The Changeling Read online

  “Well, I don’t know,” Martha said. “I just didn’t think about it being your mother. I don’t know why.”

  Ivy glanced at Martha who blushed, wondering if Ivy was thinking that she was thinking how different their mothers were. How different her own brightly beautiful mother was from the ghostly gray woman on the stairs.

  “I guess it was because she didn’t stop us to ask any questions,” Martha said. “Like some mothers always ask where you’ve been and where you’re going and everything. She didn’t seem as—as curious as most mothers.”

  “I know,” Ivy said. “I guess she’s had so many kids she’s used up most of her curiosity already.” Ivy jerked a knot into one end of the rope. “Besides she drinks too much. Sometimes she hardly notices anything at all.”

  Martha tried not to be embarrassed, or at least not to look as if she were, but Ivy didn’t look at her anyway. She was busy putting her socks into her shoes and brushing the oak leaves off the seat of her dress. Martha felt she had to say something.

  “Oh,” she said, very unconcernedly, and then hastily, to change the subject. “Uh, how many kids are there? I mean how many kids does she have?”

  Ivy stood very still for a moment as if she were thinking. Then she turned and looked at Martha with a strange expression. It was her eyes mostly. As if she were looking at Martha intently but with her mind on something else.

  “Only seven Carsons,” she said very distinctly. “Eight if you count me. But there are really only seven Carsons.”

  “What do—why don’t—who—?” Martha stammered, overcome with such violent curiosity that the question kept tripping on itself. But Ivy had turned; and running to the trunk of the biggest tree, she started up it as quickly as a squirrel. Martha hurried after her, and when Ivy reached the first crotch, she leaned down and reached to grab Martha’s hand to help her along up. Then Ivy went on, shinnying up a steep place that Martha was afraid to try.

  When Ivy, carrying the rope in a coil around her shoulder, reached the spot she had in mind, Martha couldn’t stand it any longer. Leaning out of her safe nest in the crotch of the tree she called up at Ivy, “Why don’t you count? Why aren’t you eight?”

  “Ummmm,” Ivy said, because she was using her teeth to hold one end of the rope, and then, “Because I’m not really. I’m really a changeling.”

  “A what?” Martha called, and the “what” turned into a squeak of terror, as above her, Ivy pulled herself off balance and almost fell. She teetered a moment and then steadied.

  “A changeling!” she called down very clearly. “Don’t you know what a changeling is?”

  Martha admitted that she had no idea.

  “Well, a changeling comes when some other creatures, gnomes or witches or fairies or trolls, steal a human baby and put one of their own babies in its place. And the human parents don’t even know it’s happened. At least, they don’t usually suspect for years and years.”

  “Why not?” Martha found the idea so horribly fascinating she leaned out, craning her neck to look up at Ivy—almost forgetting how afraid she was of falling. “Can’t they tell by looking at it?”

  “No, because the supernatural people do it when the babies are just a few hours old—because that’s the only time they can make the babies look just alike. Aunt Evaline says that in some countries, in places where they know about such things, they never leave a new baby alone for the first few days after it’s born—so a changeling can’t be left in its place.”

  “Do the parents ever find out—I mean, how do they find out if they’ve got a changeling or not?”

  “Oh, later on, when they’re almost grown, they start looking a little different sometimes. Especially if the real parents were goblins or trolls or something like that. And sometimes changelings start doing very strange things, or having strange powers. Like this one woman in England whose real parents were witches; she just got up one night and went off for a ride on a broom. Right up until then nobody knew she was a witch at all. She didn’t even know it herself.”

  Martha stared, speechless, imagining an ordinary Englishwoman suddenly finding herself high in a black sky on a flying broom. She could almost feel exactly what a shock it would be. Coming back down to Bent Oaks and Ivy, she asked, “You—you don’t think your real parents were witches, do you?”

