a chapel, a foundry, a stockhouse and a coal storage house, a doctor’s cottage, a recreation center, and a morgue. It even had sidewalks and roads.” Apollo and William didn’t realize it, but they were already walking on concrete, only inches below the overgrowth. North Brother Island housed a small town that had been reclaimed by the earth. If it had been daylight, they would’ve already spotted a few of the larger derelict buildings, but for now those were camouflaged by the night and vegetation. So they stayed by the fire hydrant, marveling at it as if they’d unearthed a spaceship.

“You see lights over that way?” Apollo asked. Firelight, not electric light. To the south and floating in the air. “Will-o’-the-wisp,” William said softly, watching them, too. Apollo’s eyes adjusted to the sight, and he realized he was seeing a small fire burning on the second floor of a two-story building. The entire wall facing Apollo had fallen away long ago, so it was like looking inside a diorama. He couldn’t see anyone by the fire, but who else could have set it? Emma. Surviving alone on this island all this time. He never expected he’d actually find her. Nervous electricity shot down the back of his skull. If he was honest, it was the same charge he’d felt before their first date. In a moment William and Apollo were no longer walking together. Apollo Kagwa broke into a run.

BY 1981 THE smallpox patients had been long gone from North Brother Island. The war veterans evacuated, the drug addicts no longer treated there. The island became known only as a nesting colony for the black-crowned night heron. Smallish, unassuming-looking birds that spend hours and hours clicking at each other, then stumble into asthmatic squawking when the mood hits. The night herons ruled the island for over twenty years, but in the early part of the twenty-first century, they abandoned it. The reason for their departure remained unknown, a bit of birder curiosity at best, nothing news making. Tonight Apollo Kagwa discovered why the black-crowned night herons had left. They’d been displaced. Women and children had returned to North Brother Island.

“I am the god, Apollo,” he whispered. He spoke so softly he hardly even heard himself. “I am the god Apollo,” he said, louder now. He couldn’t stop the volume from rising. He felt the wildness, a crazed energy, refusing to be contained. Another term for this is panic. He reached the Nurses’ Residence. The building had no front door. He climbed the front steps as quickly as his quaking legs allowed. “I am the god Apollo!” he shouted this time. “And I want my revenge!”

“I’m here,” Apollo said again, “for my wife.” “Are you here to apologize and beg forgiveness?” a third woman asked, sounding slightly winded and clearly sarcastic. “Or did you mean to kill her?” asked the fourth, and when she said the words, his whole body tensed, and the women laughed together like people long hardened from a war. “I want my revenge!” shouted the first. “She took my child!” added the second. “She made me suffer!” hissed the third. “Her blood is owed to me!” came the fourth. Now they didn’t laugh but clucked their tongues. They seemed so unsurprised. Apollo wondered how many times these four women had made the same journey with a man who’d appeared on the island. Maybe this was how the path beneath them had come to be beaten down so well; back and forth with the bodies of the men. And where would this path end?

A bad fairy tale has some simple goddamn moral. A great fairy tale tells the truth.”

“The Scottish called it glamer,” Cal said. “Glamour. It’s an old kind of magic. An illusion to make something appear different than it really is. A monster might look like a beautiful maiden. A ruined castle appears to be a golden palace. A baby is…” Her voice drifted off. Apollo found himself speaking to the puppet just as Cal said the children would. “Not a baby,” he whispered. “What a smart boy,” the puppet said. “But this isn’t a fairy tale,” Apollo answered. “Are you sure?”

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view,” William Wheeler shouted in the courtyard. He sounded giddy. Or insane. “Until you climb into his skin and walk around in it!”

William shouted as Cal and the guards led Apollo away, but the words—if they were words—remained unintelligible. He sounded, instead, like an animal that knows its end is near and resists the knowledge as much as the death. Apollo Kagwa would never see William Wheeler again.

But when you got close to us, when you approached our island, you crossed new waters, and when you beached that boat, you were on a different shore. The Amazons were said to live on the island of Themyscira, and the Yolngu people of Australia tell of Bralgu, the Island of the Dead. Magical places, where the rules of the world are different. You’ve crossed into such a place, Apollo.” “This is North Brother Island,” he said. Ahead he heard the sounds of children now, laughter and squealing. “It was,” Cal said. “But then we arrived here and remade it.”

“I told you to stop calling me that. It’s not my real name. I didn’t know my real name either. Didn’t know who I really was. Then I found the place where I belonged. Found people who understood me. I could talk to them like I never could to anyone. When I was there, I took off William Wheeler’s face and found my true face underneath. Once my friends saw my true face, they gave me my true name. In fact, Apollo, you know it already, too.” “How would I know that?” The man in the cage raised his voice and spoke as if reading an announcement. “Dinner plans tonight. A meal inspired by Baby Brian.” Apollo took a step backward. The man brought his face to the mesh barrier. “Boiled vegetables!” he shouted. “You’re Kinder Garten,” Apollo said. “We!” he hissed. “We are Kinder Garten. Ten thousand men with one name.”

The wind picked up across the water, and the trees near the water’s edge snapped and flapped. Apollo turned toward the tree line, squinted and scanned. For a moment he thought he saw a silhouette of a man…but a man of an unimaginable size. More likely it was only an oddly shaped hill caught by the moonlight and animated by Apollo’s fear. It had to be that.

