The first thing I did when McInnes snapped me out of the trance was to look at the clock—four in the morning. As Cummings had described the sensation, I, too, felt curiously refreshed, as if I had slept for eight hours, yet my sticky shirt and the matted hair at my temples belied that possibility. McInnes seemed totally worn and wrung-out. He pulled himself a draft and drank it down like a man home from the desert. In the dim light of the empty bar, he eyed me with incredulity and fascination. I offered him a Camel, and we sat smoking in the dead of morning.
“Did I say anything revealing?” I asked at last.
“Do you know any German?”
“A smattering,” I replied. “Two years in high school.”
“You were speaking German like the Brothers Grimm.”
“What did I say? What did you make of it?”
“I’m not sure. What’s a Wechselbalg?”
“I never heard of the word.”
“You cried out as if something terrible was happening to you. Something about der Teufel. The devil, right?”
“I never met the man.”
“And the Feen. Is that a fiend?”
“Maybe.”
“Der Kobolden? You shrieked when you saw them, whatever they are. Any ideas?”
“None.”
“Entführend?”
“Sorry.”
“I could not tell what you were trying to say. It was a mash of languages. You were with your parents, I think, or calling out for your parents, and it was all in German, something about mit, mit—that’s ‘with,’ right? You wanted to go with them?”
“But my parents aren’t German.”
“The ones you were remembering are. Someone came along, the fiends or the devils or der Kobolden, and they wanted to take you away.”
I swallowed. The scene was coming back to me.
“Whoever or whatever it was grabbed you, and you were crying out for Mama and Papa and das Klavier.”
“The piano.”
“I never heard anything like it, and you said you were stolen away. And I asked, ‘When?’ and you said something in German I could not understand, so I asked you again, and you said, ‘Fifty-nine,’ and I said, ‘That can’t be. That’s only six years ago.’ And you said, clear as a bell, ‘No . . . 1859.’ ”
McInnes blinked his eyes and looked closely at me. I was shaking, so I lit another cigarette. We stared at the smoke, not saying a word. He finished first and ground out the butt so hard that he nearly broke the ashtray.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Know what I think?” McInnes asked. “I think you were remembering a past life. I think you may have once upon a time been a German boy.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Have you ever heard of the changeling myth?”
“I don’t believe in fairy tales.”
“Well . . . when I asked you about your father, all you said was, ‘He knows.’ ” McInnes yawned. Morning was quite nearly upon us. “What do you think he knew, Henry? Do you think he knew about the past?”
I knew, but I did not say. There was coffee at the bar and eggs in a miniature refrigerator. Using the hot plate in the back, I made us breakfast, settling my wayward thoughts by concentrating on simple tasks. A kind of hazy, dirty light seeped in through the windows at dawn. I stood behind the counter; he sat in front on his usual stool, and we ate our scrambled eggs and drank our coffee black. At that hour the room looked worn and pitiful, and McInnes’s eyes tired and vacant, the way my father had appeared the last time we met.
He put on his hat and shrugged into his coat. An awkward pause between us let me know that he would not be coming back. The night had been too raw and strange for the old professor. “Good-bye, and good luck.”
As his hand turned the knob, I called out for him to wait. “What was my name,” I asked, “in this so-called former life of mine?”
He did not bother to turn around. “You know, I never thought to ask.”
? CHAPTER 16 ?
When a gun goes off on a cold winter’s day, the retort echoes through the forest for miles around and every living creature stops to look and listen. The first gunshot of hunting season startled and put the faeries on alert. Scouts fanned out along the ridge, searching for orange or camouflage vests or hats, listening for the trudge of men seeking out deer, pheasant, turkey, grouse, rabbit, fox, or black bear. Sometimes the hunters brought their dogs, dumb and beautiful—mottled pointers, feathery setters, blueticks, black-and-tans, retrievers. The dogs could be more dangerous than their owners. Unless we masked our scent along every path, the dogs could smell us out.