  “Oh no. Aunt Evaline and I think I might be a wood nymph or a water sprite or something like that. See, when I was born and my mother was so sick afterwards, with all those other kids and everything, nobody paid much attention to me at all, until I went to live with Aunt Evaline. And by then it was already too late. I suppose that was why I liked it so much right away at Aunt Evaline’s. I didn’t really belong where I was before, so no wonder I liked it better with her.”

  While Ivy was talking, she had finished tieing the last knot; and then sliding her legs over and down the dangling rope, she slid off the limb. She slid slowly down the twisting rope, approaching Martha’s level and then dropping below it, so that her face spun in and out of sight. Watching Ivy floating, spinning downward, in and out of sunlight, no one could have doubted for a moment.

  “Of course,” Martha said to herself, “a changeling. That explains everything.”

  But by the time she had reached the ground, climbing slowly and carefully, feeling cautiously for the very safest handholds, Martha had decided to ask just one more question.

  “Do you really believe it?” she asked. “About changelings and everything?”

  “I believe in just about everything,” Ivy said.

  6

  FINDING OUT THAT IVY was a changeling was a great comfort to Martha, although she never understood exactly why. She only knew that she believed it in a different and fiercer way than she believed in most other things she couldn’t exactly prove.

  She believed in changelings more fiercely than she believed in reincarnation or divining rods, and even more than she believed in the Monster of Lake Onowora—and that was a great deal. Believing in the Monster was important because it was the Monster, and Ivy, who saved Martha from a whole lifetime of being a Brownie.

  Martha became a Brownie not long after she and Ivy met, because being a Brownie is the first stage in becoming a Girl Scout, and the Abbott family had a long history of Girl Scouting. Martha’s grandfather, Thomas Abbott the first, had given money to help build the Scout Cabin at Lake Onowora. Martha’s grandmother and mother had both been Scout leaders in the past. And, of course, Cath was just about the champion Girl Scout of Rosewood Manor Estates. She had started out as a Brownie as soon as she was seven and gone all the way through. By sixth grade she already had medals on top of medals.

  Martha, however, had known instinctively at a very early age that she was not cut out to be a Girl Scout. Of course, when Cath had started as a Brownie, Martha’s mother had been the Brownie Leader, and perhaps that made a difference. Martha thought she would have liked that. It would be nice to have a definite appointment with your mother once a week, even if it had to be in uniform. As it was, by the time Martha was Brownie age, her mother was all involved in other important things, and there was a new leader named Mrs. Wonburg. Martha supposed that there were all sorts of ways to run a Brownie troop, but Mrs. Wonburg’s troop was sort of a cross between an old ladies’ sewing circle and boot camp for the Green Berets. Martha didn’t like embroidering samplers with the Girl Scout laws any better than she liked taking nature walks in lockstep. Besides, Ivy was not a member.

  But, of course, the Abbotts wouldn’t hear of Martha’s quitting, and so all that fall she daydreamed during meetings, puffed and staggered during calisthenics, and wandered off and got lost during hikes. Mrs. Wonburg reported to Mrs. Abbott that Martha was emotionally unsound, but that scouting would save her, if anything could.

  So, on Thursdays, Mrs. Wonburg worked very hard at the salvation of Martha; but on all the other days there was Ivy. Fortunately, Martha’s grandmother had decided to spend that winter in Florida, as she often did,
and with all the other Abbotts on such full schedules, Martha had many unsupervised hours. Nearly all of those hours were spent with Ivy, at Bent Oaks or in other favorite places in the Rosewood Hills. One of the best of these was Lake Onowora.

  Lake Onowora was a large county reservoir a few miles back along the ridge of Rosewood Hills, where the smaller Rosewood range ran into the coast range. By highway it was several miles to the lake and Onowora Park, but on the Ridge Trail it was less than a half hour’s fast walk. On weekends when the weather was good, Martha and Ivy went there often on explorations. One day they took along a camera that Martha had inherited from Tom when he got a new one for his birthday. They took turns taking pictures all that day—along the trail, at the stables near the lake, on the steps of the Scout Cabin, and along the lake itself. When the pictures were developed, Martha and Ivy discovered the Monster.