“People call us witches,” Cal said quickly. She grabbed Apollo’s hand. “But maybe what they’re really saying is that we were women who did things that seemed impossible. You remember those old stories about mothers who could lift cars when their kids were trapped underneath? I think of it like that. When you have to save the one you love, you will become someone else, something else. You will transform. The only real magic is the things we’ll do for the ones we love.

He still looked confused. “But once you’re on the water, why would it matter?” Cal looked back to the trees once again. “The big one can swim,” she said.

“You know the myth of Callisto?” she asked. “She was a nymph. She had a child by Zeus, and for this she was punished by his wife Hera. Callisto was turned into a bear. Zeus suffered no consequences, of course. The baby grew up to be a great hunter, Arcas. One day Callisto saw Arcas in the woods, and recognizing her child, she wanted to hug him, to speak with him. But all Arcas saw was a great bear attacking. He was about to shoot her with an arrow when Zeus saved them both and turned them into constellations, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. I always saw this as a happy end, as happy as those Greek stories ever get. Callisto got to spend eternity there in the heavens with her child. She could always see him. She would always know he was safe.” Cal looked out at the water then caught Apollo’s eyes. “I’m tired, and I want to see my little boy again.”

“How am I going to track her down?” Apollo asked. “Emma swore Brian was alive. She knew it, felt it. The last time I saw her, she said she’d finally narrowed it down.” “To what?” Apollo whispered. Cal reloaded her pistol. “She said Brian is in the forest. I’ve thought about that. There’s only one forest in all of New York City.”

There are some things people aren’t meant to see. Even with all he’d experienced on the island, Apollo understood that whatever lay buried in that grave existed as the farthest landmark on this new map of the spectral territories. Ultima Thule of grief. Would he go insane if he opened that casket? Would he burst into flames? Turn to stone? Despite all this, he finally turned the key.

But did those heroes ever feel like Apollo did now? The real people, not the characters they became. They were human beings too, after all. They must’ve shivered in the shadow of the world’s great horrors. They must have wondered how they would ever see the quest through. And somehow they persevered. Maybe that was the point of telling those stories again and again, one generation to the next. If they could be brave, then we might be, too.

And the body moved again. The mouth. The maw. It opened and closed, opened and closed stiffly, like a puppet’s jaw. Then he heard a straining sound, like an empty Styrofoam cup being squeezed and released, the hinges of the dry jaw creaking. Apollo feared more roaches would stream out, but that didn’t happen, so he held on to the body. The mouth stretched and shut. Not hard to see what it was doing. It was trying to feed. Drops of his blood quivered on those inhuman lips, the blood from his cut finger. Nothing else about the body suggested life. Only the mouth became animated. Not really alive, but impossible to think of it as truly dead. An automaton. Fueled by blood and belief. As it suckled blood from his finger, the creaking sound came in a rhythm, squeeze and release, squeeze and release. Apollo pulled his finger from the mouth, and in an instant the jaw stopped working. It lay as still as before. “Something made you and then left you behind,” he whispered.

“You deserved better than you got,” Apollo said. “I’m sorry if you felt any pain.”

“And your lovely, stupid child believes you. Then he grows up and tells the same lie to his daughters. And she tells them to her sons. Then, finally, it has to be true, because why else would my good, caring family have passed it on for so very long? Do you know how much harm ‘happily ever after’ has done to mankind? I wish they said something else at the end of those stories instead. ‘They tried to be happy.’ Or ‘Eternal happiness is a fruitless pursuit.’ What do you think?”

“Joe,” he said. “Here in the United States everyone calls me Joe. In America your name must be convenient or it must be changed.”

“You stole our son.” The words so low, they hardly registered. “No,” Jorgen said. “Not me. I’m too old.” He looked up at the ceiling. “But when I was younger, yes, I did my service.”

“The first immigrant to have an impact on Queens was the Laurentide ice sheet, twenty thousand years ago,” Jorgen said. “The northern hemisphere was in an ice age, and a glacier in Labrador—we call it Canada now—spread itself across a border that had yet to be drawn up.” Jorgen beckoned for Apollo, but still Apollo didn’t move any closer. He scanned the room again, those Japanese screens, wondering if someone, something might be hiding on the other side. Meanwhile this old man wanted to talk about glaciers. “The ice sheet reached Wisconsin, then Michigan,” Jorgen continued. “Central Indiana, Illinois. Nothing could stop it. It moved rock and split the earth. When the glacier reached New York, the ice sheet was one thousand feet thick, almost as tall as the Empire State Building. When it finally stopped moving, it lay here, across what we would eventually call New York City, for the next twenty-five hundred years. Eventually the world warmed up again, and that glacier melted away. “But by then it had done something miraculous. It had moved enough stone and earth to make a great barrier between the land and the sea. It pushed the Atlantic Ocean back. If it wasn’t for that glacier, all of Queens and Brooklyn would still be underwater today. We’d be underwater right now. All that thanks to one Canadian.”

Soon the most important question about them was no longer asked: How had they made this impossible trip? How had they crossed the Atlantic? I can tell you. They had help.” For an instant, Apollo felt himself back on North Brother Island and Cal there with him as they watched the trawler chugging out to open waters. “The big one can swim,” he muttered. “Yes, he can,” Jorgen said, watching Apollo with a look of surprise.

“What about Nils?” Apollo asked, looking away from the rendering, facing Jorgen. “Did Nils help look? Did he try?” Jorgen raised his hands. “Well no, of course not.” “But he was her father,” Apollo said. “He’s the one who took Agnes into the woods in the first place,” Jorgen said. “And he’s the one who left her out there. In the cave.”