"Keith Donohue - The Stolen Child" - читать интересную книгу автора (Donohue Keith)

which itself comes from the Latin Fata, the goddess of fate. The fay lived in groups called the faerie,
between the heavenly and earthly realms.
There exist in this world a range of sublunary spirits that carminibus coelo possunt deducere
lunam, and they have been divided since ancient times into six kinds: fiery, aerial, terrestrial, watery,
subterranean, and the whole class of fair-ies and nymphs. Of the sprites of fire, water, and air, I know
next to nothing. But the terrestrial and underground devils I know all too well, and of these, there is
infinite variety and attendant myth about their behavior, custom, and culture. Known around the world by
many different namesтАФLares, genii, fauns, satyrs, foliots, Robin Goodfellows, pucks, leprechauns,
pukas, sidhe, trollsтАФthe few that remain live hidden in the woods and are rarely seen or encountered by
human beings. If you must give me a name, call me hobgob-lin.
Or better yet, I am a changelingтАФa word that describes within its own name what we are bound
and intended to do. We kidnap a human child and replace him or her with one of our own. The
hobgoblin becomes the child, and the child becomes a hobgoblin. Not any boy or girl will do, but only
those rare souls baffled by their young lives or attuned to the weeping troubles of this world. The
changelings select carefully, for such opportunities might come along only once a decade or so. A child
who becomes part of our soci-ety might have to wait a century before his turn in the cycle arrives, when
he can become a changeling and reenter the human world.
Preparation is tedious, involving close surveillance of the child, and of his friends and family. This
must be done unobserved, of course, and it's best to select the child before he begins school, because it
becomes more compli-cated by then, having to memorize and process a great deal of information
beyond the intimate family, and being able to mimic his personality and his-tory as clearly as mirroring his
physique and features. Infants are the easiest, but caring for them is a problem for the changelings. Age
six or seven is best. Anyone much older is bound to have a more highly developed sense of self. No
matter how old or young, the object is to deceive the parents into think-ing that this changeling is actually
their child. More easily done than most people imagine.
No, the difficulty lies not in assuming a child's history but in the painful physical act of the change
itself. First, start with the bones and skin, stretching until one shudders and nearly snaps into the right size
and body shape. Then the others begin work on one's new head and face, which require the skills of a
sculptor. There's considerable pushing and pulling at the cartilage, as if the skull were a soft wad of clay
or taffy, and then the malicious business with the teeth, the removal of the hair, and the tedious
re-weaving. The entire process occurs without a gram of painkiller, although a few imbibe a noxious
alcohol made from the fermented mash of acorns. A nasty undertaking, but well worth it, although I
could do without the rather complicated rearrangement of the genitals. In the end, one is an exact copy
of a child. Thirty years ago, in 1949, I was a changeling who became a human again.
I changed lives with Henry Day, a boy born on a farm outside of town.
On a late summer's afternoon, when he was seven, Henry ran away from home and hid in a hollow
chestnut tree. Our changeling spies followed him and raised the alarm, and I transformed myself into his
perfect facsimile. We grabbed him, and I slipped into the hollowed space to switch my life for his. When
the search party found me that night, they were happy, relieved, and proudтАФnot angry, as I had
expected. "Henry," a red-haired man in a fireman's suit said to me as I pretended to sleep in the hiding
place. I opened my eyes and gave him a bright smile. The man wrapped me in a thin blanket and carried
me out of the woods to a paved road, where a fire truck stood waiting, its red light pulsing like a
heartbeat. The firemen took me home to Henry's parents, to my new father and mother. As we drove
along the road that night, I kept thinking that if that first test could be passed, the world would once again
be mine.
It is a commonly held myth that, among the birds and the beasts, the mother recognizes her young
as her own and will refuse a stranger thrust into the den or the nest. This is not so. In fact, the cuckoo
commonly lays its eggs in other birds' nests, and despite its extraordinary size and voracious appetite, the
cuckoo chick receives as much, indeed more, maternal care, often to the point of driving the other chicks
from their lofty home. Sometimes the mother bird starves her own offspring because of the cuckoo's