  Even when the picture was first developed, it was a little blurry; but you could plainly make out the top of the smooth dark body and the strange sea horse head, rearing up out of the water of the lake. Ivy had heard, from Aunt Evaline of course, all about a wonderful monster who lived in a lake in Scotland, and who was famous all over the world. Ivy and Martha were sure that their monster was every bit as good. They decided, however, to keep it a secret until they could find some way to prove that they had seen him first and therefore he really belonged to them. At first they planned to set a trap.

  For days they scouted the lake nearly every afternoon, lying in wait behind boulders and in the midst of prickly bushes. They saw any number of interesting things: wild deer coming down to drink, immense blurry tracks in a muddy bank near the skeleton of an unidentified animal, a bunch of little boys skinny-dipping—but nothing of the Monster himself.

  But they had a clue that seemed helpful. The tracks had surely been made by the Monster, and it had probably killed and eaten the one-time owner of the skeleton. Therefore, they knew that their Monster was a meat-eating monster, and it would be necessary to use meat to bait their trap.

  Their first plan was to dig a pit trap and cover it with twigs and grass. They borrowed a huge man-sized shovel, and took turns carrying it up the trail to the lake. There, choosing a likely spot in the main trail, they started to dig. But the soil around the lake was clayey, and the shovel was hard to handle. They soon found that the only way two seven-year-old girls could drive it into the ground at all was for both of them to leap up onto the top of the blade at once, one on each side. That worked fairly well until Martha misjudged her leap and missed the blade, and the shovel tipped over on top of Ivy, whacking her on the side of the head.

  After that, they decided that it probably wasn’t necessary to catch the Monster itself, if they could only get absolute proof of its existence. Perhaps a closer and clearer photograph would do. Then the credit would be theirs, and somebody else could do the shovel work.

  As time went by, the catching of the Monster, or at least the sighting of it, became almost an obsession with them. All sorts of other things were forgotten for the moment in the heat and excitement of the chase—even fear. Martha even found herself one day, when Ivy had gone back to Bent Oaks for something they’d forgotten there, all alone out on a limb. She had been left with the camera, astride a limb of a rather low tree, hanging directly above the spot where a pork chop, borrowed from the Abbott’s deep freeze, hung temptingly on a string a little way above the ground.

  Ivy had been gone for some time when it suddenly occurred to Martha that if the Monster was as big as Ivy sometimes said he would be, he might not be satisfied with one small pork chop—and the limb on which she was sitting was not so terribly high. Not long afterwards there was a splashing noise out in the lake; and Martha, suddenly amazingly improved as a tree climber, shinnied to the ground and was halfway down the Ridge Trail before she stopped to think. But when she did, she realized with pride that, considering everything, it was pretty amazing that she had been there at all.

  The Monster continued to be camera-shy, and Martha and Ivy finally decided that he probably only came up on land during the night. They went so far as to discuss lying in wait for him at night, but Martha’s newfound courage didn’t stretch quite that far.

  “Couldn’t we tell someone else and get some help?” Martha suggested.

  “Who?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Martha said. “Not my family I guess. They would just laugh and say things about Martha’s imagination. Besides they’re awful busy. We might tell the ranger, though.”

  “The ranger wouldn’t believe us,” Ivy said.

  “How do you know he wouldn’t? He seems like a nice man.”

  “I just know,” Ivy said. “It’s probably because of second sight. I have it sometimes.”

  “Second sight?” Martha asked.

  “Sure,” Ivy said. “Second sight is when you know something without knowing why you know it. It comes from inside instead of outside of you. That’s why it’s called second sight. First sight is outside. I have second sight about things sometimes.”

  “Does Aunt Evaline have second sight?” Martha asked. She was pretty sure what the answer would be, but she wanted to ask anyway. She liked the way Ivy looked when she talked about Aunt Evaline.

  “Aunt Evaline even has third and fourth sight,” Ivy said. “But anyway, I think we better think up some way to prove that there’s a monster before we tell the ranger. If we could get some better footprints even.”

  “What if we made another pork chop trap and poured paint around it?” Martha said. Martha had once walked absentmindedly through a finger painting drying on the schoolroom floor. She had left very clear footprints across the schoolroom, and the teacher had had some very strong things to say about day-dreamers who never knew where they were going. The memory was very clear in Martha’s mind.

  Ivy liked the idea, but she pointed out that the paint would sink into the ground if they poured it out ahead of time. The final solution was a pork chop baited trap rigged to a can of paint balanced on a tree limb overhead. The Monster would spill the paint as he ate the pork chop and tromp around in it while it was still fresh. They picked a good spot on the trail near the lake before they went home that night.

  Martha, as usual, collected most of the supplies. They needed a new pork chop—the hunt had dragged on for so long that it had become necessary to bury the old one—and a can of paint. The pork chop was no problem, but the only paint she could find was a small can of purple bicycle enamel that belonged to Tom. She smuggled the supplies to school on the day they were planning to set the paint trap, only to be struck down that very afternoon with chicken pox and sent home to spend a week in bed. The Carsons’ phone was disconnected that month, as it often was, so Martha didn’t know what Ivy decided to do about the Monster. That is, she didn’t know until Thursday.

  Thursday, of course, was Brownie afternoon. Safely home in bed, Martha was congratulating herself on the fact that even chicken pox had its good points, when Cath came home with a horrifying story. It seemed that Mrs. Wonburg, leading her troop on a hike to Onowora Park, had stepped on a pork chop and been struck above the left ear by a can of purple paint. Fortunately the can hadn’t been large, but the enamel was “easy-spreading” and “fast-drying.” Mrs. Wonburg was undoubtedly livid.

  Martha immediately cast suspicion on herself by bursting into tears, and soon afterwards the can of paint was traced to the Abbotts through Tom’s newly purple bicycle. And so Martha—who refused to implicate Ivy, even though, or maybe because the Abbotts were so sure that Ivy was largely to blame—was permanently expelled from the Brownies.

  7

  PAINTING MRS. WONBURG put an end to the search for the Monster of Lake Onowora. But he was not forgotten. Martha and Ivy spoke of him often, and once or twice they left a small sacrificial offering from the Abbotts’ freezer for him on the bank of the lake, near the spot where they had first seen his blurry footprints. But they no longer wanted to catch him or even to expose his presence to the
rest of the world. It was really more exciting to keep him as a secret; and besides, Martha felt that letting him keep his freedom was the least that she could do for him. She owed him that much.

  The first few days after the painting incident were very bad for Martha, while the disgrace of being expelled from Brownies hung heavy over her head. The whole family, except Tom who laughed and laughed, pelted her with questions heavy with bewilderment, concern, indignation and frustration.

  “Why, in the name of sanity, would you do such a thing? Not to mention, how?”

  “Yeah, Marty,” Tom said under his breath. “How’d you do it? Show me how someday.”

  “What I can’t understand,” Cath said, “is how someone who almost flunked kindergarten because she couldn’t learn to tie her own shoes, just two years later could build such a complicated rope snare. There’s more to it than you’re telling.”

  But because she was absolutely determined not to tell on Ivy, Martha didn’t dare to offer any explanation at all. She never had been able to convince anybody with an outright lie, so her only defense was to fall back on her reputation as a crybaby. Her answer to every question was tears.

  At least it worked. In the face of tears, the Abbotts, none of whom had cried for years and years, felt frustrated and helpless. Then they, being such busy people and having so many other pressing things to take care of, soon forgot about the purple paint problem.

  But glad as she was to not be a Brownie, Martha knew, even then, that the Abbotts really meant well when they had enrolled her in the troop. In fact, they were always going out of their way to do something of the sort for her, because everyone was so certain that something needed to be done. The problem was knowing just what to do. With Cath it had been easy. Cath always knew exactly what she wanted, as well as how to get it, and the things she wanted were things the other Abbotts understood, like pretty clothes and a rumpus room in the basement where she could entertain her friends.